Hard Times

Hard Times: For These Times is the tenth novel by the English writer Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. It surveys English society and satirises its social and economic conditions.

The book is unusual among Dickens's novels in several ways. It is by far the shortest he wrote, barely a quarter of the length of the novels that came immediately before and after it; unlike all but one of the others it has neither a preface nor illustrations; and it is the only one of his novels with no scenes set in London. Instead it takes place in the fictitious Victorian industrial town of Coketown, a generic northern mill town in some respects similar to Manchester, though smaller, and possibly based in part on Preston. The story follows the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind and his family, and the utilitarian education he imposes on his children, against the background of the factories and the people who work in them. One of Dickens's reasons for writing the book was that sales of his weekly periodical Household Words were low, and he hoped that publishing the novel in instalments there would help.

The novel is one of Dickens's shortest and most direct pieces of social argument, and it is written against a philosophy that reduces people to the sums they can be counted in.