Hard Times

<p>The shortest of Charles Dickens’s novels <i>Hard Times </i>is also his most pointed and impassioned satire of social injustice.<br><br>Set in Coketown a fictional industrial town in the north of England <i>Hard Times</i> was born of its author’s indignation at the soul-crushing conditions of the industrial age and yet it vibrantly transcends the stock situations and polemical weaknesses typical of social protest fiction of the time. The indelible characters-Mr. Gradgrind whose utilitarian educational philosophy emotionally cripples his own children the hypocritical factory owner Josiah Bounderby Stephen Blackpool an honest worker wrongly accused of a crime and Sissy Jupe a circus performer whose father abandons her to what he hopes is a better life-all come alive in classic Dickensian fashion and contribute to a satiric vision of society tempered equally by righteous anger and compassionate humanity.</p>