Hard Times

About the book

Thomas Gradgrind believes children should be educated through measurable facts, a conviction that shapes his own family as well as the classroom. In industrial Coketown, that approach exists beside the self-congratulation of factory owner Josiah Bounderby and the difficult lives of working people. Dickens brings the worlds of calculation, labour, family, and circus performance into contact, testing what happens when imagination and feeling are treated as useless. Louisa Gradgrind's experience gives the argument an intimate focus, while Stephen Blackpool's situation exposes the inadequacy of comfortable public explanations. The novel is shorter and more concentrated than many Dickens works, using strong contrasts to challenge a supposedly practical account of human needs. Its central question concerns the cost of mistaking a partial method for a complete understanding of life.

• Education
• Industrial society
• Imagination and feeling

Why read it

For a concentrated social novel that makes the limitations of an educational theory visible in the lives it shapes.

English text