Hard Times: For These Times

Dickens's scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society.

Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens's most powerful and unforgettable novels, is all brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Its emblematic citizen, the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, lives to impose his version of education: facts and statistics that feed the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above curiosity and logic over sentiment, only to see his philosophy warp and destroy the lives of his own family.

Filled with memorable characters and scenes, Hard Times is a daring novel of ideas--and, ultimately, a celebration of love, hope, and imagination.

With an Introduction by Frederick Busch
and an Afterword by Jane Smiley

Charles Dickens (1812-70) had a happy childhood until age twelve when, due to his father’s confinement in debtors’ prison, he was forced to leave school to work in a factory. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success, including Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1850), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished.

Frederick Busch (1941-2006) was the author of eighteen works of fiction, including Closing Arguments, Girls, and The Mutual Friend, a novel about Charles Dickens. The winner of numerous awards, he was the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University.

Jane Smiley is an American novelist. In addition to her many novels (including Ten Days in the Hills, Horse Heaven, and A Thousand Acres), she wrote a short biography of Charles Dickens for the Penguin Lives series (2001).