Hard Times

First published in August 1854, 'Hard Times' is a novel that sought to highlight the social and economic divide that was growing between capitalistic mill owners and workers during the Victorian era of Great Britain by Charles Dickens, an English writer, and social critic, who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the most distinguished novelist of the Victorian era.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 symbolic 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 harmony above curiosity and logic over feeling, only to see his philosophy warp and destroy the lives of his own family. Filled with unforgettable characters and scenes, it is truly a daring novel of ideas and, ultimately, a celebration of love, hope, and imagination.