Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society here is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Timesweaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love, of Sissy the circus girl with love to spare who is deserted and adopted into their family, and of the honest mill worker Stephen Blackpool and the bombastic mill owner Josiah Bounderby. The key contrasts created are finally less those between wealth and poverty, or capitalists and workers, than those between the head and the heart, between "Fact"--the cold, rationalistic approach to life that Dickens associates with utilitarianism--and "Fancy"--a warmth of the imagination and of the feelings, which values individuals above ideas.

Concentrated and compressed in its narrative form, Hard Timesis at once a fable, a novel of ideas, and a social novel that seeks to engage directly and analytically with political issues. The central conflicts raised in the text, between government's duty not to intervene to guarantee the liberty of the subject, and between quantitative and qualitative assessments of progress, remain unresolved today in the late or post industrial stages of liberal democracies.

Graham Law's edition of Hard Times is the most useful edition for teaching Dickens that I have seenIts text is authoritative, and the range of contextual documents included gives readers an opportunity to situate the work in the discussions of industrialization and labor as they took place in nineteenth-century England." - Barry V. Qualls, Rutgers University

"This beautifully produced edition combines a freshly written, informative introduction with helpful and well-judged notes. Particularly welcome is the wealth of documentary material and examples carefully chosen from other contemporary fiction, enabling readers to place Hard Times within its full Victorian context. This is an excellent edition—clear, authoritative and stimulating." - Kate Flint, University of Oxford

Dickens, Charles: -

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) has been remembered in history as one of the greatest authors of the Victorian era. Not only having received tremendous success while he was alive, Charles Dickens' work continues to be read as voraciously as when it was first published. Because of his tremendous popularity, Charles Dickens has secured himself the position of not only being one of the greatest writers of his generation, but one of the most celebrated writers of all time. In addition to his writing, Charles Dickens was a prominent activist, dedicating much of his life to fighting for better social conditions for the poor as well as powerfully advocating for better laws to protect the rights of children. When a piece of literature refers to either unfair working and living conditions, or else portrays the state of a morally corrupt social class, the writing is thus referred to as Dickensian. Much of literary traditions thus owe their inspiration from the writing of Charles Dickens.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781551110752
ISBN 10	155111075X
Title	Hard Times
Author	Charles Dickens
Series	Broadview Editions Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Broadview Press Ltd
Year published	1996-03-30
Number of pages	460
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.