Recommendations
Books Like Hard Times
Best books to read after Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens's most concentrated social satire (1854) attacks Utilitarian philosophy applied to education and industry — Gradgrind's fact-obsessed school and Bounderby's lying self-made-man ideology are the two faces of a social philosophy Dickens found inhuman. These recommendations extend the experience through Dickens's other social novels, through Victorian and modern fiction about industrial capitalism, and through the political tradition Hard Times participates in.
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North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
The great Victorian companion to Hard Times — Gaskell's industrial novel addresses many of the same concerns (factory conditions, the relationship between capital and labor, the education of a middle-class woman in working-class reality) but with more psychological complexity and more sympathy for the employers as well as the workers.
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Little Dorrit
by Charles Dickens
Written immediately after Hard Times and extending its social critique from the factory floor to the entire social and governmental apparatus — the Circumlocution Office is the bureaucratic equivalent of Gradgrind's educational system, both organized around the suppression of human energy and imagination.
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Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's masterwork from the same period as Hard Times — where Hard Times is compressed and schematic, Bleak House is expansive and socially comprehensive, but both are organized around the same insight that English social institutions are primarily organized around the perpetuation of privilege rather than the delivery of justice.
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Mary Barton
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's first novel is the most direct literary treatment of the Manchester working-class conditions that Dickens was using in Hard Times — Gaskell had lived in Manchester and observed the conditions from the inside; her portrait of the cotton workers' lives is more precisely documented than Dickens's Coketown.
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The Road to Wigan Pier
by George Orwell
Orwell's documentary account of working-class conditions in the north of England in 1936 inherits Hard Times's political project — the exposure of industrial capitalism's human costs — and includes a famous extended essay analyzing Dickens's politics that is the best short account of what Hard Times is doing and what it fails to do.
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Germinal
by Émile Zola
Zola's naturalist novel of a French mining community on strike is the European equivalent of Hard Times — the most sustained portrait in nineteenth-century fiction of industrial capitalism's effects on working-class life, rendered with a documentary precision and emotional force that Hard Times's schematism prevents Dickens from achieving.
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The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair
Sinclair's muckraking American novel about the Chicago meatpacking industry inherits Hard Times's political purpose — the use of fiction to expose industrial conditions and generate reform — and pursues it with a documentary intensity that Dickens's satirical mode didn't allow; the American descendant of the social-reform novel Dickens pioneered.
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Animal Farm
by George Orwell
Orwell's political fable shares Hard Times's project of exposing ideological hypocrisy — where Bounderby's lie about his origins justifies the poverty of his workers, the pigs' corruption of the Seven Commandments justifies their own privilege; the satirical demolition of political self-justification as a mode of class oppression.
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