Charles Dickens Hard Times

About Hard Times

Hard Times (1854) is Charles Dickens's most explicitly political novel and his shortest — a direct attack on Utilitarianism and industrial capitalism as systems that reduce human beings to economic units and suppress the imagination and sympathy that make life worth living. Set in the fictional northern industrial town of Coketown, it is the novel in which Dickens most clearly states the moral argument that underlies all his fiction: that fancy, play, and human connection are not luxuries but necessities.