Hard Times was the most recent novel that I completed in my personal project of reading all of Charles Dickens’ novels in the order of publication. And I must say, that this satirical novel was my least favorite so far. This was published in 1854, first in serialized form and then in book form, taking place not in London but in a fictitious manufacturing town, Coketown, often compared to Manchester. Based on Galatians 6:7, For whatsoever a man sow, that shall he also reap.” The first book is entitled “Sowing,” the second book is entitled “Reaping”, and the third is “Garnering.”

In Book I, we are introduced to the superintendent, Thomas Gradgrind, in his school in Coketown where he emphasizes the teaching of facts, nothing but facts. Louisa and Thomas are his two oldest children with three younger children in the family cared for by Sissy. Tom and Louisa befriend Sissy, all of them very unhappy with their strict and rigid upbringing. Mr. Gradgrind’s close friend and devoid of all sentiment proposes marriage to Louisa, even though he is thirty years her senior. Louisa accepts the proposal and the newlyweds move to Lyon where Bounderby wants to observe how labor is used in the factories. In Book II, Thomas accepts a job with Bounderby and becomes more indebted to him as he becomes more reckless in his conduct. There are other characters, including the mill workers, where one gets wrapped up in their plight culminating in some dramatic ways in Book III, “Garnering.”

One of the predominant themes was that Charles Dickens wished to educate the readers about the poor working conditions of some of the factories in the industrial towns. There is also the question of morality where the wealthy are portrayed as morally corrupt as he explores the effect of social class in Hard Times. At this point, I am returning to Dickens’ London as I begin Little Doritt.

The influence of Thomas Carlyle and other critics of the Industrial Revolution can be felt throughout this work - a sober fable of the effects of dehumanisation and material values of the Victorian merchant classes, and didactically lampooned in the characters of Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby. Their victims - Gradgrind's family, Stephen Blackpool, Rachel and the foppish Jem Harthouse, provide a supporting cast of typical Dickens characters and allow the author to alert his readers to the dangers of embracing a world in which imagination and wonder are crushed beneath mechanisation and the relentless march of progress.

I know everyone one says this is the least popular novel of Dickens, but I loved it! Full of Frivolity, fun, Friendship and Forgiveness! Sorry can't help myself when there's an opportunity for alliteration. I found the characters not only well rounded but also full of depth, I always like it when an accomplished author portrays a character as a deadly sin and then lets them loose on each other, only with some of those characters to eventually to work out for themselves that they in fact are flawed just like all human beings. Perhaps this Dickens won't be for everyone but I really enjoyed it

Dickens wrote Hard Times as an attempt to increase sales of his flagging magazine and had to produce it in weekly instalments which probably explains why it's so bereft of inspiration and artistry. It's ironic that a novel lauding the importance of heart and imagination as guiding principles in social reform should have a mercantile consideration at root. Hard Times is a leaden rhetorical read. There's little subtlety in its sermonising. There's not even much of a story and what story there is doesn't always make sense. Most surprisingly of all it doesn't include a single memorable character. The characters are programmed automatons of the flimsy plot. Even the humour is relentlessly off key. The only positive note is his standard sentimentalised girl-woman only plays a minor role in this novel.

For me this joins A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield as duds in the Dickens' canon, though it doesn't possess the redeeming features those two novels possessed.

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الرواية من روايات الأدب الإنجليزي القليلة
اللِّي شدتني .. بعكس (قصة مدينتين) مثلًا ! رغم إنها لم تكن سيئة..
حياة تشارلز ديكنز وطفولتُه البائسة
اثرها ظاهر بِشكل كبير علي شخصياته اللِّي بيرسمها بإحترافية
التجارب الأليمة التي يمر بها كُل شخص هي التي تصنعه بالتأكيد وبالتالي تترك تأثير عظيم
فى نفسه،
رواية تترك بصمة إنسانية عميقة ف الوجدان.
تتضمن الرواية حديث عن الأطفال الصغار الَّذين عانوا الكثير من العذاب والقهر والضياع بسبب
الظروف الاجتماعية السائدة ف مجتمعاتهِم.
البعض يختار الظروف لتكون عونًا له علي الأيام، يستمد منها القوة، والحكمة أيضًا
وهناك آخرين.. يجدوا منها الفرصة السانحة لتُصبح الظروف شماعة لإرتكاب الأخطاء في حق أنفسهم
ومن حولهِم.. حياتك البائسة من الممكن أن تكون مدرستك. فقط إذا اردت.

عمل إنساني، بيوصل رسالة فعلًا
الأسلوب سهل وبسيط بكُل ما فى هذه الحياة من أمل وألم.
رغم البؤس بها إلا إنه لم يُظهر لنا الدنيا سوداوية .. بل يرى أن
كل شيء قابل للإصلاح ..

3,5/5
Seguramente 'Tiempos difíciles' no se sume a mis Dickens predilectos pero aún así creo que es una novela muy interesante y que he disfrutado.
El contexto político y social es realmente el centro de la historia, y más que los personajes es la trama la que importa en esta novela con temas muy claros como la Revolución industrial, la educación victoriana, la diferencia de clases, la hipocresía generalizada... y sobre todo la lucha entre la ciencia, los hechos y la imaginación.
Me han encantado todas las reflexiones de Dickens en esta novela aunque sí que es verdad que me ha faltado algo para llegar a adorarla.

they were the hard of times, they were the hard of times

Dicken’s shortest novel and so,so good. We read it for The Literary Life Podcast.

A literary response to the changes taking place in Britain in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the restructuring of the old order, in more ways than one, caused thereof, Hard Times, one of Dickens’ not so popular novels, is a powerful testament to the threat industrialisation and its various manifestations posed to human beings who were no longer human, without emotions and imaginations, almost mechanical themselves. This mechanisation, enjoined with a philosophy (not that they would call it a philosophy) of rational self-interest, and a belief of the characteristics of human nature being equivalent to and limited to ‘facts’, is evident in the actions of Mr. Gradgrind, and the Bully of Humility, Mr. Bounderby, who also reduce the already oppressed workers to mere tools, ‘hands’, as if they were not complex human beings.

The overarching theme may be the critique of the dreary condition of the public, but Dicken’s concerns in Hard Times have more to do with the family and through the juxtaposition of the private and the public, he aims to portray a damaging and limiting upbringing and its consequences in the adult life. But, in quite a pleasant turn, there is no romanticising of marriage or a Victorian emphasis on sex-roles, although, as is usual in a Dickens novel, there does exist the notion that feminine compassion is what can counteract the mechanising effects of such an upbringing (as Louisa finally brings her father to see the faults of his way) or even the effects of industrialisation in general (as Rachael becomes the source of Stephen’s fortitude), and restore social harmony.

The different worlds of the novel are bound together in a tight plot, as, again, is usual in a Dickens novel, and though their coming together time and again is important to the overall plot, so is their individual existence, as they become symbolical of different strands of the Victorian society that Dickens takes up. The truth of Mr. Bounderby’s childhood, for instance – the fiction of which is supposed to support the theory of social mobility – is a motif used by Dickens to emphasize the falsity of the Victorian assumption that the poor couldn’t rise up because they didn’t work hard enough to overcome the many obstacles in their path. Dickens suggests that perhaps poverty cannot be overcome through determination alone. Another individual strand is Stephen Blackpool’s estrangement from his fellow workmen, which doubly victimizes him, suggests, in my opinion, that that is the kind of life the poor, those with no power, are doomed to. Sissy Jupe’s (actual) matter-of-fact attitude despite her original home in the circus and her ‘wrong’ answers about statistics in school which are actually closer to truth than facts could ever be, drive home the absurdity of a world of facts and figures.

Despite the omniscient narrator’s moral tone that shapes our interpretation of the novel, the novel itself is in no way didactic. No, Dickens doesn’t stoop to that. In fact, the narrator’s tone is more mocking and ironic than moral. And the novel is probably better for that. Louisa doesn’t get a happy life, Stephen dies, Tom Gradgrind dies, only Mr. Gradgrind changes his ways, things aren’t miraculously set right. Within human life, for Dickens, is inherent the uncertainty of change and the certainty of individuality. What makes Hard Times as good as it is, is this realistic acknowledgement of the fact that an individual alone (or even more than one) may not, in the end, be able to reform the society, and he may, even on seeing the truth, not want to. Humans are, after all, not governed by facts and statistics.

I was afraid I’d be disappointed by this novel, and while I caught on halfway that I wouldn’t be, it was only while I was writing this review that I realised how much I actually liked it. It is certainly not my favourite Dickens (that will probably always be a tie between Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities) but it is not half bad – quite brilliant in some ways, in fact – and certainly deserving of 4 stars at least.

Dickens leaves me feeling like Kevin Mallone: "Why use lot word when few word do trick?" I think I'd prefer to watch his novels staged as plays, because sure there's plenty of drama in his plots and life in his characters and idealism in his themes. But his writing style? It's just not my cuppa. This book is pretty good, but very tiresome. Yes, it's satirical. Yes, it's incisive. Yes, it's often funny. It's also meandering, padded, and inelegant. It's tedious, it's grating, and it's bull-headed. Updike wrote lush garden paths. This guy writes grime-caked sidewalks.

3 stars. He's got rock solid ideas but Dickens writes like he's trying to force his way through your front door.

this is the first time i read „hard times“ - and i am impressed, as usual, by dickens inexhaustable capacity to create memorable characters and to give us exquisitely carved scenes between them, with extremely satisfying, subtle dialogue and meta-communication. the scene in which mr. bounderby is trying to tell mrs. sparsit of his intention to marry louisa gradgrind, for instance, and her unexpected reaction to it - are among the best i‘ve read.
the novel explores the consequences of Industrialization and sole belief in Facts - above Nature and belief in Imagination and Compassion - and shows how both industrialization and facts, as sole belief, will make people unhappy. All of this is vividly and exquisitely carried out, the scenes have strong cinematic qualities and are both amusing and highly interesting. a wonderful read.

Not Dicken's best work, but still, ya know, Dickens.

It's pretty much "Lets light some straw men on fire!" day in Dickens land. Presumably Hard Times was chosen as the title because "Let's Kick Some Deserving Fuckers In The Teeth" was already taken.

Still I don't know anyone I'd rather watch burn people and deliver teeth kicks then Dickens.