This annotated edition of Dickens’s Hard Times includes:
• An original critical essay on the novel and its industrial England
• A biographical essay on the life of Charles Dickens
• Historical context on utilitarianism, factories, and Victorian schooling
• A note on the 1854 text, first serialized in Household Words
A volume in CLASSICS OF WORLD LITERATURE from Erato Press.
“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.” So begins the coldest and most modern of Dickens’s novels — his assault on a world that measures everything and values nothing.
In the grim factory town of Coketown, Thomas Gradgrind raises his children on facts, statistics, and the ruthless logic of self-interest, banishing every trace of wonder, story, and feeling. He is certain he is preparing them for life. He is destroying them. Around his experiment Dickens builds a furious portrait of industrial England: the mill-owner Bounderby, all bluster and self-made myth; the weary factory hand Stephen Blackpool, crushed between master and mob; and Louisa Gradgrind, the daughter raised without a heart, who discovers too late that she has one.
Dickens’s shortest and fiercest novel, Hard Times is his indictment of a civilization that worships numbers and starves the imagination — of schools that manufacture little machines, of an economics that treats people as “hands,” and of the quiet catastrophe of a life lived without wonder. Written in 1854, it reads today like a prophecy of the data age: of metrics, targets, and the reduction of human beings to what can be counted.
This Erato Press edition presents the complete novel with an original critical afterword by Henry Bugalho — on Dickens’s war with utilitarianism, the real Coketowns behind the fiction, and why Hard Times matters more now than ever — together with a biography of the author and historical notes for the modern reader.
Not a self-help book about hard times, but Charles Dickens’s classic novel: the whole text, with the apparatus a first-time reader or student needs. For readers of Dickens, Victorian fiction, and the great English social novel.
