Hard Times Review

Set mind smokestacks and factories, Charles Dickens Hard Times is a blistering portrait of Victorian England as it struggles with the massive economic turmoil on by the Industrial Revolution.

Champion the mind-numbing materialism of the period is Thomas Gradgrind, one Dickens’s most vivid characters. He opens the novel by arguing that boys and girls should taught “nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.”. Forbidding the development of imagination, Gradbring is ultimately forced to confront the results of his philosophy- his own daughter’s terrible unhappiness.

Full of suspense, humor, and tenderness, Hard Times is a brilliant defense of art in an age of mechanism

Barnes and Noble Classics

Like usual, Dickens is very crafted with character names. You have characters who are products of the Enlightenment and you have characters that are more Romantic. As in===how the philosophy of the enlightenment thinkers is flawed (romantics try to prove that in their novels). You see a lot about the concept of FACTS–but later on, some of the characters realize their mistake.