Hard Times (Norton Critical Editions)

by Charles Dickens (Author), SylvereMonod (Editor), Fred Kaplan (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $4.33

  Backgrounds, Sources, and Contemporary Reactions reprints all of the documents on industrialism, education, and utilitarianism that appeared in the Second Edition, save one, and introduces new pieces by R. D. Butterworth and Thomas Carlyle. Criticism collects seventeen important essays on Hard Times-seven of them new to the Third Edition-by Hippolyte Taine, John Ruskin, George Gissing, Bernard Shaw, F. R. Leavis, Monroe Engel, Robert Barnard, David Craig, David Lodge, Roger Fowler, Patricia E. Johnson, Gorman Beauchamp, Martha C. Nussbaum, David L. Cowles, Jean Ferguson Carr, Eric P. Levy, and Leona Toker. A Chronology and revised Selected Bibliography are also included.

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $3.25

• Used

  Hardcover
  1995

  $4.33

• New

  Paperback
  1995

  $6.72

  Introduction and Notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster. Illustrated by F. Walker and Maurice Greiffenhagen. Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted environment. This is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby. However human joy is not excluded thanks to 'Mr Sleary's Horse-Riding' circus, a gin-soaked and hilarious troupe of open-hearted and affectionate people who act as an antidote to all the drudgery and misery endured by the ordinary citizens of Coketown. Macaulay attacked Hard Times for its 'sullen socialism', but 20th-century critics such as George Bernard Shaw and F.R. Leavis have praised this book in the highest terms, while readers the world over have found inspiration and enjoyment from what is both Dickens' shortest completed novel and also one of his important statements on Victorian society.