Hard Times
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the grim, soot-blackened industrial town of Coketown, facts reign supreme and imagination is ruthlessly crushed — this is the suffocating world Charles Dickens conjures in Hard Times, a searing indictment of utilitarian philosophy and the mechanisation of the human soul. At the heart of the novel stands Thomas Gradgrind, a rigidly rationalist schoolmaster whose creed of cold facts over feeling drives his own children — Louisa and Tom — toward ruin, while the circus performer Sissy Jupe serves as the story's moral compass, embodying the warmth and empathy that Coketown's industrial order so violently represses. Published in 1854 and widely regarded as one of Dickens's most concentrated and politically charged works, Hard Times presents a withering critique of Victorian capitalism, class exploitation, and the dehumanising effects of factory life — themes that resonate with unsettling force even today. Dickens employs his characteristic blend of sharp satire, vivid caricature, and genuine pathos to lay bare the consequences of a society that treats human beings as units of economic production. Compact yet devastating, this novel leaves the reader asking: when a world is stripped of wonder, what is left of humanity?
Author: Charles Dickens
Format: Paperback
Genre: Classic fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the grim, soot-blackened industrial town of Coketown, facts reign supreme and imagination is ruthlessly crushed — this is the suffocating world Charles Dickens conjures in Hard Times, a searing indictment of utilitarian philosophy and the mechanisation of the human soul. At the heart of the novel stands Thomas Gradgrind, a rigidly rationalist schoolmaster whose creed of cold facts over feeling drives his own children — Louisa and Tom — toward ruin, while the circus performer Sissy Jupe serves as the story's moral compass, embodying the warmth and empathy that Coketown's industrial order so violently represses. Published in 1854 and widely regarded as one of Dickens's most concentrated and politically charged works, Hard Times presents a withering critique of Victorian capitalism, class exploitation, and the dehumanising effects of factory life — themes that resonate with unsettling force even today. Dickens employs his characteristic blend of sharp satire, vivid caricature, and genuine pathos to lay bare the consequences of a society that treats human beings as units of economic production. Compact yet devastating, this novel leaves the reader asking: when a world is stripped of wonder, what is left of humanity?