Hard Times

In Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens, always keenly aware of the social situation around  him, turned his attention to the morality of the Industrial Revolution and its effects on the possibilities of human happiness. The novel is more of a simple fable than anything else that the mature Dickens wrote, and the names of the characters (Gradgrind, M'Choakumchild, Bounderby) sound like the names from a comic strip; but the force of the novel comes from its juxtaposition of apparent and real knowledge, of the mechanical and the imaginative and the moments of supreme irony that show how bizarre were some of the values of Victorian England and the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Hard Times cannot be read simply as a novel; it is much more  a commentary on the social and economic conditions of late Victorian England and the value system it bred.