Hard Times

'Now, what I want is, Facts.' So begins Dickens's shortest novel, in the classroom of Thomas Gradgrind, a retired merchant in the smoky mill town of Coketown who has raised his children Louisa and Tom on facts and figures alone, with no room for wonder or feeling. Louisa is married off to Josiah Bounderby, a boastful banker and mill owner thirty years older; Tom, empty and selfish, robs the bank and lets the blame fall on Stephen Blackpool, an honest weaver shunned by both his master and his fellow workers. Only Sissy Jupe, a girl from a travelling circus, keeps the warmth the Gradgrinds lack.

Dickens wrote the novel in weekly parts for his magazine Household Words in 1854, after visiting a long strike in Preston, and dedicated it to Thomas Carlyle. It is his sharpest attack on the economic thinking of his age, which counted workers as 'hands', and John Ruskin thought it in some ways the greatest thing he had written. Its long London counterpart is Bleak House.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.

Published in instalments, books such as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol mixed comedy and social protest.