"Hard Times" (1854) by Charles Dickens

The only book in which Dickens ventures into the industrial heartland of the England of his time, the sprawling factory belt in the north around Manchester and Liverpool. Also the shortest of all his novels, slightly above one-third the average length of the others.

The hard-hitting portrayal of the exploitation of workers by unscrupulous factory owners and the poignant description of the near-starvation-level living standards of male and female workers in the burgeoning factory towns of the industrial north are of great interest, particularly as no other major British novelist of the time seems to have seriously looked into the social impact of the Industrial Revolution.

The anger Dickens felt at what he saw on his own background-gathering tour gives the text a distinctly bitterer, less overall genial tone than that of any other of his novels, a tone that, combined with the relative brevity of the novel and its industrial theme make this a distinctly atypical work in his œuvre.

Hard Times was first published in weekly instalments between April and August 1854 in Dickens’s own weekly magazine Household Words, without illustrations. The illustrations by Frederick Walter that are shown here were included in the hardcover 1862 Library Edition of the novel.

(103,000 words)

An e-book is available for downloading below.

Hard Times (e-book)