Hard Times
A retired hardware merchant who believes in facts and nothing else raises his children on statistics, and the novel watches the theory meet the people it is supposed to describe. Coketown is a fictional mill town built out of Preston, where Dickens had gone to report on a strike.
It is the shortest of his novels and the most schematic: good characters and bad ones, a circus and a school, a bank robbery and a ruined marriage. The schematism is the point. Dickens wanted a fable about what happens when education is reduced to measurable results, and he wrote it quickly, in weekly parts, for a readership he expected to disagree.
Public-domain status
First published in 1854. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Charles Dickens died in 1870, so this work has been free to republish there since 1941.
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Keep reading
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891
- The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875
- Manchester — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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