Customer Reviews

Hard Times (Enriched Classics)

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Arguably, Dickens could be classified as the greatest of all English speaking novelists...of all times. There are very few writers that can offer his consistency, novel after novel, story after story. Yes, many have written works that perhaps equal any of his given works, but few if any have been able to turn out such a volume of pure quality. Very, very few authors have had such a large portion of their work pass the test of time. Dickens gains new readers year in and year out and there is a reason for this!

Over the past 50 or so years I have heard this particular work referred to as "not Dickens' best," and "A minor work by Dickens," and other comments along those lines. I am really not in a position, nor do I have the ability to proclaim or rank this author's work one way or the other. Dickens for me is like any other author...I either like it or I do not like it; it either is a joy to read or it is not. Now I have read this short novel at least five times over the years and listen to several versions on CD and Tape. The best, minor Dickens' work, timeless classic, not pertinent in today's world, a mere political rant? Well I don't know. I do know that it is one of my favorites and do look forwarded to reading it again down the road. I am one of those horrid and probably misguided individuals who sort of make their own mind up about anything I read, and more or less ignore the pontifications of those that are suppose to know about such things. All that being said though, I cannot look you in the eye and state that I have ever read one story; one word by this author that I did not enjoy right down to the tip of my toes. He delights me.

The setting of course is in Victorian England and the Industrial Revolution is in full tilt. Make no mistake; Dickens makes no pretenses of not being of the extreme left ilk...a good little Socialist through and through. This work, like many others make his feeling well known. Like much of his work, there is no in-between here. The characters portrayed here are either very, very evil or they are very, very good. The author handles social situations in much the same way he handles his characters in this work. All are exaggerated to a certain extent, all are black and white and there is little middle ground to be found. The Capitalists are truly pigs and the working classes, the proletariat, are all Saint like creatures. For what the author is attempting here, this is quite appropriate.

Now let it be know right here that I have spent a lifetime trying my best of completely ignore the effete yammering from the left and the bellicose braying from the right in all matters. I am one of those creatures who simply do not care and more or less chose my own road. I read this story and others like it, for the sheer joy of soaking in the written words of a maters story teller. While the political and social message here is not lost on me, I simply choose to ignore it. That is just me though and it certainly makes me feel nothing less of those that take the political message and run with, or reject it... more power to them.

As with all of his other work, Dickens has created some unforgettable, if exaggerated characters in this work; my favorite Gradgrind (who, I must admit, sort of reminding me of my own father), his children Tom and Louisa, the young girl Grangrind has taken to raise, Sissy Jupe and of course the completely obnoxious cad Bounderby. Even the location; the city of Coketown is more like a character than a place displaying many of the characteristics of a human, rather than that of a town or village. Dickens is able to describe these people and places in such a way that they become close friends...even the evil ones, soon after they are introduced....well, maybe not friends, but certainly people you know and will want to revisit from time to time at the very least.

The term "hard times," while a good title for this work is a bit misleading in a way, as there is plenty of humor injected throughout the book. Seldom does a chapter pass that I find myself not chuckling over the bits of ironic humor and scathing satire the author inserts here and there. The opening tirade of Bounderby is an absolute hoot even to this day, as it certainly was at the time it was written.

And the plot! While it is simple at first glance in this work, there is never-the -less many little side plots going constantly, with personalities created an thrown in here and there to add flavor and spice to the overall story. The author skillfully blends these side paths he takes us upon and before the end of the story, brings us back to the main road. I like this! In many ways simple; in many ways so complex. I suppose the reader will find what they want.

As with all of Dickens' work, the reader must at all times keep in mind when, where and why it was written. Time and place are quite important in the understanding of this particular author and to not consider these things, much will be lost to the modern mind.

Highly recommend this one and I hope it brings others the same reading joy it has brought to be over the years.

Don Blankenship
The Ozarks

"Hard Times" is a minor Charles Dickens classic. Like all Charles Dickens' novels it features some great, memorable characters. The setting of the industrial city of Coketown is vividly described as a miserable, polluted town. There are some strong themes of class struggles between the working men in the factories and the harsh upper classes who seek to exploit them. Nearly all of the upper class characters are depicted in a negative light while the real heroes of the story are from the working class. As always, Dickens finds an entertaining way to shine a bright light on the social problems of Victorian-era England. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and highly recommend it. However, if you are choosing your first introduction to Charles Dickens, then you should pick one of his better-known novels.

Over decades since college I've read and re-read my way through Dickens' masterworks while unnecessarily slighting "Hard Times." I enjoyed it at least as much as any of his pointedly social commentaries and much more than some ("Bleak House," for example). Dickens' fans know what to expect - when a character is good, their virtue is saintly, and when they are bad, they are horrid. Each reaches their apotheosis, damnation, or belated enlightenment, as their character deserves, making this a deliciously brisk Dickens read and perfect literary snack. There's nothing difficult about "Hard Times," which makes it a delight.

Written in 1854 as a weekly series in the "Household Words" periodical edited by Dickens, this short novel is not one of his best. But even a middling Dickens can be better than the best of those new age plot-less wonders our book club has had to endure lately. Propelled by interesting, if somewhat exaggerated characters, the story manages to hold your interest from beginning, to climax, to end. Appealing to masses of readers, the book pays homage to all those common folks struggling against oppressive socio-economic-forces designed to stifle creativity and opportunity. It's a system whose schools eschew the arts and humanities. These are hard times, but not times without humor. In the very first chapter, you'll find it difficult not to recall Dragnet's Joe Friday as school teacher Gradgrind screams: Only Facts; just the Facts; all we care about are facts. Gradgrind makes it clear that feelings, art, decoration, are worthless distractions. Only facts have value. Gradgrind's over-the-top Jack Webb notwithstanding, you'll witness Dickensian irony at its best when Gradgrind's own children, Tom and Louisa, prove early victims of this "just the facts" upbringing. By way of contrast, Sissy Jupe, perhaps Gradgrind's worst student, the indigent daughter of circus performers, channels her innate creativity to save Tom from jail and Louisa from a Snidely Whiplash husband.

Among Dickens' works, this is a short novel, only some 10 hours long in the audio book version.

The relatively suspenseful plot is interesting but not particularly convoluted and the characters few enough to easily remember and follow.

The narrator is just superb and proves in fact to be a gifted actor by giving each character an appropriate and distinctive intonation.

Overall, though a bit moralizing, this novel is highly entertaining and warmly recommended to all who appreciate Charles Dickens.

Hard Times is unique in Charles Dickens' vast canon - a compact, concise novel from a writer known for epic, sweeping ones and a thoroughly serious, highly didactic work from an author known for light-hearted, sentimental ones. It was an immediate bestseller and has always been widely read, but its differences have long meant that Hard has not been as widely popular as his more famous works. Conversely, some who are usually hard on Dickens - notably F. R. Leavis - think it his best, or even his only truly great, work. I think it is somewhere between - well below Dickens' best but not with his least significant work. Opinions will surely continue to vary widely, and all must make their own decision.

Though sometimes unfairly criticized as lightweight, all Dickens' novels are sociopolitically conscious - a trait that became ever more pronounced. This mid-career work was his first overtly sociopolitical novel, and he never again made such an obvious attempt - or, according to many, such a successful one. It has two main targets: the extremes of capitalism and utilitarianism. Hard was written when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing; factories were spreading swiftly, beginning to dominate skylines and having an environmental effect. More noticeably and immediately, they were starting to monopolize the economy; the poor had come almost to depend on them. This gave them (just barely) enough to get by, but their lives were otherwise wretched: dirty, cramped, and in every other way meager. Hard's fictional Coketown is a highly accurate, vividly detailed version of the industrial cities that had come to have a strong presence. They were in one way impressive - clear proof of advancing technology. However, they were also an eyesore and had an adverse effect on many areas of society. Dickens memorably shows what made them so horrid - the dirt, stink, and other viscerally putrid factors plus the more important human elements. This last comes mostly via his usual set of highly memorable, fully sympathetic characters. Hard unflinchingly depicts the truly miserable working conditions of the era's laborers, and Dickens paints their plight so engagingly, emotionally, and thought-provokingly that we feel with and for them. Behind all this are of course greedy capitalists who cynically fed off such wretches without caring for their condition and the corrupt, apathetic politicians who let them. Dickens does not focus on them directly, doubtless because it would draw less sympathy from the average reader, but the perceptive can sense their presence. We also see how the poor lived outside work and get a ghastly overall glimpse of mid-nineteenth century England's seedy lower class life. As all this suggests, Dickens essentially laments the same miseries as Marx - though of course with a far different emphasis and endgame.

Utilitarianism was a popular philosophical antidote, but Dickens thought it hardly better than the problem. Hard is arguably misleading, or even unfair, in that it focuses only on the system's most utterly extreme manifestations; one might even call it a caricature. However, the aspects it viciously satirizes did exist. Dickens deals mostly with educational implications. The incredibly daunting educational regimen forced on the book's children seems near-unbelievable but is actually a reduced - yes, reduced - version of that inflicted on Utilitarian John Stuart Mill. Dickens knows that proponents of such things had good intentions, satirizing them relatively lightly in the book's only real comic segments, but shows their effects on children to be disastrous. High-minded as such utilitarians may have been, they were absurdly impractical, robbing children of childhood without even knowing it and arguably teaching them fewer real skills than more conventional methods could have if correctly applied.

It is to Dickens' credit that he does all this without heavy-handedness. His points come across quite forcefully; he powerfully tugs at our hearts and minds, and his super-popular works may have even had a hand in reform. Yet he never loses sight of the story, which is engaging and relatively fast-paced, full of suspense and twists. As always with Dickens, the book is highly emotional, and the characters are strong. Even those not keen on the unconventional elements will appreciate these traditional strengths.

All told, Hard is recommended more for those not usually fond of Dickens than for fans, though the latter should also read it. They may not like it as much as they will expect, but Dickens was such a strong writer that everything he wrote can be enjoyed and appreciated; whatever else we think of Hard Times, it is certainly not hard reading.

I have not finished this book - it has been hard to get into it. I do enjoy Dickens though, so I am going to keep at it. Not one of my favorites, though.

Although I initially had quite a struggle with Charles Dickens he has quite grown on me. By the time I got to this book I knew what to expect and consequently, I think, enjoyed it more than I normally would. This is one of the typical Dicken's books in my mind and is a pretty classic example of his writing style (follow one main character and many sub plots that all twist together by the end of the novel.) I really enjoyed trying to predict how people in the book would fit together and thought it was a rather charming little read. I don't think it will really stick with me as a book that "changed my life" but I'm glad I took the time to read it at least once.

Thank you very much indeed for your excellent service - I received the novel within only a few days of my order.

Bruce Berry (Dr.)

"Hard Times" is set in the ugly and imaginary (but all too realistic) mid-Victorian Northern city of Coketown - a near-dystopian blend of the worst of capitalism and the ravages of rampant industrialization. Its blackened factories belch soot, steam and a poisonous haze of sun-blotting pollution. Its citizens are joyless automotons, dancing their repetitive daily work jig to the mind-numbing tick of a drudging, miserable metronome that is wound up every day by Josiah Bounderby, the heartless factory owner, a banker and ostensibly Coketown's leading citizen.

While the workers have begun to sample the delights of the forbidden fruit of trade unions and labour organization, the very idea is still much in its infancy. Indeed, Bounderby is so completely ensconced in the status quo that he cannot even imagine why a worker would want more than he has and why he would feel that there was anything more that he might possibly need. He genuinely believes that what he offers his workers is complete, generous, utterly selfless and more than sufficient unto their needs.

Thomas Gradgrind is a retired hardware merchant. While not quite in the same league as Bounderby with respect to wealth and insufferable pomposity, Gradgrind is now a teacher and, like Bounderby, is so completely comfortable as to be utterly unable to imagine any other way of living. In fact, Dickens portrays Gradgrind as a staunch utilitarian who does his utmost as a parent, a person, and an educator to eradicate any fanciful notions of imagination, joy, dreaming, aesthetics, music, poetry, fiction or, indeed, even amusement, in both his students and his children. His students' curriculum is centered on "facts, facts, facts" and hard skills such as analysis, deduction, mathematics, science and pure observation are glorified.

"Hard Times" is really the story of Gradgrind's children, Louisa and Thomas Jr, brought up in the sullen atmosphere of Coketown under the strict discipline of their father's colourless educational regimen. It is the story of Louisa's arranged marriage to Bounderby, a man thirty years her senior who imagined her as his bride even as he watched her grow from infancy. It is also the story of Thomas Jr's fall from grace as he is unable to avoid the twin siren calls of the vices of gambling and liquor to escape from the drudgery of life as his father's son and as Bounderby's employee.

While I found "Hard Times" to be as entertaining as any other Dickens novel that I've read (and, frankly, I've loved them all), I did find it to be too bleak and unremittingly socialist in nature. Dickens' far left-wing political leanings were crystal clear.

There were "blacks" and there were "whites" but there were no grays anywhere in sight. "Hard Times" was a story of polar opposites, fact vs fancy, joy, happiness and hope vs despair, honesty vs dishonesty, generosity vs greed, and so on. And, although Dickens did allow the story to end portraying Thomas Gradgrind as a parent who was doing his very best to act on his love for his children, even these acts of altruism were aimed at ultimately ensuring that theft against the evil Bounderby went un-punished. In short, Bounderby and the capitalist class could do no right while the working class could, in effect, do no wrong.

Entertaining, to be sure, and not a story that I would want to have missed but "Hard Times" is also a story that is not as timeless as others Dickens has written.

Paul Weiss