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Hard Times

Hard Times

Paperback

Fiction AnthologiesPlays

ISBN10: 1533059411
ISBN13: 9781533059413
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: May 2 2016
Pages: 198
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.42 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Hard Times, is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book appraises English society and highlights the social and economic pressures of the times. Hard Times is unusual in several respects. It is by far the shortest of Dickens' novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately before and after it Also, unlike all but one of his other novels, Hard Times has neither a preface nor illustrations. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London.Instead the story is set in the fictitiousVictorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester, though smaller. Coketown may be partially based on 19th-century Preston. One of Dickens's reasons for writing Hard Times was that sales of his weekly periodical, Household Words, were low, and it was hoped the novel's publication in instalments would boost circulation - as indeed proved to be the case. Since publication it has received a mixed response from critics. Critics such as George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Macaulayhave mainly focused on Dickens's treatment of trade unions and his post-Industrial Revolution pessimism regarding the divide etween capitalist mill owners and undervalued workers during the Victorian era. F. R. Leavis, a great admirer of the book, included it-but not Dickens' work as a whole-as part of his Great Tradition of English novels.

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