Hard times - Charles Dickens

Play, film and television drama occasionally remind us On the turning of those dark Satanic mills' of the poet Blake that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and marred the once green and pleasant land. When Dickens published Hard Times, industrial conditions were at the very nadir of savagery and squalor. Between the Bounderby system of economics and the Gradgrind system of education Dickens took to task a system that was turning his country into a rubbish-heap inhabited largely by slaves. If Dickens had not been a great novelist he would have been a great reformer: some people consider that as a result of his work he was both. Hard Times and Oliver Twist stirred more than the conscience of queen: they stirred a people. Because to Dickens it seemed that the Bounderbys and the Gradgrinds were to endure for ever he could not afford to treat them with that mocking geniality with which he handled the doomed survivors of a fcudal past--the Dedlocks and the Bumbles. That is why we can join with G. K. Chesterton in thinking this the harshest of all Dickens's books, but perhaps the most heartfelt and the most economically composed. In an England where industrial troubles of a different kind are moulding our destiny, Hard Times is perhaps the novel of Dickens we can least afford to overlook. Vintage paperback Contains foxing

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