Hard Times was underrated in Dickens's lifetime but is now one of his most discussed works. What we may see as its flaws and ambiva-lences are historically revealing and are one of the reasons for the attention it has commanded in recent years. It is unusually interesting among his novels, an attempt to do something he had never done before, to construct a tight and concentrated attack upon theories and attitudes prevailing in his time - and still in ours. Dickens's protagonist in Hard Times is the heart ofindusttial society. He wrote in a letter to a ftiend a few months after finishing that the idea for the novel had 'laid hold of me by the throat in a very violent manner' (PL, vii, 453); and it is this well-focused fire, what Orwell called Dickens's 'generous anger',that gives Hard Times its immense power.

Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London,but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted environment. This is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the heartless factory owner Iosiah Bounderby. However,human joy is not excluded thanks to 'Mr Sleary's Horse-Riding' circus, a gin-soaked and hilarious troupe of open-hearted and affectionate people who act as an antidote to all the drudgery and misery endured by the ordinary citizens of Coketown.

Macaulay attacked Hard Times for its 'sullen socialism',but 20th-century critics such as George Bernard Shaw and F.R. Leavis have praised this book in the highest terms,while readers the world over have found inspiration and enjoyment from what is both Dickens' shortest completed novel and also one of his important statements on Victorian society.

    INTRODUCTION

           BOOK THE FIRST -- SOWING

 I  The One Thing Needful

 II  Murdering the Innocents

 III A Loophole

 IV  MrBounderby

 V  The Key-Note

VI  Sleary's Horsemanship

VII Mrs Sparsit

VIII  Never Wonder

IX  Sissy's Progress

 V  Stephen Blackpool

VI No Way Out

XII  The Old Woman

VIII  Rachael

VIV  The Great Manufacturer

XV  Father and Daughter

XVI  Husband and Wife

     BOOK THE SECOND -- REAPING

 I  Effects in the Bank

 II  Mr James Harthouse

III  The Whelp

IV  Men and Brothers

 V  Men andMasters

VI  Fading Away

VII  Gunpowder

VIII  Explosion

VXX  Hearing the Last of It

X  Mrs Sparsit's Staircase

XI  Lower and Lower

XII  Down

     BOOK THE THIRD -- GARNERING

 I  Another Thing Needful

II  Very Ridiculous

III  Very Decided

IV  Lost

V  Found

VI  The Starlight

VII  Whelp-Hunting

VII  Philosophical

IX  Final

          ILLUSTRATIONS

Stephen and Rachad in the sick-room

Mr Harthouse dining at the Bounderbys

Mr Harthouse and Tom Gradgrind in the garden

Stephen Blackpool recovered from the Old Heft Shaft