Hard Times

Thomas Gradgrind runs a school on the principle that children should be taught nothing but Facts — no fancy, no wonder, no fiction — and raises his own children the same way, with results that arrive, in the course of the book, exactly as badly as the reader expects. Hard Times is Dickens' shortest and angriest novel, an attack on Utilitarian education and the industrial arithmetic that reduces Coketown's mill workers to "hands," set in a fictional Lancashire town of red brick and black canals where even the machinery seems to move "like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness."

It ran weekly in Dickens' own magazine Household Words from April to August 1854, written fast to shore up the paper's falling circulation, and was published complete in one volume that August. Unlike his other novels it has almost no subplot and no room to digress — writing to his friend John Forster while it was underway, Dickens called the weekly format's "difficulty of space" simply "CRUSHING" — and the result is the most tightly built and the most directly political thing he wrote.

Bibliomancer restores the 1854 text exactly as Dickens wrote it.