Publisher's Synopsis
Hard Times is one of Dickens' most powerful books; a portrait of life in a Lancashire mill town in the 1840s. It is however, not merely the surroundings that oppress Louisa and young Tom, the children of the fact-loving Gradgrind, but also the uncompromising utilitarianism espoused by their father and his like, that enslaves men to machines suppressing the spiritual for the sake of the factual.
