Everything you need to understand or teach
Hard Times by Charles Dickens.
Products may contain comprehensive summaries, analysis, notes, articles, essays,
lesson plans and more. See below for details on what is included.
Biography EssayThe life story of Charles Dickens is, from several perspectives, a success story. Generally regarded today as one of the greatest novelists in the English language, Dickens had the unus...
Read more
The English author Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was, and probably still is, the most widely read Victorian novelist. He is now appreciated more for his "dark" novels than for his humorous w...
Read more
He was only fifty-eight when he died. His horse had been shot, as he had wanted; his body lay in a casket in his home at Gad's Hill, festooned with scarlet geraniums. Tributes poured in from all over ...
Read more
The life story of Charles Dickens is, from several perspectives, a success story. Generally regarded today as one of the greatest novelists in the English language, Dickens had the unusual good fort...
Read more
Charles Dickens had one thing in common with his creation Thomas Gradgrind, the heartless utilitarian in Hard Times: a love of facts. Along with fourteen novels, many of them rich in topical allusion,...
Read more
Drawing his narrative themes from the sensation novel and the popular stage, Charles Dickens heavily freighted most of his plots with mystery, crime, and suspense. His chief legacies to crime litera...
Read more
From the appearance of his first full-length work of prose fiction, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, in 1836-1837, Charles Dickens has retained his place as one of the best-loved and most...
Read more
In October 1844 Charles Dickens was in Genoa working on his second Christmas book, The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (1845). Hoping that a long forei...
Read more
Ruskin was an English critic, essayist, historian, poet, novella writer, autobiographer, and diarist. Endowed with a passion for reforming what he considered his "blind and wandering fellow-men...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Engel favorably appraises Hard Times, focusing upon its economy of presentation and emphasis upon the need for imagination—not utility alone—to make life bearab...
Read more
In the essay below, Cockshut seeks to demonstrate—contra F. R. Leavis—that Hard Times is not Dickens's masterpiece. He does, however, consider it a novel of high accomplishment.
...
Read more
The essay below, along with David H. Hirsch 's "Hard Times and F. R. Leavis" (1964), represents the most trenchant critical response to Leavis's famous 1948 essay championi...
Read more
The essay below represents one of the two most notable critical responses to F. R. Leavis's seminal 1948 essay on Hard Times, the other being John Holloway's "Hard Times: A Histor...
Read more
In the essay below, Deneau details incestuous overtones in relations between Tom and Louisa Gradgrind in Hard Times.
One of Dickens's major concerns in Hard Times is to display the disastrous r...
Read more
In the following essay, Sonstroem identifies conflict between Fact—dry statistics and empirical definitions—and Fancy—variously identified with imagination, romance, wonder, and n...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Banerjee explores the relation between the tripartite structure of Hard Times—"Sowing," "Reaping," and "Garnering"—and...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Barnard discusses Dickens's treatment of industrial unrest and his characterizations of Gradgrind and Bounderby in Hard Times.
"I am afraid I shall not be able...
Read more
In the following essay, Craig details Dickens's use of cultural and popular elements in Hard Times.
Dickens's flair for expressing matters of common concern in their own style shows in t...
Read more
Below, Whipple suggests that some representative assessments of Hard Times fail to consider "the distinction between Dickens as a creator of character and Dickens as a humorous satirist of what...
Read more
In the following essay, Butwin examines Hard Times as a novel of social reform and compares it with social-reform journalism of the period.
Modern criticism tends to judge the novel that aims at socia...
Read more
In the excerpt below, Hardy examines Hard Times as one among several novels in which Dickens chose not to affirm a sure solution to the social problems he addressed.
Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale ...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Nelson cites Hard Times and incidents in its plot in the course of illustrating the importance of life's mystery and diversity as presented in Dicken's works.
T...
Read more
Here, Fowler discusses Dickens's use of language and dialect in Hard Times as a tool for characterization and "unresolved ideological complexity. "
The polarization of critical re...
Read more
In the following essay, McMaster examines how Dickens uses color imagery in Hard Times to reinforce its characterizations and themes.
In Hard Times Dickens made colour a major feature of design. One o...
Read more
In the essay below, Carr assesses Dickens's "sympathetic identification with feminine discourses in the 1850s" as exemplified in Hard Times.
In his 1872 retrospective essay on Dic...
Read more
In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1898, Gissing writes of Hard Times as a failed labor novel..
We do not nowadays look for a fervent Christianity in leaders of the people. I...
Read more
Regarded as one of England's premier men of letters during the first half of the twentieth century, Chesterton is best known today as a colorful bon vivant, a witty essayist, Catholic apologist...
Read more
Shaw is generally considered the greatest and best-known dramatist to write in the English language since Shakespeare. During the late nineteenth century, he was also a prominent literary, art, music,...
Read more
A respected Canadian professor of economics, Leacock is best known as one of the leading humorists of the first half of the twentieth century. He is also the author of biographies of Twain and Dickens...
Read more
In the essay below, Harrison profiles the characters in Hard Times, each of whom is "the ghost of some greater creation," appearing in a "great book" which is "no le...
Read more
Leavis was an influential twentieth-century English critic. His methodology combines close textual criticism with predominantly moral and social concerns; however, Leavis is not interested in the indi...
Read more
Johnson is one of the most prominent Dickens scholars of the mid to late twentieth century, and his two-volume Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952) is considered an essential text on Dicken...
Read more
Solutions to Singularity and Industrialization
In an attempt to propel the quality and way of life forward by means of efficiency and advancement of technology, industrialization destroys many intrin...
Read more
Charles Dickens lived in England during the 19th century, during a period of rapid economic growth when the industrial revolution was in full swing. Industrial cities sprung up throughout England, su...
Read more
This character is one of the negative ones in this book. He is cruel and selfish. I think that by ¡§painting¡¨ Tom, the author, Charles Dickens, shows the impact of factual childho...
Read more
In this essay I will be discussing work from Pre 1914 century prose that we have been studying. All the pieces of work that we look at are from the Victorian era. All writers put their points acros...
Read more
Charles Dickens was a Victorian sardonic writer who wrote social criticisms about Victorian England. In the first seven chapters of the novel I think Charles Dickens is criticising several issues part...
Read more
Hard Times
Dickens did not like the changes industrialisation brought to Victorian society. Industrialisation brought many factories, poor working conditions and overcrowded cities. Dickens also hate...
Read more
"The Key-Note," which is Chapter 5 of Book I of Charles Dickens's Hard Times, is full of imagery. Imagery is a collection of images in a literary work. Each sentence holds at least one image, all re...
Read more
Sissy Jupe: More Than Just A Number
In Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times, he uses the characters to present the reader with many messages. One of these messages presented is that the Gradgrind syste...
Read more
Charles John Huffam Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles (John Huffam) Dickens
Letter by John Ruskin
Modern Life and Industrialization in Marx, Chaplin and Dickens
