Hard Times

Hard Times is unusual in several respects. It is by far the shortest of Dickens' novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written before and after it. Also, unlike all but one of his other novels, Hard Times has neither a preface, nor illustrations. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London. Instead the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester, though smaller. Coketown ...