Hard times by John Dickens

                  Hard times

"A loving heart is truest wisdom..."

Introduction:-

• Name:- Charles John Dickens
• Born:- 1812
• Death:- 1870
• Occupation:- writer

Notable works:- Oliver twist.

                He was an English writer and critics who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and by the 20th century,critics and scholars had recognished him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today. 

PREFACE:-

                Hard times by Charles Dickens is a novel about a school superintendent named Thomas Gradgrind who raises his childhood Tom and Lousia strictly. Hard times is a novel written in the Victorian age by Charles Dickens. This novel shows tyranny and oppression of manufacturers and owners of factories during the 19th century Dicken explores how drastically the industrial revolution changed lives of people particularly farmers.

THEMES:-

1. Fact v/s fancy
2. Industrialsm and it's evils
3. Unhappy marriages
4. Femininity
5. Surveillance and knowledge
6. Fidelity
7. Escape
8. A complate human being
9. Class conflict

   ABOUT HARD TIMES

Hard times:for this Times

        Hard times is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirizes the social and economic conditions of the era.   

        Hard times is unusual in several ways. It is by far the shortest of Dickens novels , barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately 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, generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester, though smaller. Coketown may be partially based on19th-century Preston.

                  One of Dickens's reasons for writing Hard Times was that sales off his weekly periodical Household Words were lowCritics such as George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Macaulav have mainly focused on Dickens's treatment of trade unions and his post- industrial Revolution pessimism regarding workers during the Victorian era. F.R.Leavis, a great admirer of the book , included it but not Dickens's work as a whole - as part of his Great Tradition of English novels.

Conclusion:-

                            The story ends with a glimpse into the future where Mr Bounderby dies alone in Coketown and Mr Gradgrind abandons his fact-oriented and rational philosophy to help poor people instead. Cecilia Jupe, on the other hand, marries and lives a happy life with her own family while Louisa never will have one of her own.