In this, Dickens' most openly political novel, we discover the terrible human consequences of a ruthlessly materialistic philosophy in the lives of Thomas Gradgrind's family, brought up to believe that only 'Facts! Facts! Facts!' have any meaning. Set in Coketown, a typical Lancashire milltown, the novel graphically exposes the truth about Victorian 'progress'...

Charles Dickens began to plan the story which was to become Hard Times in the winter of 1853-4, and it is clear from the trouble he took over the choice of a title, as well as the correspondence he entered into concerning themes and their treatment, that he wanted to be sure that his novel would hit its satirical targets without causing too much offence - a difficult balancing act to achieve. On January 20th he asked John Forster to look at fourteen possible titles (which included 'Prove It', 'Simple Arithmetic' and the eventual choice, Hard Times). In April he wrote to Mrs Gaskell, the novelist of northern industrial England, asking her to 'look at the story' and 'judge where and how near I seem to be approaching what you have in your mind. ' Dickens was clearly uncertain about some aspects of his tone and subject-matter - he is careful to state that he will be avoiding the controversial issue of workers' strikes, and perhaps he was also (understandably) unsure about straying outside his normal London-based settings and having to reproduce a Lancashire dialect.

What are Dickens' 'satirical targets'? First, as he says in a letter to another friend, Charles Knight, he wishes to attack 'those who see figures and averages, and nothing else' - in other words, the 'Gradgrind Philosophy', in which mechanical reason is seen as the only possible guide to human behaviour and endeavour, and which is represented in the novel not only by Gradgrind himself but also by the industrial machines and the profits they yield. Dickens also mocks (for example) the callousness and ignorance of Parliament (peopled by the 'dustmen', the MP's), and the cynical behaviour of 'gentlemen' like James Harthouse who have 'no opinions' - in other words, no beliefs and no principles.

What makes the novel powerful and affecting, however, is the way in which we see these attitudes corroding human relationships: Gradgrind attempting to destroy his children's imaginations with a relentless diet of 'ologies', Harthouse setting about the seduction of Louisa with heartless calculation, Bounderby denying the affectionate care he received from his mother so that he may aggrandise the myth of his wretched childhood, vital to his image as the self-made man. There are weaknesses, to be sure - some of the pathos may seem a little heavy-handed to a modem listener, and it is difficult to see Stephen Blackpool as more than a mouthpiece for certain ideas - but the ultimate picture of a society in which decent human beings are sacrificed to the gods of profit remains powerful and relevant today. Although Hard Times is less humorous, more economical and more explicitly 'political' than his other novels, its central message is movingly and characteristically Dickensian: if there is no place for imagination, beauty and pleasure in our world, then 'the... heart will wither up' and 'the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally stark death. ' Or, as Mr Sleary inimitably puts it, 'People mutht be amuthed. They can't be alwayth a-learning, nor yet they can't be alwayth a-working, they an't made for it... '