People who brush aside Dickens because they think it's all going to be old, overhyped, crusty stories are missing out BIG TIME. Dickens is truly hilarious, and that wit paired with dynamic characters and multilayered tales make for positively riveting reading. I was laughing out loud throughout this book, like when Mrs. Sparsit calls Bounderby a "Noodle" behind his back, or when the robbery occurs but serious talk about it keeps getting derailed because no one can stay on topic and instead they start talking about snoring and such.
There were a couple tricky bits to get through, primarily just reading the phonetically written dialogue of Blackpool and Rachael. But I just looked at a quick Shmoop summary for those couple chapters and then read them again and that helped me immensely.
Everything else was just really REALLY good! I'm someone who enjoys recurring motifs and themes that can be picked out directly, and Dickens does an excellent job of presenting these to the reader without shoving it down their throat. In "Hard Times" Dickens presents a look at imagination and emotions VS a very factual, no-nonsense attitude, all set against the industrial city of Coketown. It's a very well-paced and put together novel, and I enjoyed it thoroughly! ( )

This is a proud moment. The moment in which I announce the conquering of one of my biggest literary-related fears. The finishing of a full-length Charles Dickens novel. Of course, I've read A Christmas Carol over and over---but that doesn't really count. It doesn't count because, for one thing, it's a novella. Secondly, everyone, everyone, knows the story. It's easy to read A Christmas Carol because you can fill in the hard stuff with visions of Mickey Mouse and Jiminy Cricket, if you really need to.

But Hard Times! Oh, the joy! (...and, Oh! The oxymoron!) It was just the right level of difficult for me. My knowledge of vocabulary was challenged, but I understood it all in context enough to laugh, smile, sigh, and nod my way through the whole wonderful book. I don't know why I've been so afraid to tackle 19th century classics. Every time I read one, I thoroughly enjoy it and come away feeling fulfilled and that I've spent my reading time wisely.

Book Description: "Set amid smokestacks and factories, Charles Dickens's Hard Times is a blistering portrait of Victorian England as it struggles with the massive economic turmoil brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Championing the mind-numbing materialism of the period is Thomas Gradgrind, one of Dickens's most vivid characters. He opens the novel by arguing that boys and girls should be taught 'nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.' Forbidding the development of imagination, Gradgrind is ultimately forced to confront the results of his philosophy--his own daughter's terrible unhappiness. Full of suspense, humor, and tenderness, Hard Times is a brilliant defense of art in an age of mechanism."

My Thoughts: There is so much to enjoy about this book that I do find it difficult to really put it all into an orderly review. I was surprised by the many elements of mystery, romance--even a bit of edge-of-your-seat action at the end! I do wish some of the characters would have ended up with happier endings. I found that many of Grandgrind's "facts" were truths of his own making and it caused me to reconsider some of the things in my own life that I would consider "facts". I also chuckled, a lot, at the revelation of Bounderby's "origins".

The "unwanted wife" trope, reminiscent of both Jane Eyre and Silas Marner, was interesting to see. I like to think that Dickens was riffing off Bronte's work of seven years earlier and that Eliot, in turn, was inspired to include the theme in her work, seven years later.

I liked the idea that both Sissy and Stephen's wife were making big impacts on the characters without actually being present in the story. Stephen's wife, especially, was a major player---yet her time in the novel takes up but a few sentences. If it weren't for her though, many of the characters' lives would have taken entirely different directions.

A couple of my favorite quotes were:

"If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!"

Also, Dickens's fun play on Peter Piper: "If the greedy little Gradgrinds grasped at more than this, what was it for good gracious goodness' sake, that the greedy little Gradgrinds grasped at?" ( )

Justly one of Dickens' least-read novels, Hard Times is a bit of an anomaly in several ways. His 10th novel, Dickens was writing in the journal Household Words in 1854, which gave him a lot less space than usual - this is perhaps a third the length of your average Dickens work. It's also a fairly straightforward story that strikes one more as a moral treatise than anything else. Aside from the famous circus sequence, the novel feels dry and a little perfunctory. The Lancashire characters' accents are also questionable at best, and indecipherable at worst.

George Bernard Shaw liked this book, and it's not hard to see why. This is perhaps Dickens' most blatantly political book, an argument against society becoming too rational and utilitarian, too capitalist at the extent of humanity. It was an argument that had already been greatly lost by 1854, and one we are still fighting today in 2016. In that sense, Hard Times still encapsulates Dickens' core philosophies. At the same time, this is never going to be one of the works for which CD is remembered. His sheer talent is still there, in spades, but it's notable that after this work, Dickens entered the third and final act of his career, in which his novels were allowed to take their time, and he'd never sound a dull note again. ( )

I was had never heard anything about this book before. Thomas Gradgrind, a "fanatic of the demonstrable fact," who raises his children, Tom and Louisa. The extreme reliance on facts means you should not have flowers on your carpet, after all you don't walk on flowers.There is old woman who seems interested in Bounderby and says she visits Coketown once a year. At a crowded union meeting, the agitator Slackbridge accuses Stephen Blackpool of treachery because he will not join the union, and Stephen learns he is to be 'sent to Coventry' becoming an outsider. Mr. Gradgrind sees his daughter as his great success in being raised in his method. But there are disastrous consequences to his teachings. ( )

Dickens, it seems, repeatedly leans to the mass of the people, then draws back, because to commit himself would have been to wake up from the dream of harmony between classes.
(Introduction, page 35)

The indefatigable Mrs Sparsit, with a violent cold upon her, her voice reduced to a whisper, and her stately frame so racked by continual sneezes that it seemed in danger of dismemberment…
(page 257) ( )