The Day x Connell Guides - The Connell Guide to Dickens' Hard Times

"It has a kind of perfection as a work of art that we don’t associate with Dickens – a perfection that is one with the sustained and complete seriousness for which among his productions it is unique.” So says the famous 20th century critic F.R. Leavis about Hard Times. In its angry denunciation of the more heartless aspects of capitalism, Hard Times is perhaps Dickens’s most passionate novel, with the name of its principal character, Gradgrind, frequently invoked as shorthand for a rigid adherence to fact. In this short, incisive guide Uttara Natarajan shows why the novel, initially neglected by critics and readers alike, has come to be seen as one of Dickens’s greatest.