Hard Times
by Charles Dickens · 1854
Classics · ranked #72 in category
In the fictional northern industrial town of Coketown, the philosophy of fact and utilitarianism — embodied by the schoolmaster Gradgrind — produces its human cost: children unable to imagine, workers brutalised by their labour, and a circus family that represents everything the Gradgrind world suppresses. Dickens's most polemical novel, and one of the shortest.
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