Hard Times

Hard Times - Mass Market Paperbound

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$5.95
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Hard Times
  • Hard Times
Hard Times - Mass Market Paperbound

Hard Times - Mass Market Paperbound

by Charles Dickens
$5.95
$5.95

Book Overview

by Charles Dickens (Author), Frederick Busch (Introduction by), Jane Smiley (Afterword by)

Dickens's scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society.

Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens's most powerful and unforgettable novels, is all brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Its emblematic citizen, the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, lives to impose his version of education: facts and statistics that feed the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above curiosity and logic over sentiment, only to see his philosophy warp and destroy the lives of his own family.

Filled with memorable characters and scenes, Hard Times is a daring novel of ideas--and, ultimately, a celebration of love, hope, and imagination.

With an Introduction by Frederick Busch
and an Afterword by Jane Smiley

Author Biography

Charles Dickens (1812-70) had a happy childhood until age twelve when, due to his father's confinement in debtors' prison, he was forced to leave school to work in a factory. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success, including Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1850), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished.

Frederick Busch (1941-2006) was the author of eighteen works of fiction, including Closing Arguments, Girls, and The Mutual Friend, a novel about Charles Dickens. The winner of numerous awards, he was the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University.

Jane Smiley is an American novelist. In addition to her many novels (including Ten Days in the Hills, Horse Heaven, and A Thousand Acres), she wrote a short biography of Charles Dickens for the Penguin Lives series (2001).
Number of Pages: 336
Dimensions: 0.93 x 6.86 x 4.2 IN
Publication Date: July 01, 2008
Accelerated Reader:
Quiz Name: Hard Times
Interest Level: Upper Grades, 9-12
Reading Level: 9.3
Point Value: 20
ISBN9780451530998
Author Charles Dickens
PublisherSignet Book
GenreLiterature
FormatOther
PublishedJuly 2008
LanguageENG- English
Pages336
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceTeens & young adults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Classics Coming of Age Fiction

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About Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.

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