Classicly

The shortest of Charles Dickens’s novels, Hard Times is also his most pointed and impassioned satire of social injustice. Set in Coketown, a fictional industrial town in the north of England, Hard Times was born of its author’s indignation at the soul-crushing conditions of the industrial age, and yet it vibrantly transcends the stock situations and polemical weaknesses typical of social protest fiction of the time.