Hard Times

Looks at working conditions in a Victorian factory town in the industrial north of England. It's an extraordinary novel that considers how enslavement to systems at the expense of imagination and feeling can wreck human lives. This new edition celebrates Charles Dickens' most openly campaigning novel, through which the author said he aimed to ''strike the heaviest blow in my power''. Hard Times explores the important social questions of the day and places prosperity and morality under the microscope.