When ‘Hard Times’ appeared as a serial in Household Words in 1854, Dickens was about midway in his literary career. In the same year this novel appeared in an octavo volume with a dedication to Thomas Carlyle. Its purpose, according to Dickens himself, was to satirize ‘those who see figures and averages and nothing else—the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time — the men who through long years to come will do more to damage the really useful facts of Political Economy than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life.’ The satire, however, like much that Dickens attempted in the same vein, was not very bitter. The characters in ‘Hard Times’ are not numerous; and the plot itself is less intricate than others by the same author. The chief figures are Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, ‘a man of realities, ‘ with his unbounded faith in statistics; Louisa, his eldest daughter; and Josiah Bounderby, as practical as Mr. Gradgrind, but less kind-hearted. Louisa, though many years younger than Mr. Bounderby, is persuaded by her father to marry him. She is also influenced in making this marriage by her desire to smooth the path of her brother Tom, a clerk in Mr. Bounderby’s office. Though not happy, she resists the blandishments of James Harthouse, a professed friend of her husband’s. To escape him she has to go home to her father; and this leads to a permanent estrangement between husband and wife. In the mean time Tom Gradgrind has stolen money from Bounderby, and to avoid punishment runs away from England …
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