Hard Times, which has never achieved the popularity and seldom the recognition of Dickens’s other novels, is his withering portrait of a Lancashire mill-town in the 1840s. In the persons of Gradgrind and Bounderby he powerfully stigmatized the prevalent philosophy of Utilitarianism which, whether in school or factory, allowed human beings to be caged in a dreary scenery of brick terraces and foul chimneys, to be enslaved to machines, and reduced to numbers.

‘It has a kind of perfection as a work of art that we don’t associate with Dickens – a perfection that is one with the sustained and complete seriousness for which among his productions it is unique. The prose is that of one of the greatest masters of English, and the dialogue – very much a test in such an undertaking – is consummate; beautifully natural in its stylization’ – F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition

The cover shows a detail from ‘The Nant-Y-Glo Iron Works’, a watercolour by George Robertson in the National Museum of Wales

The portrait of Dickens inside the front cover is from an engraving after a painting by W. P. Frith, by permission of the Trustees of the Dickens House