Charles Dickens's Hard Times Study Guide

All you need to know about Charles Dickens's Hard Times is in this advanced guide to the text. Connell Guides are advanced guide books that offer sophisticated analysis and broad critical perspectives for higher-level GCSE and A Level English Literature students. Written by leading academics, Connell Guides are clear, concise and beautifully designed to help students understand, and enjoy, great works of literature. They are perfect for coursework, revision and exam preparation. Connell Guides are also great reads themselves scholarly, yet approachable and entertaining.

With its angry denunciation of the more heartless aspects of capitalism, Hard Times is perhaps Dickens's most passionate novel, with the name of its principal character, Gradgrind, frequently invoked as shorthand for a rigid adherence to fact. In this short, incisive guide Uttara Natarajan shows why the novel, initially neglected by critics and readers alike, has come to be seen as one of Dickens's greatest.