Hard Times (Peacock)

“Let us strike the keynote, Coketown, before pursuing our tune… It was a town of machines and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever, and never got uncoiled…” – Hard Times The novel is set in the imaginary industrial town of Coketown. With a typically unforgettable cast of characters – the hard-headed fact-worshipper Professor Gradgrind, the heartless factory owner Bounderby, the warmly endearing Sissy Jupe and the eternally noble Stephen Blackpool – HARD TIMES carries uniquely powerful message and remains one of the most widely read of Dickens’ major novels. It is a bitter expose of capitalist exploitation during the Industrial Revolution – and a fierce denunciation of the philosophy of materialism, which threatens the human imagination in all times and places.