Advanced
Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for Hard Times by Charles Dickens - Available

Hard Times

by Charles Dickens
Frederick Busch
ebook
Read a sample Read a sample
Dickens’s scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society. 
Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens’s most powerful and unforgettable novels, is all brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Its emblematic citizen, the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, lives to impose his version of education: facts and statistics that feed the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above curiosity and logic over sentiment, only to see his philosophy warp and destroy the lives of his own family.
Filled with memorable characters and scenes, Hard Times is a daring novel of ideas—and, ultimately, a celebration of love, hope, and imagination.
With an Introduction by Frederick Busch 
and an Afterword by Jane Smiley
Expand title description text
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Kindle Book

  • Release date: April 15, 2009

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781101042199
  • Release date: April 15, 2009

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9781101042199
  • File size: 369 KB
  • Release date: April 15, 2009

Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Classic Literature Fiction Literature Historical Fiction

Languages

English

Levels

Lexile® Measure:1060
Text Difficulty:6-9

Dickens’s scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society. 
Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens’s most powerful and unforgettable novels, is all brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Its emblematic citizen, the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, lives to impose his version of education: facts and statistics that feed the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above curiosity and logic over sentiment, only to see his philosophy warp and destroy the lives of his own family.
Filled with memorable characters and scenes, Hard Times is a daring novel of ideas—and, ultimately, a celebration of love, hope, and imagination.
With an Introduction by Frederick Busch 
and an Afterword by Jane Smiley
Expand title description text
Classic Literature Fiction Literature Historical Fiction
Digital Collection Selection Guidelines