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Hard Times
 
 

Hard Times [Mass Market Paperback]

Charles Dickens , Robert Donald Spector
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
Price: CDN$ 6.95 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 25. Details
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From School Library Journal

Grade 7-12-Dickens' satire on the Victorian family and the philosophies of a society which sought to turn men into machines.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From AudioFile

[Editor's Note--The following is a combined review with DAVID COPPERFIELD, GHOST STORIES, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, OLIVER TWIST, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, THE PICKWICK PAPERS, and A TALE OF TWO CITIES.]--New Millennium presents the distinguished Academy Award winner Paul Scofield interpreting abridgments of the novels and stories of Charles Dickens. These are excellent readings, sonorous and compelling. However, they lack the verve and character of the old Victorian qualities that have been so wonderfully captured on cassette by Martin Jarvis and Miriam Margolyes, among others. And while few authors benefit more from pruning than the paid-by-the-word Dickens, some of these cuttings are far too drastic. In addition, hurried post-production is evident in numerous audible edits, frequent mouth noises, and occasional overlapping of announcer and narrator. Y.R. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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Customer Reviews

41 Reviews
5 star:
 (11)
4 star:
 (12)
3 star:
 (10)
2 star:
 (6)
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3.6 out of 5 stars (41 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Dickens sings the blues., May 7 2003
By 
This review is from: Hard Times (Mass Market Paperback)
Despite the explicit title, "Hard Times" is not so much an ode to poverty and misery as it is a commentary on the increasing impact of industrialization on the fragmentation of society and on the dehumanization of education. The result, as Dickens implies, leads to lives hollowed by the emptiness of work for work's sake and wealth for wealth's sake.

The setting is Coketown, a factory town befouled by industrial smog and populated by underpaid and undereducated laborers. The novel's most prominent character is one of the town's richest citizens, Josiah Bounderby, a pompous blowhard who owns a textile mill and a bank and whose conversation usually includes some boastful story about his impoverished childhood and the hard work that led to his present fortune.

Bounderby is the commercial projection of Thomas Gradgrind, a local schoolteacher and an extraordinarily pragmatic man who instills in his students and his own children the importance of memorizing facts and figures and the iniquity of indulging in entertaining activities. Gradgrind offers to Bounderby his son, Tom Jr., as an unwilling apprentice, and his daughter, Louisa, as an unwilling bride.

On the other end of the town's social scale is Stephen Blackpool, a simple, downcast man who works as a weaver at Bounderby's mill and slogs through life misunderstood and mistreated. When he refuses to join his fellow workers in a labor uprising, he is ostracized; when he criticizes the economic disparity between Bounderby and the workers, he is fired and forced to leave town; when Bounderby's bank is robbed one night, he is suspected as the thief. So halfway through the novel, Dickens grants his reader an interesting, albeit somewhat contrived, plot element to embellish the narrative.

If this novel contains a ray of sunshine, it is in Sissy Jupe, a girl abandoned by her father and adopted by Gradgrind, whose oppressive educational method nearly breaks her. However, she grows up with her own intuitive sense of propriety, which she uses as a tool to eject a dishonorable character from the novel. Her strong and independent spirit will allow her to do much better in life than Louisa, who withers away in an unhappy marriage, and Tom Jr., whose boredom renders him vulnerable to temptations.

Compared to his other novels, "Hard Times" is relatively short and straightforward and has few characters, as though Dickens felt that what he had to say was so important, it had to be said quickly and bluntly. He is less interested in realism than in making a point, and it's really the poetic power of his prose that enables him to get away with the overbearing sentimentality and often ridiculous caricatures that accompany his poignant human truths.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Some Old Truths, Mar 14 2003
By 
IRA Ross (LYNDHURST, NJ United States 07071) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Hard Times (Mass Market Paperback)
_Hard Times_ is a familiarly sentimental work by Dickens. This is especially the case regarding the character of Sissy Jupe, an overly sweet, innocent young girl who is abandoned by her father. Dickens seems determined to tug at the heart strings with this character.

Dickens does an admirable job in covering new ground concerning the factory owners and bankers exploitation of the poor, as well as exploring the beginnings of labor unrest in 1850's England. There is much for the factory laborer to be unhappy with in Cokestown, where the factories belch out dirty, polluted smoke all day long. Dickens combines these issues with his examination of the difficulties inherent in parenting and gives truth to the old adage that how the branch is bent, so grows the tree. Through much grief and contrition years later, school master Thomas Gradgrind learns that a cold, no nonsense approach to bringing up his daughter Louisa and his son, Tom, was wrong. Louisa has a good heart and dotes on her younger brother, but is otherwise very distrustful of humanity and exists in the world suffused in apathy; Tom is simply, as Dickens calls him, "a whelp", and a dishonest one at that. Louisa marries Josiah Bounderby, a banker who turns his nose up at the factory hands and mocks their aspirations to move up in the world. Bounderby refers to these individuals as trying to put a "gold spoon" in their mouths. The actions of Bounderby and the Gradgrinds directly lead to tragic consequences for Stephen Blackpool, an honest and courageous loom worker, who merely chooses not to be involved with the townspeople or their labor leader. Another old truth that there is no justice in the world is as real today as it was in Dickens' time.

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Time Were Hard--And Dickens Shows How & Why, Nov 4 2003
By 
Martin Asiner (jersey city, nj United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Hard Times (Mass Market Paperback)
It is unfortunate that HARD TIMES by Charles Dickens is not usually read outside the classroom. It is an unforgettable glimpse of an age that did not prize the worth of the individual over a collective society--sort of like today's emphasis on the same. What stamps HARD TIMES as the classic that it is is Dickens' continual focus on the rights of the individual and his championing of anti-child labor laws. In an age that routinely crushed individuals in the grinding gears of a society that was hell-bent on automating the factory system, it was only lone voices like Charles Dickens who, in his novels, cried out to stop the madness. In HARD TIMES, Dickens takes a savagely satirical poke at a then popular system of thought: utilitarianism, a philosophy which saw men and children as interchangeable cogs in a machine that demanded that all facets of life and output be reduced to facts, numbers, and quantifiable data. Thomas Gradgrind opens the novel by insisting that the students in his school be just like Officer Joe Friday from "Dragnet" fame: give me the facts, and only the facts. Those who can deliver advance. Those who cannot get routinely squashed flat. Josiah Bounderby is the villain as he represents the ultimate in a selfishness and fact-centeredness way of life. As typical of Dickens, there is a vast assortment of subplots that he manages to tie neatly together by the closing pages. What stamps HARD TIMES as relevant in this or any future age is Dickens' insistance that, regardless of technological advances, the individual will always matter. HARD TIMES says this as well as any other book.
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