--- title: Counting Down Charles Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 8: Hard Times description: It’s dawning on me that the marriage plot, which maps so well onto novels by Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot, is misapplied to... canonical: https://time.com/archive/7124147/counting-down-dickens-greatest-novels-number-8-hard-times/ author: Radhika Jones article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2012-01-29T23:14:20.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-25T05:07:49.242Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 8: Hard Times og:description: Dickens' shortest novel is very taut, and occasionally some sharp little passage arrives that reminds you of his more expansive greatness. og:url: https://time.com/archive/7124147/counting-down-dickens-greatest-novels-number-8-hard-times/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt98b6f89c266338d1/698a9066d0753364e3e768f8/hard-times-charles-dickens.jpg?branch=production&width=600&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 600 og:image:height: 338 og:image:alt: Hard Times Charles Dickens og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 8: Hard Times twitter:description: Dickens' shortest novel is very taut, and occasionally some sharp little passage arrives that reminds you of his more expansive greatness. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt98b6f89c266338d1/698a9066d0753364e3e768f8/hard-times-charles-dickens.jpg?branch=production&width=600&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 8: Hard Times > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with Ally. Ally is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: July 2026. ## Ally: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Ally is a digital financial services company offering online-only banking, including checking and savings accounts, through Ally.com and its mobile apps. Launched in 2009 as an original disruptor in financial services, Ally was built to challenge outdated banking norms with a simpler, more convenient way to bank. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Radhika Jones](https://time.com/author/radhika-jones/) Jan 29, 2012 11:14 PM UTC  by [Radhika Jones](https://time.com/author/radhika-jones/) Jan 29, 2012 11:14 PM UTC It’s dawning on me that the marriage plot, which maps so well onto novels by Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot, is misapplied to Dickens. It is far more productive to think of him as a writer of would-be divorce plots. _Hard Times_ is set in smog-choked Coketown, a fictional cesspool where the underclass toils at the factory and the upper class lives for business, not pleasure. If you think nothing good can come of this landscape, you are right. The story pairs two ill-fated marriages, one at its end, the other at its inception. The former involves Stephen Blackpool, a 40-year-old factory hand whose wife has gone violently insane, and who visits his employer, the righteous Mr. Bounderby, to inquire about a possible separation. Stephen has read in the papers that wealthy couples can be set free of their marital ties, and wonders how he can emulate them. Their exchange is quite startling in its starkness: --- > “” --- Hang on, Stephen! The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act will pass just three years after _Hard Times_ is published, allowing ordinary people to divorce through the courts instead of having to obtain an Act of Parliament. But it’s too late for our poor factory hand; as for future discontented spouses, the proof of adultery required and the stigma attached would act as a strong deterrent for at least another half-century. **(READ: Counting Down Dickens’ Greatest Novels.** [**Number 10: Oliver Twist**](http://entertainment.time.com/2012/01/27/counting-down-dickens-greatest-novels-number-10-oliver-twist/?iid=ent-main-mostpop1)**)** The novel’s other bad marriage is between Mr. Bounderby and Louisa Gradgrind, whose father runs his household the same way he runs his model school: all logic, no imagination. It is not a good omen for their happiness that Bounderby proposes to Louisa through Mr. Gradgrind, who boils the offer down to a matter of probabilities: “In considering this question, it is not unimportant to take into account the statistics of marriage, so far as they have yet been obtained, in England and Wales…” The emotionally stunted Louisa duly becomes a statistic, and wretched incompatibility ensues. I read _Hard Times_ in my high-school English class and didn’t like it. (Mr. Tyler, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry!) The Stephen Blackpool narrative is compelling to me now — in part simply because I’m near his age — but Louisa, to whom a young woman might be expected to relate, is simply too inaccessible; she stares into the fire and gives away nothing of her feelings, keeping both her father and the reader at a distance. There’s a lot of telling, not showing, from Mr. Gradgrind’s opening salvo, “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life,” to Louisa’s breakdown on abandoning her marriage and returning to her father’s house: “Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart?” This narrative shorthand may have seemed a necessary sacrifice. _Hard Times_ was serialized weekly instead of monthly — it was a quick and dirty effort to prop up the revenues of the magazine _Household Words_, which Dickens was editing — and though the author was game to do it, he chafed at the shorter space allotted him. “The difficulty of space is crushing,” he wrote to his friend and future biographer, John Forster. “Nobody can have an idea of it who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some elbow-room.” This was the man who’d written _Dombey and Son_, _David Copperfield_ and _Bleak House_. Imagine the Beatles having to go back to two-and-a-half-minute pop songs after recording “Hey Jude.” **(READ: Counting Down Dickens’ Greatest Novels.** [**Number 9:** **_Dombey and Son_**](http://entertainment.time.com/2012/01/28/counting-down-dickens-greatest-novels-number-9-dombey-and-son/)**)** But thin as it is, _Hard Times_ is very taut, and occasionally some sharp little passage arrives that reminds you of Dickens’ more expansive greatness. It’s fun to watch them appear, like crocuses poking out of asphalt. Here is Coketown beginning its day — the continuation of an earlier comparison of factories to fairy palaces (at least, as Dickens writes, that’s what travelers by express train always said): --- > “” --- Dickens has a wonderful ability to animate the world through metaphor, and “melancholy mad elephants” is about as evocative a description of giant, lumbering factory machines as any I’ve seen. You can hear them clunking. What you don’t hear is the word “factory” — a nice example of showing, not telling. _Hard Times_ is Dickens’ shortest novel, which is probably why I read it in school — that and its quick gloss of life in the industrial revolution (among other challenges, Stephen Blackpool is shunned by his colleagues for his unwillingness to join a union). But there are better examples of the so-called social-problem novel — like _North and South_, by Dickens’ protégé Elizabeth Gaskell, which he serialized in _Household Words_ right after _Hard Times_. It’s a little longer, but it’s got a richer, more inviting plot, and (bonus!) there’s a terrific four-part miniseries production of it, starring Richard Armitage. Plus any self-respecting teenager is going to use _Hard Times_ as an excuse for pushback against required reading. The whole message is anti-institutional: administrators are blowhards and idiots, the system rewards the uncreative and only the performers in the local traveling circus understand the meaning of life. The irony is, it’s very hard to understand the circus master — he’s got a wicked lisp. As crystal-clear as the moral of this story is, it’s got to be read aloud in order to make sense. “People mutht be amuthed, Thquire,” says Mr. Sleary, the sage of the circus, to Mr. Gradgrind. “They can’t be alwayth a working, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a learning. Make the betht of uth; not the wurtht.” Reading Mr. Sleary’s line out loud is amusing and endearing in itself. I may not love _Hard Times_, but I’m happy to make the best of it. I see its merits now, as a brisk, efficient vehicle for ideas about creativity, openness, emotion and irreconcilable differences. _Come back tomorrow for our look at Charles Dickens’ seventh best novel — The Pickwick Papers._ **READ: The Previous Entry in This Series—**[**Number 9:** **_Dombey and Son_**](http://entertainment.time.com/2012/01/28/counting-down-dickens-greatest-novels-number-9-dombey-and-son/) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7124147/counting-down-dickens-greatest-novels-number-8-hard-times/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7124147/counting-down-dickens-greatest-novels-number-8-hard-times/"},"headline":"Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. 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