Hard Times

First published in 1854, this novel is set in Coketown, a northern industrial town of factories, smoke, and utilitarian schooling. Thomas Gradgrind raises his children Louisa and Tom on facts alone and marries Louisa to the self-made mill owner Josiah Bounderby. Into their circle come Sissy Jupe, a circus child left behind when her father vanishes, and Stephen Blackpool, a weaver trapped in a bad marriage and in the mill's labour disputes. The plot follows how Gradgrind's system works on his household and on the town, and how private deceit and public hard facts collide. It is a social novel of industrial England, not a London comedy of manners.

Bound in cream cloth printed with a montage of Keeping’s illustrations from the text, with dark red spine-label. Dark red endleaves. Dark red slipcase, with Dickens’s signature in gold.