Hard Times (Signet Classics)

Author: Dickens, Charles

Brand: Signet

Color: Multicolor

Edition: Reissue

Features:

• Product Condition: No Defects

Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Number Of Pages: 336

Release Date: 01-07-2008

Part Number: 9780451530998

Details: Product Description
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
About the Author
Charles Dickens (1812–70) had a happy childhood until age twelve when, due to his father’s confinement in debtors’ prison, he was forced to leave school to work in a factory. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication of
Sketches by Boz (1836) and
The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success, including
Oliver Twist (1838),
David Copperfield (1850),
A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and
Great Expectations (1861). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished.


Frederick Busch (1941–2006) was the author of eighteen works of fiction, including
Closing Arguments,
Girls, and
The Mutual Friend, a novel about Charles Dickens. The winner of numerous awards, he was the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University.


Jane Smiley is an American novelist. In addition to her many novels (including
Ten Days in the Hills,
Horse Heaven, and
A Thousand Acres), she wrote a short biography of Charles Dickens for the Penguin Lives series (2001).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER I
The One Thing Needful

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!”

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellerage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was,—all helped the emphasis.

“In this life, we want nothing but Facts, Sir; nothing but Facts!”

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial

EAN: 9780451530998

Package Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches

Languages: English