Thinking Activity on Hard Time

Hard Times – For These Times (commonly known as Hard Times) is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirises the social and economic conditions of the era.

Hard Times is unusual in several ways. It is by far the shortest of Dickens' novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately before and after it.Also, unlike all but one of his other novels, Hard Times has neither a preface nor illustrations. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London. Instead the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester, though smaller. Coketown may be partially based on 19th-century Preston.

Autobiographical   element

• It is a critical truism that Dickens expressed his own boredom with his wife and marriage through Stephen Blackpool's desire for a divorce. Kaplan says that in the portrayal of Stephen's wife, Dickens gives vent to his feelings about his wife Catherine's "incompetence, clumsiness, withdrawal from responsibility." But there was also considerable contemporary interest in the subject, for the first divorce reform bill was being debated in Parliament at the same time that Dickens was writing Hard Times.

•  But even though part of the stated motivation for reform was to protect women and increase access to divorce, the debates over the Matrimonial Causes Bill, as it was officially called, had a large element of bad faith in them. For example, efforts to scuttle the Bill entirely were cynically based on arguments that it did nothing for the poor or to equalize the position of women. In the end, divorce law reform essentially continued the status of divorce as an instrument primarily for well-off men to assure that, as Lord Cranworth put it, women not be able to "palm spurious offspring upon their husbands."

Reading materials:-

1].   Divorce laws

2].    Gothic and Ungothic Novels

3].   Father and daughter plot

4] Louisa's marriage,there are a number of puzzling gaps in the story


5].  Marginalized characters marriage life


6].   Similarity between Louisa and Stephen

7]  Hard Time - The ending explanation

8] Two Interview and two protagonist connection

9]  Time representation in Hard Time.



Answer the question.

1] According to your reading what is more important" fact or fiction " ?


2]. At the end of the story who wins ?
      [ Fact or Fiction ]

3] Do you  find any similarity's between Louisa and Stephen ?


4] At the end of the story who survives ? Or who wins ?  Louisa's father or  Sissy jupe .


5]  This novel talk's about marriage low, diverses low,why there are different rules for different class? Why there is no equality in rules and regulation ?


6].  Did this title justify this work ? Can you illustrate  the title with help of character's life ?



Work Citation

1].   “Hard Times.” Novels for Students, Encyclopedia.com, 23 Apr. 2020, www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/hard-times.

2].  “Hard Times (Novel).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Apr. 2020, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_(novel).