Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Set in fictional Coketown in the North of England the `Hard Times' of which Dickens writes are the years of the Industrial Revolution. The story centres on the Gradgrind family. Father Tom is an `eminently practical man' whose emphasis on facts and figures in his family's education suppresses all their sense of wonder. Parallel with this is the relationship between employer and factory worker each constrained by a similar lack of vision and imagination. As a result it is the worker who suffers the `Hard Times'. As with all Dickens' work, satire and good humour are the tools which expose the weaknesses of an inhuman system.