The shortest of Dickens' novels, Hard Times, was also, until quite recently, the least regarded of them. The comedy is savagely and scornfully sardonic, to the virtual exclusion of the humour - that delighted apprehension of and rejoicing in idiosyncrasy and absurdity for their own sakes, which often cuts right across moral considerations and which we normally take for granted in Dickens. Then, too, the novel is curiously skeletal. There are four separate plots, or …showed first 75 words of 1997 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1997 total…it stood for, was another county to him. He reacted toward it, and toward the attitudes that had made it what it was, with horror and fear - with what intensity Hard Times shows. In the end, though, his lack of intimate knowledge of it is unimportant. As a critique in fiction of industrial society, there is nothing to compare with Hard Times until we come to D.H. Lawrence's novels in our own century.