Rating: 
Summary: Strong novel, but not as memorable
Review: I read this book later than I read novels such as Great Expecatations and David Copperfield, but I don't remember it as well. Hard Times is a fine novel - short, often miserable (but that's the reason why this novel is so important), but with a good message. It's also an effective satire that actually does have its moments of humor as well as pathos (such as when Stephen Blackpool dies). I do recommend it, but as good as a book it is, it'll never be one of my favorite Dickens novels.
Rating:
Summary: A Quite Good Book
Review: A most interesting book, and not the "downer" one might expect from the title. The story begins with the issue of what might happen to children raised in a setting where the non-logical human qualities are repressed. This is blended in with the relationship dynamics of those who own the factories and those who make the factories actually produce something to sell. Further, related issues are added. These various topics are intermingled in a moving story.
Rating: 
Summary: Hardly a masterpiece, but brilliant at times
Review: "Hard Times" belongs to the second half of Dickens's writing career, in which his work becomes rather more somber and, by common critical assent, more mature and satisfying. Personally, I prefer his earlier work and his very first novel, "Pickwick Papers", is to my mind his greatest. Surprisingly, "Hard Times", despite its title and reputation, contains some brilliant flashes of Dickens humour, especially in the earlier part. The descriptions of Bounderby and Gradgrind, and the early dialogue with the circus folk, are genuinely hilarious.This is Dickens's shortest novel, about a third of the length of each of his previous four. Themes, subplots and characters are introduced without being fully explored. The author was perhaps feeling the constraints of writing in installments for a periodical, although he was well used to doing that. This relative brevity, together with the youth of some of the central characters, make this book a good introduction to Dickens for young readers. There are the large dollops of Victorian melodrama and the reliance on unlikely coincidences that mar much of Dickens's work. Also the usual tendency for characters to become caricatures and to have names that are a little too apt (a teacher called Mr. McChoakumchild?). The respected critic F.R. Leavis considered "Hard Times" to be Dickens's masterpiece and "only serious work of art". This seems to me wildly wrong, but such an extreme opinion may prompt you to read the book, just so that you can form your own opinion. I read it because I had just finished "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, which deals with the plight of Chicago factory workers, and I wanted to compare the two. Sinclair's book has greater immediacy. It takes you much closer to the suffering of the workers. In the Dickens novel, the mill workers and their plight are distanced; they are relegated to being the background to a family drama, which is what really interests the author. A third, and still greater work, that examines the same themes, is Zola's "Germinal". I recommend all three. Together, they give real insight into the social conditions that led to the proletarian political and revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Rating: 
Summary: Time Were Hard--And Dickens Shows How & Why
Review: It is unfortunate that HARD TIMES by Charles Dickens is not usually read outside the classroom. It is an unforgettable glimpse of an age that did not prize the worth of the individual over a collective society--sort of like today's emphasis on the same. What stamps HARD TIMES as the classic that it is is Dickens' continual focus on the rights of the individual and his championing of anti-child labor laws. In an age that routinely crushed individuals in the grinding gears of a society that was hell-bent on automating the factory system, it was only lone voices like Charles Dickens who, in his novels, cried out to stop the madness. In HARD TIMES, Dickens takes a savagely satirical poke at a then popular system of thought: utilitarianism, a philosophy which saw men and children as interchangeable cogs in a machine that demanded that all facets of life and output be reduced to facts, numbers, and quantifiable data. Thomas Gradgrind opens the novel by insisting that the students in his school be just like Officer Joe Friday from "Dragnet" fame: give me the facts, and only the facts. Those who can deliver advance. Those who cannot get routinely squashed flat. Josiah Bounderby is the villain as he represents the ultimate in a selfishness and fact-centeredness way of life. As typical of Dickens, there is a vast assortment of subplots that he manages to tie neatly together by the closing pages. What stamps HARD TIMES as relevant in this or any future age is Dickens' insistance that, regardless of technological advances, the individual will always matter. HARD TIMES says this as well as any other book.
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