A powerful and courageous work of fiction, Hard Times looks at working conditions in a Victorian factory town in the industrial north of England. It´s an extraordinary novel that considers how enslavement to systems at the expense of imagination and feeling can wreck human lives. This edition celebrates Charles Dickens´ most openly campaigning novel, through which the author said he aimed to ´strike the heaviest blow in my power´. Hard Times explores the important social questions of the day and places prosperity and morality under the microscope.