Hard Times

Charles Dickens had written in a letter to Carlyle that he wrote Hard Times (1854) with the purpose to “shake people in a terrible mistake of these days.” The ‘terrible mistake’ refers to the utilitarian philosophy elucidated in Hard Times as the ‘Theory of Fact’ by the steadfast disciplinarian Thomas Gradgrind. Hard Times traces the life of a sensible, kind-hearted girl Sissy, a circus child abandoned by her remorseful father