Hard Times, Clothbound Gift Edition

Name: Hard Times, Clothbound Gift Edition
Price: 22.50 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780141198347

By: Charles Dickens

Penguin Classics / 2012 / Hardcover

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Product Description

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For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

Divided into sections of sowing, reaping, and garnering, Hard Times is a scathing portrait of the outcome of Victorian capitalism, industrialism, and utilitarianism. Set in the manufacturing city of "Coketown," Dickens focuses all his powers of observation on the treatment of the working class by their employers. Looking at the outcome of mistreating employees and living a life based purely on emotionless rationality, Dickens assaults the ideas that prosperity and morality are intertwined, and that people can be reduced to numbers, statistics, and profits.

Part of the Penguin Classics Hardcover Series, the fabric-bound, imprinted cover was designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith. Hard Times features a pattern of light green horses & flora on a darker green background. Ribbon marker is also included. 368 pages, hardcover.

Product Information

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Title: Hard Times, Clothbound Gift Edition
By: Charles Dickens
Format: Hardcover
Number of Pages: 368
Vendor: Penguin Classics
Publication Date: 2012

Dimensions: 7.75 X 5.06 (inches)
Weight: 1 pound 2 ounces
ISBN: 0141198346
ISBN-13: 9780141198347
Stock No: WW198347

Publisher's Description

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Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from any young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and 'bully of humanity' Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery. And, as their fortunes cross with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimized weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is eventually forced to recognize the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and machinery.

Author Bio

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Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney’s clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.