SUMMARY OF HARD TIMES OF CHARLES DICKENS

SUMMARY OF HARD TIMES OF CHARLES DICKENS 

      One of the most precious novels of Victorian era is HARD TIMES written by Charles Dickens.The setting is Coketown, an industrial community in the north of England, and the main plot concerns one of its leading Citizens, Mr Thomas Gradgrind, and his family. Gradgrind is a convinced advocate of the utilitarian philosophy of 'fact', and has brought up his children 

on this principle as well as spreading it more widely through a school that he has established. The story concerns the fates of his two eldest children, Tom and Louisa, and, to a lesser extent, of two of the pupils at the school , Sissy Jupe and Bitzer. As a result of their imagination and sense of beauty being starved throughout childhood, Tom and Louisa grow up to be bored and discontented, and in different ways their lives come to disaster. Tom robs the bank at which he works and has to flee the country; Louisa makes an unhappy marriage with Josiah Bounder by, a prosperous local business man, and after almost succumbing to the temptation offered by a would-be seducer, the upper-class politician James Harthouse, she' leaves her husband and returns home. Bitzer also illustrates the unfortunate 

influence of the system of education he receives, and proves to be thoroughly selfish and ungrateful; Sissy, on the other hand, has been brought up in a circus and remains untouched by the influence of her schooling, her natural goodness and instinctive wisdom enabling her to help Louisa in her difficulties. The sub-plot concerns a Coketown mill-worker, Stephen Blackpool, who is unable to obtain a divorce from a drunken wife who causes him much misery and to marry a good woman, Rachael, whom he loves. Stephen is first ostracised by his fellow-workmen because he refuses to join a trade union, then he is accused of the bank robbery of which Tom is guilty. Tom's name is eventually cleared, but only after Stephen has met his death by falling down a disused mine-shaft. 

By the end of the novel, Mr Gradgrind, whose wife has died, whose son is disgraced and exiled, and whose daughter's life is in ruins, has been brought to see the error of his ways and is a much sadder but also a much wiser man.