“Hard times” is in fact a powerful portrait of a Lancashire mill town in the 1840. In the persons of
Grandgrid and Bounderby Dickens stigmatises the prevalent philosophy of Utilitarism which,
whether in school or in factory, allowed human beings to be enslaved to machines and reduced to
numbers. The story in Hard Times takes place in the industrial North and Coketown is the fictional
name of the town were the novel is set ".... It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have
been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it,..... the jail might have been the infirmary, the
infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been eighter, or both, or anything else,
for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact.
Everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial”.
The story is told by using the omniscient third – person narration technique. The writer knows and
explains everything.
