Dicken's, the writer of novels political - "A Tale of Two Cities"; comical - "The Pickwick Papers" and romantic - "Great Expectations", could also be a writer of biting social satire. This vein, which came from deep within Dickens and was formed in the humilities of his childhood, manifests itself in many of his works - "Barnaby Rudge", "Oliver Twist", "The Old Curiosity Shop" and others, finds its peak - or trough - in one of Dickens most dramatic novels - "Hard Times".

In "Hard Times" the reader is spared nothing of the misery that Britain's Victorian industrilaised workers had to endure. Here you will find the cotton mill sweatshops of "Coketown" (Manchester). Here you will find children working long hours at the age of seven. Here you will find a downtrodden class, trapped in their own poverty - unable to escape, divorce or even die without the heavy, iron hand of Victorian Capitalism interfering in every hour and aspect of there lives,

Here you will find working class schools where the children are not "educated" but their little heads filled by rote with "facts sir, facts, facts, facts!". Here in "Hard Times" you will find the monstrous face of Capitalist Materialism where men twist their caps in anguish trying to tell a mighty industrialist boss their common woes, to be met with the answers of the puritanical work ethic that ruled all.

In "Hard Times" there is no beauty, no joy, no gladness, just the beastliness of a Capitalist society feeding self righteously off the hard times of its worker-drones.

In this book we see Dickens the social reformer. We will not say "socialist" for Dickens scorned equally the mealy mouthed do-gooders, freethinkers  and liberals of his time. Dickens has been described as a "Conservative-social reformer". He had too a strong sense of national pride and an earnestness for his work that drove him to an early grave at fifty-eight, to be drawn to Marxism, then stirring.

Dickens was in many ways an archetypal "national-socialist", though that description would have had little meaning to him.

To read "Hard Times" is to understand but one part of a multi-part personality, but it is an important part. It is the Dickens at one with the common people, sharing and showing their common misery and the book and others like it, helped paved the way for very slow reform.