Table of Contents

Introduction
A summary of the plot
What is Hard Times about?
Is Hard Times socialist?
How do we cope with Dickens's
sentimentality?
Why is the novel so unsubtle?
Is Hard Times a realist novel?
Where's the sex?
Is Louisa in love with James
Harthouse?
Is cleverness unwomanly?
What's the point of the circus?
What can we learn from the novel today?

About the Author

Uttara Natarajan is Reader in English at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths University of London, where she has been teaching and thinking about Dickens for the last fifteen years. She has published extensively on the Romantic essayist, William Hazlitt, and on other Romantic writers. Publications include Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense (1998), Metaphysical Hazlitt (with Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu, 2005), and The Romantic Poets: A Guide to Criticism (2007).