Hard Times - Charles Dickens

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Résumé :
Hard Times is the most Victorian novel among the others by great Charles Dickens. It is the novel where under an external sentimentality there is rough furiousness of the realist writer, to whom imperfection of a human nature and darkness of a human soul are not the news, but still provoke rejection. Friendship and betrayal, love and hate, opposition of the children of the fortune and forgotten men are just some plot lines of the novel. Hard Times is a truly all embracing epochal novel where the history of the whole country and era is depicted in the story of a small town.Hard Times is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in 1854. It is significant for being the shortest of his full novels. The book is one of a number of state-of-the-nation novels published around the same time, another being North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, which aimed to highlight the social and economic pressures some people were under. The novel is unusual, in that it is not set in London, as is Dickens' usual wont, but the fictitious Victorian industrial town of Coketown. It has met mixed critical response from a diverse range of critics, such F. R. Leavis, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Macaulay. This was usual for Dickens' treatment of trade unions, and the pessimism about the division between capitalistic millowners and the undervalued workers, after the Industrial Revolution, set in the Victorian era of Britain.This story of class conflict in Victorian England serves as a powerful critique of the social injustices that plagued the Industrial Revolution.

Biographie:
Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812 - 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity. Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education and other social reforms.

Sommaire:
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) var ?ekktur enskur sk?ldsagnah?fundur og samf?lagsgagnr?nandi, almennt talinn einn af merkustu rith?fundum Viktor?ut?mans. Dickens f?ddist ? Portsmouth ? Englandi og upplif?i erfi?a ?sku, sem einkenndist af fj?rhagserfi?leikum, sem s??ar haf?i ?hrif ? miki? af skrifum hans. Dickens ??la?ist fr?g? me? ra?myndas?gum og var? ?ekktur fyrir h?fileika s?na til a? sameina h?mor, mikla f?lagslega athugun og dj?pt mannlegar pers?nur. Verk hans varpa lj?si ? bar?ttu f?t?kra, galla stofnanakerfa og miki? misr?mi ? milli ?j??f?lagsst?tta ? Englandi ? 19. ?ld. ? dag er Dickens ekki a?eins fagna? fyrir sannf?randi fr?sagnir heldur einnig fyrir varanleg ?hrif hans ? b?kmenntir og samf?lag....