... This dark, unforgettable story of Catherine Earnshaw and the swarthy Heathcliff 'is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath', and Emily Bronte records the progress of their love with such truth, imagination, and emotional intensity that a plain tale of the York-shire moors acquires the depth and simplicity of ancient tragedy.
Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted environment. This is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby. However, human joy is not excluded thanks to 'Mr Sleary's Horse Riding'…
In Hard Times, says George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens means to show us "that it is not our disorder but our order that is horrible; that it is not our criminals but our magnates that are robbing and murdering us ..."