Hard Times. For These Times

‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root everything else.’ So begins Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), a work with its subtitle: For These Times. With his satiric swipe at industrialism, James Mill’s Utilitarianism, and the national obsession with the ‘science’ of Political Economy (measuring everything by facts, figures, and averages), Dickens confirmed to his friend Carlyle, to whom the work was dedicated: ‘I know it contains nothing in which you do not think with me.’ There were no illustrations to Hard Times, Dickens’s shortest novel.

[Page 4 and 5 of Charles Dickens's Hard Times. For These Times.]