Hard Times

A mill town where the schoolmaster teaches nothing but facts, the mill owner believes in nothing but arithmetic, and a circus turns out to be the only honest institution in the book. Dickens set it in a place he called Coketown after visiting Preston during a strike, and made it his shortest novel because it ran weekly and space was tight. Ruskin thought it his best. Ninety-nine plates by painters from Watteau to Frith, ranging from a draper's shop to Dolly Varden, give the novel's hard facts a visual life.