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