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The story of "Hard Times" is set in the North of England, in an industry city called Coketown, an epitome and symbol of the English society after the Industrial Revolution, about 1854, when the reactionary bourgeoisie had suppressed the Chartism and the class-contradiction had became severer and severer. It is the historic background of "Hard Times". In"Hard Times" Dickens shows a genuine sympathy for the workers in Coketown, including Stephen Blackpool, an honest and hardworking …

…course, the novel does not show any confidence or affirmation in the proletariat. Yet the hardness and the bitterness in the criticism of capitalism clearly express Dickens's intense disappointment for the bourgeois society. In a word, "Hard Times", rather than presenting a historically picture of the extraordinary changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, is an attack on the utilitarian value system of the middle 19th century. Its profound significance should not be underestimated today.