Hard Times is a tale of the battle between head and heart and the need for a balance between the two. It is not theDickens of David Copperfield and Great Expectations; it has no sprawling picaresque narrative, no reassuring hero-protagonist to tell the story. Instead, a cynical, ironic third-person narrator leads us through the sooty streets of industrial ‘Coketown’ and into the lives of its inhabitants. With stinging wit and the blackest of comedy, Dickens savages the laissez-faire economics of utilitarianism and its effect on workers and children, depicting a world where the laws of supply and demand are the sole basis of human interaction.

Though set in industrial Victorian England, this is a tale that speaks to a wide audience outside its cultural origins and historical setting, as it tells the familiar story of extremes in thought being enforced as the one-true-way, without regard for the realities and complexities of human existence. Much of this concerns the raising and education of children, in which training for productivity was all important, and creativity was considered an unproductive frill. This theme is familiar today as we try to recover from both Ontario ’s “Crisis in Education” and the global financial crisis, situations that have developed through an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power and a blind faith in economic growth and free market capitalism – much like the forces and values of England during the 19 th Century Industrial Revolution. To witness the recent reaction of economists and business leaders to the collapse of the global economy, was to be vividly reminded of Mr. Gradgrind’s astonishment as his daughter Louisa turns on him at the climax of Hard Times:

“All that I know is that your philosophy and your teaching will not save me. Now, Father, you have brought me to this. Save me by some other means!”