Hard Times

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Paul Scofield

In the squalor of a textile town, successful businessman and arch-pragmatist Thomas Gradgrind, proclaiming that he is a self-made man, teaches his children to suppress their imaginations and embrace hard facts. He arranges the marriage of his daughter Louisa to Josiah Bounderby, an unattractive, boastful manufacturer who is thirty years older her senior, and Gradgrind's son Tom goes to work in Bounderby's bank. But after Tom steals from his employer and Louisa flees the horrors of her marriage, Gradgrind must reconsider his lifelong devotion to facts and utility.

Public Domain (P)1996 Phoenix Books, Inc.

One to make you think

A good invite into Victorian times in England. But a bit hard to follow. I think I’ll have to listen a second time.