"Set in Coketown, the fictitious English mill-town modeled after Preston, Hard Times follows the stories of Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy mill owner, his family, and the poor mill workers in the town. The storylines of Gradgrind's children, Louisa, Tom, and Sissy, run parallel to the troubles of the hard workers struggling to survive in a time of severe inequality. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1854 first edition, with new edits made to encompass more recent scholarly findings. The text comes paired with explanatory footnotes, illustrations and photographs depicting the scenes of the novel in contrast with their historical counterparts, and an introduction by the editor that brings Hard Times into a twenty-first century analysis on the social, economic, and political themes of the novel. "Contexts" carries over most of the contextual materials that help a modern reader acclimate to the harsh realities of mid-nineteenth century industrial England. "Criticism" brings together eighteen essays on Hard Times, five of which were seen in the third edition by Taine, Ruskin, Gissing, Leavis, and Shaw. New essays by Christopher Barnes, Christine Lupton, Victor Sage, Efraim Sicher, and Nils Clausson reexamine the novel as literary art, while Tamar Ketabgian, Kent Greenfield and John E. Nilsson, David M. Levy, Paulette Kidder, Martha Nussbaum, David Lodge, David L. Cowles, and Theodore Dalrymple provide perspectives ranging from the connections to the natural world to the study of law and the word of human experience in between. A Chronology and revised Selected Bibliography are also included."--