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A review by lindseysparks
Hard Times by Charles Dickens, Jeff Nunokawa, Gage McWeeny
3.0
If you handed me this book without telling me that author I would probably not have guessed it was Dickens. The intro to my edition explains that Dickens had planned to take a year off from novel writing after finishing Bleak House. The other men with a stake in his magazine begged him to write a serialized novel in it to boost sales. He did and Hard Times is the result.
It feels like he started this feeling that he had given in but wasn't going to try very hard. I can see him thinking, well, I'll just make this short and you're not getting a big cast of characters and I really wanted to write an essay denouncing Utilitarianism so I'll just make this about that. Then he gets going and about halfway through starts having fun with it. I started having more fun too and surprised myself be ending up liking it. It's no Bleak House, but it was enjoyable and I liked it better than Little Dorritt, The Old Curiosity Shop and even Our Mutual Friend.
It feels like he started this feeling that he had given in but wasn't going to try very hard. I can see him thinking, well, I'll just make this short and you're not getting a big cast of characters and I really wanted to write an essay denouncing Utilitarianism so I'll just make this about that. Then he gets going and about halfway through starts having fun with it. I started having more fun too and surprised myself be ending up liking it. It's no Bleak House, but it was enjoyable and I liked it better than Little Dorritt, The Old Curiosity Shop and even Our Mutual Friend.