In the Library
Hard Times
Charles Dickens, 1854
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 7.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 37
- Length
- Length 103k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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The Jungle
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Sinclair does the same job on Chicago's killing floors, but with documentary fury and no circus, no comedy, nothing at all to soften the fall.
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About the book
In a Coketown schoolroom a man with a square coat and square shoulders demands Facts, nothing but Facts, and drills the fancy out of rows of children until the girl raised among circus horses cannot say what a horse is, while the boy who recites its teeth and hoofs is held up as the model. Outside stands a town of unnatural red and black, its smoke trailing off in interminable serpents, a piston working up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. Charles Dickens wanted to know what a place like that does to the children it raises. One of them grows into a young woman who cannot want anything. Another learns that a person is only a sum to be worked out. And a weaver on the mill floor keeps saying it is aw a muddle, and he is the only one in the book telling the plain truth. Nothing else in Dickens is this angry, or this tender toward the people it is angry for.