Hard Times | Historical Background

The period in which Dickens wrote is called the Victorian Age, after the popular, long-lived Queen Victoria, who occupied the throne of England from 1837—the very year Dickens made his debut in fiction—until 1901.

Victorian England was the scene of enormous, far-reaching changes: changes in the nature and organization of work, in population growth, and changes in the very landscape itself, brought about by the railway and the growth of wholly new industrial cities and towns like the Coketown described in Hard Times.

In 1812, when Dickens was born,...

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