The shortest of Dickens' novels Hard Times was also until quite recently the least regarded of them. The comedy is savagely and scornfully sardonic to the virtual exclusion of the humour - that delighted apprehension of and rejoicing in idiosyncrasy and absurdity for their own sakes which often cuts right across moral considerations and which we normally take for granted in Dickens. Then too the novel is curiously skeletal. There are four separate plots or at least four separate centres of interest: the re-education through suffering of Mr. Gradgrind the exposure of Bounderby the life and death of Stephen Blackpool and the story of Sissy Jupe