Hard Times: For These Times ~ Paperbound

Front Cover
Classic Books Company

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Selected pages

Contents

CHAPTER IV
153
Men and Masters
162
CHAPTER VI
170
Gunpowder
184
Explosion
198
Hearing the Last of
212
Mrs Sparsits Staircase PAGE
222
CHAPTER XII
237

CHAPTER X
70
CHAPTER XI
77
CHAPTER XII
86
CHAPTER XIII
92
CHAPTER XIV
101
CHAPTER XV
107
CHAPTER XVI
116
CHAPTER I
123
CHAPTER II
138
The Whelp
147
BOOK THE THIRD GARNERING
243
CHAPTER II
250
CHAPTER III
261
CHAPTER IV
271
CHAPTER V
282
CHAPTER VI
292
Whelphunting
303
CHAPTER VIII
316
CHAPTER IX
324

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Popular passages

Page 70 - I ENTERTAIN a weak idea that the English people are as hard-worked as any people upon whom the sun shines. I acknowledge to this ridiculous idiosyncrasy, as a reason why I would give them a little more .play.
Page vii - Allowing for his manner of telling them, the things he tells us are always true. I wish that he could think it right to limit his brilliant exaggeration to works written only for public amusement; and when he takes up a subject of high national importance, such as that which he handled in Hard Times, that he would use severer and more accurate analysis.
Page 24 - It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.
Page 6 - You must paper it," said the gentleman, rather warmly. "You must paper it," said Thomas Gradgrind, "whether you like it or not. Don't tell us you wouldn't paper it. What do you mean, boy?" "I'il explain to you, then," said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, "why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses.
Page 4 - Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.
Page 93 - Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone at her • ' There have been plenty to do that. Thou art not the man to cast the last stone, Stephen, when she is brought so low.
Page 6 - ... he had a genius for coming up to the scratch, wherever and whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly customer. He would go in and damage any subject whatever with his right, follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he always fought All England) to the ropes, and fall upon him neatly. He was certain to knock the wind out of common sense, and render that unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time.
Page 154 - As he stood there, trying to quench his fiery face with his drink of water, the comparison between the orator and the crowd of attentive faces turned towards him was extremely to his disadvantage. Judging him by Nature's evidence, he was above the mass in very little but the stage on which he stood.
Page 2 - ... the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, — nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, — all helped the emphasis. 'In this life, we want nothing but Facts, Sir; nothing but Facts!

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