Charles Dickens uses satire in his novel Hard Times as he attempts to bring to light social issues such as class division, education, and industrialization in nineteenth-century English society. Hard Times was originally published in weekly segments in Dickens's magazine, Household Words, from April 1854 to August 1854 (Cody 1). To better fit the libraries of the time, Charles Dickens divided Hard Times into three books: Sowing, Reaping, and Garnering. Each book, with its theme, guides us through the lives of the characters who live in the fictional town that Dickens calls "Coketown". Much like sowing seeds in a garden, Dickens uses Book the First: Sowing, to plant the characters and plot of Hard Times. First, we are introduced to the industrialized capitalist town of Coketown (Dickens 19). Dickens describes Coketown as a town that “lay shrouded in a mist of its own, which seemed impervious to the sun's rays” (203). Coketown is dominated by a society of rich, ruthless, materialistic capitalists. In Book One: Sowing, we are introduced to the main characters, the first of whom is Thomas Gradgrind (5). Gradgrind was a prominent school head who believed in “realities, facts and calculations”. He is described as a cold-hearted man who strictly forbids the promotion of imagination and emotion, especially in his two children: Tom and Louisa (Dickens 5). Mr. Gradgrind raises his children in Coketown, a capitalist industrial town that Dickens calls, a dump with “waste barrels and old iron, shining piles of coal, ashes everywhere, shrouded in a veil of mist and rain” (128). In this city that seems impenetrable to the sun's rays, her children grow up without social ties, more...... middle of paper ...... than their father and husband. Louisa seems to be the only one to have a seemingly happy ending as she is loved by Sissy's children. Charles Dickens used the themes of sowing, reaping, and reaping in his fiction to criticize the social, moral, and economic abuses of his era. In his novel Hard Times, Dickens provides a clear illustration of the English class system by examining the lives and motivations of both rich and poor. Characters from both ends of society are used by Dickens to show how the class system works, and through his overt social criticism and satire, Dickens ultimately concludes that this system is unjust and unfair to the poor. Works Cited Cody, David. "Dickens: A Brief Biography." Dickens: a short biography. The Victorian Web, 2004. Network. 2 November 2013.Dickens, Charles. Hard times. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishing, 1854. Print.