Dickens's Hard Times takes place in Coketown, a coal mining town, focused on a small cluster of characters. There’s Gradgrind, a leading citizen and MP and education reformer. The Gradgrind children, Tom and Louisa, have both been trained according to Gradgrind’s modern educational methods. Bounderby is the manager of one of the factories in town, where Stephen Blackpool works as one of the factory “hands.” Finally, there's Harthouse, an unscrupulous nobleman.

The plot turns on several moments. Bounderby marries Louisa Gradgrind, who despises him: Harthouse shows up in town, recognizes Louisa’s unhappiness, and sets about to seduce her away from her husband. Meanwhile, Stephen Blackpool suffers the burden of a drunkard wife who disappears for long periods and then suddenly returns. He is in love with Rachael, who helps him care for his wife. Blackpool is caught between the labor movement, with which he refuses to cooperate in order to keep a promise to Rachael, and the management. Bounderby treats him with contempt, 

Blackpool realizes that there is no future in Coketown for him, and so he leaves. Around the same time, there is a robbery from the Bank. Bounderby suspects that Blackpool is responsible, and Rachael sends word to him and asks him to return to Coketown. When he does not return, a search party disccovers that he had an accident. He dies shortly after, but before he dies it is proven that Tom Gradgrind is the thief.

As always, Dickens is using his melodrama for social criticism. Grandgrind famously represents an education method that emphasizes fact and reason and excludes fancy and imagination. He and his associate, the wonderfully named M’Choakumchild, train their children to exclude fancy. In a famous scene early in the story, Sissy Jupe, one of the students, is trying to define a horse and is told that she should provide only facts and figures. Dickens’s attack on the education method that squelches fancy is part of his defense of childhood.

Dickens links this educational method up with a laissez faire economic theory in which everyone seeks his own self-interest, without any concern for others. This has been Gradgrind’s theory, but when Tom is found guilty, he comes to see the error of his educational philosophy. He recognizes the damage done to Louisa, and also sees that it suppresses genuine humane feeling.

The factory system is, of course, an object of attack and satire. Bounderby speaks of himself as a kind of prototypical self-made man -  abandoned by his parents, raised by a brutal grandmother. Eventually, his story is exposed as a complete fabrication. His mother raised him and cared for him lovingly. This satire of the self-made capitalist cuts in the other direction too: Dickens is as savage with the union movement as with management. Blackpool is as much a victim of other workers as he is of Bounderby’s management.

As always, Dickens's social critique is given at least a Christian gloss by typological titling and characterization. The first chapter is titled “One Thing Needful,” which quotes Jesus’ reminder to Martha in Luke 10.  In this chapter, though, the “one thing needful” is Gradgrind’s facts. The Biblical reference makes an ironic contrast with the content of the chapter. The first chapter of the third book is “Another Thing Needful,” and in this chapter Gradgrind comes to his senses and realizes that there is a wisdom of the heart as well as a wisdom of the head, leading him to ask Louisa’s forgiveness for the harshness of her upbringing. The gospel's “one thing needful” has been turned into a brief for sentiment.

Several characters are drawn in Satanic features. Harthouse is a kind of serpent/tempter, an agreeable, languid seducer. Slackbridge, the labor leader, has some of the same qualities. Stephen, by contrast, is a quiet but courageous Hand, who follows his conscience wherever it leads. He is exiled, his near-death and resurrection is a turning point in the plot. Dickens presents his death assomething of a martyr’s death, and surely Dickens alludes to the death of his namesake, the first Christian martyr, in writing Stephen's death scene.