** spoiler alert ** This was a good Dickens, easy to get into and a relatively short read at 300 pages. I enjoyed it very much but wouldn’t rank it as one of my favourite Dickens. It’s set in industrial Coketown where the “Hands” are beginning to unionize. Mr. Gradgrind is a schoolmaster who likes facts, not fancy, and he raises his children and runs his school on this basis. This upbringing is unfortunate for his elder children, Louisa and Tom. The younger children are spared to some extent by the introduction of Sissy Jupe into the household, a pupil taken in after being abandoned by her father. Louisa is married off to Gradgrind’s closest friend, Mr. Bounderby, a mill owner and banker thirty years her senior who shares her father’s utilitarian views, and frequently boasts about dragging himself up from his humble beginnings. Stephen Blackpool is a millhand who refuses to join the union but is dismissed by Bounderby, caught between both sides. He is framed for a bank robbery by Tom Gradgrind, the “Whelp” who has gotten into debt, and frequently makes demands of his sister.