Introduction / Paul Edward Gray -- [Part one. Interpretations] -- The battle for Preston / K.J. Fielding -- Politics / Humphry House -- Good intentions and bad results / Philip Collins -- Hard times : the problems of a weekly serial / John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson -- Critique of materialism / Edgar H. Johnson -- Hard times - Dickens's masterpiece? / A.O.J. Cockshut -- The social microcosmic pattern / Earle Davis -- Dickens as social novelist / Sylvere Monod -- The rhetoric of Hard times / David Lodge -- [Part two. View Points] -- George Gissing -- G.K. Chesterton -- George Bernard Shaw -- George Orwell -- K.J. Fielding -- J. Hillis Miller -- Lionel Stevenson.
