Hard Times
(Unknown)

Above 19th-century Coketown, soot billows from the mills’ smokestacks like black flags. As the town’s leading citizen, Thomas Gradgrind values hard facts and unflinching reason above all else, and he teaches these values to his children, Louisa and Tom. Gradgrind’s friend, the self-made industrialist Josiah Bounderby, manages his mills with similar heartlessness—much to his profit. But a series of events shakes both men to their very core, causing profound pain to those around them and an eventual awakening.