Tightly plotted, with an economy of words, incidents, and characters that is not typical of Dickens, Hard Times is partly a critique of a political and economic movement that was taking England by storm in the 1850s, and partly a demonstration of Dickens’s belief that children need wonder in their lives — fairy tales, make-believe, fancy — and that the hard-working people need recreational pursuits to beguile their time off and relieve the tedium and stress of their workaday lives. This pitted Dickens against temperance ( anti-alcohol) activists and Sabbatarians ( who demanded that nothing should be allowed to go on, on Sundays, except church services) . He also bashes both sides in the corruption-contest between organized labor and their industrialist employers, and lambastes the unjust system that made divorce legal only for the very rich.