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Riverside Dickens Festival takes place Feb. 2-3, 2013, returning to the historic buildings and streets of downtown Riverside.  The theme of the event is based on a Charles Dickens novel each year and in 2013 it is “Hard Times”.

Hard Times, a social protest novel of  19th century England, applies to the working class, known as the “Hands,” who are having a “hard time” in this novel. But the other class has a hard time, as well. Why? The century, marked by the Industrial Revolution, was also a century of political and economic unrest in the world. The Industrial Revolution, though producing much good, created deplorable living conditions in England. Overcrowding in the cities as a consequence of the population shift from rural to urban areas and the increase in the numbers of immigrants from poverty-stricken Ireland resulted in disease and hunger for thousands of the laboring class.

Thomas Gradgrind, who runs a school in the industrial city of Coketown, sees his children, Louisa and Tom, peering into a circus. This is in direct opposition to his views about fanciful entertainment. It doesn’t help that the daughter of one of the traveling circus members has been enrolled in Gradgrind’s school and is a bad influence. Discovering that the girl has been abandoned by her parents, Gradgrind agrees to take her in with the hope of reforming her. Hard Times touches on themes that are relevant today such as poverty, homelessness, divorce and marital incompatibility. Divorce was expensive and legally difficult, as well as socially unacceptable in the 19th century. Whether you had money or not, happiness wasn’t always around the bend.