Charles Dickens is considered to be one of the greatest British writers of all times. He was a social activist who wrote plays and novels during the Victorian period. His most famous novels include Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield. Hard Times was a protest against materialism, set in an industrial coketown in mid-nineteenth-century England. Governed solely by self-interest, Thomas Gradgrind destroys his children, Louisa and Thomas, by a complete absence of sympathy and sentiment.