Here are Peter Ackroyd’s and G.K. Chesterton’s brief discussions of “Hard Times”. Both seek to explain just what it was Dickens was striving to do in this novel and therefore why it is so different a text than his others.
Also of note and attached are:
Margaret Simpson’s Introduction to “The Companion to Hard Times“, which gives a terrific overview of the place and time of the novel and the way it was integrated into Household Words
R.D. Butterworth’s “Dickens the Novelist: The Preston Strike and Hard Times“, which describes Dickens’s experience of the strike and his use of it (or not) for his novelistic purposes
Finally, I’ve attached Dickens’s “On Strike”, published in the 11 February 1854 edition of “Household Words” just before Hard Times began its run on 1 April 1854.
“But Dickens was not interested in writing a political or social tract; he was writing a fairy story of the industrial age.”
Ackroyd
“And although this Hard Times is . . . the hardest of his works . . . this only emphasises the more clearly the fact that he stood almost alone for a more humane and hilarious view of democracy.”
Chesterton
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22362/22362-h/22362-h.htm#HARD_TIMES
Simpson
Butterworth
“On Strike”
All the (Dickensian) Year Round 
Thanks for sharing these, Chris. Very interesting reading 😀
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