In this study of what is often considered to be Dickens's most important novel. Thomas asserts that Hard Times can be understood as a "fable of fragmentation and wholeness.".

Dickens conceived of Hard Times as a severe critique of the industrial and philosophical excesses of industrial England in the mid-nineteenth century. The problem of fragmentation is one mode by which Dickens expressed this critique. Thomas structures her analysis around five key areas in which fragmentation is the dominant theme. As Dickens shows in Hard Times, the machinery of nineteenth-century industry had the capacity to dismember and destroy the bodies of individual workers.

Thomas provides detailed information about the unfenced machines and industrial accidents of Dickens's time, greatly enhancing her readers' understanding of these brutal facts of Victorian life. As Thomas demonstrates, this physical fragmentation had its counterpart in the social thought of Dickens's times. Utilitarianism, a philosophy that imposes a strict rationalism on all human endeavor, and an educational system that provides a "strict diet of facts," are two forms of intellectual fragmentation pervasive in Dickens's novel and explicated by Thomas in this study.

In addition, industrial relations that reduce workers to "hands" represent a form of emotional fragmentation, which Dickens emphatically criticizes in Hard Times. The inaccessibility of divorce for the majority of individuals also led to emotional fragmentation, separating individuals trapped in unhappy marriages from potential happiness. Thomas explores this last issue in light of contemporary debates on divorce-law reform, as well as Dickens's own deeply unhappy marriage.