have had diverse opinions on the novel. John Ruskin declared Hard Times to be his favourite Dickens work due to its exploration of important social questions. However, Thomas Macaulay branded it "sullen socialism", on the grounds that Dickens did not fully comprehend the politics of the time. Edwin Percy Whipple criticized the novel in Scribner's Magazine by saying, "'Hard Times' is a satire on political economy, of which Dickens knew little, and the little he did know offended his benevolent feelings..." as he believed Dickens' criticisms of a utilitarian education were misguided. George Bernard Shaw argued Hard Times to be a novel of "passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world". But he criticized the novel for failing to provide an accurate account of trade unionism of the time, arguing that Slackbridge, the poisonous orator, was "a mere figment of middle-class imagination". Believing that it was very different from Dickens's other novels, Shaw also said: "Many readers find the change disappointing. Others find Dickens worth reading almost for the first time." F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, described the book as essentially a moral fable, and that 'of all Dickens's works (it is) the one that has all the strengths of his genius – that of a completely serious work of art'. This, however, was a view which he later revised in Dickens the Novelist, which recognised that Dickens's strengths and artistry appeared fully in other works. Walter Allen characterised Hard Times as being an unsurpassed "critique of industrial society", which was later superseded by works of D. H. Lawrence. Other writers have described the novel as being, as G. K. Chesterton commented in his work Appreciations and Criticisms, "the harshest of his stories"; whereas George Orwell praised the novel (and Dickens himself) for "generous anger". Adaptations The novel was adapted as a 1915 silent film, Hard Times, directed by Thomas Bentley. In 1988 Portuguese director João Botelho adapted the novel to the big screen in Hard Times (shot entirely in black & white) transferring the action to an unspecified industrial Portuguese city of the 1980s. Hard Times has been adapted twice for BBC Radio, first in 1998 starring John Woodvine as Gradgrind, Tom Baker as Josiah Bounderby and Anna Massey as Mrs. Sparsit, and again in 2007 starring Kenneth Cranham as Gradgrind, Philip Jackson as Bounderby, Alan Williams as Stephen, Becky Hindley as Rachael, Helen