Events at this location

Hard Times

by Charles Dickens

“Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.”

Charles Dickens’s Hard Times: For These Times tells a story about honoring the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and social injustice. It takes place in Coketown, where Mr. Thomas Gradgrind feeds his pupils and his family with facts, banning imagination and wonder from young minds. Consequently, his obedient daughter Louisa becomes trapped in a loveless marriage, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in crime. As their fortunes cross with an array of colorful characters, including a free-spirited circus girl and a victimized mill worker, Gradgrind is forced to question everything he believes in. Although written in 1854, this remains one of the most relevant novels Dickens ever created and still speaks to today’s world.

Sunday, April 2, 2023, at 1:30 PM

Cost: $10

Reservations are required and can be made ONLINE

Sense and Sensibility

by Jane Austen

“I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.”

Published in 1811 and deeply beloved in the Victorian era, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility continues to delight readers today. The novel follows the three Dashwood sisters – Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret – as they come of age. Having to move away from their childhood home with their widowed mother, the sisters experience love, romance, heartbreak, and reconciliation in very different ways. Austen’s book asks the question of the reader: Which is the more satisfying path through life – acting with sense, or with sensibility?

Sunday, June 25, 2023, at 1:30 pm

Cost: $10

Reservations are required and can be made ONLINE