Is Hard Times a realist novel?

Hard Times was one of Charles Dickens's shorter works and was actually written with the intention of garnering more sales for his other works. It, like most of his other novels, takes a hard, often harsh, look at society and the living conditions of the people of Britain. As to whether it can be classified as a "realist" novel, there are two ways of looking at this.
The first way is to take in the fact that one of the main characters, Thomas Grandgrind, looks at life with no sympathy, and no rose-colored glasses, whatsoever. He teaches his children, Louisa and Tom, to be "settlers": people who just take what they can get and never try to achieve their dreams, or want for anything more than what is available to them at the moment. As a result of this, Louisa marries a man much older than her that she doesn't love (and eventually cheats on), and her brother Tom convinces her to do it so that he can benefit from the financial stability the older man provides. This way of thinking that life is what it is and there is no point in trying to change anything could be argued to be "realist." A realist just sees what is in front of them and decides to deal with it, without expecting or hoping anything will change or trying to see things in a different light.
The second way of looking at this story, though, is to think of it as less of a realist novel, and more of an exaggeration. By focusing on these harsh times in a work that was also written to criticize the social and economic changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution (which Dickens did not support), the author is perhaps making things look bleaker than they really are in order to drum up support from his readers. So, perhaps in a way the novel is a realist one, but its readers must ask themselves, is it realistic?