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    Hard Times
    Hard Times
    Hard Times
    Ebook406 pages7 hours

    Hard Times

    By Charles Dickens

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Dickens' satirical indictment of 19th century Utilitarianism

    “Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us and not the worst.” ― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

    Hard Times by Charles Dickens is his most unusual novel. It is substantially shorter than his others and is not set in London, but in a fictitious mil-town named Coketown. The novel follows the life of the young people and workers of Coketown as they seek to survive the utilitarian ideals manifest in the town.
    This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it.

    Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes



    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXist Publishing
    Release dateApr 28, 2015
    ISBN9781623958992
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is the most popular and, many believe, the greatest English author. He wrote many classic novels, including David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol. Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities are available from Brilliance Audio.

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    Reviews for Hard Times

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh, Father, What have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here?

      My friend Levi Stahl once noted how reading Henry James utilized the higher gears of his brain. I have always relished that sentiment, though I fear Henry James is above my pay grade. It is a different kettle with Dickens, my maudlin thoughts drift to Cassavetes on Capra, a reworking of my already repurposed grace. Get behind me, social realism.

      Hard Times is an interesting collection of set pieces collected in a smelting town with a set of characters which honestly can be seen in Turgenev. The novel doesn't afford an arc much as a series of consequences. It is here where the other (evil) Scott Walker from Wisconsin finds his nocturnal emission: organized labor chokes the life out of people. It couldn't be inhaling coal dust or toiling every day bereft of Vitamin C, no, it is collective bargaining and an improper educational system. I should note that the Governor isn't a character in this novel. Only his peculiar sentiment.

      Siblings are raised in a Spartan pedagogic environment, one which worships facts and retention as opposed to creativity. The daughter then marries a self made Scott Pruitt, while the wayward son fancies gambling and living above his station. There is no mention of an ostrich jacket. There is an honest worker. He can't abide by the union and, before Bob's your uncle, he is fingered for a robbery. Life can only aspire to transcend self-interest. It remains but an aspiration.
    • 5/5
      This is the version from 1834, as originally published serialized in Household Words. Highly recommended, as read by Phil Benson, who has the perfect accent and intonation for Dickens' only northern novel. I didn't realize till almost the end that "Hard" has a double meaning, not just difficult (as in the life of poor working people) but unemotional and uncaring. The children are taught to be hard, which puts Luisa in a bad marriage and Tom into an immoral lifestyle. Bounderby is hard on others. It is Gradgrind's turn away from being hard which helps save everyone, and the characters who were not hard at all (Stephen, Rachael, and Sissy) meet their various fates but always retain their integrity.
    • 3/5
      Justly one of Dickens' least-read novels, Hard Times is a bit of an anomaly in several ways. His 10th novel, Dickens was writing in the journal Household Words in 1854, which gave him a lot less space than usual - this is perhaps a third the length of your average Dickens work. It's also a fairly straightforward story that strikes one more as a moral treatise than anything else. Aside from the famous circus sequence, the novel feels dry and a little perfunctory. The Lancashire characters' accents are also questionable at best, and indecipherable at worst.

      George Bernard Shaw liked this book, and it's not hard to see why. This is perhaps Dickens' most blatantly political book, an argument against society becoming too rational and utilitarian, too capitalist at the extent of humanity. It was an argument that had already been greatly lost by 1854, and one we are still fighting today in 2016. In that sense, Hard Times still encapsulates Dickens' core philosophies. At the same time, this is never going to be one of the works for which CD is remembered. His sheer talent is still there, in spades, but it's notable that after this work, Dickens entered the third and final act of his career, in which his novels were allowed to take their time, and he'd never sound a dull note again.
    • 4/5
      Reading this back to back with Pickwick Papers this work is darker and more cynical. But still an excellent book, by turns comic, thoughtful and timely, another great novel by Mr. Dickens. Also a masterful performance by the reader, Anton Lesser.
    • 4/5
      I was assigned Hard Times in high school, and actually remembered it as one of the few works by Dickens I had enjoyed. Rereading it, I did still enjoy it on the whole, but I still found in it so many of the qualities that put me off in Dickens--although often they're closely associated with qualities I do like.What I do like is the humor. Dickens can be witty and sharp, and this satire of utilitarianism comes off in bright primary colors, and his distaste for the Industrial Revolution and Industrialists and members of Unions alike in sooty black. Yet in terms of this picture of the Industrial North of England I couldn't help contrasting it in my mind--unfavorably--to Gaskell's North and South. There are ways in which I do find Dickens the superior writer. He had the humor I remember lacking from Gaskell and goodness, Dickens can turn a memorable phrase. But Gaskell's is a much more nuanced portrait of the Industrial Revolution. She shows its dark side--she can't be accused, unlike Dickens' character Bounderby, of trying to claim the smoky, grimy air is good for your health! Or that factory work is "light" and "pleasant." But Gaskell also shows the dynamism of the new forces at work that empowered workers compared to what had come before or to the more agricultural, class-bound South. Dickens' industrialist Bounderby is no more than a caricature--Gaskell's industrialist Thornton is a rounded figure, with virtues and flaws and a point of view that doesn't represent a straw man. On the other side of the class divide, Gaskell's workingman Nicholas Higgins to me represents a much stronger figure than either Slackbridge or the sentimentalized Blackwell in Hard Times. And I hate how Dickens represents the speech of the working class, though he's hardly alone in that in his era or ours. But it was a trial trying to make out Blackwell's speech: "I ha' hed what's been spok'n o' me, and tis' lickly that I shan't mend it." It's not as if educated speakers of English don't drop sounds. How would you pronounce "thought?" But it's not as if Dickens resorts to that kind of phonetic spelling above for upper class characters. Those caricatures, over-the-top characterizations and the hectoring polemics extend even to one of Dickens' most notable characteristics--the use of character names as tags for one-sided qualities--even if I do have to smile at names such as "Gradgrind" or "Bounderby" or "Harthouse."If my rating doesn't fall below a three (and I didn't hesitate to give A Tale of Two Cities lower) it's because, reading Blackwell's dialogue aside, this is so very readable. So much of this book is very, very quotable. I also found Louisa Bounderby an interesting character. She's a much less pallid character than I usually see in Dicken's women characters--including the others within this book not out and out caricatures like Mrs Sparsit. Louisa's a kind of anti-Emma Bovary. If Flaubert's title heroine was a female Don Quixote, driven to destruction by too much fanciful reading, then Louisa is the other side of the spectrum--one made emotionally arid by strangling all imagination and playfulness out of her from an early age to suit her father's utilitarian principles. And at least in this novel I can't accuse Dickens of being verbose--this one is less than 300 pages. Worth reading, despite my reservations.
    • 5/5
      Imposed in school, but one of the best ways to learn about the industrial revolution
    • 3/5
      The message of Hard Times rings very true today. "...that there i[s] a love in the world, not all [S]elf-intere[s]t after all, but [s]omething very different...." However, this was by far the most difficult Dickens read that I can remember. Reading the sections where his satire of the Utilitarians is at its thickest at times feels like walking through quicksand in order to follow the plot. The story is simple and you cannot miss his point, but everything slogs.
    • 3/5
      I am a big fan of Dickens, but this one was a disappointment for me. Like many of his novels, he is making a commentary on society. In this case, he is criticizing the trend of memorizing facts in education and society's movement toward industrialization. Two of the main characters, siblings Louisa and Tom Gradgrind are brought up to memorize facts and ignore stories and imaginative fancy. They end up being socially dysfunctional; in Louisa's case she is unable to build emotional ties and Tom becomes a complete selfish boor. What this novel was missing is what Dickens does so well in his other books. The characters seemed flat and one-dimensional. Where were the memorable supporting characters like Uriah Heep, or Jenny Wren? The book felt preachy, especially the ending, and lacked the usual humor and warmth for me. My least favorite Dickens so far.
    • 4/5
      Dickens' novel Hard Times presents some of the themes common to Dickens. There is a young child, Sissy Jupe, whose father abandons her. And we have yet another example of mal-education with the system of Thomas Gradgrind, "facts, facts, facts". Dickens creates interest with deft touches like the scene of Gradgrind's children, Louisa and Thomas, finding their imaginations stirred (perhaps for the first time) at the sight of a Circus. This does not last for long -- not in the family of Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, who runs it just as sternly and irrationally rational as his school. Stir in some colorful supporting characters and we have the start of a rather interesting story. I find the novel to be surprisingly readable. There is something to be said for Dickens' economy of words, paragraphs and chapters as compared with most of his earlier (and later) novels. Unfortunately the economy is achieved at the expense of fun, the wonderfully wild and jovial, bumbling blunderbusses and curious characters that made much of Dickens so much fun are not present (sad!). That having been said it is a fine sentimental story -- ironic in its' aggressive stance against sentiment. The character of Louisa, in particular, seems to be one of Dickens' favorite types: the young woman beset by fate sharing her plight with the likes of Esther Summerson. She comes up short as does this novel in most aspects, when compared with the rest of Dickens' oeuvre.
    • 2/5
      I loved many of Dickens' other works - "Great Expectations" and "A Tale of Two Cities" are excellent - but "Hard Times" is an awful read. I found it to be pretentious. It is currently sitting on my self with a book mark about three-quarters of the way through it. I won't finish it.
    • 2/5
      Dickens' 10th full length novel and far from his best. Essentially a polemic against harsh employers, early unions and the unhealthy dirt of newly industrialised cities, the book seems to miss most targets. The main characters seem even more one dimensional than usual - Gradgrind is a a great name for the grinding teacher, but as a character, he fails to be believable. His daughter, Louise, marries the mill owner Bounderby (another great name, but equally a failure as a character) and their marriage forms one of the central themes. In my Dickens marathon over the last 6 months or so, I am yet to find a normal, happy, productive marriage. Louise's marriage is worse than most depicted by Dickens, loveless and unequal, but I find it telling that there are NO normal marriages in such an extensive body of fiction. Read May 2012.
    • 4/5
      This was my first Dickens' novel, admittedly my choice as it is considerably shorter than any of his other major works. There were sections I found very entertaining- his reputation for conveying humor and biting social commentary is well earned. That said, I didn't find the actual story line particularly compelling and would have preferred more emphasis on fewer characters. All in all, an enjoyable but not outstanding book.
    • 4/5
      Louisa Gradgrind and her brother grow up in mid-19th century London filled with nothing by facts, law, discipline, and capitalism. As a result, Louisa enters into a loveless marriage to an ass of an older man, her brother turns to the seedier side of life, while the orphan child, Sissy, who made her home with the Gradgrinds after being deserted by her circus performing father seems to grow into the woman that Louisa should have become. A treatise on the importance of beauty, imagination, and human compassion triumphing over the then-burgeoning trend toward the mechanization of society, Hard Times is a typical Dickens novel with wonderful - and extensive - wordplay, lively dialogue, and a slightly sarcastic sense of humor. Definitely for the advanced reader, I recommend this book for the young adult section of a public library especially because of its place in classical literature.
    • 4/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this novel by Dickens. His tone is more caustic than usual, but as always, the social satire, fabulous characters, and complex plot are great. No one names characters like Dickens did!
    • 4/5
      Hard Times is Charles Dickens shortest work at 277 pages and is unlike his other novels because it is set in a fictional city called Coketown, an industrial city with its pollution and social disparities. The book features trade unions and the divide between capitalism and labor. The book is structured as three parts, Sowing, Reaping and Garnering based on the Bible verse, “as a man sows, so shall he reap” and on The Book Of Ruth who garners what is left in the field after the reaping is done. The characters are Professor Gradgrind who worships “facts” and raises his daughter and son only on facts and no love or pleasure. He places his son Tom in service with Mr. Bounderby, a braggart and lier. He also marries his daughter to this older man. Mr Gradgrind takes in a child of the circus, Sissy Jupe to try to educate her after her father leaves without notice. And finally Stephen Blackpool, a noble man, shunned by his own class, poorly treated by Bounderby and finally accused of a crime he didn’t commit. The book is an indictment of utilitarian philosophy. This is a fast read for a Dickens book. I enjoyed the story and the characters were fun.
    • 1/5
      Yuck! Soot, coal, suffering. Rinse, lather, repeat. Even by the standards of Dickens' classic sentimentality for the underdog, this novel is a dud. Probably not the best introduction to Charles Dickens unless you want your child to enjoy the pleasures of never reading again. This novel makes Zola's "Germinal," also about downtrodden coal miners, seem like a work of candy-colored upbeat positivity.
    • 5/5
      "NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing
      but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else,
      and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of
      reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any
      service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own
      children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these
      children. Stick to Facts, sir!"
    • 4/5
      Typical Dickens -- some social commentary, great caricature characters, intertwined events not revealed until the end; all the greatness (even the usual trait-names).

      Unlike some of his other books, though, there is no absolute main character. No-nonsense Barnaby marries Gradgrind's daughter Louisa, who agrees to the loveless marriage to help her brother Tom pay his gambling debts. An abandoned child, a mysterious old woman, a nosy "upperclass" servant, slurring carnies, a bankrobbery, romance and intrigue...hilarity and seriousness all rolled together.
    • 2/5
      Dickens at his didactic worst, assembling a cast of paperthin caricatures and prodding them to play out a sledgehammer moral pantomime.
    • 3/5
      When I saw this audiobook from the library I thought, "Ugh. Not this one." I have some vague recollection of reading Hard Times once -- or trying -- but remember nothing except the bitter aftertaste. Did I give up after the first few pages? Did I skim it for a test and then forget it? Are parts of it written in a dialect that is hard to read with your eyeballs? When I started listening to it in the car, it was awfully slow and dry; but the reader was so good I kept listening. By the end, I was riveted. Was Dickens meant to be read aloud? The narrator Frederick Davidson did a tremendous job with the comic character Mrs. Sparsit; but he also added realism to scenes that might have seemed overly dramatic on the page, such as Louisa's breakdown. My favorite scene to hear was the night Rachel watched over Stephen and his wife, and his tearful promise to her the next day. This audiobook was a great introduction to Dickens and makes me want to hear more.As a side note, I found some similarities between the themes of this story and Mansfield Park. There is nothing wrong, in my opinion, with making facts part of education; the problem is facts without principle or purpose or thoughtfulness or analysis. Mr. Gradgrind's refusal to teach morality and his regrets over the consequences reminded me of Sir Thomas, the father in Mansfield Park: "Sir Thomas, poor Sir Thomas, a parent, and conscious of errors in his own conduct as a parent, was the longest to suffer. He felt that he ought not to have allowed the marriage; that his daughter's sentiments had been sufficiently known to him to render him culpable in authorising it; that in so doing he had sacrificed the right to the expedient . . . These were reflections that required some time to soften . . . the anguish arising from the conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters was never to be entirely done away . . . [He] clearly saw that he had but increased the evil by teaching them to repress their spirits in his presence so as to make their real disposition unknown to him . . . Here had been grievous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting . . . Bitterly did he deplore a deficiency which now he could scarcely comprehend to have been possible. Wretchedly did he feel, that with all the cost and care of an anxious and expensive education, he had brought up his daughters without their understanding their first duties, or his being acquainted with their character and temper."Other similarities between the two stories are the theme of an ineffectual mother, providing no balance to the father's system of education; the vain, rich playboy who chases women without considering the consequences (Henry Crawford, Jem Harthouse); the poor girl taken into the family who becomes the heart of the family (Fanny, Sissy); and the father's increasing love and value for that girl who has grown up under his protection, but free from the influence of his system of education. In some ways, the father is the driving force of both stories: the consequences of his mistakes drive the narrative; his acceptance of those mistakes provide the conclusion. Of course, Louisa and Maria are very different characters, but they have both married men they can't stand -- so where does Louisa's sense of honor derive, when Maria's is absent? Either it was just innate, or her father's love and constant attention, though often misplaced, still supported some sort of moral grounding that Maria never possessed, or that Mrs. Norris strangled in the cradle.Mrs. Norris has no alter ego in Hard Times, at least not in the children's upbringing; however Mrs. Sparsit certainly exerted an similarly evil influence. Bounderby was happy with Louisa until Mrs. Sparsit persuaded him he should not be; for someone who expressed so much shock at Stephen Blackpool's desire to divorce his wife, her hypocrisy in actively undermining the marriage is appalling. But, her hypocrisy is not out of character, when you consider that in neither case was she motivated by morality, but rather by a desire to exert influence and express contempt.
    • 4/5
      One of Dickens' lesser known works, Hard Times for These Times is similar to his other works in that it touches upon societal problems of the day, such as poverty. I read this about five years ago and while I recall enjoying it, I am fuzzy on the details. I think it is well worth a re-read though and since I am recommending it to myself again, I would definitely recommend to others!
    • 4/5
      Not one of Dickens' best, though Dickens is still one of the best writers of the 19th century, even when he was writing as a hack. It was made more interesting a read in this day and age of Tea Partiers and puritanical Evangelicals who hate the thought of paying taxes for the public good, it reminded me that these things are cyclical. A quick read, though, so if you've got it in front of you, give it a shot.
    • 2/5
      We read an excerpt from this novel in a children's lit class as there is a scene from an extreme sort of facts only, pragmatist education. I wanted to see where the novel went from there. I was somewhat disappointed in this is a pretty straight forward criticism of industrial England in the the early 1800's. Very melodramatic. Not Dickens at his best.
    • 4/5
      This started off being very funny and quite promising, but seemed to lose its way rather. Although often thought of as a critique of the harshness of capitalism during the industrial revolution, this aspect forms more of a backdrop rather than imbuing the whole course of events as is the case with, for example, Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Gradgrind, the ultimate right-brained individual who learns the value of emotional responses alongside purely rational ones, and the deferential and tragic labourer Stephen Blackpool, are the most interesting characters.
    • 4/5
      The story begins with Thomas Gradgrind, an educator raising his children on “facts, facts, facts,” to the exclusion of creativity and imagination. The book follows his children as they grow and enter the world, and all the diverse individuals who feel the touch of his philosophy: those who embrace it and those who chafe at the bit. It is clear that Dickens condemns this point of view, although not Mr. Gradgrind himself, who exhibits the three-dimensional complexity of Dickens’ best characters. The book is part melodrama, part satire, and especially an indictment of the worst aspects of 19th century England’s industrial practices and social mores. The sense of moral outrage is powerful, and inspirational in the reading. But what rises above it all is his characters – still living and breathing more than 150 years after they were created.
    • 5/5
      Certainly my favorite of Dickens's works, and I think his best rendering of the impact of industrialism on both urban and suburban British society in the 19th century. Beautifully drawn, it's easy to see the lineage through to Orwell's works in Down and Out and Wigan Peir.
    • 4/5
      The first Charles Dickens that I read . . . very good place to start, if you are new to Dickens. Shorter than some of his better known works (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities), and is easier to read.
    • 3/5
      I read this novel with the same determination a child feels when eating cold vegetables before being allowed to enjoy desert. My least favorite of the Charles Dickens novels I've read, Hard Times made for some hard reading. Dickens' displays his characteristic urban bleakness as he describes life in an emerging factory town and the despair inherent in many of the personal relationships of the characters. Read this book if you must (admitted, Dickens certainly has his moments in this novel), but I can't highly recommend this one.
    • 3/5
      The opening chapter is to die for.
    • 4/5
      A good story about a phony English gentleman in an industrial town. However, no where near as good as Great Expectations.

    Book preview

    Hard Times - Charles Dickens

    SOWING

    CHAPTER I THE ONE THING NEEDFUL

    ‘Now, what I want is, Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.  This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!’

    The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside.  The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was,—all helped the emphasis.

    ‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’

    The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.

    CHAPTER II

    MURDERING THE INNOCENTS

    Thomas Gradgrind, sir.  A man of realities.  A man of facts and calculations.  A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over.  Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind.  With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.  It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.  You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind—no, sir!

    In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general.  In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’ Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.

    Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge.  He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

    ‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl.  Who is that girl?’

    ‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.

    ‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy.  Call yourself Cecilia.’

    ‘It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,’ returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.

    ‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Tell him he mustn’t.  Cecilia Jupe.  Let me see.  What is your father?’

    ‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.’

    Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.

    ‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here.  You mustn’t tell us about that, here.  Your father breaks horses, don’t he?’

    ‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.’

    ‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here.  Very well, then.  Describe your father as a horsebreaker.  He doctors sick horses, I dare say?’

    ‘Oh yes, sir.’

    ‘Very well, then.  He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker.  Give me your definition of a horse.’

    (Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

    ‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers.  ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals!  Some boy’s definition of a horse.  Bitzer, yours.’

    The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely white-washed room, irradiated Sissy.  For, the boys and girls sat on the face of the inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end.  But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed.  His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form.  His short-cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face.  His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.

    ‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind.  ‘Your definition of a horse.’

    ‘Quadruped.  Graminivorous.  Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive.  Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too.  Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron.  Age known by marks in mouth.’  Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

    ‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘You know what a horse is.’

    She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have blushed deeper than she had blushed all this time.  Bitzer, after rapidly blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the light upon his quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the antennæ of busy insects, put his knuckles to his freckled forehead, and sat down again.

    The third gentleman now stepped forth.  A mighty man at cutting and drying, he was; a government officer; in his way (and in most other people’s too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a system to force down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard of at the bar of his little Public-office, ready to fight all England.  To continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the scratch, wherever and whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly customer.  He would go in and damage any subject whatever with his right, follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he always fought All England) to the ropes, and fall upon him neatly.  He was certain to knock the wind out of common sense, and render that unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time.  And he had it in charge from high authority to bring about the great public-office Millennium, when Commissioners should reign upon earth.

    ‘Very well,’ said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms.  ‘That’s a horse.  Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a room with representations of horses?’

    After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, sir!’  Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, sir!’—as the custom is, in these examinations.

    ‘Of course, No.  Why wouldn’t you?’

    A pause.  One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would paint it.

    ‘You must paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.

    ‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not.  Don’t tell us you wouldn’t paper it.  What do you mean, boy?’

    ‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses.  Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact?  Do you?’

    ‘Yes, sir!’ from one half.  ‘No, sir!’ from the other.

    ‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half.  ‘Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact.  What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’  Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.

    ‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the gentleman.  ‘Now, I’ll try you again.  Suppose you were going to carpet a room.  Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?’

    There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong.  Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.

    ‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.

    Sissy blushed, and stood up.

    ‘So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you?’ said the gentleman.  ‘Why would you?’

    ‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.

    ‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?’

    ‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir.  They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir.  They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—’

    ‘Ay, ay, ay!  But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point.  ‘That’s it!  You are never to fancy.’

    ‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’

    ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman.  And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

    ‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact.  We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.  You must discard the word Fancy altogether.  You have nothing to do with it.  You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact.  You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets.  You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery.  You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls.  You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration.  This is the new discovery.  This is fact.  This is taste.’

    The girl curtseyed, and sat down.  She was very young, and she p. 8looked as if she were frightened by the matter-of-fact prospect the world afforded.

    ‘Now, if Mr. M’Choakumchild,’ said the gentleman, ‘will proceed to give his first lesson here, Mr. Gradgrind, I shall be happy, at your request, to observe his mode of procedure.’

    Mr. Gradgrind was much obliged.  ‘Mr. M’Choakumchild, we only wait for you.’

    So, Mr. M’Choakumchild began in his best manner.  He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.  He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions.  Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers.  He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek.  He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass.  Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild.  If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

    He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained.  Say, good M’Choakumchild.  When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him!

    CHAPTER III A LOOPHOLE

    Mr. Gradgrind walked homeward from the school, in a state of considerable satisfaction.  It was his school, and he intended it to be a model.  He intended every child in it to be a model—just as the young Gradgrinds were all models.

    There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one.  They had been lectured at, from their tenderest years; coursed, like little hares.  Almost as soon as they could run alone, they had been made to run to the lecture-room.  The first object with which they had an association, or of which they had a remembrance, was a large black board with a dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.

    Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an Ogre Fact forbid!  I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing castle, with Heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair.

    No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly.  No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are!  No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen, and driven Charles’s Wain like a locomotive engine-driver.  No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.

    To his matter-of-fact home, which was called Stone Lodge, Mr. Gradgrind directed his steps.  He had virtually retired from the wholesale hardware trade before he built Stone Lodge, and was now looking about for a suitable opportunity of making an arithmetical figure in Parliament.  Stone Lodge was situated on a moor within a mile or two of a great town—called Coketown in the present faithful guide-book.

    A very regular feature on the face of the country, Stone Lodge was.  Not the least disguise toned down or shaded off that uncompromising fact in the landscape.  A great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the principal windows, as its master’s heavy brows overshadowed his eyes.  A calculated, cast up, balanced, and proved house.  Six windows on this side of the door, six on that side; a total of twelve in this wing, a total of twelve in the other wing; four-and-twenty carried over to the back wings.  A lawn and garden and an infant avenue, all ruled straight like a botanical account-book.  Gas and ventilation, drainage and water-service, all of the primest quality.  Iron clamps and girders, fire-proof from top to bottom; mechanical lifts for the housemaids, with all their brushes and brooms; everything that heart could desire.

    Everything?  Well, I suppose so.  The little Gradgrinds had cabinets in various departments of science too.  They had a little conchological cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet; and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits of stone and ore looked as though they might have been broken from the parent substances by those tremendously hard instruments their own names; and, to paraphrase the idle legend of Peter Piper, who had never found his way into their nursery, If the greedy little Gradgrinds grasped at more than this, what was it for good gracious goodness’ sake, that the greedy little Gradgrinds grasped it!

    Their father walked on in a hopeful and satisfied frame of mind.  He was an affectionate father, after his manner; but he would probably have described himself (if he had been put, like Sissy Jupe, upon a definition) as ‘an eminently practical’ father.  He had a particular pride in the phrase eminently practical, which was considered to have a special application to him.  Whatsoever the public meeting held in Coketown, and whatsoever the subject of such meeting, some Coketowner was sure to seize the occasion of alluding to his eminently practical friend Gradgrind.  This always pleased the eminently practical friend.  He knew it to be his due, but his due was acceptable.

    He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled, when his ears were invaded by the sound of music.  The clashing and banging band attached to the horse-riding establishment, which had there set up its rest in a wooden pavilion, was in full bray.  A flag, floating from the summit of the temple, proclaimed to mankind that it was ‘Sleary’s Horse-riding’ which claimed their suffrages.  Sleary himself, a stout modern statue with a money-box at its elbow, in an ecclesiastical niche of early Gothic architecture, took the money.  Miss Josephine Sleary, as some very long and very narrow strips of printed bill announced, was then inaugurating the entertainments with her graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act.  Among the other pleasing but always strictly moral wonders which must be seen to be believed, Signor Jupe was that afternoon to ‘elucidate the diverting accomplishments of his highly trained performing dog Merrylegs.’  He was also to exhibit ‘his astounding feat of throwing seventy-five hundred-weight in rapid succession backhanded over his head, thus forming a fountain of solid iron in mid-air, a feat never before attempted in this or any other country, and which having elicited such rapturous plaudits from enthusiastic throngs it cannot be withdrawn.’  The same Signor Jupe was to ‘enliven the varied performances at frequent intervals with his chaste Shaksperean quips and retorts.’  Lastly, he was to wind them up by appearing in his favourite character of Mr. William Button, of Tooley Street, in ‘the highly novel and laughable hippo-comedietta of The Tailor’s Journey to Brentford.’

    Thomas Gradgrind took no heed of these trivialities of course, but passed on as a practical man ought to pass on, either brushing the noisy insects from his thoughts, or consigning them to the House of Correction.  But, the turning of the road took him by the back of the booth, and at the back of the booth a number of children were congregated in a number of stealthy attitudes, striving to peep in at the hidden glories of the place.

    This brought him to a stop.  ‘Now, to think of these vagabonds,’ said he, ‘attracting the young rabble from a model school.’

    A space of stunted grass and dry rubbish being between him and the young rabble, he took his eyeglass out of his waistcoat to look for any child he knew by name, and might order off.  Phenomenon almost incredible though distinctly seen, what did he then behold but his own metallurgical Louisa, peeping with all her might through a hole in a deal board, and his own mathematical Thomas abasing himself on the ground to catch but a hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act!

    Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where his family was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring child, and said:

    ‘Louisa!!  Thomas!!’

    Both rose, red and disconcerted.  But, Louisa looked at her father with more boldness than Thomas did.  Indeed, Thomas did not look at him, but gave himself up to be taken home like a machine.

    ‘In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, leading each away by a hand; ‘what do you do here?’

    ‘Wanted to see what it was like,’ returned Louisa, shortly.

    ‘What it was like?’

    ‘Yes, father.’

    There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in the girl: yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its expression.  Not with the brightness natural to cheerful youth, but with uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had something painful in them, analogous to the changes on a blind face groping its way.

    She was a child now, of fifteen or sixteen; but at no distant day would seem to become a woman all at once.  Her father thought so as he looked at her.  She was pretty.  Would have been self-willed (he thought in his eminently practical way) but for her bringing-up.

    ‘Thomas, though I have the fact before me, I find it difficult to believe that you, with your education and resources, should have brought your sister to a scene like this.’

    ‘I brought him, father,’ said Louisa, quickly.  ‘I asked him to come.’

    ‘I am sorry to hear it.  I am very sorry indeed to hear it.  It makes Thomas no better, and it makes you worse, Louisa.’

    She looked at her father again, but no tear fell down her cheek.

    ‘You!  Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the sciences is open; Thomas and you, who may be said to be replete with facts; Thomas and you, who have been trained to mathematical exactness; Thomas and you, here!’ cried Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘In this degraded position!  I am amazed.’

    ‘I was tired, father.  I have been tired a long time,’ said Louisa.

    ‘Tired?  Of what?’ asked the astonished father.

    ‘I don’t know of what—of everything, I think.’

    ‘Say not another word,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘You are childish.  I will hear no more.’  He did not speak again until they had walked some half-a-mile in silence, when he gravely broke out with: ‘What would your best friends say, Louisa?  Do you attach no value to their good opinion?  What would Mr. Bounderby say?’  At the mention of this name, his daughter stole a look at him, remarkable for its intense and searching character.  He saw nothing of it, for before he looked at her, she had again cast down her eyes!

    ‘What,’ he repeated presently, ‘would Mr. Bounderby say?’  All the way to Stone Lodge, as with grave indignation he led the two delinquents home, he repeated at intervals ‘What would Mr. Bounderby say?’—as if Mr. Bounderby had been Mrs. Grundy.

    CHAPTER IV MR. BOUNDERBY

    Not being Mrs. Grundy, who was Mr. Bounderby?

    Why, Mr. Bounderby was as near being Mr. Gradgrind’s bosom friend, as a man perfectly devoid of sentiment can approach that spiritual relationship towards another man perfectly devoid of sentiment.  So near was Mr. Bounderby—or, if the reader should prefer it, so far off.

    He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not.  A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh.  A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him.  A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up.  A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start.  A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man.  A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty.  A man who was the Bully of humility.

    A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight added to it again, without surprising anybody.  He had not much hair.  One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.

    In the formal drawing-room of Stone Lodge, standing on the hearthrug, warming himself before the fire, Mr. Bounderby delivered some observations to Mrs. Gradgrind on the circumstance of its being his birthday.  He stood before the fire, partly because it was a cool spring afternoon, though the sun shone; partly because the shade of Stone Lodge was always haunted by the ghost of damp mortar; partly because he thus took up a commanding position, from which to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind.

    ‘I hadn’t a shoe to my foot.  As to a stocking, I didn’t know such a thing by name.  I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty.  That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday.  Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch.’

    Mrs. Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic without any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her; Mrs. Gradgrind hoped it was a dry ditch?

    ‘No!  As wet as a sop.  A foot of water in it,’ said Mr. Bounderby.

    ‘Enough to give a baby cold,’ Mrs. Gradgrind considered.

    ‘Cold?  I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything else, I believe, that was capable of inflammation,’ returned Mr. Bounderby.  ‘For years, ma’am, I was one of the most miserable little wretches ever seen.  I was so sickly, that I was always moaning and groaning.  I was so ragged and dirty, that you wouldn’t have touched me with a pair of tongs.’

    Mrs. Gradgrind faintly looked at the tongs, as the most appropriate thing her imbecility could think of doing.

    ‘How I fought through it, I don’t know,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I was determined, I suppose.  I have been a determined character in later life, and I suppose I was then.  Here I am, Mrs. Gradgrind, anyhow, and nobody to thank for my being here, but myself.’

    Mrs. Gradgrind meekly and weakly hoped that his mother—

    ‘My mother?  Bolted, ma’am!’ said Bounderby.

    Mrs. Gradgrind, stunned as usual, collapsed and gave it up.

    ‘My mother left me to my grandmother,’ said Bounderby; ‘and, according to the best of my remembrance, my grandmother was the wickedest and the worst old woman that ever lived.  If I got a little pair of shoes by any chance, she would take ’em off and sell ’em for drink.  Why, I have known that grandmother of mine lie in her bed and drink her four-teen glasses of liquor before breakfast!’

    Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of vitality, looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of a small female figure, without enough light behind it.

    ‘She kept a chandler’s shop,’ pursued Bounderby, ‘and kept me in an egg-box.  That was the cot of my infancy; an old egg-box.  As soon as I was big enough to run away, of course I ran away.  Then I became a young vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me, everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me.  They were right; they had no business to do anything else.  I was a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest.  I know that very well.’

    His pride in having at any time of his life achieved such a great social distinction as to be a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest, was only to be satisfied by three sonorous repetitions of the boast.

    ‘I was to pull through it, I suppose, Mrs. Gradgrind.  Whether I was to do it or not, ma’am, I did it.  I pulled through it, though nobody threw me out a rope.  Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  Those are the antecedents, and the culmination.  Josiah Bounderby of Coketown learnt his letters from the outsides of the shops, Mrs. Gradgrind, and was first able to tell the time upon a dial-plate, from studying the steeple clock of St. Giles’s Church, London, under the direction of a drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief, and an incorrigible vagrant.  Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of your district schools and your model schools, and your training schools, and your whole kettle-of-fish of schools; and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, tells you plainly, all right, all correct—he hadn’t such advantages—but let us have hard-headed, solid-fisted people—the education that made him won’t do for everybody, he knows well—such and such his education was, however, and you may force him to swallow boiling fat, but you shall never force him to suppress the facts of his life.’

    Being heated when he arrived at this climax, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown stopped.  He stopped just as his eminently practical friend, still accompanied by the two young culprits, entered the room.  His eminently practical friend, on seeing him, stopped also, and gave Louisa a reproachful look that plainly said, ‘Behold your Bounderby!’

    ‘Well!’ blustered Mr. Bounderby, ‘what’s the matter?  What is young Thomas in the dumps about?’

    He spoke of young Thomas, but he looked at Louisa.

    ‘We were peeping at the circus,’ muttered Louisa, haughtily, without lifting up her eyes, ‘and father caught us.’

    ‘And, Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband in a lofty manner, ‘I should as soon have expected to find my children reading poetry.’

    ‘Dear me,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘How can you, Louisa and Thomas!  I wonder at you.  I declare you’re enough to make one regret ever having had a family at all.  I have a great mind to say I wish I hadn’t.  Then what would you have done, I should like to know?’

    Mr. Gradgrind did not seem favourably impressed by these cogent remarks.  He frowned impatiently.

    ‘As if, with my head in its present throbbing state, you couldn’t go and look at the shells and minerals and things provided for you, instead of circuses!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘You know, as well as I do, no young people have circus masters, or keep circuses in cabinets, or attend lectures about circuses.  What can you possibly want to know of circuses then?  I am sure you have enough to do, if that’s what you want.  With my head in its

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