Hard Times

by Dickens, Charles

  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 present state, I

  couldn't remember the mere names of half the facts you have got to

  attend to.'

  'That's the reason!' pouted Louisa.

  'Don't tell me that's the reason, because it can't be nothing of

  the sort,' said Mrs. Gradgrind. 'Go and be somethingological

  directly.' Mrs. Gradgrind was not a scientific character, and

  usually dismissed her children to their studies with this general

  injunction to choose their pursuit.

  In truth, Mrs. Gradgrind's stock of facts in general was woefully

  defective; but Mr. Gradgrind in raising her to her high matrimonial

  position, had been influenced by two reasons. Firstly, she was

  most satisfactory as a question of figures; and, secondly, she had

  'no nonsense' about her. By nonsense he meant fancy; and truly it

  is probable she was as free from any alloy of that nature, as any

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  human being not arrived at the perfection of an absolute idiot,

  ever was.

  The simple circumstance of being left alone with her husband and

  Mr. Bounderby, was sufficient to stun this admirable lady again

  without collision between herself and any other fact. So, she once

  more died away, and nobody minded her.

  'Bounderby,' said Mr. Gradgrind, drawing a chair to the fireside,

  'you are always so interested in my young people - particularly in

  Louisa - that I make no apology for saying to you, I am very much

  vexed by this discovery. I have systematically devoted myself (as

  you know) to the education of the reason of my family. The reason

  is (as you know) the only faculty to which education should be

  addressed. 'And yet, Bounderby, it would appear from this

  unexpected circumstance of to-day, though in itself a trifling one,

  as if something had crept into Thomas's and Louisa's minds which is

  - or rather, which is not - I don't know that I can express myself

  better than by saying - which has never been intended to be

  developed, and in which their reason has no part.'

  'There certainly is no reason in looking with interest at a parcel

  of vagabonds,' returned Bounderby. 'When I was a vagabond myself,

  nobody looked with any interest at me; I know that.'

  'Then comes the question; said the eminently practical father, with

  his eyes on the fire, 'in what has this vulgar curiosity its rise?'

  'I'll tell you in what. In idle imagination.'

  'I hope not,' said the eminently practical; 'I confess, however,

  that the misgiving has crossed me on my way home.'

  'In idle imagination, Gradgrind,' repeated Bounderby. 'A very bad

  thing for anybody, but a cursed bad thing for a girl like Louisa.

  I should ask Mrs. Gradgrind's pardon for strong expressions, but

  that she knows very well I am not a refined character. Whoever

  expects refinement in me will be disappointed. I hadn't a refined

  bringing up.'

  'Whether,' said Gradgrind, pondering with his hands in his pockets,

  and his cavernous eyes on the fire, 'whether any instructor or

  servant can have suggested anything? Whether Louisa or Thomas can

  have been reading anything? Whether, in spite of all precautions,

  any idle story-book can have got into the house? Because, in minds

  that have been practically formed by rule and line, from the cradle

  upwards, this is so curious, so incomprehensible.'

  'Stop a bit!' cried Bounderby, who all this time had been standing,

  as before, on the hearth, bursting at the very furniture of the

  room with explosive humility. 'You have one of those strollers'

  children in the school.'

  'Cecilia Jupe, by name,' said Mr. Gradgrind, with something of a

  stricken look at his friend.

  'Now, stop a bit!' cried Bounderby again. 'How did she come

  there?'

  'Why, the fact is, I saw the girl myself, for the first time, only

  just now. She specially applied here at the house to be admitted,

  as not regularly belonging to our town, and - yes, you are right,

  Bounderby, you are right.'

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  Dickens, Charles - Hard Times

  'Now, stop a bit!' cried Bounderby, once more. 'Louisa saw her

  when she came?'

  'Louisa certainly did see her, for she mentioned the application to

  me. But Louisa saw her, I have no doubt, in Mrs. Gradgrind's

  presence.'

  'Pray, Mrs. Gradgrind,' said Bounderby, 'what passed?'

  'Oh, my poor health!' returned Mrs. Gradgrind. 'The girl wanted to

  come to the school, and Mr. Gradgrind wanted girls to come to the

  school, and Louisa and Thomas both said that the girl wanted to

  come, and that Mr. Gradgrind wanted girls to come, and how was it

  possible to contradict them when such was the fact!'

  'Now I tell you what, Gradgrind!' said Mr. Bounderby. 'Turn this

  girl to the right about, and there's an end of it.'

  'I am much of your opinion.'

  'Do it at once,' said Bounderby, 'has always been my motto from a

  child. When I thought I would run away from my egg-box and my

  grandmother, I did it at once. Do you the same. Do this at once!'

  'Are you walking?' asked his friend. 'I have the father's address.

  Perhaps you would not mind walking to town with me?'

  'Not the least in the world,' said Mr. Bounderby, 'as long as you

  do it at once!'

  So, Mr. Bounderby threw on his hat - he always threw it on, as

  expressing a man who had been far too busily employed in making

  himself, to acquire any fashion of wearing his hat - and with his

  hands in his pockets, sauntered out into the hall. 'I never wear

  gloves,' it was his custom to say. 'I didn't climb up the ladder

  in them. - Shouldn't be so high up, if I had.'

  Being left to saunter in the hall a minute or two while Mr.

  Gradgrind went up-stairs for the address, he opened the door of the

  children's study and looked into that serene floor-clothed

  apartment, which, notwithstanding its book-cases and its cabinets

  and its variety of learned and philosophical appliances, had much

  of the genial aspect of a room devoted to hair-cutting. Louisa

  languidly leaned upon the window looking out, without looking at

  anything, while young Thomas stood sniffing revengefully at the

  fire. Adam Smith and Malthus, two younger Gradgrinds, were out at

  lecture in custody; and little Jane, after manufacturing a good

  deal of moist pipe-clay on her face with slate-pencil and tears,

  had fallen asleep over vulgar fractions.

  'It's all ri
ght now, Louisa: it's all right, young Thomas,' said

  Mr. Bounderby; 'you won't do so any more. I'll answer for it's

  being all over with father. Well, Louisa, that's worth a kiss,

  isn't it?'

  'You can take one, Mr. Bounderby,' returned Louisa, when she had

  coldly paused, and slowly walked across the room, and ungraciously

  raised her cheek towards him, with her face turned away.

  'Always my pet; ain't you, Louisa?' said Mr. Bounderby. 'Good-bye,

  Louisa!'

  He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek

  he had kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning red.

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  Dickens, Charles - Hard Times

  She was still doing this, five minutes afterwards.

  'What are you about, Loo?' her brother sulkily remonstrated.

  'You'll rub a hole in your face.'

  'You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom. I

  wouldn't cry!'

  CHAPTER V - THE KEYNOTE

  COKETOWN, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was

  a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs.

  Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before

  pursuing our tune.

  It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if

  the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a

  town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.

  It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which

  interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and

  ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a

  river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of

  building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling

  all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked

  monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state

  of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very

  like one another, and many small streets still more like one

  another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went

  in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same

  pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same

  as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the

  last and the next.

  These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the

  work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off,

  comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and

  elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine

  lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The

  rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

  You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the

  members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there - as the

  members of eighteen religious persuasions had done - they made it a

  pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in

  highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.

  The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with

  a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles

  like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town

  were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The

  jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been

  the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or

  anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the

  graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the

  material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the

  immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school

  of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man

  were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in

  hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures,

  or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in

  the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

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  A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of

  course got on well? Why no, not quite well. No? Dear me!

  No. Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects

  like gold that had stood the fire. First, the perplexing mystery

  of the place was, Who belonged to the eighteen denominations?

  Because, whoever did, the labouring people did not. It was very

  strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning, and note

  how few of them the barbarous jangling of bells that was driving

  the sick and nervous mad, called away from their own quarter, from

  their own close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, where

  they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going,

  as at a thing with which they had no manner of concern. Nor was it

  merely the stranger who noticed this, because there was a native

  organization in Coketown itself, whose members were to be heard of

  in the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning for

  acts of parliament that should make these people religious by main

  force. Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that these

  same people would get drunk, and showed in tabular statements that

  they did get drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement,

  human or Divine (except a medal), would induce them to forego their

  custom of getting drunk. Then came the chemist and druggist, with

  other tabular statements, showing that when they didn't get drunk,

  they took opium. Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail,

  with more tabular statements, outdoing all the previous tabular

  statements, and showing that the same people would resort to low

  haunts, hidden from the public eye, where they heard low singing

  and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined in it; and where A. B., aged

  twenty-four next birthday, and committed for eighteen months'

  solitary, had himself said (not that he had ever shown himself

  particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began, as he was perfectly

  sure and confident that otherwise he would have been a tip-top

  moral specimen. Then came Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two

  gentlemen at this present moment walking through Coketown, and both

  eminently practical, who could, on occasion, furnish more tabular

  statements derived from their own personal experience, and

  illustrated by cases they had known and seen, from which it clearly

  appeared - in short, it was the only clear thing in the case - that

  these same people were a bad lot altogether, gentlemen; that do

  what you would for them they were never thankful for it, gentlemen;

  that they were restless, gentlemen; that they never knew what they

  wanted; that they lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter; and

  insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat,

  and yet were eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable. In short, it

  was the moral of the old nursery fable:

  There was an old woman, and what do you think?

  She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink;
/>   Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet,

  And yet this old woman would NEVER be quiet.

  Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the

  case of the Coketown population and the case of the little

  Gradgrinds? Surely, none of us in our sober senses and acquainted

  with figures, are to be told at this time of day, that one of the

  foremost elements in the existence of the Coketown working-people

  had been for scores of years, deliberately set at nought? That

  there was any Fancy in them demanding to be brought into healthy

  existence instead of struggling on in convulsions? That exactly in

  the ratio as they worked long and monotonously, the craving grew

  within them for some physical relief - some relaxation, encouraging

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  good humour and good spirits, and giving them a vent - some

  recognized holiday, though it were but for an honest dance to a

  stirring band of music - some occasional light pie in which even

  M'Choakumchild had no finger - which craving must and would be

  satisfied aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong, until the

  laws of the Creation were repealed?

  'This man lives at Pod's End, and I don't quite know Pod's End,'

  said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Which is it, Bounderby?'

  Mr. Bounderby knew it was somewhere down town, but knew no more

  respecting it. So they stopped for a moment, looking about.

  Almost as they did so, there came running round the corner of the

  street at a quick pace and with a frightened look, a girl whom Mr.

  Gradgrind recognized. 'Halloa!' said he. 'Stop! Where are you

  going! Stop!' Girl number twenty stopped then, palpitating, and

  made him a curtsey.

  'Why are you tearing about the streets,' said Mr. Gradgrind, 'in

  this improper manner?'

  'I was - I was run after, sir,' the girl panted, 'and I wanted to

  get away.'

  'Run after?' repeated Mr. Gradgrind. 'Who would run after you?'

  The question was unexpectedly and suddenly answered for her, by the

  colourless boy, Bitzer, who came round the corner with such blind

  speed and so little anticipating a stoppage on the pavement, that

  he brought himself up against Mr. Gradgrind's waistcoat and

  rebounded into the road.

  'What do you mean, boy?' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'What are you doing?

  How dare you dash against - everybody - in this manner?' Bitzer