Hard Times
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