Hard Times
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 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.’
‘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 right 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. 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.
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