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Thomas Gradgrind believes children should learn facts and nothing but facts: no stories, no wondering, no play. His own children, Louisa and Tom, grow up starved of joy, while Sissy, a circus girl taken into his house, keeps her warm heart. Dickens sets the cold schoolroom against the traveling circus, with its clowns and horse riders, and asks a simple question: what does a person actually need to live?
Charles Dickens wrote Hard Times in 1854, publishing it week by week in his own magazine, Household Words, and it is the shortest of his novels. It is also his most focused piece of anger. He had visited the northern mill towns, and he built his imaginary Coketown out of their smoke, their machinery, and the hard doctrine that only facts, figures, and profit count as real.
The book opens in a bare schoolroom where Thomas Gradgrind demands facts, and nothing but facts, from a roomful of children treated as little vessels to be filled. His own two children, Louisa and Tom, are raised on the same starved diet, while Sissy Jupe, a circus rider's daughter taken into the Gradgrind house, quietly keeps her imagination and her loyalty. Around them stand the boastful mill owner Bounderby, the patient weaver Stephen Blackpool and his friend Rachael, and James Harthouse, a bored gentleman who drifts into town.
Dickens divides the story into three books, Sowing, Reaping, and Garnering, and the harvest is bitter before it is kind. Read it for the argument, yes, but also for Sleary's circus people, whose simple creed is that people must be amused.
Charles Dickens published Hard Times in 1854, first in weekly parts in his own magazine, Household Words. It is his shortest novel and his angriest. In Coketown, a northern mill town of smoke and machinery, Thomas Gradgrind raises his children Louisa and Tom on facts alone, while the circus girl Sissy Jupe, the weaver Stephen Blackpool, and Sleary's horse riders keep insisting that people also need fancy, kindness, and wonder.
This text, from the 1905 Chapman and Hall edition, carries the novel in its three books, Sowing, Reaping, and Garnering, exactly as Dickens divided it for the weekly parts of Household Words in 1854. Chapter titles keep his agricultural plainness: The One Thing Needful, Murdering the Innocents, A Loophole, and, opening the third book, Another Thing Needful. Four illustrations by Marcus Stone, Maurice Greiffenhagen, and F. Walker head the list at the front.
The first chapter is the whole argument in one scene. In a plain, bare, monotonous schoolroom, Gradgrind's square forefinger underlines his demand: facts alone are wanted in life, and the children sit like little vessels ready to be filled with imperial gallons of fact. The second chapter sends the same doctrine into the classroom in action, where Sissy Jupe, who lives among horses, cannot define one to its satisfaction.
Coketown itself arrives in the fifth chapter, The Keynote, all brick, smoke, and machinery. Read the novel with its chapter architecture in view: what is sown in the schoolroom is reaped in the bank, the mill, and the marriage, and gathered, at last, in mercy.
Edition: Edition of 1905. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 786.
The first chapter
‘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.
Continue: Book the First (Sowing), Chapter II: Murdering the Innocents
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1854. Author died 1870. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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