* * * * *

Hard Times

      “Hard Times” is not one of the longest, but it is one of the
     most powerful of Dickens’s works.  John Ruskin went so far as
     to call it “in several respects the greatest” book Dickens had
     written.  It is, of course, a fierce attack on the early
     Victorian school of political economists.  The Bounderbys and
     Gradgrinds are typical of certain characters, and, though they
     change their form of speech, are still recognisable to-day.  As
     a study of social and industrial life in England in the
     manufacturing districts fifty years ago, “Hard Times” will
     always be valuable, though allowance must be made here as
     elsewhere for the novelist’s tendency to
     exaggeration—­exaggeration of virtue no less than of vice or
     weakness.  In Josiah Bounderby and Stephen Blackpool this
     characteristic is pronounced.  The first, according to John
     Ruskin, being a dramatic monster, and the second a dramatic
     perfection.  The story first appeared serially in “Household
     Words” between April 1 and August 12, 1854.

I.—­Mr. Thomas Gradgrind

“Thomas Gradgrind, sir.  A man of facts and calculations.  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.”

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 Thomas Gradgrind presented himself to the schoolmaster and children before him.  It was his school, and he intended it to be a model.

“Now, what I want is facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts.  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.”

Mr. Gradgrind, having waited to hear a model lesson delivered by the school master, walked home in a considerable state of satisfaction.

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, they had been made to run to the lecture-room.

To his matter-of-fact home, which was called Stone Lodge, Mr. Gradgrind directed his steps.  The house was situated on a moor, within a mile or two of a great town, called Coketown.

On the outskirts of this town a travelling circus ("Sleary’s Horse-riding”) had pitched its tent, and, to his amazement, Mr. Gradgrind observed his two eldest children trying to obtain a peep, at the back of the booth, of the hidden glories within.