Now what I want is Facts.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary — Chapter 1: The One Thing Needful
In an empty schoolroom, a dark-eyed, rigid man emphatically expresses
to the schoolmaster and another adult his desire for children to
be taught facts, saying that “nothing else will ever be of any service
to them.”
Summary — Chapter 2: Murdering the Innocents
In the industrial city of Coketown, a place dominated
by grim factories and oppressed by coils of black smoke, the dark-eyed,
rigid man—Thomas Gradgrind—has established a school. He has hired
a teacher, Mr. McChoakumchild, whom he hopes will instill in the students
nothing but cold, hard facts. Visiting the school, Gradgrind tests
a pair of students by asking them to define a horse. Sissy Jupe, the
daughter of a horse-riding circus entertainer, is unable to answer, but
a pale young man called Bitzer gives a cut-and-dried definition that
pleases Gradgrind.
Summary — Chapter 3: A Loophole
While walking back to his home, appropriately named Stone
Lodge, Gradgrind catches his two eldest children spying on the circus through
a peephole in the fence. Having raised his children according to
his philosophy of fact and having permitted them no imaginative
entertainment, Gradgrind becomes furious. He drags the young Tom
and sixteen-year-old Louisa home. Louisa admits that curiosity drew
her to the circus and tries to defend her brother by saying she
dragged him there, but all Gradgrind can do is ask angrily what Mr.
Bounderby would say.
Summary — Chapter 4: Mr. Bounderby
This same Mr. Bounderby—a wealthy, boastful industrialist
who owns factories and a bank—is at that very moment in the drawing room
at Stone Lodge, pontificating to the pallid and lethargic Mrs. Gradgrind
about his poverty-stricken childhood. Bounderby never fails to talk
at length about this subject. He reminds Mrs. Gradgrind that he
was born in a ditch, abandoned by his mother, and raised by a cruel,
alcoholic grandmother. At this point, Gradgrind enters and tells
Bounderby about his children’s misbehavior. Mrs. Gradgrind scolds
the children halfheartedly, admonishing them to “go and be somethingological.”
Bounderby theorizes that Sissy Jupe, the circus entertainer’s daughter
who attends Gradgrind’s school, may have led the young Gradgrinds
astray. Gradgrind agrees, and they set out to inform Sissy’s father
that Sissy is no longer welcome at the school. Bounderby demands
a kiss from Louisa before they leave.
Analysis — Book the First: Sowing: Chapters
1–4
Dickens was concerned with the miserable lives of the
poor and working classes in the England of his day, and Hard
Times is one of several of his novels that addresses these
social problems directly. Hard Times is not Dickens’s
most subtle novel, and most of its moral themes are explicitly articulated
through extremely sharp, exaggerated characterization, and through
the narrator’s frequent interjection of his own opinions and sentiments.
For instance, in the opening section of the book, a simple contrast
emerges between Mr. Gradgrind’s philosophy of fact and Sissy Jupe’s
frequent indulgence in romantic, imaginative fancy. While Gradgrind’s
philosophy includes the idea that people should only act according
to their own best interests, which they can calculate through rational
principles, the actions of the simple, loving Sissy are inspired
by her feelings, usually of compassion toward others. The philosophy
of fact is continually shown to be at the heart of the problems
of the poor—the smokestacks, factory machines, and clouds of black
smog are all associated with fact—while fancy is held up as the
route to charity and love between fellow men. Philosophically, this
contrast is a drastic and obvious oversimplification. Clearly, a
commitment to factual accuracy does not lead directly to selfishness,
and a commitment to imagination does not signify a commitment to
social equality. But for the purposes of Hard Times, these
contrasting ideas serve as a kind of shorthand for the states of
mind that enable certain kinds of action. Cold rationalism divorced
from sentiment and feeling can lead to insensitivity about human
suffering, and imagination can enhance one’s sense of sympathy.
Gradgrind’s philosophy of fact is intimately related to
the Industrial Revolution, a cause of the mechanization of human
nature. Dickens suggests that when humans are forced to perform
the same monotonous tasks repeatedly, in a drab, incessantly noisy,
and smoky environment, they become like the machines with which
they work—unfeeling and not enlivened by fancy. The connection between
Gradgrind’s philosophy of fact and the social effects of the Industrial
Revolution is made explicit by two details in the first section
of the novel. First, the narrator reports that when Gradgrind finds
his children at the circus, “Tom gave himself up to be taken home
like a machine.” By dulling Tom’s feelings and his sense of free will,
his education has rendered his thoughts and actions mechanical.
The second detail illustrating the connection between Gradgrind’s
philosophy and the process of industrialization is the choice of
names for Gradgrind’s two younger sons, Adam Smith and Malthus.
These children play no role in the plot, but their names are relevant
to the novel’s themes. Adam Smith (1723–1790)
was a Scottish economist who produced the theory that the economy
is controlled by an “invisible hand,” and that employers and workers do
not control the fluctuations of supply and demand. Malthus (1766–1834)
was an economist who argued that poverty is a result of overpopulation
and that the poor must have smaller families in order to improve
the general standard of living in society. Both of these writers
addressed the poverty of mind and body that accompanies industrialization.
Through these two names, Dickens suggests that the philosophy of
fact to which Gradgrind subscribes and the deleterious social effects
of the Industrial Revolution are inextricably related.
