Hard Times – Charles Dickens

Hard Times – Charles Dickens

Main Characters of 'Hard Times'

Thomas Gradgrind

Gradgrind is a middle-class businessman and later a Member of Parliament. More importantly, he is the owner and operator of the educational system Dickens is dead set against. Grandgrind's system is based on the idea that only facts, math, and the measurable are important. He thinks that touchy-feely things like emotions and creativity should be repressed. Gradgrind not only raises his own kids according to his theory, but also makes sure that the school children taught by Mr. M'Choakumchild have it drilled into their heads as well.

However, as he finds many years later, if you don't teach morality, the kids won't learn morality. And so Gradgrind's comeuppance is extremely appropriate (of the eye-for-an-eye variety). Everyone who has excelled at Gradgrind-directed studies ends up betraying or letting him down in a shattering way. His daughter Louisa makes a terrible marriage, almost has an affair, and ends up separated and childless. His son Tom becomes a thief and frames another man for his crime. In the final kicker, Bitzer, the model student, refuses every appeal for mercy and gratitude from his old headmaster. Instead he just quotes Gradgrind's own materialistic and selfish philosophies back to him.

Still, what seems interesting is that Gradgrind doesn't himself live according to his worldview. He is generous – for instance, he accepts Sissy into his school and lets her live at his house when her father abandons her. He is a lot more tolerant and empathetic than other fathers of the time would be toward a near-adulterous daughter. We see him immediately take Louisa in and encourage her to be apart from Bounderby. And by helping Tom escape from justice without hesitation, Gradgrind shows that he believes that his duties as a father outweigh whatever he might owe the nation as an indifferent citizen.

In the end, Gradgrind is actually able to see how wrongheaded his approach has been. He changes his attitude and behavior to the point that he is ostracized by members of his party in Parliament. Why do you think this is? Gradgrind is the poster-boy for the strict school of thought that the novel seems to be demonizing. What is the reader to make of the fact that he actually turns out to be a fairly decent human being?

Mrs. Gradgrind

Mrs. Gradgrind is passive, sickly, dim-witted, and not very present in the novel or in her children's lives. Gradgrind basically says that he married her because she had no personality whatsoever and thus would not get in the way of his education plans for his kids. He's right. Mrs. Gradgrind has one bright moment just before she dies. She suddenly realizes that Louisa and Tom are missing a key ingredient in becoming normal human beings. Even then, however, she can't actually say what that might be, and in any case it's already too late.

Louisa Gradgrind

We watch Louisa, Gradgrind's daughter and human guinea pig, grow from about twelve to about twenty-two years old. Her dad raises her to disregard emotions and see everything in terms of facts or statistics. This is a disaster. She becomes trapped in a loveless marriage, almost has an affair, and spends the rest of her life trying to learn to be a normal human being with feelings.

(Most) Girls Just Want to Have Fun: Louisa, Education, and Femininity

Actually, for Dickens, not just girls but all people should be allowed to have fun. But Louisa has been brought up to only consider life in Utilitarian terms (check out Shmoop's "In a Nutshell" section for some background info on Utilitarianism). She tries to see everything numerically, either through the hard sciences or through statistical evaluation of human behavior. This is as unnatural as it sounds. She is so completely detached that most human emotions and experiences are beyond her grasp. In a novel full of some of the most tragic characters Dickens ever wrote, she is probably the saddest.

Louisa's life is so wasted on a loveless (read: really, really repulsive) marriage and a would-be affair with a cynical opportunist (read: soulless jerk) that she is not even allowed to have a second chance at a more fulfilling existence. Think about it – Dickens could have made her story end any way he wanted to. She's only 22 years old at the end of the novel, after all! But no, she dies a lonely and childless spinster. Louisa is denied the kind of domestic and maternal life that was for Dickens the height of what women should aspire to. There is a pretty direct and awful connection between her childhood and adulthood here. She is damaged by her father's desire to remove her from the world of emotions, morality, and anything else that can't be put into numbers. By the time she's an adult, she's lost a large part of her humanity, the part that makes her a woman (or was considered to, back in the day).

Why finish her plot line this way? Why give Louisa such a sad ending? We'll suggest a couple of possibilities, and you see what you think. Perhaps the idea is that she is such a one-note embodiment of the Gradgrind philosophy that she really can't be allowed to reproduce. To save the rest of the world, this philosophy and its products must die out with her (and with her brother Tom, who also dies childless). Or maybe the key is the way the novel's last paragraph name-checks the reader directly – maybe the best way to motivate some kind of action is this kind of no-holds-barred heartstring tugging. Are there other possible explanations?

Takes One to Know All: Louisa as the Novel's Universal Foil

OK, that's probably enough about Louisa as a person. Let's take a step back and check out the way she fits into the novel's structure. We're going to get all metaphorical here and say that Louisa is the Kevin Bacon of this novel – pretty much every other character is one degree of separation away from her. There is almost no one that she is not a foil for or a comparison to. She is the female version of Tom (though unlike him, who is universally shown to be a selfish jerk, she seems to have been able to go either way). Louisa is the opposite of the emotionally competent Sissy (for whom she is a dire warning to never let the head totally rule the heart). To Mrs. Sparsit, Louisa becomes the wife to Bounderby that Mrs. Sparsit doesn't get to be (but would probably have been better as). We also see that Louisa is ruined by the same system that destroys Stephen Blackpool (who has an even worse fate, to be sure, but they are both living wasted lives). Can you pair her like this with any other characters – Rachael? Harthouse? Bounderby? Her father?

Tom Gradgrind

Tom is Louisa's brother, and is raised in the same manner that she is. He ends up a degenerate gambler who robs Bounderby's bank to pay his debts. Tom then has to be smuggled abroad in order to avoid going to prison. After many years in exile, he becomes remorseful, but dies on the trip back to England.

If Louisa is the kid who could have turned out differently, Tom is the worst-case scenario for what happens when morality and emotional maturity are skipped over in favor of facts in early childhood. In other words? When we first meet him, he starts out a cowardly jerk. Later, when he is shipped off abroad to escape prison, he has become a cowardly, jerky, selfish thief.

In a way, Tom might be an even better argument than his sister about why facts-only educational systems are such a bad idea. Let's work it out together. To make a reasonably well-adjusted human being, the natural inclinations that a person is born with need to be molded carefully by that person's environment and education. Take Louisa for instance. She's just naturally caring. Unfortunately, she does end pretty badly as a result of her upbringing, but she doesn't hurt anyone in the process. Unlike his sister, Tom's natural tendency is to only look out for numero uno. The education his father molds him with only gives Tom an excuse for pure, unadulterated self-interest.

Tom's education gives him an explanation for why it's OK to only look out for himself. Actually, not just an explanation, but a logical justification! So, Tom goes through life trying to advance his interests and get ahead by using and abusing other people. He guilt-trips his sister into marrying Bounderby so that he can be slightly better positioned at the bank. Tom also makes friends with Harthouse and tells him all of Louisa's secrets because he is psyched to be in the same room with the novel's version of the prom king. To top it all off, he frames Stephen for the bank robbery just because he sees the opportunity to do so. We're guessing that if Tom had learned a little more about generosity and charity, he wouldn't have ended up a criminal. So he probably wouldn't have ended up being Mother Theresa, but perhaps with a different upbringing Tom might've lived his life with a little more compassion.

Sissy Jupe

Sissy is the daughter of a circus performer, who comes to live with the Gradgrinds as a servant when her father abandons her. She is naturally good and emotionally healthy, so the Gradgrind philosophy doesn't affect her, and she is able to take care of Louisa and to arrange Tom's escape. At the end of the novel, she is the only character who gets a happy ending of marriage and children.

Sissy is the main force for good in the novel. She is kind, caring, and loving. In the face of being abandoned by her father and then being forced to learn the Gradgrind philosophy, she never stops being the only grounding, emotionally positive force in Coketown. In a way, she is similar to another one of Dickens's favorite character types, the perfect young woman who selflessly takes care of other people. Check out Esther in Bleak House, Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit, Lizzie in Our Mutual Friend… OK, there are a lot of them. Take our word for it.

But in this novel, Sissy is also a messenger from the land of imagination, creativity, and selfless actions. For instance, all three are combined when she cheers up her father after a hard day in the circus ring by reading him fairy tales about ogres and giants. What's more, everyone else in the novel is so weirdly screwed up, that the reader is always hugely relieved whenever Sissy appears, because finally someone normal is going to say some normal things in a normal way about all the craziness going on.

And yet Sissy, like Bounderby, is an interesting contradiction. She is obviously tied to the circus, to entertainment, to the life of the imagination. But she is also clearly one of the more realistic and matter-of-fact characters in the novel. The reason she can't deal with most of things Gradgrind's school is trying to teach her is that they are so abstract. Gradgrind's policies don't make any actual sense despite being logical (well, to a Utilitarianist, anyway). Think about when Sissy tells Louisa about her mistakes in school. They are all intersections of economic theory. They're clearly meant to be Sissy's more reasonable, human interpretations of what the world is actually like. For instance, when questioned about how very unimportant a few deaths in a thousand people are, she pretty sensibly answers that to the families of those dead people, those deaths are actually quite significant indeed.

Josiah Bounderby

Bounderby is a successful capitalist who owns a factory and a bank in Coketown. He brags about having grown up an orphan, and marries Louisa Gradgrind hoping to make her a trophy wife. In the end, she leaves him, his stories about his childhood turn out to be lies, and he dies of a fit in the street.

The novel doesn't really beat around the bush with this one. Bounderby is awful. He is loud, obnoxious, completely self-centered, and the novel's most snobby and status-obsessed character. He is a terrible reader of people. Bounderby totally fails to see that Stephen is the only loyal worker in his factory. He also doesn't get that Harthouse is after his wife. On top of all that, he certainly never figures out what every other character in the novel knows by the end – that Tom is the bank robber. And of course, with this guy as a boss, it's no wonder the workers want to go on strike. As our only example of a capitalist, Bounderby really stacks the deck for the little guys (even if they are mean to Stephen).

And yet, Bounderby is actually just one giant contradiction. On the one hand, he completely buys into the Gradgrind philosophy of facts, more facts, and only facts. Bounderby think about his workers as faceless, emotionless "Hands." He also pretty much announces that his wife is just a piece of status-building property. However, at the same time, Bounderby is by far the most imaginative character in the novel. He is able (for years!) to maintain a crazy, detailed, fake story of being an abandoned child, growing up dirt poor, and being a completely self-made man. Talk about the power of creativity!

Yes, it turns out that Bounderby actually grew up in a normal, loving, probably over-indulgent family that helped him get a start in life. It seems that he uses his powers of creativity to dismiss poor people's complaints. Whenever his workers gripe about their awful working conditions, he points to his fictional hard childhood to make them all look like whiners. How do you think the novel would be different if the childhood Bounderby describes were real? Or, what if he didn't make up this kind of story for himself at all and just told it like it was – how would his character change? What about the novel?

James Harthouse

Harthouse is a well-born young guy who is trying to get into Parliament. He's in the same political party as Gradgrind. He comes to Coketown to learn how to work the political process and get to know some money men like Bounderby. While there, he tries to seduce Louisa and almost succeeds. After she runs away from him, Sissy tells him to never show his face around town again.

Of all of these guys, Harthouse is probably the one whose personality we can most easily recognize. Outwardly, he is all handsomeness and gentlemanly good manners. He has the kind of slick, smooth social ability that makes him instantly likable. Inside, his whole M.O. is to talk everything down. His philosophy of life is that everything is worth nothing, and that there are no honest people. Basically, he thinks that caring very much about anything is a big old waste of time. It's a measure of just how lost and confused Louisa is that this kind of nonsense really appeals to her.

In a way, Harthouse is just like Tom: both use the absence of morality to justify their own bad behaviors. Though the actions are different (theft on one side and attempted adultery on the other), the attitudes behind these actions can be easily covered up by Utilitarian thinking. To Dickens, the main problem with an economic or statistical approach to figuring out how people should act is that people who are prone to doing bad things will be able to excuse all sorts of awful crimes. All they have to do is talk about life as a numbers game. Characters like Harthouse are a handy way of showing this problem.

Mrs. Sparsit

Mrs. Sparsit is Bounderby's middle-aged housekeeper. She was born into money and a high ranking family. Bounderby loves to play up this history. She is jealous of Louisa and, after Bounderby and Louisa are married, Mrs. Sparsit looks for any opportunity to bring Louisa down.

What exactly does a house-keeper do? Well, a rich, middle-class man like Bounderby couldn't really be bothered with his house, which would usually have had a bunch of servants doing the things that we have electrical appliances for. The person who managed the servants was either a wife, or in the case of a single man, a female housekeeper. The housekeeper was crucial to a well-run household, but her ambiguous rank in the house could cause a lot of problems. Think about it – what exactly is such a woman's position? She's kind of a wife, because she only works in a house where there is no wife. But, she's also kind of a servant – she can be fired, while a wife can't be gotten rid of that easily. She is higher in rank than the servants because she orders them around, but she is still lower than the house owner because he pays her a salary. So, what exactly is her rank and station? No one quite knew, and so there's lots of confusion and resentment whenever a housekeeper is in the picture. (Actually, same goes for governesses – check out Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair.)

That said, Mrs. Sparsit is a housekeeper with her eyes squarely on the prize. She wants to marry Bounderby and become a wife. Bounderby, on the other hand, has his eyes set on the bragging rights of having Mrs. Sparsit as his servant. Just as he makes up his own background, he gradually invents hers, telling everyone that she comes from the noblest of the nobility. Therein lies the confusion we mentioned. Now for the resentment. After Bounderby marries Louisa, Mrs. Sparsit makes it her mission to undermine and destroy the marriage and to catch Louisa in the act of adultery.

At the same time, Mrs. Sparsit is one of the more comic characters, useful for lightening the mood every now and again in this bleak novel. But, truthfully? Tastes in humor change over time. So, take it from us when we say that the scene of Mrs. Sparsit hauling Mrs. Pegler along is meant to be super hilarious

Mrs. Blackpool

There's not too much to say about Stephen's wife, Mrs. Blackpool. A few things: note that it's only we at Shmoop who care enough to give her a name. In the novel she is not ever called by a name. Which – meaning alert! – might have something to do with her being kind of sub-human. She is an alcoholic who periodically comes to sell off all of Stephen's stuff. She's the reason he and Rachael can't get together. Not to get all biographical on you or anything, but Dickens was not all that happy with Mrs. Dickens at about the time he wrote this novel. In fact, Dickens was about to leave Mrs. Dickens for another woman. There might or might not be a little bit of real-life resentment about the whole can't-easily-divorce thing bleeding into this character. We're just saying.

Mrs. Pegler

Mrs. Pegler is the little old woman who comes to town once a year to gaze at Bounderby. She is revealed to be his mom, whom he pays to stay away, because he tells everyone who will listen that he grew up practically an orphan in the streets. Instead, of course, what he has is a mom who loves him so much that she's willing to go along with this crazy arrangement as long as it's for his benefit.

There are a lot of parents in this novel: Sissy's dad, whom we never see except through her stories; Gradgrind; his wife, the ever sickly Mrs. Gradgrind; Sleary, the circus owner and father of the equestrienne Josephine Sleary. How does Mrs. Pegler compare to these others? What if Mrs. Gradgrind had been as devoted a mother as Mrs. Pegler? How would the childhood and adulthood of Louisa and Tom be different?

Rachael

Rachael is a factory worker who was childhood friends with Stephen's wife. She is now in love with Stephen, and helps him deal with life as a friend. After Stephen's death, she spends the rest of her life taking care of his widow.

Like many sidekicks, Rachael is kind of a one-note character. She is patient, long-suffering, giving, nurturing, and selfless…. She loves Stephen, and Stephen loves her. Sadly, they can never be together, because he's married to a belligerent drunk. Rachael is far too classy to go for an out-of-wedlock scenario. Instead, she lives a reasonably miserable life as a lonely factory worker, takes long platonic walks with Stephen in the moonlight, and spends most of her life after he dies taking care of his widow.

Why do you think Rachael was included in the novel? Why not just have Stephen and his wife, and their horrible marriage, without this other woman in the picture? Also, why do you think her fate is to deal with Stephen's wife? Why doesn't she get to move from that whole situation to a life of, say, marriage and children?

*****