The Old Curiosity Club discussion
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Hard Times
Hard Times
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Book 1 Chp. 4-5
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"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."
We don't have much of the smoke he talks about because our "black" comes from coal not factories, although we have our share of factories also. We don't have as many factories or coal breakers as we used to, but they are still there, and the "coal towns" look similar to his description, not as awful but similar. The houses are so much alike (and ugly) that I don't know how you find the right one. I'm not in one of the coal towns but a creek runs through our town that runs through the coal country first and it is called the "black creek" from all the coal dust that the coal companies used to run in it. They had to stop doing that years ago and now it's clear, but it's still called the black creek.
Dickens tells us that eighteen buildings have been built by members of various religious persuasions in Coketown, but it is not clear who belonged to these eighteen denominations because the working people did not, they stood on street corners looking at the churches and listening to the bells ring on Sunday mornings with no intention to enter any of them. I wonder what the eighteen denominations are, I can't think of that many, I'll have to search for them. The Teetotal Society complained that these same people would and did get drunk, and nothing would stop them, the chemist and druggist claimed that when they didn’t get drunk, they took opium. The chaplain of the jail told us that the same people would resort to low haunts where there was singing and dancing, and perhaps these same people joined in it; and often ended up in jail because of it. Then came Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby who knew that these same people were a bad lot altogether. This is the first mention of the working people that I can think of in the book and perhaps in the next section I'll get a break from Bounderby and Gradgrind if the "working people" enter the story.
As Gradgrind and Bounderby walk through the town they meet Sissy Jupe herself, who is being chased by Bitzer. Sissy has been out buying oils for her father’s aches and pains. She tells the men that her people often bruise themselves very badly to which Bounderby tells her it "serves them right for being idle". The two men follow her back to the dwelling place of the circus performers and when they arrive she asks them to wait until she gets a candle, and that their dog, Merrylegs, may bark at them but he doesn't doesn't bite. That sounds like Willow, the only person she ever bites is me. We are told that the house is:
"a mean little public-house, with dim red lights in it. As haggard and as shabby, as if, for want of custom, it had itself taken to drinking, and had gone the way all drunkards go, and was very near the end of it."
The chapter ends with this comment from Bounderby:
‘Merrylegs and nine oils, eh!� said Mr. Bounderby, entering last with his metallic laugh. ‘Pretty well this, for a self-made man!�
Mr. Bounderby really is the epitome of 'I had it worse, and I pulled myself up on my bootstraps, so everyone can'. I really, really detest the man already, even after a chapter and a half.
Jantine wrote: "Mr. Bounderby really is the epitome of 'I had it worse, and I pulled myself up on my bootstraps, so everyone can'. I really, really detest the man already, even after a chapter and a half."The nausea is exceedingly boundless for us poor readers.
I don't like Mr. Bounderby either. It doesn't make sense that him and Gradgrind are friends. Gradgrind loves facts, and Bounderby is clearly an exaggerator. I think they're intentionally designed to be opposites. The quote about a man "perfectly devoid of sentiment" in a relationship with another man "perfectly devoid of sentiment" was witty and made me laugh.
Oh, dear - I thought we were reading three chapters this week. I'll do my best not to delve into chapter 6 in my comments. First, Kim, you're observations always make me laugh, and I so look forward to them. :-)
It occurs to me that, in Bounderby, Dickens has gone the complete opposite of Jo, Oliver, Nell, and all of his other waifs. Bounderby is, so he tells us, a former waif who's grown into an insufferable blowhard. What are we to make of that? Nothing, perhaps, but it is interesting to me that Dickens has no compassion or affection for the man he's grown into. A far cry from Alger (whose books I haven't read, but on whose philosophy I was raised), whose waifs always were admired for pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and being self-reliant. But since Bounderby's grandmother probably sold his boots for booze, I guess he had no bootstraps on which to pull. Why did Dickens make a self-made man so detestable?
I'm watching Gradgrind with interest. He's misguided, certainly, with his lack of fancy, but I don't think he's a bad guy yet. We're specifically told he wants to educate girls, which is a point in his favor, I think.
How did Sissy and Thomas manage to not be named after economists, like their brothers, Adam Smith and Malthus?
Dickens is definitely setting up facts with factories and industry, and fancy with a more bucolic setting. Which is better in his mind? Maybe he's looking for balance (as we all are).
Will we leaving the arms of Sol and changing our meeting place to the Pegasus's Arms soon? Please save me a seat! It's a little hot to gather around the inglenook, though. Perhaps there's room for us all in the garden. The hollyhocks are lovely there.
A few comments based on the annotations in my edition.According to the annotations, Dickens giving Gradgrind the first name of Thomas was meant to be a Biblical allusion to Thomas the Doubter. It was meant to signify, at least what was understood to be Dickens� thinking, that Gradgrind may have doubts about the system in which he is a part.
A further note: Dickens considered entitling the novel either The Grindstone or The Universal Grindstone.
Alissa wrote: "The quote about a man "perfectly devoid of sentiment" in a relationship with another man "perfectly devoid of sentiment" was witty and made me laugh."Me too!--and also I love "Bully of humility." I think of this expression sometimes when I meet someone in real life whom it seems to fit, which is not all that infrequently.
Appearing here in Hard Times, it also reminds me of David Copperfield's Uriah Heep. Dickens hated a hypocrite.
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First, Kim, you're observations always make me laugh, and I so look forw..."
I’m sure there is a delightful garden and patio at the Pegasus’s Arms. I think it is the only place in Coketown where one would want to sit outside.
We are giving Bounderby a rough time of it in the early chapters. I’m glad to join the group. Dickens’s description of him as having “a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and � a strained skin to his face� reminds me of Joey Bagstock from D&S. He too was annoying, dislikable, and brash.
Now, I always thought of Bagstock as a cad, and apparently Bounderby seems more than a little interested in Louisa. Clearly, when he solicits the chance to kiss Louisa she is less than thrilled. She rubs her cheek and says she would not object if Tom would cut out the kissed part with his penknife.
When I take a look at Bounderby’s description it reminds me - as did Bagstock’s description - of ahem, the male reproductive organ. Yes, I see Dickens as likening Bounderby’s head to a penis.
As noted above there is a vast age difference between Bounderby and Louisa. Even in the Victorian times this age difference was not that common as to be dismissed by the reader.
Bounderby’s claims of his impoverished upbringing, his appearance, and his rather unhealthy and certainly unappreciated attentions towards Louisa make him a very dislikable person.
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What a place Coketown is. The school’s Utilitarian philosophy is intent on driving any fancy or imagination from the children and the multitude of churches seem unable to attract anyone of any faith inside their walls. Coketown is devoid of any intellectual or religious spirit.
The first Part of Hard Time was published in April of 1854. Historically, this places HT as being published shortly after the grandeur of the Crystal Palace of 1851. The Crystal Palace focussed on displaying to the world the wonderful achievements of British culture and manufacturing. So far, any lingering enthusiasm for England’s industrial power can’t be found in the streets, homes, or schoolroom classes of Coketown.
One other thing I wrote down (I found back my note) is how Mrs. Gradgrind seemed to be chronically ill - she always had physics, but those never worked. I wonder how much she has been ground down by coketown already, just by smelling the fumes of the factories and having to comply to the fumes of Gradgrind and Bounderby, and by surpressing her fancy, all the time.
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Hi Jantine
I agree with your diagnosis of Mrs Gradgrind.
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Gradgrind
Harry Furniss
Commentary:
"Feeling obliged to bolster the circulation of Household Words, early in 1854 Charles Dickens had written the type of serialisation he detested, a novel in compact weekly numbers (1 April-12 August), but his tenth full-length work, Hard Times, an assault on the factory system and urban blight, had proven and remained popular as a fairy tale for the Industrial Age. In subsequent editions, Dickens's short novel was illustrated � modestly, with just four wood-engravings by the leading New Man of the Sixties, Fred Walker in the Illustrated Library Edition of 1868, (we're still not at those yet) and, after Dickens's death, far more extensively in the American and British Household Edition by Charles Stanley Reinhart for Harper and Brothers, New York, in 1876, and by Harry French for Chapman and Hall the following year. Harry Furniss, then, had a substantial body of illustration to which to respond, despite the fact that in its initial publication Hard Times was one of the few Dickens novels to appear without visual accompaniment. As the sole illustrator for the Charles Dickens Library Edition, Furniss could probably have elected to produce a full program of illustration; instead, for volume five he provided thirty-two full-page pen-and-ink illustrations for The Old Curiosity Shop, and just a frontispiece for the second novel in the volume, perhaps because he was well aware that the novel as Dickens first presented it to his public was without any visual adornment or realisation. Uncharacteristically for a plate by Furniss, "Gradgrind" has a mere title and no indication as to which passage the illustrator had in mind."
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Thomas Gradgrind"
Sol Eytinge Jr.
Commentary:
In illustrating Dickens's 1854 novel, Eytinge likely did not have the benefit of studying the brief series of woodcuts that Fred Walker completed for Chapman and Hall's illustrated Library Edition in 1862. Certainly, the six illustrations in the Diamond Edition of 1867 seem to owe nothing to Walker, nor to have influenced the work of American expatriate Charles Stanley Reinhart for the Harper and Brothers' Household Edition of the novel, issued in 1876.
Moreover, Eytinge's work bears little resemblance to that of the other Household Edition illustrator, Harry French, who produced a much more naturalistic series of woodcuts for the much larger Household Edition of the novel published by Chapman and Hall.
Eytinge in depicting Thomas Gradgrind, Senior, with square head and shoulders (but notably without the nobs on the balding pate) clearly had in mind Dickens's opening textual description which this initial illustration faces. In the single volume containing both Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times, Eytinge's study of the Utilitarian Gradgrind constitutes something of a frontispiece, despite its location in the middle of book.
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Mr. Thomas Gradgrind
1930s illustration
That's all it says, who illustrated it in the 1930s I haven't figured out yet.
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Mr. Bounderby
I don't know the artist, it looks a little like Kyd, but not near as good. :-)
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I suppose I should have put this in last week's thread, but here it is.
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Thomas Gradgrind
Kyd
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Josiah Bounderby
Kyd of course
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A slightly different Mr. Bounderby by Kyd
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I suppose I should have put this in last week's thread, but here it is."
Oh Kim, I love this illustration. It certainly captures the bizarre nature of a Coketown school. And, dare I say, what many (most) students must think today.
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A slightly different Mr. Bounderby by Kyd"
Who knew Kyd would be one of the first illustrators to capture the concept of man spreading. ;-)
There was something that rubbed me the wrong way about all of these illustrations, and I finally put my finger on it. They all look so surly! While these characters are irritating, I don't imagine them as being unhappy or particularly angry. In fact, I think they're quite self-satisfied - particularly Bounderby. They may not be warm or effusively happy, but I don't think they're mean and grumpy, either.
I agree, Mary Lou. In the novel those people don't come across as grumpy. Strict, yes, but not grumpy. I even think Bounderby might have looked gleeful while telling his story or while asking for that kiss.
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Peter, I would really like to know what Thomas Gradgrind himself thinks of going to Church. According to his credo of "facts, facts, facts" he cannot be very partial to religion himself because it is not based on fact but on faith. At the same time, however, he will probably not be able to cut himself off from the church because a man in his position would simply have had to uphold church doctrines in Victorian England. Apart from that, the churches back then also had a very strong disciplinarian role - which had nothing to do with the Christian faith as such - in that they imposed a certain lifestyle, often a grim one, on their congregations. One can therefore say that in this respect, the churches and Mr. Gradgrind's school system were serving the same purpose: Making people stick to the moral code deemed most useful for British society.
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I'll see to it, Mary Lou! Thanks for reminding me as I'm getting old ;-)
As to why Thomas and Louisa have normal names whereas some of their siblings have not, I would say that this is not so much a choice made by their father as by the author: On the one hand, Dickens might have wanted to satirize Gradgrind through what names he chose for his children but one the other hand he might have sensed that purely satirical names would make it quite difficult for readers to empathize with a character, and therefore he, Dickens (but also Gradgrind) chose unsatirical names for Louisa and Thomas, two characters that, unlike the other children, will probably play an important role in the course of the novel. It would, indeed, be hard to see the human side of Louise if she were called, let's say "Empiria" or something like that.
And I really cared for her and sympathized with her loathing when that creepy Bounderby sneaked up on her and forced a kiss on her. The man is not many years younger than her father, and yet he seems to have unequivocal intentions. Quite another Quilp for that matter.
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She is definitely one of the innocents murdered by the Gradgrind philosophy as much as by the insalubrious conditions of the place. I found it very amusing, though, when she told her children to "go and be somethingological" ... she is clearly out of her depths.
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Gradgrind
Harry Furn..."
I really like that drawing, Kim. Interestingly, the commentary once again points out that Dickens detested this weekly publication rhythm, and this may underline a lot of what we said in our first discussion week about the style of his writing being somewhat different here. I still find it very hard to connect with this book.
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Mr. Bounderby
I don't know the artist, it looks a little like Kyd, but not near as good. :-)"
You mean to say the illustrator is on the sKyds?
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I suppose I should have put this in last week's thread, but here it is."
Looks like a drawing of my daughter - like on older one, though.
Tristram wrote: "You mean to say the illustrator is on the sKyds?">>groan<<
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Tristram
Yes. I agree that the churches imposed a doctrine that was often at odds with what one would think was the role of a church. And yes, the school’s were rather strict as well. As I mentioned in a post on this week’s chapter, Canada is now becoming painfully aware of what happened in our residential schools which were operated by various religious denominations.
Peter wrote: "The first Part of Hard Time was published in April of 1854. Historically, this places HT as being published shortly after the grandeur of the Crystal Palace of 1851. The Crystal Palace focussed on displaying to the world the wonderful achievements of British culture and manufacturing. So far, any lingering enthusiasm for England’s industrial power can’t be found in the streets, homes, or schoolroom classes of Coketown."After I read this, I went back and re-read that great paragraph Kim pulled, where Coketown is being described, and there really is no joy in it. It is described kind of like a circus itself: "savages" and serpents and elephants, so I remembered it in my head as kind of magical. But everything in that paragraph is grim or monotonous or both.
I was curious partly because Gaskell also seems to portray factories as kind of magical in North and South, and also inevitable, which tallies with the Crystal Palace idea that this is progress and the way of the world and good stuff.
I can't tell if Dickens thinks it's inevitable, but he sure doesn't like it.
Hard Times is underway. This is probably my least favorite of Dickens novels, but perhaps I will warm up to it as we read, after all I certainly don't dislike it to the degree that Tristram dislikes "The Old Curiosity Shop" and poor Little Nell. The first chapter in this week's installment, Chapter 4, titled "Mr. Bounderby" is filled with Mr. Bounderby and I can't stand the guy. Mr. Bounderby is unfortunately Mr. Gradgrind's dearest friend, " as a man perfectly devoid of sentiment can approach that spiritual relationship towards another man perfectly devoid of sentiment." Dickens certainly describes him exactly the way I picture him:
"He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility."
The chapter starts with Mr. Bounderby bragging to Mrs. Gradgrind that he is a "self-made man." Mrs. Gradgrind, Dickens describes as:
"a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic without any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her;"
As she listens to Mr. Bounderby's story, the reader can see that he has bored her and anyone else he can corner many times before with his supposedly miserable birth and childhood � born in a ditch, being abandoned by his mother to his drunken grandmother who, among other things, drank fourteen glasses of liquor before breakfast. Now I have no problem with Mr. Bounderby having started poor and through his own hard work and no help from anyone getting to where he was by this time, I do have trouble with his constant bragging about it and I have serious doubts as to how true this story could be. He tells Mr. Gradgrind:
‘I hadn’t a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn’t know such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch.�
Ok, he was born in a ditch, I'm not sure why. Couldn't his mother have had him in some type of building even if it was only a barn? Or perhaps she could have had him in a nice grassy field? But she picked a ditch of all places to give birth. Then for some reason on his tenth birthday he is either still in the ditch or back in the ditch. Why? He's ten, climb out of the ditch already. He then goes on to tell us that his mother abandoned him - she apparently managed to leave the ditch - to his grandmother the "wickedest and worst old woman who ever lived." She would sell his shoes, whenever he got any, for money to buy drink, and she used to drink fourteen glasses of liquor before breakfast. That had me wondering if that would be possible, I can't imagine drinking fourteen glasses of anything before breakfast unless you are counting the drinks from the night before, or the glasses are really small. He also tells Mrs. Gradgrind that she kept him in an egg-box, saying that the egg-box was the cot of his infancy. My only thought to that was wondering why she didn't keep the egg box in the house with her, that would be simplier than walking out to a ditch everyday to take care of the infant. In other words, I don't believe his entire story, why you would want to lie about spending your life in ditches and egg-boxes is beyond me, but still I don't believe him.
It is at this point Gradgrind enters and tells Bounderby about his children’s grave misbehavior of spying on the circus. Mrs. Gradgrind scolds the children halfheartedly, telling them to “go and be somethingological.”We are told this is usually the way she sends the children to their studies. On hearing the story Bounderby claims that Sissy Jupe, the circus entertainer’s daughter who attends Gradgrind’s school, may have led the young Gradgrinds astray. Gradgrind agrees and asks Bounderby if he will go with him, and they set out to inform Sissy’s father that Sissy is no longer welcome at the school.
We were told that Louisa is fifteen or sixteen and he is forty seven or forty eight, so at her age that is creepy. Bounderby watches Louisa as they talk and Gradgrind even mentions the interest Bounderby has shown in the children, especially Louisa, he seems to see nothing wrong with it. The chapter ends with this:
‘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!�