Hard Times
Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, retired
merchant in the industrial city of Coketown, England, devotes his life to a
philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and fact. He raises his oldest
children, Louisa and Tom, according to this philosophy and never allows them to
engage in fanciful or imaginative pursuits. He founds a school and charitably
takes in one of the students, the kindly and imaginative Sissy Jupe, after the
disappearance of her father, a circus entertainer.
As the Gradgrind children grow older,
Tom becomes a dissipated, self-interested hedonist, and Louisa struggles with
deep inner confusion, feeling as though she is missing something important in
her life. Eventually Louisa marries Gradgrind’s friend Josiah Bounderby, a
wealthy factory owner and banker more than twice her age. Bounderby continually
trumpets his role as a self-made man who was abandoned in the gutter by his
mother as an infant. Tom is apprenticed at the Bounderby bank, and Sissy
remains at the Gradgrind home to care for the younger children.
In the meantime, an impoverished
“Hand”—Dickens’s term for the lowest laborers in Coketown’s factories—named
Stephen Blackpool struggles with his love for Rachael, another poor factory
worker. He is unable to marry her because he is already married to a horrible,
drunken woman who disappears for months and even years at a time. Stephen
visits Bounderby to ask about a divorce but learns that only the wealthy can
obtain them. Outside Bounderby’s home, he meets Mrs. Pegler, a strange old
woman with an inexplicable devotion to Bounderby.
James Harthouse, a wealthy young
sophisticate from London, arrives in Coketown to begin a political career as a
disciple of Gradgrind, who is now a Member of Parliament. He immediately takes
an interest in Louisa and decides to try to seduce her. With the unspoken aid
of Mrs. Sparsit, a former aristocrat who has fallen on hard times and now works
for Bounderby, he sets about trying to corrupt Louisa.
The Hands, exhorted by a crooked
union spokesman named Slackbridge, try to form a union. Only Stephen refuses to
join because he feels that a union strike would only increase tensions between
employers and employees. He is cast out by the other Hands and fired by
Bounderby when he refuses to spy on them. Louisa, impressed with Stephen’s integrity,
visits him before he leaves Coketown and helps him with some money. Tom
accompanies her and tells Stephen that if he waits outside the bank for several
consecutive nights, help will come to him. Stephen does so, but no help
arrives. Eventually he packs up and leaves Coketown, hoping to find
agricultural work in the country. Not long after that, the bank is robbed, and
the lone suspect is Stephen, the vanished Hand who was seen loitering outside
the bank for several nights just before disappearing from the city.
Mrs. Sparsit witnesses Harthouse
declaring his love for Louisa, and Louisa agrees to meet him in Coketown later
that night. However, Louisa instead flees to her father’s house, where she
miserably confides to Gradgrind that her upbringing has left her married to a
man she does not love, disconnected from her feelings, deeply unhappy, and
possibly in love with Harthouse. She collapses to the floor, and Gradgrind,
struck dumb with self-reproach, begins to realize the imperfections in his philosophy
of rational self-interest.
Sissy, who loves Louisa deeply,
visits Harthouse and convinces him to leave Coketown forever. Bounderby,
furious that his wife has left him, redoubles his efforts to capture Stephen.
When Stephen tries to return to clear his good name, he falls into a mining pit
called Old Hell Shaft. Rachael and Louisa discover him, but he dies soon after
an emotional farewell to Rachael. Gradgrind and Louisa realize that Tom is
really responsible for robbing the bank, and they arrange to sneak him out of
England with the help of the circus performers with whom Sissy spent her early
childhood. They are nearly successful, but are stopped by Bitzer, a young man
who went to Gradgrind’s school and who embodies all the qualities of the
detached rationalism that Gradgrind once espoused, but who now sees its limits.
Sleary, the lisping circus proprietor, arranges for Tom to slip out of Bitzer’s
grasp, and the young robber escapes from England after all.
Mrs. Sparsit, anxious to help
Bounderby find the robbers, drags Mrs. Pegler—a known associate of Stephen
Blackpool—in to see Bounderby, thinking Mrs. Pegler is a potential witness.
Bounderby recoils, and it is revealed that Mrs. Pegler is really his loving
mother, whom he has forbidden to visit him: Bounderby is not a self-made man
after all. Angrily, Bounderby fires Mrs. Sparsit and sends her away to her
hostile relatives. Five years later, he will die alone in the streets of
Coketown. Gradgrind gives up his philosophy of fact and devotes his political
power to helping the poor. Tom realizes the error of his ways but dies without
ever seeing his family again. While Sissy marries and has a large and loving
family, Louisa never again marries and never has children. Nevertheless, Louisa
is loved by Sissy’s family and learns at last how to feel sympathy for her
fellow human beings.
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