Stephen Blackpool — Hard Times

Dickens opens among the Hands in the hardest-working quarter of Coketown and introduces Stephen Blackpool, a power-loom weaver of perfect integrity who looks older than forty because life gave him someone else's thorns along with his own. He is not one of the self-educated debaters among the workers, but a steady man whose inner life the factory cannot measure.

After the looms stop, Stephen waits in the rain for Rachael, a calm woman of thirty-five whose gentle eyes and ordered hair he knows at a glance. They walk toward home as old friends who must not be seen together too often. Rachael says honesty between them is sacred, but gossip would harm even her. Stephen admits the arrangement is hard. Her word, he tells her, is a better law than some real ones. When she warns him not to fret about the laws, he answers that everything is a muddle, and he never gets beyond it.

Rachael leaves first at her corner. Stephen watches until she vanishes into her house, then goes on under a broken sky with the moon on the chimneys. His room above a little shop is neat and decent. At the hearth he stumbles over a figure on the floor: his wife, returned again, drunk, filthy, and morally ruined. She mocks him, screams that she will sell him off over and over, and claims the bed as hers. Stephen shrinks from her with a shudder, sits with his face in his hands, and moves only once all night: to cover her in the darkness, as if even then he cannot hide her shame enough.