The Whelp — Hard Times

Dickens opens with bitter irony: it was very remarkable that a young gentleman brought up under one continuous system of unnatural restraint should be a hypocrite, yet it was certainly the case with Tom. A boy never left to his own guidance for five consecutive minutes should be incapable of governing himself at last, yet so it was. Imagination strangled in the cradle still haunts him in grovelling sensualities. The Whelp is the product Gradgrind's philosophy was designed to make.

After dinner Harthouse has Tom at the hotel with cooling drink and rarer tobacco. Tom sprawls free and easy, admiring his new friend's easy swell, and talks with drunken expansiveness about his sister. She never cared for old Bounderby, he insists; he persuaded her into the marriage so he could stay at the bank. Louisa would do anything for him. She has nothing to fall back upon that girls usually have, he adds carelessly, and can shut herself up watching the fire for an hour, but girls always get on somehow.

Harthouse listens like an agreeable demon hovering over the whelp and takes careful note of every word. Tom passes out and stumbles home still feeling his new friend's negligent gaze in the air. Dickens adds that a better brother might have walked into the black river and never returned; instead the whelp sleeps off what he has given away without knowing the cost. Harthouse has been more useful than he could have guessed.