A Loophole — Hard Times

Gradgrind walks home pleased with his model school and his five model children, raised from infancy on lectures, blackboards, and dissected constellations. They never learned nursery rhymes or wondered at the moon. They met cows only as graminivorous quadrupeds with several stomachs. Stone Lodge matches the mind that built it: square, counted, fireproof, with twelve windows here and twelve there and a garden ruled like a ledger. Everything heart could desire, unless desire itself was what got bred out.

Near town he passes Sleary's Horse-riding circus and means to ignore it the way practical men ignore noise. Then he finds children spying through cracks in the booth. His own Louisa and Thomas are among them: Louisa peeping at the Tyrolean act, Thomas on the ground trying to catch a hoof. He seizes them in the name of wonder, idleness, and folly. Louisa, fifteen, says simply that she wanted to see what it was like. Her face is sullen, but Dickens sees something else in it: a starved imagination still throwing light, like a blind face groping for a way out.

Thomas offers no defense. Louisa says she asked him to come, and Gradgrind tells her she has made herself worse. When she admits she has been tired a long time, tired of everything, he cuts her off as childish and will hear no more. She does not cry. On the walk to Stone Lodge he keeps asking the question that replaces conscience in his world: What would Mr. Bounderby say? The loophole is not the circus fence. It is the hunger that facts could not kill.