Hard Times

Gradgrind walks home from school in a state of considerable satisfaction — it is his school, and every child in it, including his own five, is intended to be a model. Dickens pauses here to show us what that means in practice. The young Gradgrinds have never seen a face in the moon. They have never heard Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. At five years old they had dissected the Great Bear like professors. They know a cow only as 'a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.' Nursery rhymes, fairy tales, wonder of any kind — all systematically rooted out before it could take hold. His home, Stone Lodge, is itself a portrait of his mind: a great square house with six windows on this side of the door, six on that, a total of twelve in each wing — calculated, cast up, balanced, and proved. The lawn is ruled straight like a botanical account-book. The children have cabinets of conchology, metallurgy, and mineralogy — everything classified, nothing imagined. On the way home, Gradgrind passes Sleary's Horse-riding — the circus camped on the edge of town — and discovers something that stops him cold: his own daughter Louisa is peeping through a hole in the booth fence, and his son Thomas is lying on the ground trying to glimpse the equestrian act beneath the boards. Confronted, Louisa meets her father's gaze with more boldness than Thomas can manage. When Gradgrind asks what she was doing there, she says simply: 'Wanted to see what it was like.' And when pressed further — 'I was tired, father. I have been tired a long time. I don't know of what — of everything, I think.' The entire walk home, Gradgrind can think of only one thing to say: 'What would Mr. Bounderby say?'