Hard Times

The chapter opens with a question — who is Mr. Bounderby? — and answers it with a thundering physical portrait: a big, loud, balloon-inflated man with swelled veins and a metallic laugh, 'the Bully of humility.' He is Gradgrind's closest friend, a banker and manufacturer who has never once, in living memory, stopped talking about how poor he used to be. Today is his birthday, and he is performing his origin story for Mrs. Gradgrind in the drawing room of Stone Lodge: born in a ditch, kept as an infant in an egg-box by a drunken grandmother who drank fourteen glasses before breakfast, learned his letters from shop signs, told the time from a church steeple under the guidance of a convicted thief. He is proud of every word of it. Mrs. Gradgrind — a thin, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, 'an indifferently executed transparency of a small female figure, without enough light behind it' — absorbs this as she absorbs everything: feebly, and without quite dying. When Gradgrind arrives with the disgraced Louisa and Thomas, Bounderby immediately identifies the culprit: Cecilia Jupe, the circus girl now in the school, must have infected them. His verdict is swift — 'Turn this girl to the right about, and there's an end of it' — and Gradgrind agrees. The two men set off for Pod's End to find her father. Before leaving, Bounderby looks in on the children's study. He tries to kiss Louisa. She walks slowly across the room, raises her cheek ungraciously toward him with her face turned away. The moment he is gone, she stands on the same spot rubbing the cheek he kissed with her handkerchief until it is burning red — and is still doing so five minutes later.