Hard Times

Dickens pauses the action to strike the keynote: Coketown. It is a town of red brick blackened by smoke until it looks like the painted face of a savage. Its chimneys trail serpents of smoke that never uncoil. Its river runs purple with dye. Its piston-engines work monotonously up and down like the heads of elephants in a state of melancholy madness. Every street is like every other street. Every day is the counterpart of the last. The jail, the infirmary, and the town hall are indistinguishable in their construction. Fact, fact, fact — everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact in the immaterial. And yet Coketown does not thrive. Its workers don't attend the eighteen chapels built for them. They drink, or take opium, or slip into low haunts where they hear singing and dancing. Each institution — the teetotal society, the prison chaplain, the employers — produces tabular statements proving the workers are incurably bad. Dickens asks, quietly, whether anyone has considered that a Fancy in them, demanding to be brought into healthy existence, has instead been left to struggle on in convulsions. Into this landscape step Gradgrind and Bounderby, on their way to Pod's End. They encounter Sissy running in the street — Bitzer has been chasing her to make her practice the horse definition. Gradgrind sends Bitzer away and makes Sissy lead them to her father. She is carrying a bottle of the nine oils — the circus remedy for bruises. They follow her to a mean little public-house at twilight, haggard and shabby, as if it had itself taken to drink.