Mrs. Sparsit — Hard Times

Mrs. Sparsit keeps Josiah Bounderby's house for a hundred a year and a great deal of wounded dignity. She is a Scadgers by marriage, a Powler by reputation, and a fallen gentlewoman by circumstance: her late husband drank himself to death in Calais after losing two fortunes, and her aristocratic aunt Lady Scadgers will not help her. Bounderby loves the contrast. He decorates her past with opera boxes and satin while reminding everyone, including her, that she now serves the man who claims he slept on pavement stones.

At breakfast he broods over Tom Gradgrind joining his office and over the tumbling-girl Sissy waiting upstairs. Mrs. Sparsit needles him about Louisa. Bounderby insists the circus child will do Louisa no good. When Gradgrind arrives with Louisa and Tom, Sissy is sent for and curtseys to everyone except Mrs. Sparsit. Bounderby roars that the housekeeper is highly connected and must be treated with deferential respect, though he affects to be nobody himself.

Gradgrind then delivers Sissy's new contract in his calm instructional voice. She will live at Stone Lodge, serve the invalid Mrs. Gradgrind, forget her old life entirely, and become a living proof of proper training. When he learns she read fairy tales to her father, he cuts her off: never breathe such destructive nonsense again. Louisa watches Sissy cry and, for the first time, really looks at her.

They leave for Stone Lodge together. Louisa never speaks one word on the way, good or bad. Bounderby returns to business. Mrs. Sparsit retreats behind her eyebrows and meditates in the gloom all evening, already studying a household that has just gained a girl full of fairies and a daughter full of silence.