Hard Times

Sissy's probation at M'Choakumchild's school is a failure by every measurable standard. She is at the bottom of the class, has a dense head for figures, takes the smallest interest in the globe's exact measurements, and cannot name the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteenpence halfpenny. After eight weeks of Political Economy, she gave the first principle as 'To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me.' She is kept to it and becomes low-spirited, but no wiser. In a rare private exchange, she tells Louisa her mistakes. When told the schoolroom represents a nation with fifty million pounds and asked if it is prosperous, she said she couldn't know unless she knew who had the money and whether any of it was hers. When told a million inhabitants and twenty-five starved to death is a proportion to remark upon, she said it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million or a million million. When given statistics on sea casualties — a hundred thousand voyagers, five hundred drowned — she said the percentage was nothing. Nothing, Miss. To the relations and friends of the people who were killed. Louisa draws Sissy out about her father: a clown, sensitive and frightened, who cried when audiences wouldn't laugh and was far timider than anyone knew. Her mother was a dancer who died at her birth. The night her father left, he asked her to fetch the nine oils from the other end of town, kissed her many times, and was gone when she returned. He had told her to take nothing that was known to be mine. She keeps the nine oils still. Every letter in Gradgrind's handwriting stops her breath, in case it is news of her father. Louisa, from this point on, waits for that letter too.