Hard Times quotes

The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall.

The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.

The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial.

A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind.

With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.

It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.

Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations.

A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over.

Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.

“Sissy Jupe, sir,” explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.

“Sissy is not a name,” said Mr. Gradgrind. “Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.”

“It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,” returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.

His short-cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face.

His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.

“Bitzer,” said Thomas Gradgrind. “Your definition of a horse.”

“It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—”

“Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,” cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. “That’s it! You are never to fancy.”

“You are not, Cecilia Jupe,” Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, “to do anything of that kind.”

… are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass.

Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M’Choakumchild.

No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are!

No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen, and driven Charles’s Wain like a locomotive engine-driver.

No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom …

Not the least disguise toned down or shaded off that uncompromising fact in the landscape. A great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the principal windows, as its master’s heavy brows overshadowed his eyes.

A calculated, cast up, balanced, and proved house.

Six windows on this side of the door, six on that side; a total of twelve in this wing, a total of twelve in the other wing; four-and-twenty carried over to the back wings.

Thomas and you, who may be said to be replete with facts; Thomas and you, who have been trained to mathematical exactness; Thomas and you, here!” cried Mr. Gradgrind. “In this degraded position! I am amazed.”

“I was tired, father. I have been tired a long time,” said Louisa.

“Tired? Of what?” asked the astonished father.

“Tired? Of what?” asked the astonished father.

“I don’t know of what⁠—of everything, I think.”

“Say not another word,” returned Mr. Gradgrind. “You are childish. I will hear no more.” He did not speak again until they had walked some half-a-mile in silence, when he gravely broke out with: “What would your best friends say, Louisa?

A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up.

A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start.

A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the bully of humility.

A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty.

A man who was the bully of humility.

A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight added to it again, without surprising anybody. He had not much hair.

A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight added to it again, without surprising anybody. He had not much hair.

One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.

In the formal drawing-room of Stone Lodge, standing on the hearthrug, warming himself before the fire, Mr. Bounderby delivered some observations to Mrs. Gradgrind on the circumstance of its being his birthday.

“What are you about, Loo?” her brother sulkily remonstrated. “You’ll rub a hole in your face.”

“You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom. I wouldn’t cry!”

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.

It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled.

It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up …

The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.

Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial.

The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to …

When she was half a dozen years younger, Louisa had been overheard to begin a conversation with her brother one day, by saying “Tom, I wonder”—upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person overhearing, stepped forth into the light and said,

“Louisa, never wonder!”

Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder.

Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections.

Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder.

Bring to me, says M’Choakumchild, yonder baby just able to walk, and I will engage that it shall never wonder.

They sometimes, after fifteen hours’ work, sat down to read mere fables about men and women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less like their own.

They took Defoe to their bosoms, instead of Euclid, and seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker.

Mr. Gradgrind was forever working, in print and out of print, at this eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable product.

“I don’t see anything in it, Tom, particularly. But since I have been looking at it, I have been wondering about you and me, grown up.”

“I have such unmanageable thoughts,” returned his sister, “that they will wonder.”

“Then I beg of you, Louisa,” said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the door without being heard, “to do nothing of that description, for goodness’ sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last of it from your father.

Sissy Jupe had not an easy time of it, between Mr. M’Choakumchild and Mrs. Gradgrind, and was not without strong impulses, in the first months of her probation, to run away.

It hailed facts all day long so very hard, and life in general was opened to her as such a closely ruled ciphering-book, that assuredly she would have run away, but for only one restraint.

It is lamentable to think of; but this restraint was the result of no arithmetical process, was self-imposed in defiance of all calculation, and went dead against any table of probabilities that any actuary would have drawn up from the premises.

What is the percentage? And I said, Miss;” here Sissy fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest error; “I said it was nothing.”

“Nothing, Miss⁠—to the relations and friends of the people who were killed. I shall never learn,” said Sissy.

“And the worst of all is, that although my poor father wished me so much to learn, and although I am so anxious to learn, because he wished me to, I am afraid I don’t like it.”

Mr. Gradgrind usually improved these occasions by remarking, when she was gone, that if Jupe had been properly trained from an early age she would have remonstrated to herself on sound principles the baselessness of these fantastic hopes.

Yet it did seem (though not to him, for he saw nothing of it) as if fantastic hope could take as strong a hold as Fact.

This observation must be limited exclusively to his daughter. As to Tom, he was becoming that not unprecedented triumph of calculation which is usually at work on number one. As to Mrs.

Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life.

It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen’s case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own.

He had known, to use his words, a peck of trouble. He was usually called Old Stephen, in a kind of rough homage to the fact.

The touch had its instantaneous effect. He let them fall, turned a smiling face upon her, and said, as he broke into a good-humoured laugh,

“Ay, Rachael, lass, awlus a muddle. That’s where I stick. I come to the muddle many times and agen, and I never get beyond it.”

They had walked some distance, and were near their own homes. The woman’s was the first reached.

… capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet serpents, with the composed faces and the regulated actions.

There is no mystery in it; there is an unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, forever.

—Supposing we were to reverse our arithmetic for material objects, and to govern these awful unknown quantities by other means!

There is no mystery in it; there is an unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, forever.—

Supposing we were to reverse our arithmetic for material objects, and to govern these awful unknown quantities by other means!

The day grew strong, and showed itself outside, even against the flaming lights within. The lights were turned out, and the work went on. The rain fell, and the smoke-serpents, submissive to the curse of all that tribe, trailed themselves upon the earth.

“If I was to live wi’ her an’ not marry her—saying such a thing could be, which it never could or would, an’ her so good—there’s a law to punish me, in every innocent child belonging to me?”

“Now, a’ God’s name,” said Stephen Blackpool, “show me the law to help me!”

“Hem! There’s a sanctity in this relation of life,” said Mr. Bounderby, “and—and—it must be kept up.”

“Louisa is becoming,” said Mr. Gradgrind, “almost a young woman.”

Time, with his innumerable horsepower, worked away, not minding what anybody said, and presently turned out young Thomas a foot taller than when his father had last taken particular notice of him.

“Thomas is becoming,” said Mr. Gradgrind, “almost a young man.”

… if, first in her own fire within the house, and then in the fiery haze without, she tried to discover what kind of woof Old Time, that greatest and longest-established Spinner of all, would weave from the threads he had already spun into a woman.

But his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes.

Silence between them. The deadly statistical clock very hollow. The distant smoke very black and heavy.

“Father,” said Louisa, “do you think I love Mr. Bounderby?”

Mr. Gradgrind was extremely discomfited by this unexpected question. “Well, my child,” he returned, “I—really—cannot take upon myself to say.”

Removing her eyes from him, she sat so long looking silently towards the town, that he said, at length: “Are you consulting the chimneys of the Coketown works, Louisa?”

“There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, fire bursts out, father!”

she answered, turning quickly.

“Why, father,” she pursued, “what a strange question to ask me! The baby-preference that even I have heard of as common among children, has never had its innocent resting-place in my breast.

You have been so careful of me, that I never had a child’s heart. You have trained me so well, that I never dreamed a child’s dream.

You have dealt so wisely with me, father, from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child’s belief or a child’s fear.”

She gave some feeble signs of returning animation when they entered, and presently the faint transparency was presented in a sitting attitude.

“Mrs. Gradgrind,” said her husband, who had waited for the achievement of this feat with some impatience, “allow me to present to you Mrs. Bounderby.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Gradgrind, “so you have settled it! Well, I’m sure I hope your health may be good, Louisa;

The business was all Fact, from first to last. The Hours did not go through any of those rosy performances, which foolish poets have ascribed to them at such times; neither did the clocks go any faster, or any slower, than at other seasons.

The deadly statistical recorder in the Gradgrind observatory knocked every second on the head as it was born, and buried it with his accustomed regularity.

So the day came, as all other days come to people who will only stick to reason;

neither did the clocks go any faster, or any slower, than at other seasons. The deadly statistical recorder in the Gradgrind observatory knocked every second on the head as it was born, and buried it with his accustomed regularity.

So the day came, as all other days come to people who will only stick to reason

; and when it came, there were married in the church of the florid wooden legs—that popular order of architecture—Josiah Bounderby Esquire of Coketown, to Louisa eldest daughter of Thomas Gradgrind Esquire of Stone Lodge, M.P. for that borough.

a dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness:—

Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen.

The wonder was, it was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such fragile chinaware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made.

But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life.

So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the things it looks upon to bless.

Mrs. Sparsit sat in her afternoon apartment at the Bank, on the shadier side of the frying street. Office-hours were over: and at that period of the day, in warm weather, she usually embellished with her genteel presence, a managerial boardroom over the public office.

This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown.

Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest hands didn’t each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat.

What I did you can do. Why don’t you go and do it?

An ill-made, high-shouldered man, with lowering brows, and his features crushed into an habitually sour expression, he contrasted most unfavourably, even in his mongrel dress, with the great body of his hearers in their plain working clothes.

Strange as it always is to consider any assembly in the act of submissively resigning itself to the dreariness of some complacent person

, lord or commoner, whom three-fourths of it could, by no human means, raise out of the slough of inanity to their own intellectual level, it was particularly strange, and it was even particularly affecting, to see this crowd of earnest faces, whose honesty in …

Thus easily did Stephen Blackpool fall into the loneliest of lives, the life of solitude among a familiar crowd.

The stranger in the land who looks into ten thousand faces for some answering look and never finds it, is in cheering society as compared with him who passes ten averted faces daily, that were once the countenances of friends.

Such experience was to be Stephen’s now, in every waking moment of his life; at his work, on his way to it and from it, at his door, at his window, everywhere.

“Wi’ yor pardon, sir,” said Stephen Blackpool, “I ha’ nowt to sen about it.”

Mr. Bounderby, who was always more or less like a wind, finding something in his way here, began to blow at it directly.

“Now, look here, Harthouse,” said he, “here’s a specimen of ’em.

“I’m as sooary as yo, sir, when the people’s leaders is bad,” said Stephen, shaking his head. “They taks such as offers. Haply ’tis na’ the sma’est o’ their misfortuns when they can get no better.”

The wind began to get boisterous.

“Now, you’ll think this pretty well, Harthouse,” said Mr. Bounderby. “You’ll think this tolerably strong. You’ll say, upon my soul this is a tidy specimen of what my friends have to deal with; but this is nothing, sir!

Aw that’s now about me in this room were heer afore I coom, an’ will be heer when I am gone.

Put that clock aboard a ship an’ pack it off to Norfolk Island, an’ the time will go on just the same.

So ’tis wi’ Slackbridge every bit.”

or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face,

Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.

Stephen worked the next day, and the next, uncheered by a word from anyone, and shunned in all his comings and goings as before. At the end of the second day, he saw land; at the end of the third, his loom stood empty.

The town was as entirely deserted as if the inhabitants had abandoned it, rather than hold communication with him. Everything looked wan at that hour.

Even the coming sun made but a pale waste in the sky, like a sad sea.

By the place where Rachael lived, though it was not in his way; by the red brick streets; by the great silent factories, not trembling yet; by the railway, where the danger-lights were waning in the strengthening day;

Bounderby, and who do not believe themselves. The only difference between us and the professors of virtue or benevolence, or philanthropy—never mind the name—is, that we know it is all meaningless, and say so; while they know it equally and will never say so.”

Why should she be shocked or warned by this reiteration?

It was not so unlike her father’s principles, and her early training, that it need startle her. Where was the great difference between the two schools, when each chained her down to material realities, and inspired her with no faith in anything else?

And yet he had not, even now, any earnest wickedness of purpose in him. Publicly and privately, it were much better for the age in which he lived, that he and the legion of whom he was one were designedly bad, than indifferent and purposeless.

It is the drifting icebergs setting with any current anywhere, that wreck the ships.

When the Devil goeth about like a roaring lion, he goeth about in a shape by which few but savages and hunters are attracted. But, when he is trimmed, smoothed, and varnished, according to the mode;

not a grim idol, cruel and cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big dumb shape set up with a sightless stare, never to be moved by anything but so many calculated tons of leverage—what had she to do with these?

Her remembrances of home and childhood were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out.

The golden waters were not there. They were flowing for the fertilization of the land where grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.

Now,

Mrs. Sparsit was not a poetical woman; but she took an idea in the nature of an allegorical fancy, into her head.

Much watching of Louisa, and much consequent observation of her impenetrable demeanour, which keenly whetted and sharpened Mrs. Sparsit’s edge, must have given her as it were a lift, in the way of inspiration.

Sparsit kept it standing. When Louisa had arrived at the bottom and disappeared in the gulf, it might fall in upon her if it would; but, until then, there it was to be, a-building, before Mrs. Sparsit’s eyes. And there Louisa always was, upon it.

And always gliding down, down, down!

Mrs. Sparsit saw James Harthouse come and go; she heard of him here and there; she saw the changes of the face he had studied; she, too, remarked to a nicety how and when it clouded, how and when it cleared;

caterpillars slung themselves, in hammocks of their own making, from various parts of her dress; rills ran from her bonnet, and her Roman nose. In such condition, Mrs. Sparsit stood hidden in the density of the shrubbery, considering what next?

Lo, Louisa coming out of the house! Hastily cloaked and muffled, and stealing away.

She elopes! She falls from the lowermost stair, and is swallowed up in the gulf.

“

I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny.

”

“How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart?

What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!

”

“If it had ever been here, its ashes alone would save me from the void in which my whole life sinks. I did not mean to say this; but, father, you remember the last time we conversed in this room?”

He had been so wholly unprepared for what he heard now

, that it was with difficulty he answered, “Yes, Louisa.”

He said it earnestly, and to do him justice he had.

In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise-rod, and in staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do great things.

Within the limits of his short tether he had tumbled about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company he kept.

“

I am so unhappy, and all that should have made me otherwise is so laid waste

, that if I had been bereft of sense to this hour, and instead of being as learned as you think me, had to begin to acquire the simplest truths, I could not want a guide to peace, contentment, honour, all the good of which …

“

Forgive me, pity me, help me! Have compassion on my great need, and let me lay this head of mine upon a loving heart!

”

I have no further trust, than that I know something of her character and her marriage. O Mr. Harthouse, I think you had that trust too!”

He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been⁠—in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away⁠—by the fervour of this reproach.

“I am not a moral sort of fellow,” he said, “and I never make any pretensions to the character of a moral sort of fellow. I am as immoral as need be.

“It wanted this to complete the defeat,” said Mr. James Harthouse, sinking, with a resigned air, on the sofa, after standing transfixed a little while. “The defeat may now be considered perfectly accomplished.

Only a poor girl⁠—only a stroller⁠—only James Harthouse made nothing of⁠—only James Harthouse a Great Pyramid of failure.

”

Day and night again, day and night again. No Stephen Blackpool. Where was the man, and why did he not come back?

Every night, Sissy went to Rachael’s lodging, and sat with her in her small neat room. All day, Rachael toiled as such people must toil, whatever their anxieties. The smoke-serpents were indifferent who was lost or found, who turned out bad or good;

Every night, Sissy went to Rachael’s lodging, and sat with her in her small neat room. All day, Rachael toiled as such people must toil, whatever their anxieties.

The smoke-serpents were indifferent who was lost or found, who turned out bad or good; the melancholy mad elephants, like the Hard Fact men, abated nothing of their set routine, whatever happened.

Day and night again, day and night again. The monotony was unbroken. Even Stephen Blackpool’s disappearance was falling into the general way, and becoming as monotonous a wonder as any piece of machinery in Coketown.

I have never said I was your mother. I have admired you at a distance; and if I have come to town sometimes, with long times between, to take a proud peep at you, I have done it unbeknown, my love, and gone away again.”

Mr. Bounderby, with his hands in his pockets, walked in impatient mortification up and down at the side of the long dining-table

, while the spectators greedily took in every syllable of Mrs. Pegler’s appeal, and at each succeeding syllable became more and more round-eyed. Mr. Bounderby still walking up and down when Mrs. Pegler had done, Mr. Gradgrind addressed that maligned old lady:

she stopped at the hedge to tie her shawl there as a guide to the place, then threw her bonnet aside, and ran as she had never run before.

Run, Sissy, run, in Heaven’s name! Don’t stop for breath. Run, run!

Quickening herself by carrying such entreaties in her thoughts, she ran from field to field, and lane to lane, and place to place, as she had never run before;

He faintly said it, without any anger against anyone.

Merely as the truth.

“Thy little sister, Rachael, thou hast not forgot her. Thou’rt not like to forget her now, and me so nigh her.

Also, that he was charged with the duty of vindicating Stephen Blackpool’s memory, and declaring the thief.

Mr. Bounderby quite confounded, stood stock-still in the street after his father-in-law had left him, swelling like an immense soap-bubble, without its beauty.

Mr. Gradgrind went home, locked himself in his room, and kept it all that day. When Sissy and Louisa tapped at his door, he said, without opening it, “Not now, my dears; in the evening.”