I
MR. GRADGRIND AND HIS "SYSTEM"
In a cheerless house called Stone Lodge, in Coketown, a factory town in England, where great weaving mills made the sky a blur of soot and smoke, lived a man named Gradgrind. He was an obstinate, stubborn man, with a square wall of a forehead and a wide, thin, set mouth. His head was bald and shining, covered with knobs like the crust of a plum pie, and skirted with bristling hair. He had grown rich in the hardware business, and was a school director of the town.
He believed in nothing but "facts." Everything in the world to him was good only to weigh and measure, and wherever he went one would have thought he carried in his pocket a rule and scales and the multiplication table. He seemed a kind of human cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts.
"Now, what I want is facts!" he used to say to Mr. M'Choakumchild, the schoolmaster. "Teach boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Nothing else is of any service to anybody. Stick to facts, sir."
He had several children whom he had brought up according to this system of his, and they led wretched lives. No little Gradgrind child had ever seen a face in the moon, or learned Mother Goose or listened to fairy stories, or read The Arabian Nights. They all hated Coketown, always rattling and throbbing with machinery; they hated its houses all built of brick as red as an Indian's face, and its black canal and river purple with dyes. And most of all they hated facts.
Louisa, the eldest daughter, looked jaded, for her imagination was quite starved under their teachings. Tom, her younger brother, was defiant and sullen. "I wish," he used to say, "that I could collect all the facts and all the figures in the world, and all the people who found them out, and I wish I could put a thousand pounds of gunpowder under them and blow them all up together!"
Louisa was generous, and the only love she knew was for her selfish, worthless brother, who repaid her with very little affection. Of their mother they saw very little; she was a thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, feeble and ailing, and had too little mind to oppose her husband in anything.
Strangely enough, Mr. Gradgrind had once had a tender heart, and down beneath the facts of his system he had it still, though it had been covered up so long that nobody would have guessed it. Least of all, perhaps, his own children.
Mr. Gradgrind's intimate friend,—one whom he was foolish enough to admire,—was Josiah Bounderby, a big, loud, staring man with a puffed head whose skin was stretched so tight it seemed to hold his eyes open. He owned the Coketown mills and a bank besides, and was very rich and pompous.
Bounderby was a precious hypocrite, of an odd sort. His greatest pride was to talk continually of his former poverty and wretchedness, and he delighted to tell everybody that he had been born in a ditch, deserted by his wicked mother, and brought up a vagabond by a drunken grandmother—from which low state he had made himself wealthy and respected by his own unaided efforts.