Louisa denied Tom’s participation in the offence; but her mother stopped her with the conclusive answer, “Louisa, don’t tell me, in my state of health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and physically impossible that you could have done it.”
“I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking at the red sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do in it.”
“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic. “Nonsense! Don’t stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you know very well that if it was ever to reach your father’s ears I should never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes!”
When a boy hates home, and a girl in her teens is rejoicing at the prospect of a short life, there has been some serious blunder in their training.
When her father was proposing to her that she should marry old Bounderby, Louisa said:
“What do I know, father, of tastes and fancies; of aspirations and affections; of all that part of my nature in which such light things might have been nourished? What escape have I had from problems that could be demonstrated, and realities that could be grasped?” As she said it, she unconsciously closed her hand, as if upon a solid object, and slowly opened it as though she were releasing dust or ash.
After her marriage to Bounderby Louisa rarely came home, and Dickens gives in detail a sequence of thought that passed through her mind on her approach to the old home after a long absence. None of the true feelings were stirred in her heart.
The dreams of childhood—its airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond, so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown, for then the least among them rises to the stature of a great charity in the heart, suffering little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world, wherein it were better for all the children of Adam that they should oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and not worldly-wise—what had she to do with these? Remembrances of how she had journeyed to the little that she knew by the enchanted roads of what she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how, first coming upon reason through the tender light of fancy, she had seen it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as itself; 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?
This quotation shows how clearly Dickens saw the relationship between the imagination and the reason. Her imagination had been dwarfed and perverted; and her power to feel, and to think, and to appreciate beauty, and to love, and to see God and understand him, was dwarfed and perverted as a consequence.
Her poor mother, who had always felt that there was something wrong with her husband’s training, but dared not oppose him, and fully supported him for the sake of peace which never really came, was worn out, and had almost become a mental wreck. Her mind was struggling with the one great question. She tried and tried vainly to find what the great defect of her husband’s system was, but she was very sure it had a great weakness somewhere. She tried to explain the matter to Louisa when she came to see her.