Gradgrind

The consumerist change was, of course, to be expected by some and welcomed by many.

Mr. Gradgrind of Dickens' Hard Times, a strict, fanatically disciplined modern man, mercilessly attempted to eradicate human weakness, is a despicable figure and as such perfectly illustrates a negative perception of a classical capitalist by the humanist critics of a modern society.

Mr. Gradgrind is deaf to temptations, unresponsive to warm emotions and simple pleasures, motivated purely by new rationality and by nothing else.

His callousness seems almost inhuman.

But capitalism finally changed and the severity of the world's Gradgrinds disappeared.

The religious background of the new economy, so persuasively described by Weber, evaporated.

And the capitalism itself, while continuing the ethic of the discipline of work and pushing productivity to new records of efficiency and inventiveness, liberated itself completely from the Protestant gloom.

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? What was there in her soul for James Harthouse to destroy which Thomas Gradgrind had nurtured there in its state of innocence? It was even the worse for her at this pass, that in her mind, implanted there before her eminently practical father began to form it, a struggling disposition to believe in a wider and nobler humanity than she had ever heard of, constantly strove with doubts and resentments.

With doubts because the aspiration had been so laid waste in her youth, with resentments because of the wrong that had been done her, if it were indeed a whisper of the truth.

Upon a nature long accustomed to self-suppression, thus torn and divided, the heart-house philosophy came as a relief and justification.

After that he wrote no more about them, and devoted his leisure chiefly to their house.

He was very often in their house, in his flittings and visitings about the Coketown district, and was much encouraged by Mr. Bounderby.

It was quite in Mr. Bounderby's gusty way to boast to all his world that he didn't care about your highly connected people, but that if his wife, Tom Gradgrind's daughter, did, she was welcome to their company.

Mr. James Harthouse began to think it would be a new sensation if the face, which changed so beautifully for the whelp, would change for him.

Blest the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have scorched its grass.» On that strip of grass, blackened here and there with the ashes thus apostrophized, the novelist may have seen, and not improbably talked with, the originals of Dr. Marigold and Chops the Dwarf and the pink-eyed albino lady and Codlin and Short, and many more of the characters that figure in his stories.

There ran through the whole of his kindly nature a strong vein of sympathy with all strollers of this class, which reveals itself in many passages of his works, and in none more plainly than in the appeal of Sleary, the lisping circus proprietor, to Mr. Gradgrind.

«People must be amused.» They can't always be a-learning, nor they can't always be a-working.

They aren't made for it.

Dickens though he visited this part of the coast every summer for 14 or 15 years never chose Ramsgate for a resort and seems to have visited it from Broadstairs on only two occasions one of which has been mentioned.

Eight years later he again visited Ramsgate but only for the purpose of seeing a circus entertainment of which popular form of amusement he was very fond though for a writer who appears to have seen so much of the manners and habits of strolling entertainers of every description his knowledge of circus life was strangely limited.

When the interesting story of the fortunes and misfortunes of the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbies appeared, the incidents in which various members of Sleary's circus company figure excited surprise equally among those who were conversant with circus life and those who knew nothing about it.

The former that he should know so little, and the latter that he should know, as they thought, so much.

A wonderful world inhabited by glorious beings with shimmering wings and glittering diadems and wands, to whom nothing is impossible, for whom neither time nor space exists save at their will.

"Where is this wonderful world?" sneers Mr. Gradgrind.

"I cannot see it.

It does not exist." No, not for you, my dear sir.