"Hard Times"

[fiefoe]

Had Charles Dickens been kind enough to refrain from spelling out dialects phonetically, this book wouldn't have given me such a hard time.

• The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was,—all helped the emphasis.
• He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.
• And he had it in charge from high authority to bring about the great public-office Millennium, when Commissioners should reign upon earth.
• ‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact.  We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.  You must discard the word Fancy altogether.  You have nothing to do with it.  You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact.  You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets.
• He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.
• 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
• particularly in the girl: yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its expression.  Not with the brightness natural to cheerful youth, but with uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had something painful in them, analogous to the changes on a blind face groping its way.
• A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh.  A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him... A man who was the Bully of humility.
• whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘How can you, Louisa and Thomas!  I wonder at you.  I declare you’re enough to make one regret ever having had a family at all.  I have a great mind to say I wish I hadn’t.  Then what would you have done, I should like to know?’
• He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek he had kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning red.  She was still doing this, five minutes afterwards.
  ‘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!’
• giving them a vent—some recognized holiday, though it were but for an honest dance to a stirring band of music—some occasional light pie in which even M’Choakumchild had no finger—which craving must and would be satisfied aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong, until the laws of the Creation were repealed?
• ‘Now, it’s a remarkable fact, sir, that it cut that man deeper, to know that his daughter knew of his being goosed, than to go through with it.’
  ‘Good!’ interrupted Mr. Bounderby.  ‘This is good, Gradgrind!  A man so fond of his daughter, that he runs away from her!
• if you don’t like to hear it, you can avail yourself of the open air.  You give it mouth enough, you do;
• Sleary's company: Yet there was a remarkable gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserving often of as much respect, and always of as much generous construction, as the every-day virtues of any class of people in the world.
• Mr. Sleary was reserved until the last.  Opening his arms wide he took her by both her hands, and would have sprung her up and down, after the riding-master manner of congratulating young ladies on their dismounting from a rapid act; but there was no rebound in Sissy, and she only stood before him crying.
• but I conthider that I lay down the philothophy of the thubject when I thay to you, Thquire, make the betht of uth: not the wurtht!’
• Mr. Bounderby was obliged to get up from table, and stand with his back to the fire, looking at her; she was such an enhancement of his position. <> ‘And you were in crack society.  Devilish high society,’ he said, warming his legs.
• 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.
• I often sit wondering here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can’t reconcile you to home better than I am able to do.  I don’t know what other girls know.  I can’t play to you, or sing to you.  I can’t talk to you so as to lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about, when you are tired.’
• Their shadows were defined upon the wall, but those of the high presses in the room were all blended together on the wall and on the ceiling, as if the brother and sister were overhung by a dark cavern.  Or, a fanciful imagination—if such treason could have been there—might have made it out to be the shadow of their subject, and of its lowering association with their future.
• after eight weeks of induction into the elements of Political Economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler three feet high, for returning to the question, ‘What is the first principle of this science?’ the absurd answer, ‘To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me.’
• ‘You are more useful to my mother, and more pleasant with her than I can ever be,’ Louisa resumed.  ‘You are pleasanter to yourself, than I am to myself.’
• In it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year.  What is your remark on that proportion?  And my remark was—for I couldn’t think of a better one—that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million.  And that was wrong, too.’
• And he said, Here are the stutterings—’ <> ‘Statistics,’ said Louisa.
• As to Tom, he was becoming that not unprecedented triumph of calculation which is usually at work on number one.
• It was in one of the many small streets for which the favourite undertaker (who turned a handsome sum out of the one poor ghastly pomp of the neighbourhood) kept a black ladder, in order that those who had done their daily groping up and down the narrow stairs might slide out of this working world by the windows.
• He sunk into a chair, and moved but once all that night.  It was to throw a covering over her; as if his hands were not enough to hide her, even in the darkness.
• Now, if I am obliged to go back without a glimpse of him—I only want a glimpse—well!  I have seen you, and you have seen him, and I must make that do.’  Saying this, she looked at Stephen as if to fix his features in her mind, and her eye was not so bright as it had been.
• Filled with these thoughts—so filled that he had an unwholesome sense of growing larger, of being placed in some new and diseased relation towards the objects among which he passed, of seeing the iris round every misty light turn red—he went home for shelter.
• She turned her head, and the light of her face shone in upon the midnight of his mind.
• He heard the thundering and surging out of doors, and it seemed to him as if his late angry mood were going about trying to get at him.  She had cast it out; she would keep it out; he trusted to her to defend him from himself.
• Now, Mr. Bounderby does not do you the injustice, and does not do himself the injustice, of pretending to anything fanciful, fantastic, or (I am using synonymous terms) sentimental.  Mr. Bounderby would have seen you grow up under his eyes, to very little purpose, if he could so far forget what is due to your good sense, not to say to his, as to address you from any such ground.
• With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there.
• ‘What do I know, father,’ said Louisa in her quiet manner, ‘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.
• * ‘Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby, putting his hands in his pockets, and assuring himself with his right hand that the cork of the little bottle was ready for use, ‘I have no occasion to say to you, that you are not only a lady born and bred, but a devilish sensible woman.’... ‘I wish with all my heart, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, in a highly superior manner; somehow she seemed, in a moment, to have established a right to pity him ever afterwards; ‘that you may be in all respects very happy.’
• Nothing moved Mrs. Sparsit from that position any more.  It was in vain for Bounderby to bluster or to assert himself in any of his explosive ways; Mrs. Sparsit was resolved to have compassion on him, as a Victim.  She was polite, obliging, cheerful, hopeful; but, the more polite, the more obliging, the more cheerful, the more hopeful, the more exemplary altogether, she; the forlorner Sacrifice and Victim, he.  She had that tenderness for his melancholy fate, that his great red countenance used to break out into cold perspirations when she looked at him.
• on all occasions during the period of betrothal, took a manufacturing aspect.  Dresses were made, jewellery was made, cakes and gloves were made, settlements were made, and an extensive assortment of Facts did appropriate honour to the contract... 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.
• ‘What a game girl you are, to be such a first-rate sister, Loo!’ whispered Tom. <> She clung to him as she should have clung to some far better nature that day, and was a little shaken in her reserved composure for the first time.
• Seated, with her needlework or netting apparatus, at the window, she had a self-laudatory sense of correcting, by her ladylike deportment, the rude business aspect of the place.  With this impression of her interesting character upon her, Mrs. Sparsit considered herself, in some sort, the Bank Fairy.  The townspeople who, in their passing and repassing, saw her there, regarded her as the Bank Dragon keeping watch over the treasures of the mine.
• a certain air of exhaustion upon him, in part arising from excessive summer, and in part from excessive gentility.  For it was to be seen with half an eye that he was a thorough gentleman, made to the model of the time; weary of everything, and putting no more faith in anything than Lucifer.
• Among the fine gentlemen not regularly belonging to the Gradgrind school, there was one of a good family and a better appearance, with a happy turn of humour which had told immensely with the House of Commons on the occasion of his entertaining it with his (and the Board of Directors) view of a railway accident, in which the most careful officers ever known, employed by the most liberal managers ever heard of, assisted by the finest mechanical contrivances ever devised, the whole in action on the best line ever constructed, had killed five people and wounded thirty-two, by a casualty without which the excellence of the whole system would have been positively incomplete.  Among the slain was a cow, and among the scattered articles unowned, a widow’s cap.  And the honourable member had so tickled the House (which has a delicate sense of humour) by putting the cap on the cow, that it became impatient of any serious reference to the Coroner’s Inquest, and brought the railway off with Cheers and Laughter.
• the most remarkable girl Mr. James Harthouse had ever seen.  She was so constrained, and yet so careless; so reserved, and yet so watchful; so cold and proud, and yet so sensitively ashamed of her husband’s braggart humility
• There’s an English family with a charming Italian motto.  What will be, will be.  It’s the only truth going!’
• There was little enough in him to brighten her face, for he was a sullen young fellow, and ungracious in his manner even to her.  So much the greater must have been the solitude of her heart, and her need of some one on whom to bestow it.  ‘So much the more is this whelp the only creature she has ever cared for,’
• ‘Oh,’ returned Tom, with contemptuous patronage, ‘she’s a regular girl.  A girl can get on anywhere.  She has settled down to the life, and she don’t mind.  It does just as well as another.  Besides, though Loo is a girl, she’s not a common sort of girl.  She can shut herself up within herself, and think—as I have often known her sit and watch the fire—for an hour at a stretch.’
• ‘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.
• He spoke with the rugged earnestness of his place and character—deepened perhaps by a proud consciousness that he was faithful to his class under all their mistrust; but he fully remembered where he was, and did not even raise his voice.
  ‘No, ma’am, no.  They’re true to one another, faithfo’ to one another, ’fectionate to one another, e’en to death.  Be poor amoong ’em, be sick amoong ’em, grieve amoong ’em for onny o’ th’ monny causes that carries grief to the poor man’s door, an’ they’ll be tender wi’ yo, gentle wi’ yo, comfortable wi’ yo, Chrisen wi’ yo.  Be sure o’ that, ma’am.  They’d be riven to bits, ere ever they’d be different.’
• ‘Sir,’ returned Stephen, with the quiet confidence of absolute certainty, ‘if yo was t’ tak a hundred Slackbridges—aw as there is, and aw the number ten times towd—an’ was t’ sew ’em up in separate sacks, an’ sink ’em in the deepest ocean as were made ere ever dry land coom to be, yo’d leave the muddle just wheer ’tis.
• Most o’ aw, rating ’em as so much Power, and reg’latin ’em as if they was figures in a soom, or machines: wi’out loves and likens, wi’out memories and inclinations, wi’out souls to weary and souls to hope—when aw goes quiet, draggin on wi’ ’em as if they’d nowt o’ th’ kind, and when aw goes onquiet, reproachin ’em for their want o’ sitch humanly feelins in their dealins wi’ yo—this will never do ’t, sir, till God’s work is onmade.’
• She was fain to take up the note again, and to substitute the much smaller sum he had named.  He was neither courtly, nor handsome, nor picturesque, in any respect; and yet his manner of accepting it, and of expressing his thanks without more words, had a grace in it that Lord Chesterfield could not have taught his son in a century.
• ‘I towd thee, my dear,’ said Stephen Blackpool—‘that night—that I would never see or think o’ onnything that angered me, but thou, so much better than me, should’st be beside it.  Thou’rt beside it now.  Thou mak’st me see it wi’ a better eye.  Bless thee.  Good night.  Good-bye!’
  It was but a hurried parting in a common street, yet it was a sacred remembrance to these two common people.  Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you.  Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; 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.
• Even the coming sun made but a pale waste in the sky, like a sad sea.
• With the aid of a little more coaching for the political sages, a little more genteel listlessness for the general society, and a tolerable management of the assumed honesty in dishonesty, most effective and most patronized of the polite deadly sins, he speedily came to be considered of much promise.
• but he raised his eyelids a little more, as if they were lifted by a feeble touch of wonder.  Albeit it was as much against the precepts of his school to wonder, as it was against the doctrines of the Gradgrind College.
• 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.
• ‘My dear brother:’ she laid her head down on his pillow, and her hair flowed over him as if she would hide him from every one but herself: ‘is there nothing that you have to tell me?
• 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
• Mrs. Sparsit was a pattern of consistency; continuing to take such pity on Mr. Bounderby to his face, as is rarely taken on man, and to call his portrait a Noodle to its face, with the greatest acrimony and contempt.
• Wet through and through: with her feet squelching and squashing in her shoes whenever she moved; with a rash of rain upon her classical visage; with a bonnet like an over-ripe fig; with all her clothes spoiled; with damp impressions of every button, string, and hook-and-eye she wore, printed off upon her highly connected back; with a stagnant verdure on her general exterior, such as accumulates on an old park fence in a mouldy lane; Mrs. Sparsit had no resource but to burst into tears of bitterness and say, ‘I have lost her!’
• Would you have robbed me—for no one’s enrichment—only for the greater desolation of this world—of the immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in which I should have learned to be more humble and more trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?’
• But Tom had been the subject of all the little tenderness of my life; perhaps he became so because I knew so well how to pity him.
• 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.
• I am quite sure that it is the only compensation you have left it in your power to make.  I do not say that it is much, or that it is enough; but it is something, and it is necessary.  Therefore, though without any other authority than I have given you, and even without the knowledge of any other person than yourself and myself, I ask you to depart from this place to-night, under an obligation never to return to it.’
• Regarded as a classical ruin, Mrs. Sparsit was an interesting spectacle on her arrival at her journey’s end; but considered in any other light, the amount of damage she had by that time sustained was excessive, and impaired her claims to admiration.
• as set forth in this degrading and disgusting document, this blighting bill, this pernicious placard, this abominable advertisement;
• We must go in different directions, seeking aid.  You shall go by the way we have come, and I will go forward by the path.  Tell any one you see, and every one what has happened.  Think of Stephen, think of Stephen!’ <> She knew by Rachael’s face that she might trust her now.  And after standing for a moment to see her running, wringing her hands as she ran, she turned and went upon her own search; 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.
• When I fell, I were in anger wi’ her, an’ hurryin on t’ be as onjust t’ her as oothers was t’ me.  But in our judgments, like as in our doins, we mun bear and forbear.  In my pain an’ trouble, lookin up yonder,—wi’ it shinin on me—I ha’ seen more clear, and ha’ made it my dyin prayer that aw th’ world may on’y coom toogether more, an’ get a better unnerstan’in o’ one another, than when I were in ’t my own weak seln.’
• ‘The Thquire thtood by you, Thethilia, and I’ll thtand by the Thquire.  More than that: thith ith a prethiouth rathcal, and belongth to that bluthtering Cove that my people nearly pitht out o’ winder.  It’ll be a dark night; I’ve got a horthe that’ll do anything but thpeak; I’ve got a pony that’ll go fifteen mile an hour with Childerth driving of him; I’ve got a dog that’ll keep a man to one plathe four-and-twenty hourth.  Get a word with the young Thquire.  Tell him, when he theeth our horthe begin to danthe, not to be afraid of being thpilt, but to look out for a pony-gig coming up.  Tell him, when he theeth that gig clothe by, to jump down, and it’ll take him off at a rattling pathe.  If my dog leth thith young man thtir a peg on foot, I give him leave to go.
• Thus saying, Mrs. Sparsit, with her Roman features like a medal struck to commemorate her scorn of Mr. Bounderby, surveyed him fixedly from head to foot, swept disdainfully past him, and ascended the staircase.