Chapter 1 — BOOK THE<br>FIRST<br>SOWING

Chapter 1

SOWING

‘Now, what I want is,
Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. 
Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and
root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of
reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any
service to them.  This is the principle on which I bring up
my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up
these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!’

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a
school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized
his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on
the schoolmaster’s sleeve.  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.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s
hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation
of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered
with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had
scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. 
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.

‘In
this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but
Facts!’

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person
present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the
inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in
order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them
until they were full to the brim.

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.  It is a mere question of
figures, a case of simple arithmetic.  You might hope to get
some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind,
or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind
(all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of
Thomas Gradgrind—no, sir!

In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced
himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the
public in general.  In such terms, no doubt, substituting
the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’
Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little
pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.

Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage
before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle
with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of
childhood at one discharge.  He seemed a galvanizing
apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the
tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely
pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know
that girl.  Who is that girl?’

‘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.

‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind.  ‘Tell him he mustn’t.  Cecilia
Jupe.  Let me see.  What is your father?’

‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please,
sir.’

Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling
with his hand.

‘We don’t want to know anything about that,
here.  You mustn’t tell us about that, here. 
Your father breaks horses, don’t he?’

‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break,
they do break horses in the ring, sir.’

‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here. 
Very well, then.  Describe your father as a
horsebreaker.  He doctors sick horses, I dare
say?’

‘Oh yes, sir.’

‘Very well, then.  He is a veterinary surgeon, a
farrier, and horsebreaker.  Give me your definition of a
horse.’

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this
demand.)

‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’
said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little
pitchers.  ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts,
in reference to one of the commonest of animals!  Some
boy’s definition of a horse.  Bitzer,
yours.’

The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on
Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of
sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the
intensely white-washed room, irradiated Sissy.  For, the
boys and girls sat on the face of the inclined plane in two
compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval; and
Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in
for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the
corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught
the end.  But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and
dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more
lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon her, the boy was
so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared
to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed. 
His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends
of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with
something paler than themselves, expressed their form.  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.’

‘Quadruped.  Graminivorous.  Forty teeth,
namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve
incisive.  Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries,
sheds hoofs, too.  Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with
iron.  Age known by marks in mouth.’  Thus (and
much more) Bitzer.

‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind.  ‘You know what a horse is.’

She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she
could have blushed deeper than she had blushed all this
time.  Bitzer, after rapidly blinking at Thomas Gradgrind
with both eyes at once, and so catching the light upon his
quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the antennæ
of busy insects, put his knuckles to his freckled forehead, and
sat down again.

The third gentleman now stepped forth.  A mighty man at
cutting and drying, he was; a government officer; in his way (and
in most other people’s too), a professed pugilist; always
in training, always with a system to force down the general
throat like a bolus, always to be heard of at the bar of his
little Public-office, ready to fight all England.  To
continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to
the scratch, wherever and whatever it was, and proving himself an
ugly customer.  He would go in and damage any subject
whatever with his right, follow up with his left, stop, exchange,
counter, bore his opponent (he always fought All England) to the
ropes, and fall upon him neatly.  He was certain to knock
the wind out of common sense, and render that unlucky adversary
deaf to the call of time.  And he had it in charge from high
authority to bring about the great public-office Millennium, when
Commissioners should reign upon earth.

‘Very well,’ said this gentleman, briskly smiling,
and folding his arms.  ‘That’s a horse. 
Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a room with
representations of horses?’

After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus,
‘Yes, sir!’  Upon which the other half, seeing
in the gentleman’s face that Yes was wrong, cried out in
chorus, ‘No, sir!’—as the custom is, in these
examinations.

‘Of course, No.  Why wouldn’t you?’

A pause.  One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of
breathing, ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a
room at all, but would paint it.

‘You must paper it,’ said the gentleman,
rather warmly.

must

‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind,
‘whether you like it or not.  Don’t tell
us you wouldn’t paper it.  What do you mean,
boy?’

us

‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the
gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you
wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. 
Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in
reality—in fact?  Do you?’

‘Yes, sir!’ from one half.  ‘No,
sir!’ from the other.

‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an
indignant look at the wrong half.  ‘Why, then, you are
not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are
not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. 
What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’ 
Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.

‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great
discovery,’ said the gentleman.  ‘Now,
I’ll try you again.  Suppose you were going to carpet
a room.  Would you use a carpet having a representation of
flowers upon it?’

There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No,
sir!’ was always the right answer to this gentleman, the
chorus of No was very strong. 
Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling
in the calm strength of knowledge.

Sissy blushed, and stood up.

‘So you would carpet your room—or your
husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a
husband—with representations of flowers, would you?’
said the gentleman.  ‘Why would you?’

‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’
returned the girl.

‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon
them, and have people walking over them with heavy
boots?’

‘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.’

‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman.  And
‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

‘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.  You don’t find that foreign birds and
butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be
permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your
crockery.  You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down
walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. 
You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these
purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of
mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and
demonstration.  This is the new discovery.  This is
fact.  This is taste.’

The girl curtseyed, and sat down.  She was very young,
and she looked as if she were frightened by the matter-of-fact
prospect the world afforded.

‘Now, if Mr. M’Choakumchild,’ said the
gentleman, ‘will proceed to give his first lesson here, Mr.
Gradgrind, I shall be happy, at your request, to observe his mode
of procedure.’

Mr. Gradgrind was much obliged.  ‘Mr.
M’Choakumchild, we only wait for you.’

So, Mr. M’Choakumchild began in his best manner. 
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.  He had been put
through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of
head-breaking questions.  Orthography, etymology, syntax,
and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general
cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra,
land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from
models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers.  He
had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable
Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the
higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French,
German, Latin, and Greek.  He knew all about all the Water
Sheds of all the world (whatever they 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.  When from
thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by,
dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber
Fancy lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort
him!

Mr. Gradgrind walked homeward from
the school, in a state of considerable satisfaction.  It was
his school, and he intended it to be a model.  He intended
every child in it to be a model—just as the young
Gradgrinds were all models.

There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every
one.  They had been lectured at, from their tenderest years;
coursed, like little hares.  Almost as soon as they could
run alone, they had been made to run to the lecture-room. 
The first object with which they had an association, or of which
they had a remembrance, was a large black board with a dry Ogre
chalking ghastly white figures on it.

Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an Ogre
Fact forbid!  I only use the word to express a monster in a
lecturing castle, with Heaven knows how many heads manipulated
into one, taking childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy
statistical dens by the hair.

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 Thumb:
it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been
introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with
several stomachs.

To his matter-of-fact home, which was called Stone Lodge, Mr.
Gradgrind directed his steps.  He had virtually retired from
the wholesale hardware trade before he built Stone Lodge, and was
now looking about for a suitable opportunity of making an
arithmetical figure in Parliament.  Stone Lodge was situated
on a moor within a mile or two of a great town—called
Coketown in the present faithful guide-book.

A very regular feature on the face of the country, Stone Lodge
was.  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.  A lawn and
garden and an infant avenue, all ruled straight like a botanical
account-book.  Gas and ventilation, drainage and
water-service, all of the primest quality.  Iron clamps and
girders, fire-proof from top to bottom; mechanical lifts for the
housemaids, with all their brushes and brooms; everything that
heart could desire.

Everything?  Well, I suppose so.  The little
Gradgrinds had cabinets in various departments of science
too.  They had a little conchological cabinet, and a little
metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet; and
the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits of
stone and ore looked as though they might have been broken from
the parent substances by those tremendously hard instruments
their own names; and, to paraphrase the idle legend of Peter
Piper, who had never found his way into their nursery, If the
greedy little Gradgrinds grasped at more than this, what was it
for good gracious goodness’ sake, that the greedy little
Gradgrinds grasped it!

Their father walked on in a hopeful and satisfied frame of
mind.  He was an affectionate father, after his manner; but
he would probably have described himself (if he had been put,
like Sissy Jupe, upon a definition) as ‘an eminently
practical’ father.  He had a particular pride in the
phrase eminently practical, which was considered to have a
special application to him.  Whatsoever the public meeting
held in Coketown, and whatsoever the subject of such meeting,
some Coketowner was sure to seize the occasion of alluding to his
eminently practical friend Gradgrind.  This always pleased
the eminently practical friend.  He knew it to be his due,
but his due was acceptable.

He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the
town, which was neither town nor country, and yet was either
spoiled, when his ears were invaded by the sound of music. 
The clashing and banging band attached to the horse-riding
establishment, which had there set up its rest in a wooden
pavilion, was in full bray.  A flag, floating from the
summit of the temple, proclaimed to mankind that it was
‘Sleary’s Horse-riding’ which claimed their
suffrages.  Sleary himself, a stout modern statue with a
money-box at its elbow, in an ecclesiastical niche of early
Gothic architecture, took the money.  Miss Josephine Sleary,
as some very long and very narrow strips of printed bill
announced, was then inaugurating the entertainments with her
graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act.  Among the other
pleasing but always strictly moral wonders which must be seen to
be believed, Signor Jupe was that afternoon to ‘elucidate
the diverting accomplishments of his highly trained performing
dog Merrylegs.’  He was also to exhibit ‘his
astounding feat of throwing seventy-five hundred-weight in rapid
succession backhanded over his head, thus forming a fountain of
solid iron in mid-air, a feat never before attempted in this or
any other country, and which having elicited such rapturous
plaudits from enthusiastic throngs it cannot be
withdrawn.’  The same Signor Jupe was to
‘enliven the varied performances at frequent intervals with
his chaste Shaksperean quips and retorts.’  Lastly, he
was to wind them up by appearing in his favourite character of
Mr. William Button, of Tooley Street, in ‘the highly novel
and laughable hippo-comedietta of The Tailor’s Journey to
Brentford.’

Thomas Gradgrind took no heed of these trivialities of course,
but passed on as a practical man ought to pass on, either
brushing the noisy insects from his thoughts, or consigning them
to the House of Correction.  But, the turning of the road
took him by the back of the booth, and at the back of the booth a
number of children were congregated in a number of stealthy
attitudes, striving to peep in at the hidden glories of the
place.

This brought him to a stop.  ‘Now, to think of
these vagabonds,’ said he, ‘attracting the young
rabble from a model school.’

A space of stunted grass and dry rubbish being between him and
the young rabble, he took his eyeglass out of his waistcoat to
look for any child he knew by name, and might order off. 
Phenomenon almost incredible though distinctly seen, what did he
then behold but his own metallurgical Louisa, peeping with all
her might through a hole in a deal board, and his own
mathematical Thomas abasing himself on the ground to catch but a
hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act!

Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where
his family was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring
child, and said:

‘Louisa!!  Thomas!!’

Both rose, red and disconcerted.  But, Louisa looked at
her father with more boldness than Thomas did.  Indeed,
Thomas did not look at him, but gave himself up to be taken home
like a machine.

‘In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!’ said
Mr. Gradgrind, leading each away by a hand; ‘what do you do
here?’

‘Wanted to see what it was like,’ returned Louisa,
shortly.

‘What it was like?’

‘Yes, father.’

There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and
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.

She was a child now, of fifteen or sixteen; but at no distant
day would seem to become a woman all at once.  Her father
thought so as he looked at her.  She was pretty.  Would
have been self-willed (he thought in his eminently practical way)
but for her bringing-up.

‘Thomas, though I have the fact before me, I find it
difficult to believe that you, with your education and resources,
should have brought your sister to a scene like this.’

‘I brought him, father,’ said Louisa,
quickly.  ‘I asked him to come.’

him

‘I am sorry to hear it.  I am very sorry indeed to
hear it.  It makes Thomas no better, and it makes you worse,
Louisa.’

She looked at her father again, but no tear fell down her
cheek.

‘You!  Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the
sciences is open; 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.

‘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?  Do you
attach no value to their good opinion?  What would Mr.
Bounderby say?’  At the mention of this name, his
daughter stole a look at him, remarkable for its intense and
searching character.  He saw nothing of it, for before he
looked at her, she had again cast down her eyes!

‘What,’ he repeated presently, ‘would Mr.
Bounderby say?’  All the way to Stone Lodge, as with
grave indignation he led the two delinquents home, he repeated at
intervals ‘What would Mr. Bounderby say?’—as if
Mr. Bounderby had been Mrs. Grundy.

Not being Mrs. Grundy, who
was Mr. Bounderby?

was

Why, Mr. Bounderby was as near being Mr. Gradgrind’s
bosom friend, as a man perfectly devoid of sentiment can approach
that spiritual relationship towards another man perfectly devoid
of sentiment.  So near was Mr. Bounderby—or, if the
reader should prefer it, so far off.

He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what
not.  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 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 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.  He stood before the fire, partly
because it was a cool spring afternoon, though the sun shone;
partly because the shade of Stone Lodge was always haunted by the
ghost of damp mortar; partly because he thus took up a commanding
position, from which to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind.

‘I hadn’t a shoe to my foot.  As to a
stocking, I didn’t know such a thing by name.  I
passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. 
That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday.  Not that a
ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch.’

Mrs. Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of
shawls, of surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was
always taking physic without any effect, and who, whenever she
showed a symptom of coming to life, was invariably stunned by
some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her; Mrs. Gradgrind hoped
it was a dry ditch?

‘No!  As wet as a sop.  A foot of water in
it,’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Enough to give a baby cold,’ Mrs. Gradgrind
considered.

‘Cold?  I was born with inflammation of the lungs,
and of everything else, I believe, that was capable of
inflammation,’ returned Mr. Bounderby.  ‘For
years, ma’am, I was one of the most miserable little
wretches ever seen.  I was so sickly, that I was always
moaning and groaning.  I was so ragged and dirty, that you
wouldn’t have touched me with a pair of tongs.’

Mrs. Gradgrind faintly looked at the tongs, as the most
appropriate thing her imbecility could think of doing.

‘How I fought through it, I don’t
know,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I was determined, I
suppose.  I have been a determined character in later life,
and I suppose I was then.  Here I am, Mrs. Gradgrind,
anyhow, and nobody to thank for my being here, but
myself.’

I

Mrs. Gradgrind meekly and weakly hoped that his
mother—

‘My mother?  Bolted, ma’am!’
said Bounderby.

My

Mrs. Gradgrind, stunned as usual, collapsed and gave it
up.