Their daughter

Tom Their son

Josiah Bounderby A pompous mill owner and banker
Later, Louisa's husband

"Mrs. Pegler" His mother

Mrs. Sparsit His housekeeper

Mr. M'Choakumchild A schoolmaster

Sleary The proprietor of a circus

"Signor" Jupe The clown

Cecelia Jupe His daughter. Known as "Sissy"

Stephen Blackpool }
} Mill workers
Rachel }

James Harthouse A man of the world

"Merrylegs" Signor Jupe's performing dog

HARD TIMES

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 im