dark, dirty mind of Mrs. Sparsit, Bounderby’s housekeeper, who is enraged with jealousy over her master’s arranged marriage to Louisa Gradgrind. She spies on Louisa, who seems to be heading for an adulterous disaster with Harthouse, the wastrel dandy with his crushing ennui; Harthouse appeals to Louisa as a destructive solution to her frustrated anger at her father, whose ambition has led to her unhappy marriage.

Sparsit, spying on Louisa, “erected in her mind a mighty Staircase, with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom; and down those stairs, from day to day and hour to hour, she saw Louisa coming.” Sparsit’s vision, exerted on behalf of Bounderby and the villainous forces of the novel, is the most copious imaginative effort in the book; it is effected for bad reasons, but it has considerable power. And note that at the bottom of the stairs is a dark pit of shame and ruin—the muddle, in all senses of its polite and demotic meanings. Louisa seems about to fall, and into the filth, which Sparsit’s metaphor attaches to illicit sexuality. Like Stephen, in love with a woman not his wife, Louisa, in a liaison with a man not her husband, will also fall; Stephen fell physically as well as economically and, some would say, morally; Louisa marches down and down those stairs.

Sparsit, peering from behind the shrubbery, later sees Louisa stealing away. In Sparsit’s mind “[s]he elopes! She falls from the lowermost stair, and is swallowed up in the gulf.” Sparsit is soaked by a rainfall as she follows Louisa, and “[g]utters and pipes had burst, drains had overflowed, and streets were under water.” The flood is not only rainwater, but from drains—sewage belches forth from them, and impurity drowns the virtue of the middle class: muddle.

Dickens was also ambivalent about Bounderby’s own powerful act of imagination in lying about the cruelties and neglect of his parents who had in fact raised him lovingly. He has pensioned his widowed mother, she says, to “keep down in my own part, and make no boasts about him, and not trouble him”; Bounderby has written a different life for himself, involving his triumph over adversities that never existed. This “writer” echoes the life of his creator. Dickens’ profligate parents often cadged money from his publishers and otherwise embarrassed Dickens, who, as he rose in reputation and wealth, paid for their cottage but forbade them entry into his life. While he admired his father’s courage in old age, he claimed to never have forgotten how his mother eagerly sought to keep him, as a small boy of eleven or twelve, living alone in a seedy room in a rough neighborhood while he earned money for the family by working among unsavory characters in a blacking factory on The Strand. He seems never to have recovered from the exclusion from his family during those difficult several months, nor to ever have forgiven his mother, whom he in turn one day banished.

Dickens was a man of great courage who took on his nation and his times. He also challenged a shadow of himself, thrown onto the pages of his novel, as he wrote the humiliation of Josiah Bounderby, a “writer” who imagined a new life for himself, and who lied it into existence while he wrote his mother out of it. Dickens, then, confronted his harsh, hard times, and he confronted any writer’s cruelest opponent: himself.

—Frederick Busch

Inscribed

TO

THOMAS CARLYLE

List of Characters

BITZER, a well-crammed pupil in Mr. Gradgrind’s model school

STEPHEN BLACKPOOL, an honest, hard-working power-loom weaver in Mr. Bounderby’s factory

MR. JOSIAH BOUNDERBY, a boastful and wealthy manufacturer

MR. E. W. B. CHILDERS, a member of Sleary’s Circus Troupe

MR. THOMAS GRADGRIND, a retired wholesale hardware merchant

THOMAS GRADGRIND, his youngest son; a selfish, ill-natured whelp

MR. JAMES HARTHOUSE, a friend of Mr. Gradgrind’s

SIGNOR JUPE, a clown in Sleary’s Circus Troupe

MR. MCCHOAKUMCHILD, a teacher in Mr. Gradgrind’s model school

SLACKBRIDGE, a trades-union agitator

MR. SLEARY, a stout, flabby man; the proprietor of a circus

MRS. BLACKPOOL, the wife of Stephen Blackpool; a dissolute, drunken woman

EMMA GORDON, a member of Sleary’s Circus Troupe

MRS. GRADGRIND, the feeble-minded wife of Mr. Thomas Gradgrind

JANE GRADGRIND, younger daughter of the preceding

LOUISA GRADGRIND, the eldest child of Mr. and Mrs. Gradgrind; afterwards the wife of Mr. Josiah Bounderby

CECILIA JUPE (“Sissy”), the daughter of Signor Jupe, a circus clown

MRS. PEGLER, a mysterious old woman, withered, but tall and shapely

RACHAEL, a factory hand; a friend of Stephen Blackpool’s

LADY SCADGERS, a fat old woman; great-aunt to Mrs. Sparsit

JOSEPHINE SLEARY, a fair-haired young woman; the daughter