Hard Times
Glossary
B
- Bitzer
- A pale, model pupil of Gradgrind's school who absorbs the Fact-only philosophy completely and without a shred of feeling. He grows up to work at Bounderby's bank and, near the novel's end, tries to arrest the fleeing Tom purely out of calculated self-interest — the system's logical, chilling end product.
- Related: Fact, Thomas Gradgrind, M'Choakumchild
C
- Coketown
- The fictional industrial mill town where the novel is set, described as 'a triumph of fact' — a grid of identical streets, smoke-serpents from factory chimneys, and a river running purple with dye. Widely read as a composite of England's industrial north, closely associated with Preston, which Dickens visited during a real 1853-54 weavers' strike.
- Related: Fact, Hands, Josiah Bounderby
F
- Fact (Gradgrind's philosophy)
- The utilitarian creed, voiced in the novel's opening line, that only provable, measurable facts have value — in education, in relationships, in life generally. The novel's plot is essentially an extended demonstration of how thoroughly this philosophy fails the people subjected to it.
- Related: Thomas Gradgrind, Coketown, M'Choakumchild
G
- Gradgrind's Model School
- The Coketown school Gradgrind founds and patronizes, run on strict Fact-only pedagogy — no fancy, no fairy tales, no wondering. Its methods and their effects on Sissy, Bitzer, and Louisa's own children form the novel's opening indictment of utilitarian education.
- Related: Fact, Thomas Gradgrind, M'Choakumchild, Bitzer
J
- James Harthouse
- A bored, well-connected young gentleman who comes to Coketown to enter politics on Gradgrind's utilitarian party and, out of idle fascination, sets out to seduce Louisa — precipitating her marriage's collapse.
- Related: Louisa Gradgrind, Thomas Gradgrind, Josiah Bounderby
- Josiah Bounderby
- A Coketown banker and mill-owner who constantly boasts of having risen from an abandoned, poverty-stricken childhood by his own effort — 'a self-made man.' He marries Louisa Gradgrind despite the thirty-year age gap between them, and his self-mythology is exposed as false late in the novel by his own mother, Mrs. Pegler.
- Related: Louisa Gradgrind, Mrs. Pegler, Coketown
L
- Louisa Gradgrind
- Thomas Gradgrind's eldest child, raised strictly on Fact and taught to suppress wonder and feeling. She agrees to a loveless marriage to Bounderby largely for her brother Tom's sake, and her slow emotional crisis is the novel's central emotional plot.
- Related: Thomas Gradgrind, Josiah Bounderby, Tom Gradgrind, James Harthouse
M
- Mr. M'Choakumchild
- The schoolmaster at Gradgrind's model school, trained on an assembly line with 'some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters' in the same mechanical method. His name (a pun on 'choke') signals Dickens's satire of an education that force-feeds facts and smothers imagination.
- Related: Fact, Thomas Gradgrind, Bitzer
- Mr. Sleary
- The lisping proprietor of the traveling circus that took in Sissy Jupe's father. His troupe embodies fellow-feeling and imaginative pleasure in direct opposition to Gradgrind's Fact, and he helps Tom escape at the novel's end, delivering its closing moral about people needing to be 'amused' as well as taught.
- Related: Sissy Jupe, Fact, Tom Gradgrind
- Mrs. Pegler
- A mysterious old countrywoman who turns up periodically in Coketown asking after Bounderby. She is revealed to be his mother, exposing his self-made-man story — that he was abandoned as a child — as an invented lie; she had in fact given him a decent upbringing before he cast her off.
- Related: Josiah Bounderby
- Mrs. Sparsit
- A genteel, impoverished widow of aristocratic connections (a Powler by birth) whom Bounderby employs as his housekeeper and constantly parades as evidence of his own rise. She resents Louisa's marriage to Bounderby and schemes, ultimately unsuccessfully, to expose Louisa's supposed disgrace.
- Related: Josiah Bounderby, Louisa Gradgrind, James Harthouse
O
- Old Hell Shaft
- A disused, unfenced mine shaft near Coketown into which Stephen Blackpool falls while walking home after being falsely accused of robbery. His rescue from it, and the confession he gives before dying, resolve his central plotline.
- Related: Stephen Blackpool
P
- Power-loom weaver
- The occupation of Stephen Blackpool and Rachael — factory laborers who operated mechanized looms in Coketown's cotton mills, a job whose grueling monotony and low wages underlie the novel's labor politics.
- Related: Stephen Blackpool, Rachael, Coketown, Hands
R
- Rachael
- A fellow Coketown power-loom weaver and Stephen Blackpool's loyal, unspoken love. Her steadiness and moral clarity anchor Stephen through his troubles and, after his death, she becomes a close friend to Sissy Jupe.
- Related: Stephen Blackpool, Coketown
S
- Self-made man
- Bounderby's constant self-description — the claim to have risen from an abandoned, gutter childhood entirely through his own effort. His story is exposed as a fabrication by his mother, Mrs. Pegler, making him the novel's chief satire of Victorian self-mythologizing.
- Related: Josiah Bounderby, Mrs. Pegler
- Sissy Jupe (Cecilia Jupe)
- The daughter of a circus clown who is taken in by the Gradgrind household after her father disappears. Unable to master Fact-based schooling, she embodies the imagination, compassion, and loyalty the Gradgrind system tries to root out, and becomes Louisa's closest companion.
- Related: Thomas Gradgrind, Sleary's Circus, Louisa Gradgrind, Fact
- Slackbridge
- A professional trade-union organizer and orator who addresses Coketown's factory workers (the 'Hands') and denounces Stephen Blackpool as a traitor for refusing to join the union. Dickens presents him as a self-interested demagogue, reflecting the novel's ambivalence toward organized labor.
- Related: Stephen Blackpool, Hands
- Sleary's Circus (Sleary's Horse-riding)
- The traveling equestrian circus troupe that raised Sissy Jupe's father and that Sissy remains connected to throughout the novel. It represents everything Gradgrind's system despises — fancy, wonder, and communal loyalty — and ultimately proves more humane than Coketown's respectable institutions.
- Related: Sissy Jupe, Mr. Sleary, Fact
- Sowing, Reaping, Garnering
- The titles of the novel's three books, an agricultural metaphor (echoing 'as ye sow, so shall ye reap') that structures the plot: the planting of Gradgrind's Fact-based system in Book the First, the harvest of its consequences in Book the Second, and the final reckoning in Book the Third.
- Related: Fact, Thomas Gradgrind
- Stephen Blackpool
- A Coketown power-loom weaver of stern honesty, trapped in a wretched marriage and in love with Rachael. He refuses to join his fellow workers' union on principle, which isolates him from both his own class and Bounderby, and he is later wrongly suspected of a bank robbery he did not commit.
- Related: Rachael, Slackbridge, Josiah Bounderby, Old Hell Shaft
T
- the Hands
- The novel's recurring term for Coketown's factory workers — a usage Dickens deliberately highlights as dehumanizing, since employers like Bounderby regard their laborers only as the working hands attached to a machine, not as whole people.
- Related: Coketown, Stephen Blackpool, Slackbridge
- The National (workers' union)
- The trade union that Coketown's power-loom weavers, urged on by the organizer Slackbridge, are pressed to join. Stephen Blackpool's refusal to join it — on principle, not out of loyalty to his employer — leaves him ostracized by his fellow Hands.
- Related: Slackbridge, Stephen Blackpool, Hands
- Thomas Gradgrind
- A retired Coketown wholesale hardware merchant and later Member of Parliament whose entire philosophy of life and education rests on the phrase 'Facts alone are wanted in life.' He raises his own children, Louisa and Tom, and runs a model school on this principle, and spends much of the novel reckoning with the human cost of it.
- Related: Louisa Gradgrind, Tom Gradgrind, Fact, Gradgrind School
- Tom Gradgrind ("the Whelp")
- Louisa's younger brother, nicknamed 'the whelp,' who works as a clerk at Bounderby's bank. Raised on the same Fact-only system as his sister but without her capacity for reflection, he grows selfish and dissipated, and his gambling debts drive the novel's central crime.
- Related: Louisa Gradgrind, Thomas Gradgrind, Josiah Bounderby
U
- Utilitarianism (satirized)
- The philosophical target of Dickens's satire throughout the novel — the belief, associated with Jeremy Bentham and the political economy of the period, that human worth and social policy can be calculated in strictly measurable, self-interested terms. Gradgrind and his political circle embody it; the novel's plot dismantles it.
- Related: Fact, Thomas Gradgrind