Places: Hard Times

Coketown. Hard TimesFictional factory town in northern England that offers nothing that is not “severely workful.” Coketown is center of Dickens’s social criticism. As “a triumph of fact,” it is grim, unnatural, and mechanical, from the polluted purple river to the identical laborers who all “do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow.” Forested with the smokestacks of its textile mills, it is a “sulky blotch upon the prospect,” abandoned by the sun even in sunny midsummer. Its tenements, such as Stephen Blackpool’s home, tainted by poverty and by the drunken wife to whom he is irrevocably tied, reflect the miserable sameness and grinding labor of the workers’ lives, empty of leisure and of fancy, which the utilitarian mill owners and politicians see as mere idleness. While Coketown is often associated with the real industrial towns of Leeds, Preston, and Manchester in the north, Dickens saw his commentary as touching on English workers everywhere.

Factory. Textile mill in Coketown, owned by Josiah Bounderby. Bounderby’s factory is typical, for Dickens, of the factory system. Lit up by night, the factories look from a distance like “Fairy palaces.” Yet they are not the dream palaces of fairies; instead they are nightmarishly inhabited by the “melancholy mad elephants,” the pistons of steam engines working up and down. In its bitter monotony, its dreary labor, and in the polluted air that kills child workers and adults alike, the factory is a harsh metaphor for the tyrannical facts that govern all the stunted lives of the novel.

Sleary’s horse-riding. Traveling circus, featuring clowns, equestrian exhibitions, tumbling, and tightropes. Typically found in that “neutral ground” which is “neither town nor country,” the circus brings the old paternalist values of sentiment and charity into the new, alienated economy in which, as in the factory, the master knows nothing of the enslaved. Sissy Jupe, who brings to the Gradgrind house that “wisdom of the Heart” learned in the circus but absent from utilitarianism, is the abandoned daughter of a clown in this circus. Tom Gradgrind hides here from a vengeful Bounderby and the law after his robbery is discovered. Despised as trivial idleness by Gradgrind and Bounderby, the circus stands for that scorned leisure that proves a necessary antidote to the inescapable facts of Coketown: factory life, rampant capitalism, and domestic misery.

Gradgrind’s school. Privately funded elementary school, financed by Gradgrind, and taught by Mr. M’Choakumchild on the monitorial system, in which student “monitors” repeat lessons they have learned from the schoolmaster to a row of children. The method emphasizes repetition and the rote learning of facts; Dickens here satirizes both the new model of teacher training and the absurdity of such fact-based rote learning.

Stone Lodge. Home of the Gradgrind family. Like Bounderby’s town house, “cheerless and comfortless, boastfully and doggedly rich,” Stone Lodge reflects the character of its owner, Thomas Gradgrind. From the outside, it is perfectly symmetrical; from the inside, perfectly mechanical, its time measured off by the “deadly statistical clock” in Gradgrind’s study. For young Tom, it is the “Jaundiced Jail” he longs to escape, for Louisa the “great wilderness,” without graces, without sentiments, without heart. Both Stone Lodge and the Gradgrinds are ultimately redeemed by the admission of Sissy Jupe into this monument of fact.

Bounderby country house. “Snug little estate” outside Coketown, on which Bounderby’s bank has foreclosed. Here Bounderby, “the Bully of humility,” grows cabbages in the flower garden and allows the estate’s former elegance to fall into disrepair. The country house highlights Bounderby’s secret allegiance to aristocratic rank and status, even as his lies about his own origins pretend to humility. It is also the site of Mrs. Sparsit’s imaginary staircase, down which she imagines Louisa approaching “a dark pit of shame and ruin” with every day and hour of knowing James Harthouse. The image of the staircase was emblematic, for the Victorians, of a woman’s progress into sexual sin and social ruin.