Hard Times

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.”

The opening lines of Hard Times introduce the audience to Gradgrind’s personal philosophy. His pragmatic, utilitarian view of the world emphasizes “facts” over everything else, assuring the children that they need nothing else in their lives. The surety with which he makes his statement provides a point of contrast for later in the novel, as his worldview begins to fall apart. The confidence with which Gradgrind is wrong establishes how much he has to lose—and how much he has to learn.

“I don’t know of what—of everything, I think.”

The primary victims of Gradgrind’s mistaken beliefs are his eldest children, Louisa and Tom. They react very differently to their father’s lessons. Louisa becomes increasingly detached and alienated from the world, exhausted with the relentless pragmatism of her father’s ideology until she views herself as a joyless husk of a person. The whimsy and fanciful imagination of a young girl is ground into a miserable wreck, showing the destructive nature of the ideology in the same way that Coketown’s factories show the ecologically destructive nature of industrialization. In this quote, she explains to her father what she’s tired of.