Chapter V - The Keynote

Hard Times

by Charles Dickens

Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was
a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs.
Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before
pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red
if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a
town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It
was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable
serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got
uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple
with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows
where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where
the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like
the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It
contained several large streets all very like one another, and many
small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people
equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours,
with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and
to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every
year the counterpart of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from
the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off,
comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and
elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine
lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest
of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If
the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there - as the
members of eighteen religious persuasions had done - they made it a
pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in
highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.
The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a
square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles
like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town
were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The
jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the
jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything
else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of
their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material
aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial.
The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was
all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and
everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery,
and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in
the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never
should be, world without end, Amen.

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of
course got on well? Why no, not quite well. No? Dear me!

No. Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all
respects like gold that had stood the fire. First, the perplexing
mystery of the place was, Who belonged to the eighteen denominations?
Because, whoever did, the labouring people did not. It was very
strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning, and note how
few of them the barbarous jangling of bells that was driving the sick
and nervous mad, called away from their own quarter, from their own
close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, where they
lounged listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going, as at
a thing with which they had no manner of concern. Nor was it merely
the stranger who noticed this, because there was a native
organization in Coketown itself, whose members were to be heard of in
the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning for acts
of parliament that should make these people religious by main force.
Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that these same people
would get drunk, and showed in tabular statements that they did get
drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine
(except a medal), would induce them to forego their custom of getting
drunk. Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular
statements, showing that when they didn't get drunk, they took opium.
Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail, with more tabular
statements, outdoing all the previous tabular statements, and showing
that the same people would resort to low haunts, hidden from the
public eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and
mayhap joined in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next birthday,
and committed for eighteen months' solitary, had himself said (not
that he had ever shown himself particularly worthy of belief) his
ruin began, as he was perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he
would have been a tip-top moral specimen. Then came Mr. Gradgrind
and Mr. Bounderby, the two gentlemen at this present moment walking
through Coketown, and both eminently practical, who could, on
occasion, furnish more tabular statements derived from their own
personal experience, and illustrated by cases they had known and
seen, from which it clearly appeared - in short, it was the only
clear thing in the case - that these same people were a bad lot
altogether, gentlemen; that do what you would for them they were
never thankful for it, gentlemen; that they were restless, gentlemen;
that they never knew what they wanted; that they lived upon the best,
and bought fresh butter; and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected
all but prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and
unmanageable. In short, it was the moral of the old nursery
fable:

There was an old woman, and what do you think?
She lived
upon nothing but victuals and drink;
Victuals and drink were the
whole of her diet,
And yet this old woman would never be
quiet.

Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the
case of the Coketown population and the case of the little
Gradgrinds? Surely, none of us in our sober senses and acquainted
with figures, are to be told at this time of day, that one of the
foremost elements in the existence of the Coketown working-people had
been for scores of years, deliberately set at nought? That there was
any Fancy in them demanding to be brought into healthy existence
instead of struggling on in convulsions? That exactly in the ratio
as they worked long and monotonously, the craving grew within them
for some physical relief - some relaxation, encouraging good humour
and good spirits, and giving them a vent - some recognized holiday,
though it were but for an honest dance to a stirring band of music -
some occasional light pie in which even M'Choakumchild had no finger
- which craving must and would be satisfied aright, or must and would
inevitably go wrong, until the laws of the Creation were repealed?

'This man lives at Pod's End, and I don't quite know Pod's End,'
said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Which is it, Bounderby?'

Mr. Bounderby knew it was somewhere down town, but knew no more
respecting it. So they stopped for a moment, looking about.

Almost as they did so, there came running round the corner of
the street at a quick pace and with a frightened look, a girl whom
Mr. Gradgrind recognized. 'Halloa!' said he. 'Stop! Where are you
going! Stop!' Girl number twenty stopped then, palpitating, and made
him a curtsey.

'Why are you tearing about the streets,' said Mr. Gradgrind, 'in
this improper manner?'

'I was - I was run after, sir,' the girl panted, 'and I wanted
to get away.'

'Run after?' repeated Mr. Gradgrind. 'Who would run after
you?'

The question was unexpectedly and suddenly answered for her, by
the colourless boy, Bitzer, who came round the corner with such blind
speed and so little anticipating a stoppage on the pavement, that he
brought himself up against Mr. Gradgrind's waistcoat and rebounded
into the road.

'What do you mean, boy?' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'What are you
doing? How dare you dash against - everybody - in this manner?'
Bitzer picked up his cap, which the concussion had knocked off; and
backing, and knuckling his forehead, pleaded that it was an
accident.

'Was this boy running after you, Jupe?' asked Mr. Gradgrind.

'Yes, sir,' said the girl reluctantly.

'No, I wasn't, sir!' cried Bitzer. 'Not till she run away from
me. But the horse-riders never mind what they say, sir; they're
famous for it. You know the horse-riders are famous for never
minding what they say,' addressing Sissy. 'It's as well known in the
town as - please, sir, as the multiplication table isn't known to the
horse-riders.' Bitzer tried Mr. Bounderby with this.

'He frightened me so,' said the girl, 'with his cruel faces!'

'Oh!' cried Bitzer. 'Oh! An't you one of the rest! An't you a
horse-rider! I never looked at her, sir. I asked her if she would
know how to define a horse to-morrow, and offered to tell her again,
and she ran away, and I ran after her, sir, that she might know how
to answer when she was asked. You wouldn't have thought of saying
such mischief if you hadn't been a horse-rider?'

'Her calling seems to be pretty well known among 'em,' observed
Mr. Bounderby. 'You'd have had the whole school peeping in a row, in
a week.'

'Truly, I think so,' returned his friend. 'Bitzer, turn you
about and take yourself home. Jupe, stay here a moment. Let me hear
of your running in this manner any more, boy, and you will hear of me
through the master of the school. You understand what I mean. Go
along.'

The boy stopped in his rapid blinking, knuckled his forehead
again, glanced at Sissy, turned about, and retreated.

'Now, girl,' said Mr. Gradgrind, 'take this gentleman and me to
your father's; we are going there. What have you got in that bottle
you are carrying?'

'Gin,' said Mr. Bounderby.

'Dear, no, sir! It's the nine oils.'

'The what?' cried Mr. Bounderby.

'The nine oils, sir, to rub father with.'

'Then,' said Mr. Bounderby, with a loud short laugh, 'what the
devil do you rub your father with nine oils for?'

'It's what our people aways use, sir, when they get any hurts in
the ring,' replied the girl, looking over her shoulder, to assure
herself that her pursuer was gone. 'They bruise themselves very bad
sometimes.'

'Serve 'em right,' said Mr. Bounderby, 'for being idle.' She
glanced up at his face, with mingled astonishment and dread.

'By George!' said Mr. Bounderby, 'when I was four or five years
younger than you, I had worse bruises upon me than ten oils, twenty
oils, forty oils, would have rubbed off. I didn't get 'em by
posture-making, but by being banged about. There was no rope-
dancing for me; I danced on the bare ground and was larruped with the
rope.'

Mr. Gradgrind, though hard enough, was by no means so rough a
man as Mr. Bounderby. His character was not unkind, all things
considered; it might have been a very kind one indeed, if he had only
made some round mistake in the arithmetic that balanced it, years
ago. He said, in what he meant for a reassuring tone, as they turned
down a narrow road, 'And this is Pod's End; is it, Jupe?'

'This is it, sir, and - if you wouldn't mind, sir - this is the
house.'

She stopped, at twilight, at the door of a mean little public-
house, with dim red lights in it. As haggard and as shabby, as if,
for want of custom, it had itself taken to drinking, and had gone the
way all drunkards go, and was very near the end of it.

'It's only crossing the bar, sir, and up the stairs, if you
wouldn't mind, and waiting there for a moment till I get a candle. If
you should hear a dog, sir, it's only Merrylegs, and he only
barks.'

'Merrylegs and nine oils, eh!' said Mr. Bounderby, entering last
with his metallic laugh. 'Pretty well this, for a self-made man!'