In the first chapter of ‘"Hard Times" (The one thing needful) the reader is introduced to the Gradgrind philosophy; "…nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else." One of the things that Gradgrind believes should be rooted out is fancy; in chapter two when Sissy says "…I would fancy-", she is immediately interrupted; "Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy" Mr. Gradgrind has brought up his children, Tom and Louisa, based on a utilitarian system of education, and the rooting out of creativity, imagination, emotions and fancy, and by doing so he has suffocated their imaginations and emotions and unintentionally made them unhappy.
We can see that their upbringing makes Tom and particularly Louisa both crave some kind of imaginative stimulation, when in Chapter 3 Mr. Gradgrind finds them both looking at the circus. This is also where Louisa's love for her brother is revealed, when she stands up for him when her father accuses Tom of having brought his sister to the circus; she says "I brought him Father...I asked him to come."
Tom later took advantage of the fact the he is the only person who Louisa cares for by persuading her to agree to marry Bounderby, not because he wants her to be happy, but because he wants an easy life and thinks that if Louisa is Bounderby's wife, then Bounderby, as his employer will go easy on him knowing how much she cares for him. Tom says: "I shall very well know how to manage and smooth old Bounderby"..."... You are his little pet, you are his favourite; he'll do anything for you. When he says to me what I don't like, I shall say to him, "My sister Loo will be hurt and disappointed, Mr. Bounderby..." That'll bring him about, or nothing will." This is the beginning of Tom's taking advantage of his sister. He later in the book asks for money from her, and eventually robs the bank because she can't get him the money that he wants, and pins the blame on Stephen Blackpool. Tom's behaviour becomes completely unacceptable.
The Gradgrind system left Tom being incredibly selfish with no emotions, whereas with Louisa it has had the opposite effect; she became completely selfless., doing anything that she could to help the one person she cared for.
In the Chapter "Father and Daughter" Louisa decided to marry Mr. Bounderby to help Tom, but also because as a result of her upbringing, she could not think of a reason not to, being devoid of any real emotion and alienated from herself. She doesn't know what is best for her and having being reassured by her father that if she looks at the statistics "[most] marriages are contracted between parties of unequal ages" and therefore "The disparity [in age]...almost ceases to be disparity, and all (virtually) all but disappears" she accepts her Father's view that love and emotion do not matter, and decides that she is "satisfied to accept [Mr Bounderby's] proposal" and therefore commits hereself to a life of dull, lifeless depression, with a man she has depised since childhood, to the extent that when he took a kiss from her she told Tom "You may cut the piece out with your pen-knife if you like Tom. I wouldn't cry!"
Gradgrind's lack of emotions and imagination show clearly at the beginning of "Down", when he thinks to himself that "...the Good Samaritan was a bad economist." This shows his failure to understand the real moral of Luke 10:29-37, which is that the Good Samaritan has in fact gained something but this cannot be measured, and therefore in Gradgrind's view he has gained nothing. This is also part of the moral message that the novel is trying to put across; in trying so hard to measure and categorise everything, people are missing the true point of the matter. Another example of this is in the chapter 'Sissy's progress', where Mr M'Choakumchild is trying to teach Sissy about statistics. When he asks her "What is the percentage?" about people killed at sea, she replies "Nothing, to the relations and friends of the people who were killed." However this is considered to be the 'wrong' answer. This further illustrates how bad the 'system' is, and how Sissy is the only person with the right moral views in the novel.
In the talk with her father in "Down", Louisa reveals to him the one thing that has been missing from her life, which her mother realised just before she died; "...there is something - not an ology at all - that your father has missed..." This something is all the things that Mrs. Gradgrind saw in Sissy; love, fancy, emotions, imagination. In "Down" Louisa confronts her father about this.
"How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart?..."
In this passage, Louisa lets out everything that she has wanted to ask her father, yet before had never done so. The pauses in her speech make it seem dramitic and hard hitting. Dickens' use of the repition of questioning words such as how and where in short sentances make it clear that this is a lot of things that Louisa is desperate to know, as they come in a kind of frenzied outburst, like the fire that "bursts out" of the Coketown chimneys.
During her talk with her Father about marrying Mr.Bounderby, she is staring at the chimneys of Coketown and says" There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out Father!" Louisa's emotions have been suffocated, but when something will come to "ignite" them (as Harthouse does with Tom's help in Book 2) she is worried that the fire of her imagination will burst out, just as it does in the chimneys of Coketown. This worry proves to be justified.
This image of Louisa's imagination as a fire is repeated often throughout the novel, for example in Chapter 8 "[Louisa] now looking at the bright sparks as they dropped upon the hearth" and in Chapter 14 when Tom comes to inform her of the fact that Mr. Bounderby wants to marry her, she "looked again at the short lived sparks that so soon subsided into ashes". Louisa sees parallels in the fire to her own life; she sees the sparks burn for just a second and then die out, and she comes to wish that her "spark" will die quickly. Her imagination
In Chapter 3, her character is described as "a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow". This shows that Louisa's imagination, although it has been supressed to the extent that is almost non-existent, is still there and just about managing to stay alight but eventually becomes negatively channeled into destructive thoughts, rather than being completely eliminated as her father had hoped.
This constant referal to fire and it's eventual consequences in "Down" is an illustration of the negative effect that Gradgrind has had on his daughter since she was little in trying to stiffle her emotions.
Mr. Gradgrind is quite unprepared for what Louisa has to say in "Down" and until her outburst had no idea of the harm he had caused his children in restricting their imaginations and emotions. Louisa then further drives in her point by saying that if she had been allowed to express herself "what a much better and much happier creature [she] should be today" at which point Gradgrind realises what he has done, and "after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand and groaned aloud." This is the first moment that Gradgrind understands what he has done to his children.
Louisa's language in her next speech makes her sound almost angry, although she has reassured her father that "[she] does not reproach [him]." When she speaks of her marriage to Mr. Bounderby, she repeats 'h' sounds in the phrase "...husband whom...I hate" which makes her sound a little angry and stormy like the weather outside, and the stormyness of her emotions at this moment in time.
When Louisa finishes speaking about her upbringing, her Father is clearly upset, so when she says to him "...I am here with another object" he is shocked because he thought that she couldn't possibly say anything worse to him. Louisa reveals that she has met a "new acquaintance" and asks her father to "save [her] by some other means." This is because she doesn't know how to save herself as a result of the way she has been brought up.
This aqquaintance is Mr. James Harthouse. When he arrives in Chapter 2 of Book 2, he is immeadiately attracted to Louisa. He has had many opperunities to do things, but he has found all of them boring and Louisa is someone who he can't work out straight away, so she makes him curious. We can tell that Harthouse is interested in Louisa because of the incredible detail in which he observes her. "She was so constrained...so sensitively ashamed of her husband's braggart humility...she baffled all penetration." He immeadiately sets about trying to "figure her out" and convinces Tom to show him the way back to the hotel, where he plies him with drink and gets him to reveal that Louisa "never cared for old Bounderby." This devious and immoral way of getting information makes Harthouse one of the "Bad" characters in the book; he is immoral and has no respect for feelings, but he is quite different to the other characters who the narrator promts a negative opinion of, for example Gradgrind.
In revealing the fact that Louisa hates Bounderby, and other things about his sister, Tom has made her easy for Harthouse to befriend, and the seriousness of this is reflected in the final paragraph of the Chapter: "If he had had any idea of what he had done that night...he might have gone down to the ill-smelling river...and have curtained his head forever with it's filthy waters." This reflects morals aswell; Dickens' narrator is criticising the way that Tom has treated, and betrayed his sister.
Harthouse is nice to Louisa, so she feels close to him. He is the first person to treat her as a human being, and one of the ways he draws her closer to him is by voicing his concerns about Tom and offering to help him. He knows how much she cares for Tom and abuses this fact: "I think Tom may be gradually falling into trouble, and I wish to stretch out a helping hand to him" He is also unhappy with the way Louisa is treated by Tom:"...of her unselfishness; of her sacrifice. The return he makes her, within my observation, is a very poor one." This wins Louisa over with Harthouse, but forces her to confront herself with what she probably already knew; She doesn't want to accept the fact that Tom is using her, because he is the only person who she knows how to care for and love.
Louisa becomes close to Harthouse, observed by Mrs. Sparsit. In the chapter "Mrs. Sparsit's Staircase", Mrs Sparsit's view of social status as a staircase is revealed, and Louisa, by spending more and more time with Mr. Harthouse, is descending the imaginary staircase into a pit of despair at the bottom from which she would never be able to get out of. By being with Harthouse, Louisa is, in Mrs Sparsit's opinion, "...verging, like a weight in deep water, to the black gulf at the bottom"
Although Louisa was tempted to run away with Harthouse, in "Down", she runs to her father to save herself from the consequences of what could happen if she were to have an affair. This is because despite her upbringing, she is "innately good" and still understands the negative connotations that an affair would have upon her and possibly her family, and wants to prevent it. This is also another example of the good morals that Gradgrind is trying to promote, in that Louisa resists temptation and does what is right.
Finally at the end of "Down", when Louisa is close to collapse, her father tries to support her, but she says "I shall die if you hold me! Let me fall upon the ground!" Louisa needs to fall upon the ground because she has to learn how to deal with things by herself, which she has previously not been able to do. This is the result of Louisa's "cursed life" and her "Gradgrind upbringing"; she is incapable of dealing with her emotions. Mr. Gradgrind "saw the pride of his heart and the triumph of his system, lying, an insensible heap, at his feet." Louisa, to him, at this moment shows the failure of his system, and everything he has worked for.
However, later in the novel, Mr. Gradgrind comes round to the idea that there is "A Wisdom of the heart" and this is also a kind of moral message in that problems can be resolved, and hope is not lost.
"Down" is the chapter where Mr. Gradgrind realises the problem with his system. It also is the peak of the damage it has done to Louisa, where she cannot cope with her own emotions. Louisa has become alienated not just from others and the ability to care for and love other human beings but also from herself. She does not know or understand herself, which is why she is unable to cope. This is the main impact that the Gradgrind system has had upon her; although Louisa is a young woman, she is still very childish in her lack of ability to think for herself and cope with her emotions.
