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The Gradgrinds

The Gradgrinds

Always be suspicious of people who talk about pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. The image is an excellent one since you can only rise if you have help from others. Yet many people think they are somehow diminished if they can’t claim to have risen on their own.

Thanks to Dickens, there is a colorful name that can be applied to such people. We can call them “Bounderbies.” Bounderby is the factory owner in Hard Times who is always going on about how he owes all his success to himself and only to himself. He is tireless in the cause of self promotion. The following dialogue with the imbecilic Mrs. Gradgrind is typical:


‘I hadn’t a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn’t know such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch.’

Mrs Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic without any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her; Mrs Gradgrind hoped it was a dry ditch?

‘No! As wet as a sop. A foot of water in it,’ said Mr Bounderby.

‘Enough to give a baby cold,’ Mrs Gradgrind considered.

‘Cold? I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything else, I believe, that was capable of inflammation,’ returned Mr Bounderby. ‘For years, ma’am, I was one of the most miserable little wretches ever seen. I was so sickly, that I was always moaning and groaning. I was so ragged and dirty, that you wouldn’t have touched me with a pair of tongs.’

Mrs Gradgrind faintly looked at the tongs, as the most appropriate thing her imbecility could think of doing.

‘How I fought through it, I don’t know,’ said Bounderby. ‘I was determined, I suppose. I have been a determined character in later life, and I suppose I was then. Here I am, Mrs Gradgrind, anyhow, and nobody to thank for my being here, but myself.’

The first thing to know (as we learn at the end of the book) is that none of this is close to true. Indeed, Bounderby had plenty of support when he was advancing. But that’s not the worst of it: he uses this phony history to deny helping others. In modern parlance, he sees them as welfare cheats and undeserving freeloaders. Or as he puts it, they expect to be furnished with a coach and six and to be fed turtle soup and venison with a golden spoon.

Who are our Bounderbies?  I remember Phil Graham, when he was a Texas senator, attacking anyone receiving government assistance, only for it then to be revealed he had attended state-supported colleges and received state scholarships. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas received affirmative action support and yet is one of the major enemies of affirmative action. Alaska receives more federal support per capita than any other state and has a disproportionate number of citizens who rail against government largesse. There are Tea Partiers who attack health care for all, including those with preexisting conditions, but who accept, as a right, their Medicare payments. The examples go on and on.

What remedies does Dickens suggest? Bounderby is publicly shamed when his hypocrisy is revealed. Are our own hypocrites susceptible to such shame? The other response is that of Dickens himself, which is to say comic satire. And for that, as I’ve noted periodically on this website, we have the heirs of Dickens, figures like John Stewart and Steven Colbert and Gary Trudeau. Laughter isn’t the final answer, but it’s one tool we’ve got.

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