Louisa Gradgrind and the Importance of Emotion

Louisa Gradgrind is the main female character in the novel. She is the beautiful
daughter of Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, a school board superintendent, a sister to Tom, Malthus,
Smith, and Jane, and wife of Mr. Bounderby. She has different relations with her father,
siblings, and husband. Her relationship with different family members reveals various social
expectations of the Victorian age as well as the effects of her father’s philosophy on her
social relations. This paper will show that a life that is purely based on facts and statistics and
disdains emotions is unhappy and unfulfilling.

Father-daughter relations

Louisa’s character shows how daughters were expected to relate to their fathers
during the Victorian Age. They were expected to obey their fathers in all things. Louisa
dutifully partakes in her father’s education system which emphasizes statistics and facts and
disregards all forms of human emotion. Gradgrind’s version of education seeks to fill minds
of children with pure facts and kill the imagination of children. Nowhere is his philosophy
brought out more clearly than at the beginning of the book when he addresses a teacher:
“Now what I want, is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are
wanted in life” (Dickens 2016, 1). This kind of education ends up messing Louisa as it
prevents her from becoming emotionally competent and living an emotionally-rich life.

Apart from education, Louisa also shows total obedience to her father when she
agrees to get married to Mr. Josiah Bounderby, a friend and business associate of her father.
Mr. Bounderby is 30 years older than Louisa. The father uses statistics to convince her that
such a huge age-difference is unlikely to have any impact on either the happiness or the
longevity of the marriage (Dickens 2016). Even though Louisa has no love for Mr.

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Bounderby, she accepts to marry him. Her decision to accept to be married to Mr. Bounderby
despite their huge age difference and lack of love for him shows her strong commitment to
always obey her father.

Wife-husband relations

Louisa’s character also shows the expectations of wives to their husband. Even
though Louisa does not love her husband, she considers it her responsibility to be faithful to
him. This quality is revealed in her relationship with James Harthouse, a young man who, out
of boredom, come to Coketown. When he is introduced to Louisa, he becomes infatuated
with her despite knowing that she is married to Mr. Bounderby (Dickens 2016).

He soon falls in love with Louisa and uses various pretexts to visit her any time
Bounderby is not around. Louisa also falls in love with him. However, despite her love for
him and her unhappy marriage with Mr. Bounderby, she rejects his proposal to elope with
him (Dickens 2016). This rejection is due to her faithfulness to her husband. Even though she
does not love him, she still believes that it is her duty to be faithful to him. Her refusal to
elope with Harthouse eventually turns out to be a good decision as Harthouse is revealed to
be an egocentric person who does not care much about her.

Sibling relations

Even though Louisa has been taught to disregard all human emotions and only focus
on facts and statistics, she clearly loves her brother, Tom. In fact, it is partly because of her
desire to please Tom that she accepts to get married to Mr. Bounderby. By marrying Mr.
Bounderby, who is a very rich man, she may be able to financially help her brother (Dickens
2016). Unfortunately, when her brother finally breaks free from his father’s control, he
becomes a wreck. He gambles, drinks, and smokes. Louisa believes that it is her

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responsibility to take care of her brother. Thus, when her brother’s gambling debts pile up,
she provides him with financial aid. She only stops helping him financially when she
becomes weary of his habits.

Despite stopping the financial assistance, she still loves the brother, and the love is
mutual. When Tom is about to be exposed for robbing a bank and framing Stephen Blackpool
for the robbery, he runs away. After escaping from England, he shows that he truly loves his
sister by writing her a letter not only expressing his love for her but also his regrets for the
troubles that he had caused her (Dickens 2016). Before his death, he asks for her sister’s
forgiveness.

Societal expectations of women

In the Victorian era, women were expected to exhibit feminine traits, such as
compassion, emotional sensitivity, and moral purity. Unfortunately, Louisa does not show
these emotions. She has been brought up to disregard all forms of human emotions. As a
result of this education, she ends up to be a cold and an unfeeling person. Her inability to
show or express emotion can be seen in her reaction to her father’s announcement that he
wanted her to get married to Mr. Bounderby. Instead of letting her father know whether she
was for or against the marriage, she simply looks outside of the window at the various factory
chimneys. She then observes, “There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous
smoke. Yet when night comes, fire bursts out” (Dickens 2016, 20). This statement is in line
with the education that Louisa has received from her father. Instead of expressing her feelings
about her father’s marriage proposal, she is only able to state facts about her surroundings.

It is only after she has intense emotional conflict with her husband that she starts re-
educating herself. This process of re-education is helped by “Sissy”, Cecilia Jupe. She is the

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lady who introduces emotion to the household of Mr. Gradgrind. Sissy, unlike members of
the Gradgrind’s household, is a warm and an understanding person. Thanks to her influence,
Louisa’s younger sister, Jane Gradgrind, grows up to be an imaginative and emotionally-
sensitive person (Dickens 2016).

Sissy helps Louisa to become more emotionally competent. She teaches Louisa to
recognize and express her emotions. She manages to slowly remove the influence of Mr.
Gradgrind’s philosophy of calculating rationality and self-interest from Louisa and in doing
so, allows her to develop her natural feminine traits (Dickens 2016). Louisa’s gradual
transition from an emotionless and cold woman into a person with developed feminine traits
suggests that the author held feminine qualities or emotions in high regard.

Critique of Gradgrind’s philosophy

Charles Dickens uses the character of Louisa to criticize the philosophy of Gradgrind
which emphasizes facts and statistics over imagination and emotion. Louisa’s unhappiness
throughout the novel shows that the ability to show and express one’s emotion is key to living
a fruitful life. Louisa was unhappy as a daughter and a wife because of her lack of emotional
competence.

The failure of her marriage is also a harsh indictment of Gradgrind’s philosophy. She
married Mr. Bounderby despite not being in love with him. However, in the facts-based
world of her father, the marriage made sense because it was beneficial to the family. The
loveless marriage eventually ends in divorce. The ending of the marriage is proof that facts
and statistics cannot bring happiness, social harmony, and improve human relations. For such
things to be achieved, it is important for people to also express their emotions freely.

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Louisa’s unhappy life and death is contrasted with the life of her younger sister, Jane.
Unlike Louisa, Jane had grown up under the strong influence of the emotionally competent
Sissy. As a result of Sissy’s influence, she grows up to be an emotionally sensitive and
imaginative person. The fact that she is portrayed as being happy and Louisa as sad means
that there is a relationship between emotionally sensitivity and happiness.

In general terms, Charles Dickens’ criticism of Gradgrind’s philosophy using the sad
life and death of Louisa is also a criticism of England’s industrialization. Industrialization, as
an economic system, created workers who were made to act like machines, devoid of any
human emotions. The industrial mechanization has extremely damaging effects on both
family and personal lives (Sharma 2017, 5). Since the philosophy underpinning
industrialization was similar to Gradgrind’s philosophy of hard facts and statistics, Dickens
believed that such an economic system produced people who were as unhappy as Louisa.

Conclusion

In Hard Times, Charles Dickens uses the character of Louisa to show the failure of
Gradgrind’s philosophy. Having grown up under the influence of her father’s philosophy that
values cold facts, figures, and statistics and disdains emotions, Louisa lives her life in
accordance with her father’s philosophy. As a result, she becomes an unhappy daughter to a
cold father and an unhappy wife to a man she does not love. Her tragic life and death are used
to show that any society that is built upon values that disdain human emotions is bound to be
an unhappy one and, ultimately, a failed one.

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References

Dickens, Charles. 2016. Hard Times (Fourth International Student Edition) (Norton Critical
Editions). WW Norton & Company.

Sharma, Sandeep Kumar. 2017. “Charles Dickens’ Hard Times: A Social
Document.” Epitome: International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 3, no. 12.