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Textual Background to the Frontispiece

"In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!"

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.

THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir — peremptorily Thomas — Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind — no, sir! ["The One Thing Needful," and "Murdering the Innocents," V, 1-2 in the second half of the volume]

Commentary

In the 1910 Charles Dickens Library Edition, Harry Furniss offers just a single character study — a grosteque caricature, in fact — of philanthropist Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times for These Timnes, which initially appeared without any illustration in 1854 in Dickens's weekly journal Household Words. Furniss has apparently based the illustration on the reader's initial impressions of the mathematical, "hard-edged" Benthamite philosopher of the schoolroom scene that opens the novel, rather than on the later Gradgrind, much softened by subsequent experiences, including the breakdown of his daughter's marriage and his son's embezzling from the Coketown bank.

Early in 1854, Charles Dickens felt it absolutely necessary to bolster the sagging circulation of his new weekly magazine, Household Words. He did so by writing the type of serialisation he detested, a novel in compact weekly numbers (1 April-12 August). In this, first industrial novel and his tenth full-length work, he used the concentrated form as an assault on the factory system, callous industrialiss, urban blight, and even trades unions. Despite the absence of single protagonist, Hard Times for These Times by the summer of 1854 had proven popular with Dickens's periodical readers. It has since remained popular not so much as a novel but as a a parable or fairy tale for the modern era. In subsequent editions, Dickens's short novel was illustrated — modestly, with just four wood-engravings by the leading New Man of the Sixties, Fred Walker in the Illustrated Library Edition of 1868, and, after Dickens's death, far more extensively in the American and British Household Edition volumes by Charles Stanley Reinhart for Harper and Brothers, New York, in 1876, and by Harry French for Chapman and Hall the following year.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Harry Furniss, then, would likely have been able to study a number of earlier illustrations. As the sole illustrator for the Charles Dickens Library Edition, Furniss could probably have elected to produce a full program of illustration; instead, for volume five he provided thirty-two full-page pen-and-ink illustrations for The Old Curiosity Shop, but just a frontispiece for the second novel that fills out the volume, largely maintaining its status as unillustrated fiction. Uncharacteristically for a plate by Furniss, Gradgrind has a mere title and no indication as to which passage the illustrator had in mind when he drew it with an ink-and-wash technique. However, by the factory-owning ogre's counting gesture, we may surmise that the passage that Furniss had in mind is the one in which, in the first instalment, Dickens describes the self-made Benthamite industrialist and philanthropist. Although initially he appears as a caricature of the Carlylean Captains of Industry, Thomas Gradgrind, Member of Parliament for Coketown (Preston), gradually acknowledges the gross fallacies of his Utilitarian, Fact-based philosophy, and becomes through personal suffering a sympathetic, developing character.

Relevant Programs of Illustration for this Novel (1868 through 1876)

• O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the 1863 New York edition (1863)
• Sol Eytinge's Illustrations in the Diamond Edition (1867)
• Fred Walker's Illustrations in the Illustrated Library Edition (1868)
• Charles Stanley Reinhart's Illustrations in the Household Edition (1876)
• Harry French's Illustrations in the British Household Edition (1877)

Relevant Illustrated Library Edition (1868) and Household Edition (1877) Illustrations

Left: Sol Eytinge Junior's Thomas Gradgrind (1868); centre: Fred Walker's "Stephen Blackpool Recovered from the Old Hell Shaft." (1868). Right: Harry French's dramatic 1876 illustration of Gradgrind's catching his children watching the circus in Book the First. Sowing (1877).

Above: Reinhart's second illustration for the Household Edition published by Harper & Bros., What did he then behold but his own metallurgical Louisa, peeping with all her might through a hole in a deal board (1876).

Bibliography

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. , 1988.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.

__________. Hard Times and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Fred Walker. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman & Hall, 1868.

__________. The Old Curiosity Shop and Hard Times. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 5.

__________. Hard Times. With twenty illustrations by Harry French. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877.

__________. Hard Times. With twenty illustrations by Harry French. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877.

__________. The Uncommercial Traveller, Hard Times, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Illustrated by C. S. Reinhart and Luke Fildes. The Household Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876.

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Created 25 November 2019

Last modified 5 January 2020