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!'
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