[Mr. Gradgrind Catches Louisa and Tom at the Circus.] by Charles S. Reinhart (1844-1896). 13.32 cm wide by 10.3 cm high (half-page, horizontally mounted, with text below on a page 24 cm high by 15.7 cm wide) Illustration before Chapter I, "The One Thing Needful," in Charles Dickens's Hard Times, which appeared in American Household Edition, 1870. Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham [This image may be used for any scholarly or educational purpose without prior permission.]
Although the publisher has placed the second illustration immediately above the opening of the book, the moment illustrated comes in the third chapter, "A Loophole," when Thomas Gradgrind on his way home from his model school catches his two eldest children, Tom and Louisa, peeping "through a hole in a deal board" to watch the Tyrolean flower-act of the horse-riders. He has taken his eyeglass out of his waistcoat pocket to examine a number of children at the back of the booth, but Reinhart indicates just the two. As in the plate, in the text Louisa is standing and Tom is on the ground. In the background, Reinhart shows several circus waggons on the stubbly grass of "the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town," and, on the horizon, the smoke-stacks of Coketown factories. Since, however, Gradgrind crosses the intervening ground to confront the malefactors, one presumes he has already put his eyeglass back in his waistcoat pocket. Furthermore, Louisa in Reinhart's picture is a little younger than the pretty fifteen- or sixteen-year-old of the text.
While Tom and Louisa have both the natural curiosity and flexibility of youth, their father in his correct frockcoat, leather gloves, and tophat (possibly a beaver) seems a wooden, black column -- shades of Charlotte Brontė's description of the Reverend Mr. Brocklehurst in the Gateshead and Lowood sections of Jane Eyre (1847), perhaps:
a black pillar! such, at least, appeared to me, at first sight, the straight, narrow, sable-clad shape standing erect on the rug: the grim face at the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft by way of capital [ch. 4]
Although (as we have already seen in Coketown's schoolhouse in Chapter 2, "Murdering the Innocents," Gradgrind is not not the vicious disciplaniarian that Mr. Brocklehurst is at Lowood School, he too suffers from a lack of human sympathy at this point in the story, undervaluing emotion and "fancy." In Reinhart's plate, Gradgrind's eyeglass suggests that he cannot see what is immediately before him (his children peeping through a hole in the circus tent) whose cane may be poised to strike.
Last modified 22 September 2002