
was becoming that not unprecedented triumph of calculation which is usually at
work on number one. As to Mrs. Gradgrind, if she said anything on the subject,
she would come a little way out of her wrappers, like a feminine dormouse, and
say:
    »Good gracious bless me, how my poor head is vexed and worried by that girl
Jupe's so perseveringly asking, over and over again, about her tiresome letters!
Upon my word and honour I seem to be fated, and destined, and ordained, to live
in the midst of things that I am never to hear the last of. It really is a most
extraordinary circumstance that it appears as if I never was to hear the last of
anything!«
    At about this point, Mr. Gradgrind's eye would fall upon her; and under the
influence of that wintry piece of fact, she would become torpid again.
 

                                   Chapter X

                               Stephen Blackpool

I entertain a weak idea that the English people are as hard-worked as any people
upon whom the sun shines. I acknowledge to this ridiculous idiosyncrasy, as a
reason why I would give them a little more play.
    In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of
that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and
gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon
courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal,
every piece in a violent hurry for some one man's purpose, and the whole an
unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death;
in the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for
want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and
crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who
might be expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically
called the Hands, - a race who would have found more favour with some people, if
Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of
the seashore, only hands and stomachs - lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty
years of age.
    Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life. It is said that every life
has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or
mistake in Stephen's case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his
roses, and he had become possessed of the same somebody else's thorns in
addition to
