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.
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