 Chapter Three: A Loophole
Mr. Gradgrind is walking home from school and he is thinking about his students and his children‹who are also under his tutelage. He considers them to be models, for he has trained them since birth, and they have attended many lectures. He is quite confident in them, for they study all of the most important subjects and their academic knowledge is well-rounded. Their earliest memories are of the chalkboard and they have learned plenty of statistics, though they know nothing of children's literature, of art or poetry or "silly" songs. Mr. Gradgrind forbids "wonder" and encourages classification and dissection, the exposition of fact.
Gradgrind's home is called Stone Lodge and he moved here after working in "the wholesale hardware trade." The house is short distance outside of "a great town" called Coketown and Mr. Gradgrind's current occupation is his intention of running for a seat in Parliament. The house is perfectly balanced, proportioned and calculated. The lawn and the gardens are all perfectly even. Gradgrind is thinking about all of these things as he walks home and he is close to his conclusion that everything is right in his world and everyone is behaving as they ought. But in this moment his "ears were invaded by the sound of music." A group flying the flag of "Sleary's Horse-riding" has attracted a small crowd with such acts and exhibitions as the "graceful equestrian Tyrolean Flower-Act," the "highly trained performing dog Merrylegs" and other fanciful amusements.
Gradgrind disregards the rabble and continues home, only when he looks to the rear of the circus booth, he sees a number of children peeping to see what is inside. Of course, Gradgrind heads over, intending to remove whichever students are in affiliation with his school. Much to his surprise, he finds his two children‹"his own metallurgical Louisa" and "his own mathematical Thomas" struggling to catch a glimpse of what is happening inside. Gradgrind startles them both and orders them home. Louisa is more bold in her anger; she is older than her brother but her extra years of schooling have made her more resentful than docile. In fact, Louisa has asked her brother to come along with her to the amusement. Gradgrind is embarrassed, arguing that the two children are debasing themselves but Louisa merely replies that she is "tired" and has been "tired for a long time." Dickens ends the chapter with Mr. Gradgrind's final exclamation and his own commentary: "What would Mr. Bounderby say!"‹as if Mr. Bounderby had been Mrs. Grundy.
Analysis:
We neither know Mr. Bounderby nor Mrs. Grundy (yet another of Dickens' cliffhangers), but from Mr. Gradgrind's statement we can infer that they are similarly boring and uninspiring adults with a heavy-handed disciplinary air about them. As the novel progresses, the narrative structure will rely more and more upon cliffhangers and the sometimes-abrupt introduction and disappearance of characters. The second chapter, "Murdering the Innocents," foreshadows this chapter, "A Loophole." Just as the theological commentary on Herod's Bethlehem massacre (allusion from Chapter 2) focuses on the escape of the Christ child in the midst of the mass murder, the "Loophole" now offers escape from the "Murdering." And just as this chapter ends with the cliffhanger (Who is Mr. Bounderby?), the next chapter, entitled "Mr. Bounderby" answers that very question. The question of location is answered however: Coketown, is the setting of the novel and it is an explicit critique of the social politics, corruption and depression of Manchester, England, a heavily industrialized city.
The new characters include "metallurgical Louisa" and "mathematical Thomas" and by now, the reader should notice the combined force of rhyme, consonance and alliteration in the character's names and descriptions of places. This stylistic point is worth dwelling on because usually these three devices‹especially when used in concert‹tend towards more lyrical language and more beautiful images. This is not necessarily the case in Dickens because he simply strips these literary rules to their basic meaning. A rhyme does not have to be fanciful, it only has to hint at a common trait.
For example: Coke in Coketown rhymes with Choak in M'Choakumchild.
Consonance describes the agreement of sounds (not necessarily a rhyme, but more often alliteration, or a combination of both). These are sounds that sound nice together, they repeat without perfectly rhyming, and while they sound nice together they are not necessarily nice sounding words.
For example: Bounderby and Grundy share consonant endings آby and آdy, as well as the آnd sound in the middle. They are consonant but they do not perfectly rhyme. M'Choakumchild is depicted as a "dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures" on the black board (ch-).
Alliteration, the repetition of letters (and as a result, sounds), is a final device we can use to group characters together.
Ogre, Gradgrind, Grundy, Bounderby.
Sissy/Cecilia Jupe, Signor Jupe, Josephine Sleary, Merrylegs.
"Metallurgical Louisa," Mathematical Thomas"
In some words and descriptors, we find unpleasant images that receive the benefit of alliterated sounds: mathematical Thomas and metallurgical Louisa can be viewed as pupils who have received the same rhyming (آical) educational treatment‹but in truth, Louisa and Thomas will prove very different. Dickens takes these devices to the extreme in this chapter and while these rules prove true throughout the novel, the occasional exception or coincidental rhyme can pop up. All of the names mentioned above however, are sustained in the work. Bounderby later becomes metallic, Gradgrind establishes boundaries, etc. Dickens' caricatures are visual (he drew illustrations for the original editions) but they rely upon the repetition of repetition, over and over again, much like the factories.
Dickens takes another motif from children's literature and explicitly names the teacher as an "ogre" who is "taking childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair." The loophole is a symbol of escape‹both mentally and physically. The symbol of contrast to the loophole is Stone Lodge, the home of Gradgrind, and most definitely a "statistical den." Dickens simile presents the gardens "like a botanical account-book" and this sustains the underlying comparison between the statistical, grid-iron classifications (mathematical, metallurgical) and the freedom that one expects from nature. The children's "dissection" of the "Great Bear" constellation is a metaphor for the murder of fancy and mythology.
We recall the "horse" vs. "Quadruped. Graminivorous." debate and this is sustained in the images of animal "celebrities" from nursery rhymes‹figures who are unfamiliar for young Louisa and Thomas. Thematically, there have been several "loopholes" in the Gradgrind training. There is the loophole as peephole, which is a symbol that foreshadows a continued defiance (at least on Louisa's part); there is also the loophole of contradiction where astronomy permits the "Great Bear" but the real dog "Merrylegs" and the painted representation of "horses dancing sideways" on a wall are forbidden. Mr. Gradgrind's blind face prevents him from enjoying fancy but it also prevents him from seeing the contradictions in his thought and the loopholes through which his model children might escape.
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