 Chapter Four: Mr. Bounderby
Mr. Josiah Bounderby is Mr. Gradgrind's closest friend, and just like Gradgrind he is a man "perfectly devoid of sentiment." Bounderby is very wealthy from his trade as a banker, a merchant and a manufacturer among other things. He has an imposing figure and his entire body is oversized, swelled and overweight. He calls himself a "self-made man" and he always tells his friends (the Gradgrinds, primarily) stories of how he grew up in the most wretched conditions. Mrs. Gradgrind has a very emotional temperament and she usually faints whenever Mr. Bounderby tells his horror stories of being born in a ditch or having lived the first ten years of his life as a vagabond. Bounderby continues to tell his stories, pacing in the formal drawing-room of Stone Lodge.
Bounderby is proud of self-made status, having risen to the ranks of the Gradgrinds without the "advantages" of education. Instead of attending school, Bounderby inevitably ran away from his grandmother, who would steal his shoes and sell them for alcohol, his mother having abandoned him soon after birth. He describes the periods of his life as follows: "Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown." He taught himself to read by looking at the outsides and signs of buildings.
Mr. Gradgrind informs his friend Bounderby that Louisa and Thomas were caught spying at a circus and Mrs. Gradgrind replies "I should as soon have expected to find my children reading poetry." Louisa and Thomas are present and the three adults express their disappointment. Bounderby makes it clear that the circus is composed of the very vagabonds that Louisa and Thomas should be grateful for having avoided. For his part, Bounderby adds that the circus is a "cursed bad thing for a girl like Louisa," subsequently apologizing for his profanity, but to his credit, he did not have a "refined growing up." Mr. Gradgrind is intent upon understanding what might have motivated Louisa and Thomas to stray from their rules and standards. Bounderby brings Cecilia Jupe (one of the "strollers' children") to Gradgrind's attention and he convinces him that Cecilia must be the factor influencing the Gradgrind children. Mr. Gradgrind is at first hesitant but he soon agrees with Bounderby that Cecilia must be removed from the school so that she might not infect the other students with her ideas. The chapter ends with Gradgrind and Bounderby's immediate venture into Coketown to confront "Signor Jupe" and remove Sissy from school.
Analysis:
Josiah Bounderby dominates the chapter, much as his physical figure dominates those surrounding him. At least at this point in the novel, it is unclear how exactly he became a "self-made" man and arrived at his fortunes. Bounderby is a man of social mobility and ever expanding boundaries, but Dickens' social commentary suggests that Bounderby is hypocritical: even as he complains that he had to crawl out of poverty without aid, he is the firmest advocate of Sissy Jupe's dismissal from the school. Other characters that are introduced in this chapter are Mrs. Gradgrind, an unintelligent hypochondriac. Three younger children, Jane, Adam Smith and Malthus are briefly depicted. They are relevant as references to economists: Adam Smith is considered the father of laissez-faire (capitalist) economics and his theories encourage hard work and competition. Thomas Malthus is a less famous and more depressing thinker whose primary economic argument explained the inevitability and desirability of a certain level of poverty‹as a means of avoiding overpopulation. Smith and Malthus are both symbols of the economic mode of production that has overrun Coketown.
Bounderby's self-presentation is pure hyperbole. While he may have been very poor once and certainly is now very rich, his overbearing stories sound very much like the "art" and "fancy" to which he is nominally opposed. As in a classic fairy-tale, he has a wicked grandmother who mistreats him. And there is a Shakespearean allusion in Bounderby's explanation of his birth ("إ I was born in a ditchإ As wet as a sop. A foot of water in itإ .nobody would touch me with a pair of tongs.") Despite Bounderby's lack of a proper education, his lines are a paraphrase of very famous lines from Shakespeare's Macbeth (Act I) where witches boil a stew that includes a "finger of birth-strangled babe/Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,/Make the gruel thick and slabإ " Ditch-born babies generally have bad luck, but Bounderby has somehow overcome his.
And it is strongly suggested that the images of vagabonds and circuses are the avenues towards idleness, and after idleness comes poverty. The focus on money and industry produces a motif of metals and minerals. Just as Coketown is named for "coke"‹the coal-like fuel of the industrial furnaces, we have seen "metallurgical Louisa" and now Bounderby is described as having a "metallic laugh," Mrs. Bounderby is described as not being an "alloy" because she is unintelligent, and Jane had fallen asleep "after manufacturing a good deal of moist pipe-clay on her face with slate-pencil and tears."
Bounderby's "cavernous eyes" are a symbol of the deep, dark secrets hiding (cave-like) in his past; but his resemblance with Gradgrind reminds the reader that Bounderby and Gradgrind are constantly operating surveillance‹there is a juxtaposition in the adults' spying on the children as they peep at the public circus, and this awkward relationship reveals how much power the adults have. When Bounderby greets Louisa with a goodbye kiss, she rubs this spot of her face incessantly and her proposal to cut that hole out of her face altogether hovers between metonymy and metaphor‹Louisa is increasingly desperate to remove herself from her present situation and Bounderby's advanced age only intensifies her anguish and foreshadows Bounderby's convoluted and confused desires for Louisa.
The theme of education and self-improvement is rather well-developed in this chapter. We find the hypocrisy of the self-made man who would bar Sissy Jupe from school; another irony is in Bounderby's repeated admission of being low-class. After he uses the phrase "cursed bad thing," Bounderby continues: "I should ask Mrs. Gradgrind's pardon for strong expressions, but that she knows very well I am not a refined character. Whoever expects refinement in me will be disappointed. I hadn't a refined bringing up." The understatement here is that Bounderby should ask for pardon but he does not because he is merely behaving as ought to be expected. It is interesting that Bounderby is not a target for education and that despite his lack of education he is somehow acceptable (this is because he is rich). On the other hand, how necessary is an educational system so heavily dependent on the "Protestant Work Ethic" when its model pupils are wayward and those who most need conversion (Cecilia Jupe) are mildly persecuted? Louisa's languished looks out of the window and the description of two other children "out at lecture in custody," complete our understanding of the educational environment as an ogre's prison-cave.
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