Hard Times

The places where people live are important extensions of their character in Hard Times. This is particularly true of Gradgrind’s house, Stone Lodge, which he built as the crowning achievement of his success. He accumulated much wealth as an industrialist, so much so that he’s eventually appointed a Member of Parliament for Coketown. As he constantly declares, Stone Lodge symbolizes everything he believes contributed to his success. As a utilitarian, he holds that examining an action’s consequences can provide insight into its morality. For him, Stone Lodge is the ultimate consequence of a lifetime of intelligent and moral behavior. Living in a luxurious house of his own design validates everything he believes. When anyone questions his philosophy, Gradgrind cites the lodge to justify it. In the same way, Bounderby cites his ever-expanding estate. When a neighbor goes broke, Bounderby buys up the land and praises his own insight and intelligence. He capitalizes on the misfortune of others to symbolically validate his self-worth.

However, Stone Lodge contains a much darker symbolism. For Tom and Louisa, it’s the only home they’ve ever known and, unlike other children at school, they share it with their father. Consequently, they have no reprieve from his ideological coaching. Stone Lodge is their philosophical prison—and being trapped in the confines of their father’s ideology while growing up ruins their lives. It drives Louisa into deep unhappiness, while Tom abandons any pretense of morality. Tragically, by the time they leave Stone Lodge, their father’s ideas—and the building that symbolizes them—have had an irreversible effect on their characters, as their father insisted that they expel imagination, fancy, and sentimentality from their lives. The large, imposing lodge represents everything he taught them and its effect on their lives. They can’t truly escape the lodge or their father’s ideas.

Stone Lodge and Bounderby’s estates, as symbols of the delusions of rich men, contrast with the poor slums that men like Blackpool inhabit. Working-class homes contain very little. In desperate times, all furniture is sold to pay for essentials. The few possessions barely distinguish one slum from another. The poor aren’t afforded the opportunity to build misguided symbols of their own delusion. Bounderby and Gradgrind fail to recognize how their homes are extensions of themselves yet point to the slums as symbols of why the people in them are less deserving of wealth. That Gradgrind and Bounderby acknowledge the symbolism of slums when it benefits their ideological argument—yet ignore what it implies about themselves—illustrates their hypocrisy. They fundamentally misunderstand the world around them because they’re only interested in engaging with ideas that validate and soothe their massive egos.