17
That it works is due in large part, as I have suggested, to the fact that
Harthouse is, conventionally speaking, a gentleman. His honour has been appealed
to explicitly. It is a young woman who asks a favour (he doen't know her
that matters too), the natural chivalric and she assumes that he will obey
her request. And his norma conversational devices are wasted on her. She
would not even understand his worldly wisdom.
This seems to me to be one of the most masterly scenes of the clash of
innocence and experience in Dickens - not just that it is thematically satisfying,
but imaginatively and psychologically.
But the clashes are not always between the characters, confronting each
other like this. The struggle is also fought within the individuals themselves.
I have implied that within Louisa there is a struggle going on for the possession
of her heart. Is she to succumb to the Bounderby attitude, or what is worse,
come simply to loathe her husband? Or will she deceive him, in an adulterous
relationship with Harthouse? Now I have said she is saved by Sissy - but only
partly saved, only socially saved, in that at the end of the novel one can still
only see her as a damaged victim.
It is Gradgrind, though, isn't it, in whom the basic struggle is fought out
most fully, or rather, in whom the theme is most fully symbolised. He is both
Innocent and Experienced. He has a good muddled heart, is desperately well-
intentioned, is incapable of petty meanness or deceit - and this is his innocence.
He can be said to be numbered among the Experienced only in so far as he tries
to eradicate Fancy from human life, to systematise everything, to be truly
calculating, and to become an M.P. and threaten to spread his system throughout
Britain
He really liked Sissy too well to have a contempt for her;
otherwise he held her calculating powers in such very slight
estimation that he must have fallen upon that conclusion. Somehow
or other, he had become possessed by an idea that there was some
thing in this girl which could hardly be set forth in a tabular
form. Her capacity of definition might be easily stated at a very
low figure, her mathematical knowledge at nothing; yet he was not
sure that if he had been required, for example,to tick her off
into columns in a parliamentary return, he would have quite known
how to divide her.
In some stages of his manufacture of the human fabric, the processes
of Time are very rapid. Young Thomas and Sissy being both at such a
stage of their working up, these changes were effected in a year or
two; while Mr. Gradgrind himself seeraed stationary in his course, and
underwent no alteration.
