Hard Times

by Charles Dickens

i'm not looking forward to this...

he's already being overly descript. yay...

so he likes facts.

i already don't like mr. gradgrind. this is jane eyre all over again.

'Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don't see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don't have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.'

what the hell kind of name is that?

Ah, rather overdone, M'Choakumchild.

what's overdone is his name.

They had been lectured at, from their tenderest years; coursed, like little hares.

little bunny foo foo hopping through the forest. scooping up the field mice and bopping them on the head.

Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an Ogre Fact forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing castle, with Heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair.

aka a teacher. haha.

that's what we learned a cow is too. haha.

as in... everyone acts like they do coke?

ALLUSION!

i still wouldn't touch him with a pair of tongs...

hmm... seems like some sexual harassment.

blahblahblahblah. too much description.

aww... i think i would have rather stayed with them.

well isn't she a lucky one.

They made him out to be the Royal arms, the Union-Jack, Magna Charta, John Bull, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights, An Englishman's house is his castle, Church and State, and God save the Queen, all put together.

cool associations.

'You are quite another father to Louisa, sir.'

father is NOT the association i saw.

she seems so sweet.

Never wonder.

bye bye curiousity!

Their shadows were defined upon the wall, but those of the high presses in the room were all blended together on the wall and on the ceiling, as if the brother and sister were overhung by a dark cavern.

these people are all so messed up.

awww...

So Jupe was kept to it, and became low-spirited, but no wiser.

good for her.

'Miss Louisa, I said I didn't know. I thought I couldn't know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all,' said Sissy, wiping her eyes.

so she's actually really clever.

'Nothing, Miss—to the relations and friends of the people who were killed. I shall never learn,'

what sissy knows is emotions. coketown is facts. sissy wins in my book.

awww. how sad.

1001 arabian nights.

'Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs to jump up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across them—which is one of his tricks. He looked at father, and didn't do it at once. Everything of father's had gone wrong that night, and he hadn't pleased the public at all. He cried out that the very dog knew he was failing, and had no compassion on him. Then he beat the dog, and I was frightened, and said, "Father, father! Pray don't hurt the creature who is so fond of you! O Heaven forgive you, father, stop!" And he stopped, and the dog was bloody, and father lay down crying on the floor with the dog in his arms, and the dog licked his face.'

aww. that's why dogs are so amazing.

i hope so...

Yet it did seem (though not to him, for he saw nothing of it) as if fantastic hope could take as strong a hold as Fact.

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.

run-on sentence, much? this is why i hate dickens.

'Times, yes! 'Twould be hard, indeed, if 'twas not to be at all,'

There was not a flutter of her coarse shawl, perhaps, but had its interest in this man's eyes; not a tone of her voice but had its echo in his innermost heart.

looooooove.

creeeepy.

iiiiick. creeeeepy.

ugh he annoys me.

guhh.

It was not the touch he needed most at such a moment—the touch that could calm the wild waters of his soul, as the uplifted hand of the sublimest love and patience could abate the raging of the sea—yet it was a woman's hand too.

reminds me of my great grandma.

poor stephen.

uhm... weird.

pathetic fallacy.

i... i have no idea what the plot is yet.

he seems nicer.

weird...

more blue beard? really?

from bounderby?

i'm surprised he isn't more pushy about it.