Gradgrind: My favourite Charles Dickens character

Thomas Gradgrind - from Hard Times - is one of Charles Dickens's coldest characters and is the twelth in the Telegraph pick of the best Charles Dickens characters.

By Morwenna Ferrier 13 February 2012 • 11:24am

Granada's critically acclaimed dramatisation of Charles Dickens' Hard Times, in 1977, was directed by John Irvin and starred Patrick Allen as Gradgrind, Michelle Dibnah as Sissy Jupe (right) and Jacqueline Tong as Louisa. Credit: Photo: Rex

My Favourite Charles Dickens character: Thomas Gradgrind from Hard Times (1854)

As a teenager conditioned to react to authority, I hated Mr Gradgrind. The hard-nosed, sharp-tongued teacher-protagonist in Charles Dickens’s tenth novel, Hard Times, serialised between April and August 1854, was obsessed with facts. I wasn’t. What’s more, Gradgrind reminded me of my mathematics teacher, Mr D, a thick-necked alcoholic who handed out Chewits for right answers and howled in response to wrong ones. Mr D was also obsessed with numerical facts, and Mr D hated me. I hated Mr D and maths, and now use an accountant.

The very word, Gradgrind, is riddled with connotations: the double alliterative, the teeth-gritting pronunciation. His name is even used as a byword for those obsessed with facts. He was a disciple of Rule Utilitarianism (whereas I am a fan of Act), and wouldn’t stand for freedom of thought or deviation in class. He liked to tick boxes, a sort of Michael Gove for Victorian times, obsessed with figures and targets and curriculums.

Having made a small fortune as a hardware merchant before becoming a teacher, Gradgrind starts his journey the very personification of capitalism at a time when acquisition was society’s key motive. But, like many of Dickens’s most hard-boiled characters, he undergoes quite a change: after becoming an MP towards the end of the book, his daughter, Louisa, bemoaning her joyless upbringing, forces her parochial father to finally change his narrow-minded ways. The book ends with Gradgrind doing ‘a Scrooge’, albeit minus the literary publicity.

If in Mr D I saw Mr Gradgrind, then perhaps I saw myself in Sissy Jupe, the novel’s heroine, aka “number twenty” a girl who, upon failing to accurately define a horse in Gradgrind’s classroom, is accused of possessing “no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals.” You see I had the same problem with prime numbers.

The full series of 'My favourite Charles Dickens character' is:

• Pip (Great Expectations) by Neil McCormick

• Quilp (The Old Curiosity Shop) by Christopher Howse

• Rosa Dartle (David Copperfield) by Rupert Christiensen

• Sissy Jupe (Hard Times) by Florence Waters

• Madame Defarge (A Tale Of Two Cities) by Daisy Bowie-Sell

• Aged Parent (Great Expectations) by Martin Chilton

• Ebenezer Scrooge (A Christmas Carol) by Charles Spencer

• Uriah Heep (David Copperfield) by Mark Monahan

• Estella (Great Expectations) by Serena Davies

• Stephen Blackpool (Hard Times) by Dominic Cavendish

• Esther Summerson (Bleak House) by Rachel Ward