SOURCE: "Hard Times: 'Black and White'," in Dickens the Designer, The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1987, pp. 177-92.

[In the following essay, McMaster examines how Dickens uses color imagery in Hard Times to reinforce its characterizations and themes.]

In Hard Times Dickens made colour a major feature of design. One of the titles he considered for it was 'Black and white.' The novel is patterned on a progression between the two most powerful scenes: the first in the 'intensely whitewashed' schoolroom at the beginning, with its albino star pupil, Bitzer, so pale that he looks as though he would 'bleed white,' and the second set in Sleary's darkened circus ring at the end, with Tom Gradgrind disguised as a blackamoor clown, his face 'daubed all over' with a 'greasy composition' of black make-up.

But the world of Hard Times is not all just black and white, and that tentative title, like 'Two and two are four,' 'Stubborn things,' and 'Fact,' which appear in the same working list, was intended to indicate what was wrong with the world according to Gradgrind, and how much was missing in it. As it is a novel that treats of imagination, grace, instinct, and feeling, as well as of the utilitarian system that tries to reject them, so it is concerned with the modulation between black and white, the various tones of grey, and with brighter colours. Pigmentation is one of Dickens's recurring images, and he uses it consistently to furnish incidents for his fable and to reinforce his theme.

With a vision of a world, like Dickens's, threatened with the loss of colour and romance, Keats in 'Lamia' had produced a comparable set of associations:

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine.

For Dickens the philosophy that clips an angel's wings is Utilitarianism, and the attempt to 'conquer all mysteries by rule and line' is realized in Mr. Gradgrind's 'gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise-rod, and . . . staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses.' Gradgrind would certainly have expected his children and the pupils at his school to study the woof and texture of a rainbow, among their other Ologies. (One can imagine Bitzer's definition of a rainbow.) Dickens doesn't use the rainbow as an image, but he summons instead flowers, butterflies, peacock feathers and fire, and, instead of Keats's 'gnomed mine' that is opposed to 'the dull catalogue of common things' ('facts and calculations,' as Gradgrind would call them), he provides Sleary's circus. Like Keats he here sees evil as the tendency to drain and nullify the sources of bright colour. Colours, if not rainbows, are essential to his composition, as the mitigation of the stark black and white terms of the Gradgrind universe.

Black and white in Hard Times do not represent polar opposites in a moral scale: so much is clear from the fact that Bitzer, 'the colourless boy,' and Tom Gradgrind, whom we last see appropriately besmeared with black, are products of the same educational system. Dickens is in fact explicitly rejecting the light-dark moral contrast that he had exploited, say, in Oliver Twist, and he gives us a villain not a Fagin or a Quilp or a Carker, who all have feet more or less cloven, but a James Harthouse, 'aweary of vice, and aweary of virtue, used up as to brimstone, and used up as to bliss.' Black, as with Tom in blackamoor make-up, does have some of its customary associations with evil; but it is characteristically a pigmentation applied from without, and connotes a social degradation rather than innate evil. And white is not a positive attribute of virtue, but rather a negative quantity, an absence of imagination or passion, an absence of colour.

Dickens develops a number of unpleasant associations for whiteness and pallor. The earliest remembrance of the Grandgrind children is of 'a large black board with a dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.' Similarly—another parallel between the schoolroom and the town at large—the signs and public inscriptions in Coketown are all painted alike, 'in severe characters of black and white.' Black and white are like facts and figures, unaccommodating, undifferentiating, inhumane. The schoolroom in Mr. Gradgrind's school is bare and undecorated and 'intensely whitewashed,' and his children's playroom looks like 'a room devoted to hair-cutting'—that is, presumably, hygienic and sterile, and probably whitewashed too.

But it is in Bitzer that Dickens most memorably depicts whiteness, or lack of pigmentation, as repellent:

The boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays [of the sun] appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed. His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form. His short-cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face. His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.

Dickens's bad characters in other novels, and Bounderby in this one, are apt to be all too 'colourful'—that is, they tend to make the good characters such as Oliver and Nell seem by contrast pale and vapid. But in Bitzer for once he produced a thoroughly nasty character with no colour at all, and his nastiness resides in his colourlessness 'I [hate] that white chap,' Tom Gradgrind complains of him; 'he's always got his blinking eyes upon a fellow.' The whiteness is like the lean and hungry look of Cassius, Jingle and Stiggins—it expresses the beholder's sense of evil and danger. Even when Bitzer exerts himself, as in pursuit of Tom, he gathers no colour: 'For, there was Bitzer, out of breath, his thin lips parted, his thin nostrils distended, his white eyelashes quivering, his colourless face more colourless than ever, as if he ran himself into a white heat, when other people ran themselves into a glow.' A fit profession for the grown Bitzer is as the 'light porter' at the bank—'a very light porter indeed.' Dickens seems to have considered this avocation something of an inspiration, for in his working-plan for the number he noted, 'Bitzer light porter? Yes.' He may, I think, have been playing on the catch-phrase of Utilitarianism, 'enlightened self-interest,' for Bitzer is the supremely successful product of the Gradgrind educational system. His self-interest is complete, and enlightened—besides the light colouring—strictly to the extent that he will avoid breaking the law because breaking the law would get him into trouble. It is not surprising that F. R. Leavis [in his 'Hard Times: An Analytic Note,' 1948,] should have admired the characterization of Bitzer, for he is a very Lawrentian conception⁵ —one of the effete and bloodless products, like Clifford Chatterley, of a civilization that has lost contact with the physical and instinctual sources of life. Bitzer is a successful utilitarian, but at the price of losing his humanity. His blood is white, and he has no heart—none, that is, except for the physiological organ that pumps his corpuscles around his bodily frame after the manner described by Harvey.

The other colourless product of utilitarian principles is Mrs. Gradgrind, though she is by no means so successful in the pursuit of self-interest as Bitzer. Rather she seems the result of the enlightened self-interest of others, her husband's in particular. Mrs. Gradgrind is 'a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic without any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her.' Again, her colourlessness is an essential aspect of Dickens's conception of her. As for Bitzer he had noted in his working-plan 'Pale winking boy,' so he saw in advance Mrs. Gradgrind as a 'badly done transparency without enough light behind.' This very precise visual image, with its suggestion of the latest in the audiovisual aids market, is one he maintains consistently for poor insipid Mrs. Gradgrind. Bitzer is unwholesomely pale and white, but at least he is opaque. She is even more washed-out in colour than he. The image, when worked up into the text of the novel, becomes, 'Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of vitality, looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of a small female figure, without enough light behind it.' We are to understand that she has been so crushed and ground by Gradgrind facts that she is scarcely alive, and Dickens has never so successfully depicted a low ebb of life: a starved amoeba would be a dynamo to her. When Louisa is summoned to her deathbed she finds her 'as nearly dead, as her limited capacity of being in any state that implied the ghost of an intention to get out of it, allowed.' And her death itself is announced with the familiar image: 'the light that had always been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out.' In keeping with his larger design, the term Dickens chooses for the rendering of her fractional existence is an insufficient infusion of pigment.

Deprived of love, and dosed with an exclusive diet of hard facts, she is pathetically ignorant of what is absent in her life, the 'something—not an Ology at all,' that her husband has missed. She has no access even to her own physical being: when Louisa asks her, at her deathbed, 'Are you in pain, dear mother?,' she can only reply, 'I think there's a pain somewhere in the room, . . . but I couldn't positively say that I have got it.' As Melvyn Haberman comments [in his "The Courtship of the Void: The World of Hard Times, " 1975,] 'So withdrawn is she from her self, so vacant her being, that she cannot experience her own pain.' At her death, we are reminded of the relation between transparent Mrs. Gradgrind, victim of facts, and Bitzer, who is so constituted that he can thrive on them. Bitzer is the 'fit colourless servitor at Death's door when Mrs. Gradgrind knocked.'

The lady who is most fully opposed to Mrs. Gradgrind in the colour-scheme of the book (and it is a one-way opposition, for Mrs. Gradgrind wouldn't oppose anybody) is Mrs. Sparsit. Here there is no shortage of pigment infusion. With her definite views and her no-nonsense attitudes, she is rather like the black-and-white inscriptions in Coketown. Bounderby imagines her when young as dressed 'in white satin and jewels, a blaze of splendour,' but at the time of life in which we meet her the black predominates in her colouring. She wears white stockings, but, as a widow, presumably a black dress. Much is made of her 'dense black eyebrows,' and subsequently of her 'black eyes.' As befits her character as witch, her black eyes are black in more than their own blackness: they see evil, and, to the extent of their power, determine it. In her jealousy of Louisa she wills her into an affair with Harthouse: 'she kept her black eyes wide open, with no touch of pity, with no touch of compunction, all absorbed in interest. In the interest of seeing [Louisa], ever drawing, with no hand to stay her, nearer and nearer to the bottom of this new Giant's Staircase.' She watches eagerly, with 'gratified malice,' as Louisa proceeds to compromise herself, and draw nearer to the dark abyss that her imagination has prepared for her. As she follows Louisa on the train after spying on the assignation with Harthouse, she continues to cast dark spells to bring about the evil she longs for:

All the journey, immovable in the air though never left behind; plain to the dark eyes of her mind, as the electric wires which ruled a colossal strip of music-paper out of the evening sky, were plain to the dark eyes of her body; Mrs. Sparsit saw her staircase, with the figure coming down. Very near the bottom now. Upon the brink of the abyss.

Mrs. Sparsit, sufficiently black herself, seeks to blacken others. It is her mission to denigrate.

In the colouring of Mr. Gradgrind, Dickens suggests the need for some modulation between the stark blacks and whites that prevail in the signs of Coketown and in his children's education. For the most part he is dissociated from colour, just as he outlaws fancy, and spends his life 'annihilating the flowers of existence.' The one colour that is briefly associated with him is blue, but it is not a very vivid blue, and is cleared immediately from any romantic associations: 'Although Mr. Gradgrind did not take after Blue Beard, his room was quite a blue chamber in its abundance of blue books.' This library of the dismal science is itself sufficiently dismal, being 'a stern room, with a deadly statistical clock in it, which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin-lid.' Gradgrind is to be changed by the disasters that his educational system causes in his children's lives; and his reform, and movement towards increased humanity and understanding, is marked by his going grey. After Louisa's marriage is shattered, and he begins to suspect Tom's responsibility for the bank robbery, we hear, 'His hair had latterly begun to change its colour. . . . He leaned upon his hand again, looking grey and old.' The touch might be only a passing one, but Dickens gives it weight by including 'grey' in the final image of the book—words which he had again thought out in advance. The narrator connects humane endeavour with the effort 'to beautify . . . lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which . . . the plainest national prosperity figures can show, will be the Writing on the Wall.' This is the lesson that the Gradgrinds of the world, with their tabulation of black and white facts and figures, need to learn. Then there is a final apostrophe to the reader:

Dear reader! It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn grey and cold.

The fire imagery has been consistent, and this ending connects it with the colour motif, and suggests a consonance between the imaginative endeavour and modulation between the uncompromising extremes of black and white.

It is characteristic of Dickens's presentation of colour here, and in keeping with movements in painting, that he should differentiate between colour that is innate in the object or person, and colour that is the effect of external context, like lighting, or the kind of deposits caused by contaminated air, as in Bleak House. Although, in the colourless world as projected by Gradgrind, any infusion of colour might be seen as good, the pigment imposed from without, as on Tom's face or on the cinder-blackened buildings of Coketown, is nearly always seen as evil. The face and the town are aligned in the initial description of Coketown:

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like me painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river mat ran purple with ill-smelling dye.

The imposition of pigment on pigment, black on red, black in stagnant canal, purple in running water, is unnatural and degrading, like Tom's circus make-up, which is already intimated in the comparison of Coketown with 'the painted face of a savage.' This is no longer the colourless world of utilitarian theory and enlightened self-interest, but the soiled world of utilitarian practice: industrialism, laissez-faire, and every man for himself. The gross trailing serpents of smoke and pollution are the agents of corruption by which a potentially fair city falls to being an industrial slum. 'Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like gold that had stood the fire,' we hear. It is overlaid, tarnished and blackened. In its environs, 'the besmoked evergreens were sprinkled with a dirty powder.' Seen from a distance, it tarnishes and blackens the landscape too, as a 'sulky blotch upon the prospect . . . A blur of soot and smoke . . . murkily creeping along the earth.' And, as the action moves into the countryside surrounding Coketown, we find similar suggestions that the landscape too has been spoiled and soiled by some outside agency, and mat what was innocent has been made ugly and dangerous by an external application of black dirt. When Sissy and Rachael take their walk in the countryside, natural greens and blues are threatened by the encroaching blackness of industrial detritus: "Though the green landscape was blotted here and mere with heaps of coal, it was green elsewhere, and there were trees to see, . . . and all was over-arched by a bright blue sky. In me distance one way, Coketown showed as a black mist.' Though colour and nature seem to prevail, and the women can take pleasure in their walk, presently it emerges mat the landscape has not only been overcast by the black mist, but literally undermined as well: 'Before them, at their very feet, was the brink of a black ragged chasm hidden by the thick grass.' In this black chasm Stephen Blackpool, the victim and martyr of Bounderby's utilitarian practice, lies dying.

Stephen's name, and the place of his death, associate him with the blackness of Coketown. In the street where he lies, we hear, the undertaker keeps, as a timely convenience, 'a black ladder, in order that those who had done their daily groping up and down the narrow stairs might slide out of this working world by the windows.' This black ladder, the grim memento mori of the working-class neighbourhood, receives some emphasis. Stephen's face, as compassionately described by Rachael, is 'so white and tired.' He belongs, then, to the prevailing black-and-white colour scheme of the tentative title, but he is not judged as responsible for this joyless pattern, as Gradgrind is, and he already has the 'iron-grey hair,' the sign of his ability to accept modulation and shades of difference, which Gradgrind must painfully acquire. The dark colours associated with him suggest rather that his life has been shadowed and darkened by inescapable suffering man that he is smeared and soiled, or morally tainted. His dipsomaniac wife, however, is another matter. She is one member of the working classes for whom the narrator has no compassion, and her degradation is again signalled by external application of dirt. Her hands are 'begrimed,' and she is 'a creature so foul to look at, in her tatters, stains and splashes, but so much fouler man that in her moral infamy, that it was a shameful thing even to see her.'

But the character who is the most memorable instance of externally applied pigmentation as a signal of moral infamy is of course Tom Gradgrind. Tom, like the colourless Bitzer, is a product of his education, but, whereas the system makes of Bitzer a successful machine, it makes of Tom an unsuccessful brute. Both are less than human, but Bitzer has no passions and no physical temptations, whereas Tom has both, without any training in how to control them.

It was very remarkable mat a young gentlemen who had been brought up under one continuous system of unnatural restraint, should be a hypocrite; but it was certainly me case with Tom. It was very strange mat a young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for five consecutive minutes, should be incapable at last of governing himself; but so it was with Tom. It was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.

His grovelling sensualities lead him to pander his sister to a man she finds repulsive, to embezzle funds from the bank, and to throw suspicion on an innocent man. When these crimes have caught up with him, and Sleary has disguised him as a blackamoor clown to help him to escape the law, Tom is at least shown, so to speak, in his true colours. This is a passage that most critics quote, for it is one of the most powerful in the book. But much of its force derives from the build-up that Dickens has provided, in marking the contrast as well as the parallel between Bitzer and Tom, and in training the reader in the moral infamy of externally applied pigmentation.

In a preposterous coat, like a beadle's,. . . with seams in his black face, where fear and heat had started through the greasy composition daubed all over it; anything so grimly, detestably, ridiculously shameful as the whelp in his comic livery, Mr. Gradgrind never could . . . have believed in.

As Tom proves to his father over again that his teaching is responsible for his downfall—the statistical probabilities decree that 'so many people, out of so many, will be dishonest. . . . How can I help laws?'—the degrading blackening receives more emphasis still. Dickens rubs in the effect:

The father buried his face in his hands, and the son stood in his disgraceful grotesqueness, biting straw: his hands, with the black partly worn away inside, looking like the hands of a monkey. . . . From time to time, he turned the whites of his eyes restlessly and impatiently towards his father. They were the only parts of his face that showed any life or expression, the pigment upon it was so thick.

The passage is one of Dickens's triumphs in rendering a moral condition visible. And, to complete the pattern of black and white, he now produces Gradgrind's pupil, the 'colourless' Bitzer in a 'white heat,' eager to break his educator's heart by preventing his son's escape. Gradgrind is to be punished, crucified, by the black and white, the unmodulated declaration of facts that he had always advocated.

There is another and more comic instance of the external application of pigment as a vehicle for poetic justice. Mrs. Sparsit is by no means lacking in dark colour herself, as we have seen, but, black as she is, mere is a further daubing she is to undergo that will announce her infamy, though there is no one but the reader to see it. In her zeal to catch Louisa in the wrong she creeps through shrubbery and braves thunderstorms, collecting on the way a coating of verdure and worse: 'Mrs. Sparsit's white stockings were of many colours, green predominating; prickly things were in her shoes, caterpillars slung themselves, in hammocks of their own making, from various parts of her dress.' So much she endures unflinching while success, and Louisa's downfall, are in sight, but, when she has lost her in the crowd, and is weeping in frustrated malice, we are allowed to rejoice in the spectacle of Mrs. Sparsit properly punished, and daubed over, like Tom, with the visible signals of her villainy: 'Wet through and through: . . . with a rash of rain upon her classical visage; . . . with a stagnant verdure on her general exterior, such as accumulates on an old park fence in a mouldy lane.' To be reduced to an old park fencepost, encrusted with lichen and mould, is the appropriate come-uppance for the highly connected Mrs. Sparsit, once a Powler.

Brighter colours than the black and white of the Gradgrind and Bounderby world also have their place in the design of Hard Times. Colour, as in Sissy Jupe and the circus, generally suggests feeling, imagination and vitality; but there are some exceptions to this rule, which need considering first. For, though one would expect Bounderby to be mainly black, as he rejoices in the smoke of Coketown—"That's meat and drink to us. It's the healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the lungs', he boasts—he is actually vividly coloured. He is always talking about the workers' propensity to 'expect to be set up in a coach and six, and to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon,' and in his own complexion he is as gaudy as anyone in the novel: at his final rage at the end of his marriage we see him 'with his very ears a bright purple shot with crimson,' a veritable mandrill. But the coloration is not so inappropriate after all. For one thing the explosive pressure signalled by his crimson and purple features completes the main terms of his characterization as windy, inflated, explosive—a Braggadocio. But, besides this, the colourful imagery that differentiates him from the black-and-white world of Gradgrind is an early signal of his true nature as a creator of fiction. For, however he may disapprove of 'idle imagination' in others, he has fancifully invented a past for himself as romantic as Dick Whittington's. Colour erupts in him, in spite of his Utilitarian principles, as fire erupts in Louisa and in the factory hands, for 'all closely imprisoned forces rend and destroy.' As Warrington Winters shows [in his 'Dickens's Hard Times, ' 1971], Bounderby and his fictional past belong to Dickens's major theme in serving 'to demonstrate that we cannot live by facts alone, that the imagination must have an outlet.'

All the same, as Bounderby is differentiated from the black-and-white Gradgrind world on the one hand, so is his livid coloration distinct from the colour of Sissy June's world, which symbolizes feeling and the power of the imagination. Bounderby's fiction is not a saving myth, but a self-aggrandizing lie. Likewise his colouring is crude and forced. He lives 'in a red house with black outside shutters, green inside blinds, a black street door, up two white steps, BOUNDERBY (in letters very like himself) upon a brazen plate, and a round brazen door-handle underneath it, like a brazen full-stop.' This loudly declarative arrangement of rectangles, squares and circles recalls the 'third gentleman's' disquisition on taste in the schoolroom scene. In confounding Sissy, who says she would enjoy representations of flowers in carpets as 'pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—', he cuts her off with the command that she must never fancy, but must be regulated in all things by fact:

'You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. . . . You must see', said the gentleman, 'for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. . . . This is fact. This is taste.'

Bounderby's domestic décor would live up to these standards. For him colour is best regimented, separated, and arranged in hard-edged shapes. It is no surprise to find that his bank has exactly the same exterior as his house—red brick, black shutters, green blinds, and so forth, all 'strictly according to pattern.' These colours become, in fact, not very different from the Gradgrind black and white, inasmuch as their tendency is to eliminate differences and shades, to confound the individual with the aggregate, and so to dehumanize.

Sissy Jupe, with her allegiance to flowers, butterflies and fancy, is the representative of both colour and goodness. In the definitive schoolroom scene, she is contrasted with the colourless Bitzer, who sits in the same ray of sunshine: 'But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed.' Leavis has memorably pointed out 'the force . . . with which the moral and spiritual differences are rendered here in terms of sensation,' but he has not noticed how this contrast is part of a dominant visual pattern in the novel at large. The scene continues to emphasize her colour, particularly that which comes from within. She 'would have blushed deeper, if she could have blushed deeper than she had blushed all this time.' When she is grown we are reminded of her 'rich dark hair' and of her propensity to blush: 'Her colour rose,' and 'Sissy flushed and started.' Such are the gestures which keep her colouring before us. Her fondness for flowers distinguishes her from Gradgrind, who annihilates the flowers of existence, from M'Choakumchild, who 'had taken the bloom off the higher branches' of science, and from Tom, whom we see literally tearing roses to pieces in one scene.

Her place of origin, Sleary's circus, is more colourful still. The circus people too cherish flowers, and the 'graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act' is one of their recurring numbers. They foregather at the Pegasus's Arms, where there is a theatrical Pegasus 'with real gauze let in for his wings, golden stars stuck on all over him, and his ethereal harness made of red silk.' Her father the clown wears as part of his clown's outfit a 'white night-cap, embellished with two peacock's feathers,' and the diminutive Master Kidderminster, who aspires to her hand, plays the role of Cupid made up with 'white bismuth, and carmine.' (Make-up, incidentally, is not degrading to the circus people as to Tom, for impersonation and clowning are their immemorial and legitimate business.)

Louisa Gradgrind's moral evolution, in gravitating from Gradgrind's world to Sissy's, is also signalled by the colour scheme. Her father intends to bring her up according to the colourless Bitzer pattern, quelling all fancy and feeling in her and devoting her entirely to fact. But the young Gradgrinds are not as bloodless and passionless as Bitzer. We have seen what happens to Tom. His inability to control his 'grovelling sensualities' causes him to become besmeared with pigment from the outside. Even little Jane Gradgrind, who is to be saved for humanity by Sissy, must have her native fancy and childish cheeks daubed over by the prevailing white—she falls asleep over vulgar fractions with a composition of white clay on her features, manufactured from 'slate-pencil and tears.'

Louisa, in spite of being a docile child, early shows signs of not belonging in the Gradgrind world. She is caught, 'red and disconcerted,' peeping through a loophole at the 'graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act!' In her face 'there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow.' The redness recurs, and in her it is the signal of feeling and passion, though she is not even aware of them in herself, nor can she give them a name. There is a poignant little incident of her adolescence, when the fifty-year-old Bounderby, stirred with lust, kisses her cheek.

He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek he had kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning red. . . .

'What are you about, Loo?' her brother sulkily remonstrated. 'You'll rub a hole in your face.'

'You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom. I wouldn't cry!'

The incident sharply suggests the appalling violation—though one that she could not explain or analyse—that is practised on her in giving her to Bounderby in marriage. Having no access to her own instincts and feelings, and no knowledge that she has them, she makes no strong objection. But Bounderby's polluting kiss, so fiercely disgusting to her, is the preview of her wedding-night. And the knowledge that Tom gains of her feelings in this kiss scene shows him as doubly depraved in pushing her into the marriage.

Her father's transfer of her to Bounderby, the progress from the theory to the practice of Utilitarianism, sets her on the same path as Tom, and there is the same suggestion of denigration from without. Louisa's state of mind has been consistently associated with the fires and fumes of Coketown, and as Gradgrind proposes the match we hear of "The distant smoke very black and heavy.' She is on her way to becoming grimed over, like the red brick of Coketown and the painted face of her brother. But her symptomatic interest in fires and the light of imagination prevails over the smoke, and the more vivid colouring asserts itself. As she warns her father, 'when the night comes, Fire bursts out.'

It is Harthouse's sensual mission to awaken the dormant passion in Louisa; and he goes a long way towards succeeding. Harthouse, though not moved by strong passion himself, takes a connoisseur's delight in being the object of passion. That is, as his name implies, having no heart (he has a 'nest of addled eggs' in 'the cavity where his heart should have been') he wants to become the home for Louisa's. He specialises in arousing passion, not feeling it. Or, to use Dickens's colour metaphor, he is 'the very Devil' at 'the kindling of red fire.' As we have seen, Dickens was to develop the association of red with unleashed passion further still in A Tale of Two Cities, with the prominent red caps of the revolutionaries, and the red wine spilled in the streets that is the preview of the bloodbath of the Reign of Terror. Colour is Dickens's shorthand for aroused emotion in Louisa. Her love for Tom, the one feeling she is conscious of, first signals to Harthouse her capacity for passion, and he covets it. He sees that 'Her colour brightened' for Tom, and he begins to think 'it would be a new sensation, if the face which changed so beautifully for the whelp, would change for him.' Presently, by pretending interest in Tom, he has inveigled himself into her confidence, and proceeds on the assumption not only of her love for Tom but also of her absence of love for her husband. The signals are encouraging. She is 'flushing,' and then 'She flushed deeper and deeper, and was burning red.' Next, when she betrays that she has sold her husband's gifts to pay her brother's debts, 'She stopped, and reddened again.' Now she varies her normally numb response to her husband's blustering by facing him 'with a proud colour in her face that was a new change.' Harthouse has indeed been successful in kindling the red fire.

Louisa goes so far as to hear his urgent proposal that she should elope with him, and to be tempted by it. So much we may infer from her flight in the tempest on the train, amidst 'Fire and steam, and smoke, and red light.' But she flees not to her lover but to her father, and by the time she gets to him she is appropriately purged of pigment: 'so colourless, so disshevelled, so defiant and despairing, that he was afraid of her.'

Within the bounds of a brief fable, Louisa undergoes an emotional education. Though we are not to approve of Harthouse, he provides the means by which she discovers her own heart. Out of touch with her instincts and emotions, like her mother, and alienated from her self, she is not fully alive, and allows herself to be handed over to Bounderby like a parcel of goods, hardly even knowing that it matters. Harthouse causes an awakening of passion and consciousness; but her newly vivid colouring, like Tom's, is not integrated with moral imagination, and must be exorcised, leaving her torpid and colourless again. It is only the deep-hued Sissy (who has meanwhile changed little Jane's chalk-smeared countenance to 'a beaming face') who can reconcile her to her self. Under her influence Louisa, at the conclusion of the novel, is 'trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up.' Leaving behind the black-and-white Gradgrind world, she has come to the Jupe philosophy that rejoices in flowers, butterflies and circuses, the 'imaginative graces and delights.'

Hard Times is not a complex novel, and its colour motif is simple too. The directive we receive on the appropriate colouring of imagination and pleasure in our lives is the adage, Not too little (like the absence of pigment in Bitzer and Mrs. Gradgrind), not too much (like the artificially applied coloration of Tom, Coketown and Mrs. Sparsit), but just right (like the organic colouring of Sissy Jupe and, eventually, Louisa). This essentially simple and consistent scheme serves Dickens well, and furnishes some memorable scenes and characterizations. Artistically, he has been most successful in the negative extremes, the black and white of his tentative title: in the slug-like pallor of Bitzer and the daubed-over blackness of Coketown and Tom, who wear their pigment like tar and feathers. These are memorable figures, and for good reason commentators keep coming back to them. Sissy Jupe, once she has left behind the schoolroom and her childhood, is only intermittently successful. But Louisa, cut off from access to her own feelings and instincts and a stranger to her self, is a figure of considerable psychological interest, and Dickens has made the colour-scheme tell in the development of her character too. Though its design is less elaborately developed than that of Bleak House, Hard Times equally gains in impact and coherence from a dominant visual motif.