Sissy and Rachel discover evidence that Stephen Blackpool, who has been missing for some time, fell down the Old Hell mine shaft. They find his hat, with his name written in it, and then Rachel almost stumbles into the "black ragged chasm hidden by the thick grass."

Sissy runs for help, and soon townspeople arrive and find Stephen still alive, but badly injured, at the bottom of the shaft. Witnesses say that he fell on a jagged pile of trash, and one arm is bent under his body. He was able to stay alive drinking a bit of water in the shaft and eating some bread and meat from his pocket.

When they bring him up, he talks about the miseries the mine brought to ordinary workers when they had to work in it under dangerous conditions and the misery it now brings to the unsuspecting who fall into it.

Stephen dies of his injuries but not before he has cleared his name of having stolen the money from Bounderby's bank. Tom Gradgrind is the true thief, trying to set Blackpool up to take the fall.

The pure and good-hearted Blackpool's tragic end is a symbol of how England's industrial society, more concerned with profit than humanity, grinds up, kills, and discards its best people.