Student Question

Who is referred to as the "great manufacturer" in Hard Times?

Quick answer:

In Hard Times, the "great manufacturer" is Josiah Bounderby.

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Josiah Bounderby is the "great manufacturer" in Hard Times. He is described as banker, merchant, and manufacturer. He owns the textile factory that employs many of the poor people of Coketown for very low wages.

Hard Times's narrator is ironic in calling him the "great" manufacturer. Bounderby's only claim to greatness is that he has become a very wealthy man. He has no greatness of personal attributes, being a hypocrite, a liar, and a person with little compassion for his workers or other people. He is bloated, smug, and self-satisfied, with a tendency to loudly trumpet his opinions in an arrogant way.

Bounderby's one claim to greatness besides wealth, the one by which he differentiates himself from fallen aristocrats like Mrs. Sparsit, is that he grew rich through his own efforts. As he puts it, nobody threw him a "rope." He takes a great deal of pride in having made it up from poverty all on his own. However, this claim proves to be a lie, and at the end of the novel, he is exposed as person born to comfortable circumstances whose family launched him into the world.

Dickens uses Bounderby to puncture the pretensions of the rising industrial class in Victorian England, showing them, through his depiction of Bounderby, to be hypocrites and exploiters.

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