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Reading Comprehension Practice:

 

INSTRUCTIONS: Read this opening scene from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, practicing multi‐draft reading,
close reading, and questioning.
On the first read‐through, read mainly for a sense of plot. What is happening here? After
you’ve done the first read‐through, answer question 1 below.
On the second read‐through, read for style and structure. Use a pen or highlighter as you read
to mark repeated words, phrases, and images — noticing these repetitions will help you figure
out what Dickens is really saying, what his deeper meaning is. After you’ve finished your
second read‐through and marked the text, answer question 2 below.
On the third read‐through, put it all together, make connections, and ask questions as you
read. When you combine your understanding of plot and style — of what’s happening and
how Dickens is expressing it — what do you get? What is at stake here? Which characters are
in conflict? What is the conflict? Who is right . . . who do you think Dickens agrees with? Why?
After your third read‐through, answer questions 3 and 4 below.

 

 

 

Reading:
THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the
principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything
over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir ‐ peremptorily Thomas ‐ Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and
the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and
tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope
to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John
Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non‐existent persons), but into the head of Thomas
Gradgrind ‐ no, sir!
In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance,
or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’ Thomas
Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of
facts.
Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon
loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one
discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender
young imaginations that were to be stormed away.
‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger,
‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’
‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.
‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.’
‘It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,’ returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.
‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is
your father?’
‘He belongs to the horse‐riding, if you please, sir.’
Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.
‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here. You mustn’t tell us about that, here. Your father breaks
horses, don’t he?’
‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.’
‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors
sick horses, I dare say?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.’
(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little
pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some
boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.’
The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the
same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely white‐washed room,
irradiated Sissy. For, the boys and girls sat on the face of the inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up
the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the
beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in
advance, caught the end. 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 lighthaired
that the self‐same rays 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.
‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’
‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty‐four grinders, four eye‐teeth, and twelve incisive.
Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron.
Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’
She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have blushed deeper than she had blushed
all this time. Bitzer, after rapidly blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the
light upon his quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the antennae of busy insects, put his knuckles to
his freckled forehead, and sat down again.
The third gentleman now stepped forth. A mighty man at cutting and drying, he was; a government officer; in
his way (and in most other people’s too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a system to force
down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard of at the bar of his little Public‐office, ready to fight
all England. To continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the scratch, wherever and
whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly customer. He would go in and damage any subject whatever with
his right, follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he always fought All England) to
the ropes, and fall upon him neatly. He was certain to knock the wind out of common sense, and render that
unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time. And he had it in charge from high authority to bring about the great
public‐office Millennium, when Commissioners should reign upon earth.
‘Very well,’ said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. ‘That’s a horse. Now, let me ask you girls
and boys, Would you paper a room with representations of horses?’
After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, sir!’ Upon which the other half, seeing in the
gentleman’s face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, sir!’ ‐ as the custom is, in these examinations.
‘Of course, No. Why wouldn’t you?’
A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he
wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would paint it.
‘You must paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.
‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not. Don’t tell us you wouldn’t paper it.
What do you mean, boy?’
‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a
room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in
reality ‐ in fact? Do you?’
‘Yes, sir!’ from one half. ‘No, sir!’ from the other.
‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. ‘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.’ Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.
‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the gentleman. ‘Now, I’ll try you again. Suppose
you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?’
There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always the right answer to this gentleman, the
chorus of NO was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.
‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.
Sissy blushed, and stood up.
‘So you would carpet your room ‐ or your husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband ‐
with representations of flowers, would you?’ said the gentleman. ‘Why would you?’
‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.
‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy
boots?’
‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of
what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy ‐ ‘
‘Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. ‘That’s
it! You are never to fancy.’
‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’
‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman. And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before
long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and
of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not
to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in 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 never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds
represented upon walls. You must use,’ 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 the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.’
The girl curtseyed, and sat down. She was very young, and she looked as if she were frightened by the matterof‐
fact prospect the world afforded.

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Answer the following from the reading from above:

1. Write a 3‐4 sentence paraphrase / summary of this scene. What happens?

 

 

2. What words and phrases repeat in this scene?

 

 

 

3. What is the Conflict? How would you explain the viewpoints that are colliding here?
_____________________ vs. _____________________
_____________________ vs. _____________________
_____________________ vs. _____________________
_____________________ vs. _____________________

 

 

 

4. What do you anticipate the theme will be? What lesson will the characters learn?
Whose viewpoint will win? What clues in the reading make you think this?