Online Exhibition: Character Sketches from the World of Charles Dickens
This exhibition celebrates one of the most enduring legacies of Charles Dickens's genius: the unforgettable characters he brought to life.
Thomas Gradgrind is a retired businessman who has emotionally scarred his children through too much emphasis on facts. “Now, what I want is, Facts . . . you can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will be of service to them.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Characters in Dickens's Hard Times.
Mr. Gradgrind is dismayed by his children’s interest in a circus that’s come to town: “You know as well as I do that no young people have circus masters, or keep circuses in cabinets, or attend lectures about circuses. What can you possibly want to know about circuses then?”
Scenes and Characters from Dickens. London: Chapman and Hall, 1908.
Cecilia Jupe is the perceptive daughter of a circus performer, She comes to live with the Gradgrind family after her father abandons her. “So dark-eyed and dark-haired that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Characters in Dickens's Hard Times.
Bounderby is a banker and manufacturer in Coketown who marries Thomas Gradgrind’s daughter, Louisa. “A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Characters in Dickens's Hard Times.
Mr. Sleary is the proprietor of the circus. “A stout man . . . with one fixed eye and one loose eye, a voice (if it can be called so) like the efforts of a broken old pair of bellows, a flabby surface, and a muddled head which was never sober and never drunk.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Characters in Dickens's Hard Times.
Mrs. Sparsit is Bounderby’s genteel housekeeper. “Here she was now, in her elderly days, with the Coriolanian style of nose and the dense black eyebrows which had captivated Sparsit, making Mr. Bounderby’s tea while he took his breakfast.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Character s in Dickens's Hard Times.
A power-loom weaver with a dissipated, drunken wife he is unable to divorce, Stephen is suspected of bank robbery. “It is said that every life has roses and thorns…in Stephen’s case…somebody else had become possessed of his roses. . . ”
FOC Darley. Illustrations from the Household Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens