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| Josiah Bounderby | ||||||||
| Josiah Bounderby shares many of the same principles as his close friend Thomas Gradgrind, but rather than focused on facts and statistics Bounderby is concentrated on money and power. This dedication has lead Bounderby to be a very successful and wealthy man, owning all the factories in Coketown. He inspires his workers to dedicate themselves to the factories by sharing a fabricated story of a broken home and extreme poverty as a child, thereby embodying the self-made man. Through this characterization, Bounderby is able to brainwash social institutions and his workers into poor working conditions and long hours. It is not until his mother appears that we learn Bounderby has a good childhood with loving parents. Bounderby's character is Dickens's representation of the social system of our world - all measures of power and success are measured by wealth. However, as with Bounderby's false claims as a self-made man, wealth is not the most noble aspiration and should therefore not be an indicator of success. |
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