Mr. Bounderby

The extract is from the novel “Hard Times” written by Charles Dickens in 1854. The text provides a psychological description of the character Mr. Bounderby.

The novelist focuses readers’ attention on the behavior and on the story of Mr. Bounderby presented as a caricature of human’s nature during the Victorian Age.

Bounderby is a successful capitalist who owns a factory and a bank in Coketown. He brags about having grown up an orphan. Bounderby is awful. He is loud, obnoxious, completely self-centered, and the novel's most snobby and status-obsessed character; he is a man perfectly devoid of sentiment, a rich, big loud man with a metallic laugh. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and a such strained skin to his face that it seesm to held his brown eyes open (“Bounder” means “canaglia”).

Mr. Bounderby is described as coming from a poor family, without education and self-made. In other contexts these attributes might be presented as worthy of sympathy and/or admiration (by the Manichean vision, that describes the struggle between good and evil; the spiritual world of light and the material world of darkness). On the other hand, it seems that he uses his powers of creativity to dismiss poor people's complaints. Whenever his workers gripe about their awful working conditions, he points to his fictional hard childhood to make them all look like whiners.

Dickens uses pathos, describing the poor condition of Mr. Bounderby’s childhood (making feel the same sufference), and the grotesque (exagerations: “A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples…”).