In the squalor of a textile town, successful businessman and arch-pragmatist Thomas Gradgrind, proclaiming that he is a self-made man, teaches his children to supress their imaginations and embrace hard facts. He arranges the marriage of his daughter Louisa to Josiah Bounderby, an unattractive, boastful manufacturer who is thirty years older than she. Gradgrind believes that he has succeeded as a father when his son Thomas goes to work in Bounderby's bank. When Tom Steals from his employer and Louisa flees the horrors of her marriage, Gradgrind must acknowledge the error of his lifelong deotion to facts and utility in this classic Dickens work.