Sometimes an item in the news—in this case, an item relating to the Virginia race for lieutenant governor—so exactly mirrors something in literature that you just shake your head. I was teaching Dickens’ Hard Times yesterday and we discussed Josiah Bounderby’s fraudulent claims about being a self-made man.
Here’s the sampling of him describing the childhood he pretends to have had. He’s talking to Mrs. Gradgrind, who is not a bad stand-in for a credulous voter:
“I hadn’t a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn’t know such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch.”
Mrs. Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic without any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her; Mrs. Gradgrind hoped it was a dry ditch?
“No! As wet as a sop. A foot of water in it,” said Mr. Bounderby.
“Enough to give a baby cold,” Mrs. Gradgrind considered.
“Cold? I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything else, I believe, that was capable of inflammation,’ returned Mr. Bounderby. ‘For years, ma’am, I was one of the most miserable little wretches ever seen. I was so sickly, that I was always moaning and groaning. I was so ragged and dirty, that you wouldn’t have touched me with a pair of tongs.”
Mrs. Gradgrind faintly looked at the tongs, as the most appropriate thing her imbecility could think of doing.
“How I fought through it, I don’t know,” said Bounderby. “I was determined, I suppose. I have been a determined character in later life, and I suppose I was then. Here I am, Mrs. Gradgrind, anyhow, and nobody to thank for my being here, but myself.”
Mrs. Gradgrind meekly and weakly hoped that his mother—
“My mother? Bolted, ma’am!” said Bounderby.
Mrs. Gradgrind, stunned as usual, collapsed and gave it up.
“My mother left me to my grandmother,’ said Bounderby; ‘and, according to the best of my remembrance, my grandmother was the wickedest and the worst old woman that ever lived. If I got a little pair of shoes by any chance, she would take ’em off and sell ’em for drink. Why, I have known that grandmother of mine lie in her bed and drink her four-teen glasses of liquor before breakfast!”
Bounderby continues on in this vein for quite some time.
At the end of the novel, however, we learn that Bounderby has invented everything. Here’s his mother responding to his accusations:
“Do you deny, then, madam, that you left your son to—to be brought up in the gutter?”
“Josiah in the gutter!” exclaimed Mrs. Pegler. “No such a thing, sir. Never! For shame on you! My dear boy knows, and will give you to know, that though he come of humble parents, he come of parents that loved him as dear as the best could, and never thought it hardship on themselves to pinch a bit that he might write and cipher beautiful, and I’ve his books at home to show it! Aye, have I!” said Mrs. Pegler, with indignant pride. “And my dear boy knows, and will give you to know, sir, that after his beloved father died, when he was eight years old, his mother, too, could pinch a bit, as it was her duty and her pleasure and her pride to do it, to help him out in life, and put him ’prentice. And a steady lad he was, and a kind master he had to lend him a hand, and well he worked his own way forward to be rich and thriving.”
As I say, we discussed these passages in the morning. Then I came home to a Washington Post article about E. W. Jackson, the rightwing candidate who has accused Obama of being a Muslim and a communist and who may be most famous for declaring yoga to be satanic. First of all, here’s Jackson pulling off his Bounderby impression:
Jackson says life was so tough with his impoverished foster family that they sometimes had to eat mayonnaise sandwiches for dinner. Other nights, there was no supper at all.
There was also no indoor bathroom, Jackson said, and as the youngest of the foster children, “I brought the pot down.” He was last in line for the once-a-week bath in a galvanized tub.
And here is a real-life version of Bounderby’s mother:
“I’m like, ‘What house was he in?’” said Nadine Molet, the adopted daughter of foster parents Willie and Rebecca Molet.
Nadine Molet shared the same roof with Jackson and said the bathroom was on the first floor, beyond the well-stocked kitchen. “I never remember missing a meal. We always had fatback, cornbread, pancakes. We always took a lot of food to church.”
Leola Brown, who lived in the unit next door and would come over to babysit Molet and Jackson, said, “They didn’t want for anything.” She remembers the banana pudding and fruited Jell-O she’d find there, and the bathroom, just as in her unit, was past the kitchen and “off to the right.”
If you want to read more, go here.
The scene in the book where Bounderby is exposed is extremely satisfying. Bounderby tries to go on the offensive, ordering all the witnesses out of his house, but for once in his life his bluster doesn’t work for him:
Although Mr. Bounderby carried it off in these terms, holding the door open for the company to depart, there was a blustering sheepishness upon him, at once extremely crestfallen and superlatively absurd. Detected as the Bully of humility, who had built his windy reputation upon lies, and in his boastfulness had put the honest truth as far away from him as if he had advanced the mean claim (there is no meaner) to tack himself on to a pedigree, he cut a most ridiculous figure. With the people filing off at the door he held, who he knew would carry what had passed to the whole town, to be given to the four winds, he could not have looked a Bully more shorn and forlorn, if he had had his ears cropped. Even that unlucky female, Mrs. Sparsit, fallen from her pinnacle of exultation into the Slough of Despond, was not in so bad a plight as that remarkable man and self-made Humbug, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.
And E. W. Jackson? Here’s his response:
Jackson declined requests for interviews. His campaign spokesman, Brian Marriott, said: “Nothing he’s saying about his childhood is untrue. Those were the conditions he experienced.”
Jackson, of course, is not our only Bounderby. Given that we’ve just gone through a painful government shutdown, driven by people who want to end all government “handouts” and who claim that they themselves have risen on their own, Hard Times is as relevant as it ever was.