Tom is the son of Thomas Gradgrind, Sr., a factual man only interested with pure facts. Therefore, Tom is brought up in a utilitarian environment: taught never to wonder, doubt facts or entertain any kind of fancy. In the novel Hard Times he is part of the middle class and only has love for one person, his sister, Louisa. His sister’s husband employs him in the bank but Tom interests himself more with rebellion since he is finally away from the factual upbringing of his youth. Thus Tom enters into gambling and drink. Unfortunately for him, his bets never earn him any money and he finds himself often asking his sister for help. Her devotion toward her brother compels her to give him what he asks until he has simply taken too much. In need of money, he stages a bank robbery and places the blame on the honest Blackpool. Eventually found out, he is forced into exile where he repents and asks his sister for forgiveness.

and ends up losing his job for that. In Book Three of Hard Times Blackpool is accused of a crime he did not commit but is unable to prove his innocence except in asking Gradgrind to clear his name. These are among his last words, and he dies soon after. Through it all though, Blackpool is a moral, sensitive man holding no contempt against those who have wronged him. These struggles Blackpool confronts in Dickens’ novel exemplify the ideas of Marx. Blackpool is Marx’s personification of the corruption of the worker by capitalism. Blackpool is the first victim of the labor cause. He leads from his beginning a depressing life. “Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life. It is said that very life has its roses and thorns; there seemed however, to have been a misadventure of mistake in Stephen’s case, where by somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own.” (Hard Times, pg. 60). Stephen has not known any beauty in his life. His work is all he has, but that is not his passion. He describes his place of employment, the mill, as “...always going, and...they never work us any nearer to any distant object-except always death.” (Hard Times, pg. 140). It was something he had begun out of necessity and eventually it had moved itself into his entire being. After work every day he feels a sensation “–the sensation of its [his labor] having worked and stopped in his own head” (Hard Times, pg. 61). This idea is the entire basis Marx fashions: the fusion of the worker and his work as one until the worker is diminished.

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