رواية اوقات صعبه للكاتب تشارلز ديكنز مختصره

THOMAS GRADGRIND, A WEALTHY, RETIRED MERCHANT in

the industrial city of Coketown, England, devotes his life

to a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and fact. He

raises his oldest children, Louisa and Tom, according to

this philosophy and never allows them to engage in

fanciful or imaginative pursuits. He founds a school and

charitably takes in one of the students, the kindly and

imaginative Sissy Jupe, after the disappearance of her

father, a circus entertainer.

As the Gradgrind children grow older, Tom becomes a

dissipated, self-interested hedonist, and Louisa struggles

with deep inner confusion, feeling as though she is

missing something important in her life. Eventually Louisa

marries Gradgrind’s friend Josiah Bounderby, a wealthy

factory owner and banker more than twice her age.

Bounderby continually trumpets his role as a self-made

man who was abandoned in the gutter by his mother as

an infant. Tom is apprenticed at the Bounderby bank,

and Sissy remains at the Gradgrind home to care for the younger children.
In the meantime, an impoverished “Hand”—Dickens’s

term for the lowest laborers in Coketown’s factories—named Stephen Blackpool struggles with his love for

Rachael, another poor factory worker. He is unable to

marry her because he is already married to a horrible, drunken woman who disappears for months and even

years at a time. Stephen visits Bounderby to ask about a divorce but
learns that only the wealthy can obtain them. Outside Bounderby’s home,
he meets Mrs. Pegler, a strange old woman with an inexplicable devotion
to

Bounderby.
James Harthouse, a wealthy young sophisticate from London, arrives in
Coketown to begin a political career as a disciple of Gradgrind, who is
now a Member of Parliament. He immediately takes an interest in Louisa
and decides to try to seduce her. With the unspoken aid of Mrs.
Sparsit, a former aristocrat who has fallen on hard times and now works
for Bounderby, he sets about trying to corrupt Louisa.
The Hands, exhorted by a crooked union spokesman named Slackbridge, try
to form a union. Only Stephen refuses to join because he feels that a
union strike would only increase tensions between employers and
employees. He is cast out by the other Hands and fired by Bounderby
when he refuses to spy on them. Louisa, impressed with Stephen’s
integrity, visits him before he leaves Coketown and helps him with some
money. Tom accompanies her and tells Stephen that if he waits outside
the bank for several consecutive nights, help will come to him. Stephen
does so, but no help arrives. Eventually he packs up and leaves
Coketown, hoping to find agricultural work in the country. Not long
after that, the bank is robbed, and the lone suspect is Stephen, the
vanished Hand who was seen loitering outside the bank for several
nights just before disappearing from the city.
Mrs. Sparsit witnesses Harthouse declaring his love for Louisa, and
Louisa agrees to meet him in Coketown later that night. However, Louisa
instead flees to her father’s house, where she miserably confides to
Gradgrind that her upbringing has left her married to a man she does
not love, disconnected from her feelings, deeply unhappy, and possibly
in love with Harthouse. She collapses to the floor, and Gradgrind,
struck dumb with self-reproach, begins to realize the imperfections in
his philosophy of rational self-interest.
Sissy, who loves Louisa deeply, visits Harthouse and convinces him to
leave Coketown forever. Bounderby, furious that his wife has left him,
redoubles his efforts to capture Stephen. When Stephen tries to return
to clear his good name, he falls into a mining pit called Old Hell
Shaft. Rachael and Louisa discover him, but he dies soon after an
emotional farewell to Rachael. Gradgrind and Louisa realize that Tom is
really responsible for robbing the bank, and they arrange to sneak him
out of England with the help of the circus performers with whom Sissy
spent her early childhood. They are nearly successful, but are stopped
by Bitzer, a young man who went to Gradgrind’s school and who embodies
all the qualities of the detached rationalism that Gradgrind once
espoused, but who now sees its limits. Sleary, the lisping circus
proprietor, arranges for Tom to slip out of Bitzer’s grasp, and the
young robber escapes from England after all.
Mrs. Sparsit, anxious to help Bounderby find the robbers, drags Mrs.
Pegler—a known associate of Stephen Blackpool—in to see Bounderby,
thinking Mrs. Pegler is a potential witness. Bounderby recoils, and it
is revealed that Mrs. Pegler is really his loving mother, whom he has
forbidden to visit him: Bounderby is not a self-made man after all.
Angrily, Bounderby fires Mrs. Sparsit and sends her away to her hostile
relatives. Five years later, he will die alone in the streets of
Coketown. Gradgrind gives up his philosophy of fact and devotes his
political power to helping the poor. Tom realizes the error of his ways
but dies without ever seeing his family again. While Sissy marries and
has a large and loving family, Louisa never again marries and never has
children. Nevertheless, Louisa is loved by Sissy’s family and learns at
last how to feel sympathy for her fellow human beings.

مشكور

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