How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it? (2.1.52)
This turns out to be even more of a fiction when we find out that Bounderby had a very good, supportive start from his family. Compare this to the American idea of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. Is this really viable advice, according to the novel?
Quote #5
Tom blew his smoke aside, after he had been smoking a little while, and took an observation of his friend. '[Harthouse] don't seem to care about his dress,"' thought Tom, 'and yet how capitally he does it. What an easy swell he is!' […] There was something so very agreeable in being so intimate with such a waistcoat; in being called Tom, in such an intimate way, by such a voice; in being on such off-hand terms so soon, with such a pair of whiskers; that Tom was uncommonly pleased with himself. (2.3.5,14)
Tom can't help but be the kind of dissecting scientist he was brought up to be – chopping Harthouse up into little analytical pieces. Harthouse is made out of an "easy" way of dressing, "a waistcoat," "a voice," and "a pair of whiskers" rather than a whole person.
Quote #6
'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 […] 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 […] Then I became a young vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me, everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me. They were right; they had no business to do anything else. I was a nuisance, an encumbrance, and a pest […] I pulled through it, though nobody threw me out a rope. Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Those are the antecedents, and the culmination.' (1.4.6-19)
Bounderby lives in a rags-to-riches myth of his own making. This is almost a plot outline of a novel, or at least of a morality tale, in and of itself.