Josiah Bounderby

This character of a book assembles if not all evils of society but pretty many of them. Mr. Bounderby is a factory owner who boasts about being successful in the business sphere. Moreover, he is married to an elderly woman who was a widow until she met Josiah. His social circle seems to be profitable and thoroughly chosen since Josiah is Mr. Gradgrind friend. It is worth mentioning that our character is a capitalist by his nature and this means he is not going to change his life priorities. Being a respected man he needs to have a young wife who will listen to him and become some sort of marionette in his bossy hands. Therefore, Mr. Bouderby marries Louisa Gradgrind who lacks emotions and will never confront him.

From the first sight, Josiah is an ordinary man but involving deeper in the essence of his character the reader may understand that he is completely self-centered since it is found out from the text that the man paid his mother money for her pretending that they are not acquainted. Such a noble man didn’t have any right to act like that, to be honest. Moreover, in order to show that he was persistent and worked a lot to become a businessman, Josiah invents a bunch of face stories which highlight his childhood like the one in poverty and misery.

Even though he is experienced in love affairs, he finds out making Louisa happy impossible and decided to live his life alone but with his business. He was unable to make Louisa love him since everything was taking to money and numbers, but Louisa wanted to have the other life and attitude not the same as she got from her father. Therefore, he blamed her for being emotionally vulnerable to feelings.