Time representation in Hard Time

In Hard Times both city and citizen are bound by Time. Coketown with its 'interminable serpents of smoke' and its elephant-machines moving 'in a state of melancholy madness' is fettered by Time. It is inhabited by people 'who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.' Many of its effects are apparent. In Coketown, like its machines, 'Time, with his innumerable horse-power, worked away,… and presently turned out young Thomas a foot taller than when his father had last taken particular notice of him.' After passing 'Thomas on in the mill,' Time 'passed him on into Bounderby's Bank, made him an inmate of Bounderby's house….' Likewise,'the same great manufacturer… passed Sissy onward in his mill, and worked her up into a very pretty article indeed.'

A second force in the novel, more frequently noted and dramatically more powerful than Time, is that which views life as governed by Fact. This force, too, is connected with Time.
In Hard Times to act as one would in (according to) Fact is—of necessity—to bind one's self to the present, to be one of those 'to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.'
Two of the children who offer illustrative contrast are Sissy and Louisa. In Chapter 9 of Book the First, whose title 'Sissy's Progress' connotes movement and change, the narrator suggests that, even though Sissy grows and develops through the years, life at Stone Lodge, going 'monotonously round like a piece of machinery which discouraged human interference,' is not in its essentials changed by Time. Positions shift—Gradgrind, for example, becomes a member of Parliament—but Time in Stone Lodge remains benumbed in the Present, turning seldom backward or forward. What sustains Sissy Jupe is a belief that amounts to religious faith, and a hope that keeps open the curtains of the Future: 'the girl believed that her father had not deserted her; she lived in the hope that he would come back, and in the faith that he would be made the happier by her remaining where she was.' Sissy's belief keeps her from running away. Her memories of her father and Merrylegs, though not exclusively happy ones, fortify her affection for him and strengthen her hope. She tells Louisa: 'I keep the nine oils ready for him, and I know he will come back. Every letter that I see in Mr Gradgrind's hand takes my breath away and blinds my eyes, for I think it comes from father, or from Mr Sleary about father.' Although Mr Gradgrind does not approve of such 'fantastic hopes,' the narrator comments that 'it did seem… as if fantastic hope could take as strong a hold as Fact.'
Louisa has no such sustenance. Others look to her future—her father with a well-intentioned but matter-of-fact plan for her marriage, her brother with his own selfish plan for helping his situation with Bounderby. Louisa has little to hope for. She cannot imagine ways of doing for Tom what other girls might do for those they love. 'I can't play to you, or sing to you,' she says, 'I can't talk to you so as to lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about, when you are tired.' Such feelings of helplessness are not expressed only to Tom. In talking to her father Louisa says, 'Father, I have often thought that life is very short'; she wishes 'to do the little I can, and the little I am fit for.' If the second statement expresses a hope, it is a short-term, highly limited one, so hesitant a step along that avenue to the future as scarcely to offer any glimpse at all. Indeed, her statement, 'What does it matter!' repeated twice during the conversation, suggests more of despair than hope, of drawing in than moving out.
When she sits before her fire watching the dying sparks, Louisa embodies the situation of the person closed solely within the present, the person without hope. The red sparks 'made me think… how short my life would be,' she tells her mother, 'and how little I could hope to do in it.' Although a personal outburst appears to threaten when she later tells her father that 'when the night comes, Fire bursts out,' her own bursting-out—i.e., the temptation to run away with Harthouse—is severely contained. As a rebellion against her restrictive background, it appears weak because she overcomes it without significant difficulty (although it does bring her and her father to an important point of conciliation and understanding); as a moral victory, it appears weak because Harthouse is too much of a dandy to be a very strong temptation for a woman of her temperament and (presumed) intelligence—whatever kind of husband Bounderby is. But even more, by this time the fires of Louisa's spirit have faded and are not to be stoked by a shabby and illicit romance. When she stood at the door of Stone Lodge earlier as her father listened to Mr Bounderby's offer of marriage to his daughter, Louisa found little to look forward to. References to Time and fire come together:
It seemed as if, first in her own fire within the house, and then in the fiery haze without she tried to discover what kind of wool Old Time, that greatest and longest-established Spinner of all, would weave from the threads he had already spun into a woman. But his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.
Louisa does not look toward the future with hope, but simply speculates, quietly and passively.