loveless marriage. They have no children. Bounderby is callous, self-centred and ultimately revealed to be a liar and fraud. Louisa Louisa (Loo) Gradgrind, (later Louisa Bounderby), is the eldest child of the Gradgrind family. She has been taught to suppress her feelings and finds it hard to express herself clearly, saying as a child that she has "unmanageable thoughts." After her unhappy marriage, she is tempted to adultery by James Harthouse, but resists him and returns to her father. Her rejection of Harthouse leads to a new understanding of life and of the value of emotions and the imagination. She reproaches her father for his dry and fact-based approach to the world and convinces him of the error of his ways. Sissy Jupe Cecilia (Sissy) Jupe is a circus girl of Sleary's circus, as well as a student of Thomas Gradgrind's very strict classroom. Sissy has her own set of values and beliefs which make her seem unintelligent in the Gradgrind household. At the end of the novel, when the Gradgrinds' philosophy of religiously adhering solely to facts breaks down, Sissy is the character who teaches them how to live. Sissy Jupe is first introduced to the readers as Girl Number Twenty in Gradgrind's classroom. She struggles to keep up with Gradgrind's extreme reliance on the recitation of facts, and therefore is seen as not worthy of the school. Sissy is also representative of creativity and wonderment because of her circus background, and those were things that the Gradgrind children were not allowed to engage in. With the urging of Josiah Bounderby, Mr. Gradgrind goes to inform Sissy's father that she can no longer attend his school. Gradgrind and Bounderby arrive at the Pegasus' Arms, the Coketown public-house where Sissy, her father, and the rest of Sleary's circus were staying. While Sissy and her father were very close once, Mr. Jupe packed up and abandoned his daughter, leaving Sissy alone. In a moment of compassion, Mr. Gradgrind takes Sissy into his home and gives her a second chance at the school. Sissy continues to fall behind in the school, so Mr. Gradgrind keeps her at home to tend to his invalid wife. While Sissy is the device of imagination and fantasy in the novel, she also serves as the voice of reason. The reason she cannot grasp the philosophy of Gradgrind's classroom is because she actually has a more realistic