Coketown is an industrial city filled with large, smoking factories.Mr Gradgrind's ideas are shared by a rich man called Mr Bounderby, who owns many of Coketown's factories as well as the local bank."Louisa should only know facts, but Sissy will have imaginative ideas from the circus," he complains.In this grey place, Thomas Gradgrind has opened a school for the children of the factory s workers.Mr Gradgrind believes that you can pour facts into a child's mind in the same way that you can pour oil into a machine:
to both will work better that way."They need facts, facts and more facts," he tells the teacher on a school visit.