Aside from the description of Bounderby as an old-looking
bald man who probably "talked his hair off", we also have the ridiculous way in which he
described his infancy, trying to be the epitome of the "log cabin" paradigm, and to the
point of excessive effrontery trying to portray a sad and lonely childhood that
supposedly made him the self-proclaimed warrior that he is
today.
As part of the satire, the instances in which
Bounderby tells stories about his past are plain silly: How his mother left him with a
drunk grandmother that would sell his shoes for drink, how she kept him in an egg box,
how he was born in a wet ditch and other ridiculous
tales.
With Sparsit, chapter VII, Dickens brings out the
satire in that she used to be a well-to-do woman who fell into Hard Times, but he
focuses on how she is a "Powler" , which is a form of pedigree but he mockingly
describes as
The better class of minds, however, did not need
to be informed that the Powlers were an ancient stock, who could trace themselves so
exceedingly far back that it was not surprising if they sometimes lost themselves -
which they had rather frequently done, as respected horse-flesh, blind-hookey, Hebrew
monetary transactions, and the Insolvent Debtors'
Court.
So basically Dickens
mocks the rich man's poor past with Bounderby's excessive self humbling which makes him
look pretty ignorant and silly, and mocks the poor woman's rich past by mocking how
Bounderby brags about him being her master and paying her "100 a year" for keeping the
household of "Josiah Bounderby of Coketown" which is the name he gave
himself.
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