In the industrial city of Coketown, Josiah Bounderby is a rich and fairly obnoxious factory owner and banker. He loves to tell everyone he meets about how he grew up in the gutter, abused by a drunken grandmother. He is friends with Thomas Gradgrind, a rich politician and an education reformer in whose school students only learn about facts. Gradgrind's own children, Tom and Louisa, also grow up in this system. The kids are forbidden to be creative or imaginative or to have too many feelings.
When a traveling circus show comes to Coketown, one of the clowns abandons his daughter, Sissy Jupe, there. Gradgrind takes her in as a servant. She is a natural, happy girl, and his system does not seem to make too much of a dent in her good nature...