Josiah Bounderby often uses sad stories of his childhood as a tool to win the sympathy of the townspeople. In Book 1, Chapter 4, he uses hyperbole to heighten his story's emotional appeal:
As soon as I was big enough to run away, of course I ran away. Then I became a young vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me, everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me. They were right; they had no business to do anything else. I was a nuisance, an encumbrance, and a pest. I know that very well.
Here, there are two instances of hyperbole: first, Mr. Bounderby’s claims of childhood neglect, and second, his own disingenuous self-deprecation. Josiah Bounderby claims to have been raised in an atmosphere of poverty and neglect (a claim later debunked in the second half of the novel). Whatever degree of hardship Josiah may have faced has been clearly exaggerated here, in which he claims no one ever showed him kindness (“everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me”). Bounderby suggests his childhood was so ugly he had to run away “as soon as [he] was big enough,” only to then be abused by everyone he met as a street urchin.
Then, to further the listener’s sense of pity, Bounderby says that people were “right” to abuse his younger self, because he was a “nuisance, an encumbrance, and a pest.” However annoying he may have been as a child, Bounderby exaggerates his own negative traits to an unrealistic degree. In so doing, Bounderby tries to portray himself as self-loathing or self-shaming. This is all done to the end of encouraging his audience to disagree with him (and affirm that he was never deserving of such conditions in the first place). Everything Bounderby says works to make the listener pity him and affirm his value.
Bounderby’s lies are exaggerated way beyond the point of believability, such that the reader doubts he is telling the truth long before his deceptions are revealed. In this way, instances of hyperbole like this one clue the reader in to Bounderby’s character as a liar and a fraud, and foreshadow his mother’s speech to the townspeople later on.
