When Louisa asks Sissy about her father and mother, the book uses a simile to describe Louisa's motivations using a simile:
“Did your father love her?” Louisa asked these questions with a strong, wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an interest gone astray like a banished creature, and hiding in solitary places.
The narration compares Louisa’s interest in Sissy’s family (and her interest in others more broadly) to a “banished creature” who conceals itself in “solitary places.” Growing up in the Gradgrind household, Louisa has never been allowed to ask questions (her parents enjoin her to “never wonder!”). Yet, Louisa still retains her curiosity about the people and world around her. Though this “interest,” as Dickens terms it, remains hidden (“banished” from notice in her home), Louisa purposefully continues to nourish it on her own (“in solitary places”).
Louisa’s curiosity is compared to a wild “creature,” an autonomous being with a strong instinct for self-preservation (it knows how to hide, and how to survive in its condition of “banishment”). Louisa’s interest in others is also described as “strong” and “wandering,” like an animal with a mind of its own. It is also “peculiar to her,” unique to Louisa out of all of the characters in the book. This curiosity is a core part of Louisa’s personality, so strongly ingrained in her that she could not erase it even if she wanted to. Its “wild,” independent character, as expressed through this simile, speaks to a kind of hidden rebelliousness within Louisa, who is unwilling or unable to bring it to heel.
When Louisa visits the home of Stephen Blackpool and reflects on how little she understands about his life, she uses a simile to compare people to insects:
She knew [the factory workers] in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants and beetles. But she knew from her reading infinitely more of the ways of toiling insects than of these toiling men and women.
Louisa has never entered the home of a worker before, and has never thought of them as individual people. Up until now she thought of them as a moving mass, “like ants and beetles” going to the factory and back.
The workers are totally objectified in Coketown, valued only as a means to a commercial end. Their objectification is reflected in this simile. The choice of insects to describe the workers speaks to their dehumanization within the factory town. They are treated in every way like a crowd of unthinking insects set to a single purpose—mindless toil—rather than a crowd of complex individuals with needs, rights, and desires.
The choice to compare the workers to insects also reflects the disconnection between the middle and working classes in Coketown. Louisa is intelligent, well-educated (as referenced in this scene), and well into adulthood. But she is only now beginning to see the factory hands as full, complete people. Her education, full of facts as it was, taught her little to nothing about how the people around her live, or that their inner worlds are as complex as her own.
