Stephen Blackpool: My favourite Charles Dickens character When Charles Dickens picks him out for our attention among the crowd of "Hands" who work the mills, he has reached a state of suicidal desperation. Can he get divorced? No, his mighty boss Bounderby assures him - that's not for the likes of him. In the end, the poor man's certain destruction is woven into the fabric of his own honest integrity: unable to fall in-step with the mill's industrial agitators, yet speaking too clearly his mind to Bounderby (at the latter's own insistence) about the blatant injustices his fellow-men face, he is first ostracised, then sacked - and swiftly ends up a broken and dying man, at the bottom of a waste-pit, Hell's Shaft, having been framed for a robbery.