Louisa is the practical daughter of a powerful industrialist. Sissy is the imaginative daughter of a clown. What will happen when two such different lives collide?

In Coketown, there's no place for imagination. There are facts and figures and absolutely nothing else - or so Thomas Gradgrind thinks. When the circus appears in town, it brings Sissy Jupe with it. A young girl who has been abandoned by her father and is taken in by Thomas Gradgrind. Full of fun and energy, will Sissy save the Gradgrind children from a life of fact-and-figure-filled misery before it's too late?