Just the Facts?

 “Now, what I want is, Facts,” said the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, “Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out everything else” (Dickenson 1).  So begins the famous first chapter of Hard Times.  A really bleak picture of education under a utilitarian system. 

Utilitarianists may not all have agreed, but many nineteenth century scholars did.  I was recently surprised to find Dickens quoted in a most unexpected place, one of my historiography books.  Edward Hallett Carr, in his attempt to define the study of history, observed that the nineteenth century was “a great age for facts” (Carr 5). 

It may not seem surprising to describe history as the study of facts.  The 1830s historian Ranke claimed that the job of the historian is to simply describe “how it really was” (Carr 5).  First gather the facts and then draw conclusions from them.  This may sound like common sense, but let’s think about it a little more. 

For starters, what is a fact?  Who decides what the facts are?  Which facts are chosen and how are they organized?  (Problems still encountered by journalists as well as historians…)

The inclusion, omission, and arrangement of various “facts” can promote different interpretations or conclusions.  Gradgrind’s collection of blue books could be used to prove “anything you like” (Dickens 71).  Gradgrind sat among his collection of facts and settled the most complicated social questions, once and for all.  All the facts may have proven his solutions, but it made no difference to the people concerned.   Studying “just the facts” is like an astronomer in an observatory with no windows (Dickens 71).  Useless.

James Harthouse, also not the best role-model, had another name for the “hard Fact fellows.”  He had been adopted into their tribe, and believed they were most certainly all “conscious hypocrites” (Dickens 124).  Practitioners of virtue and philanthropy may believe that everything is meaningless, but would never say so.  The “just the fact” fellows, by contrast, believe everything is meaningless and do say so (Dickens 124). 

What Dickens was getting at, here, was certainly not that virtue or philanthropy are meaningless.  Rather, these “hard Fact” fellows are missing the point of being human.

Statistics may have been all-important in M’Choakumhild’s school.  Statistics, percentages, and numbers are facts, and facts are all that are necessary.  Right?  For example, if a hundred thousand people go on a long sea voyage, and five hundred die, what is the percentage? 

Nothing, says Sissy Jupe.  What do percentages matter to the grieving friends and relatives? (Dickens 43).   

Sissy, uneducated though she was, still had all the right answers.

Works Cited

Carr, Edward Hallett.  What is History? New York: Vintage, 1961. Print.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Dover, 2001. Print. 

When the Last Trumpet Sounds

Judging by his works, Dickens’ views on religion seem difficult to pin down. 

Theologians often found reason to complain, since religious figures in his texts were frequently shown in a negative light.  In December of 1842, a publication entitled The Christian Remembrancer complained that “his religion, wherever any is introduced, is for the most part such mere pagan sentimentalism, that we should have been better pleased by its absence.  The clergy are never introduced otherwise than with a sneer” (House 113). 

At first glance, this appears to be true of Hard Times as well.  While this book does not feature an abundance of clergy members, Coketown does boast of several religious institutions.  Eighteen churches, to be exact, built by eighteen different religious persuasions.  All constructed of the same dreary and soot covered red brick that the rest of the town is made out of (Dickens 17). 

Who went to these eighteen different churches?

Nobody, apparently.  Not the laboring people, anyway.  It was amazing to walk through the streets on Sunday morning and see how few of the people took any notice at all of the jangling, maddening church bells (Dickens 17).  Coketown was a model of utilitarianist workfulness, and there was no room for faith in the utilitarianist system. 

Every session of the House of Commons, members of Coketown’s religious persuasions indignantly petitioned for an act of parliament that would force people to be more religious.  A lot of good it did.

Dickens may have portrayed organized religion as useless, but the text is not without more positive religious references.  His personal views on religion focused more on works than on faith, and his books may have reflected this (House 111).

Religion, in fact, might have offered a cure for the inhuman evils of utilitarianism. 

The use of Christian language was common in the nineteenth century (House 106).  Throughout Hard Times, Christian references are used in very specific places, often in opposition to utilitarianism. 

When, for example, will the dehumanizing, mathematical, utilitarian system finally end?  At the sound of the last trumpet (Dickens 74). 

More significantly, certain chapter titles and moments in the text suggest biblical passages.  “One Thing Needful,” for example, echoes the language of the tenth chapter of Luke.  Jesus enters the house of Mary and Martha.  Martha busies herself with housework, but Mary sits at Jesus’s feet.  When Martha scolds Mary about not helping, Jesus answers, “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.  But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41-42 KJV).  This passage is often interpreted as demonstrating the importance of putting the kingdom of God before the world.  If the kingdom of God is to be reached, then love must come before practical, utilitarian matters.  This aligns with the overall message of Dickens’ novel (Sexton). 

The book titles, “Sowing,” “Reaping,” and “Garnering” also echo religious language.  Also found in the tenth chapter of Luke is Jesus’s address to the seventy: “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth laborers into his harvest.  Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves” (Luke 10:2-3). 

Sissy Jupe exemplified this exhortation.  She, a model of Christian charity, was sent among the wolves of Coketown to heal the sick (Sexton).  Not just the physically sick, but the mentally and ethically sick as well.  She cares for Louisa after her breakdown at the end of the second book.  Louisa’s sister Jane perhaps owes it to Sissy’s care that she did not experience the same deadening of character that Gradgrind’s eminent practicality had forced upon Louisa.

The March 1842 edition of a Boston publication, The Christian Examiner, disagreed completely with the Remembrancer’s assessment.  Here, they stated that Dickens “shows us, more clearly than any other author whom we can name, what Fancy, baptized with a truly Christian spirit, may achieve towards reconciling man to man, and, through love of the brother whom we have seen, towards leading us to the purer love of the father, whom we have not seen” (House 112). 

The eighteen religious denominations in Coketown may have been useless, but Sissy demonstrated true Christian love.  Her character functioned as a stark contrast to heartless utilitarianist practices.  What is first principle of the science of Political Economy, M’Choakumchild wanted to know?  “To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me” was Sissy’s answer (Dickens 41).  A good first principle for all of us to follow. 

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Dover, 2001. Print.

House, Humphry. The Dickens World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. Print.  

Sexton, James. “Dickens’ Hard Times and Dystopia.” Victorian Web. 11 Oct. 2002. Accessed 11 Apr. 2017. Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/hardtimes/sexton1.html

A Practical Education

The first two chapter of Hard Times may be among the most memorable parts of the book.  The schoolmaster’s rant about facts, the bare and monotonous school room, the children addressed by inhumanizing numbers rather than names… and silly questions like “define a horse.” 

Apart from the other delightful aspects of education (the endless memorization of facts), the children also received practical education in how to decorate a house.

No decorative wallpaper!  No pictures of horses on the walls!  You don’t see horses on the walls in real life, it is ridiculous!  That is a fact!  And if you don’t see it in real life, you don’t do it! 

Girl number twenty, would you carpet your room with representations of flowers?

“They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy…”

“You are never to fancy!” (Dickens 5).

Poor girl number twenty.  And the rest of those children too, to have their imagination crushed and outlawed.  Not even my fourth grade teacher was quite that bad, and she was pretty scary.

The teacher in Gradgrind’s school, Mr. M’Choakumchild was certainly highly educated.

“He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.  He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions.  Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers.  He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin and Greek.  He knew all about the Water Sheds of the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass” (Dickens 6). 

Shortly after Hard Times was published, the paragraph describing M’Choakumchild was reprinted under the title “Description of a Modern Trained and Certificated Schoolmaster” (Collins 31).  Heaven help those poor students! 

Others saw nothing wrong with such a system.  After all, it isn’t a disadvantage for teachers to know a lot of facts, as long as they are also good at teaching (Collins 31).

But Dickens had done his research, and Gradgrind’s school and headmaster M’Choakumchild were not entirely fictional. 

Mr. M’Choakumchild had just come from a training college.   Training colleges for student-teachers were new and attracting attention in educational circles at the time the book was written.  Much had been expected from the first graduating group of Queen’s Scholars, since the results of the new educational scheme could be seen and judged.  Dickens himself was particularly interested in this new method of training teachers, since he had been urging that underqualified teachers should be removed from schools (Collins 29). 

School Inspectors, headmasters, and principals complained, however, that the education students were receiving focused too much on memorizing useless information and was not relevant to the real needs and abilities of the children (Collins 31).  Education with a mechanical, factorylike, fact-focused approach may have done wonders for expanding the capacity of the memory, but it was not succeeding at educating “the whole child” (Collins 32).  The excessive facts that students memorized were useless in real-life situations, while necessary skills like reason and judgement were undeveloped.  Such an education was simply not practical. What would the eminently practical Gradgrind have said?

The lessons taught in the school were also not entirely fictional.  Consider for a moment the incredibly silly question put to Sissy, who belonged to the equestrian troupe of a circus: “Girl number twenty, what is your definition of a horse?”

Sissy may have been dumbfounded by the absurdity of the question, but the prize pupil Bitzer was ready with an answer: “Quadruped. Graminivorous.  Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive.  Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs too.  Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron.  Age known by marks in mouth” (Dickens 3). 

This was actually not an uncommon practice in a nineteenth century English classroom.  It was an example of an “object lesson.”  Teacher’s manuals of the time were full of them.  One such example from an actual teacher’s manual instructs the teacher to direct students to “produce, draw, or imagine a cat.”  After the students imagine a cat, the lesson begins: “Having preceded thus far, determine the family Felinae, Lt. felis, English, feline.  Synopsis of Felinae. – Front teeth in each jaw, 6; canine teeth, 2 in each jaw, very powerful and formed for tearing; molar or cheek teeth, 4… Head, large and round; eyes… Feet formed for walking; toes on the fore feet, 5; hind feet, 4…” (Collins 36). 

Sound’s a bit like Bitzer’s description of a horse, right? 

What was the purpose of such silly questions?  Well, it was a distortion of the object lessons invented by Pestalozzi, who intended that the technique be used to teach students to observe and correctly describe nature (Collins 36-37).  But without the actual object in front of them, the students did no observing or describing what they observed.  The lesson became a simple repetition of facts given by the teacher.

Education in Gradgrind’s school focused on memorization of facts.  Sound even passingly familiar?  In an era where teaching is focused on standardized tests (which measure knowledge of facts, but not critical thinking skills), and classrooms with twenty or more children (where individual attention is impossible), the educational system portrayed Dicken’s Hard Times may have more in common with the realities of the present than we would like to admit. 

Works Cited

Collins, Philip. “Good Intentions and Bad Results.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hard Times. Edited by Paul Edward Gray. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969. Print.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Dover, 2001. Print.