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.