LITERARY STUDIES

Text Analysis

Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)

BOOK THE FIRST “SOWING”

Chapter 1 “The One Thing Needful”

‘NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but  Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out  everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals  upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is  the principle on which I bring up  my own children, and this is the  principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’ 

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve…The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person  present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined  plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have  imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the  brim.

Chapter 2 “Murdering The Innocents”

THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and  calculations. A man who proceeds up on the principle that two and two  are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing  for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir - peremptorily Thomas -  Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the  multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind - no, sir!  In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself,  whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and  girls,’ for ‘sir,’ Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to  the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts. 

Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood  at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged  with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his  square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’

‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.  ‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy.  Call yourself Cecilia.’

Give me your definition of a horse.’

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty  possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of  animals! Some boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.’

… ‘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.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse  is.’

Chapter 5 “The Keynote”

COKETOWN, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune. 

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.