The One Thing Needful — Hard Times

Hard Times opens with a manifesto, not a plot. In a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, an unnamed speaker tells the schoolmaster that what he wants is Facts: teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts, plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts, he insists, and he brings up his own children on the same principle. Stick to Facts, sir. The scene is the book's keynote before Gradgrind is even named.

Dickens makes the philosophy physical. The speaker's square forefinger underscores every sentence on the schoolmaster's sleeve. His forehead is a wall, his mouth wide and hard set, his voice inflexible and dictatorial, his bristling head like a plantation of firs or a crust of knobs, as if it scarcely had warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. Square coat, square legs, square shoulders, even a neckcloth trained to take him by the throat like a stubborn fact: the man looks less like a person than a geometry lesson stored in human form.

He repeats that in this life we want nothing but Facts, and the three grown persons present step back and sweep their eyes over the inclined plane of little vessels arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they are full to the brim. No child speaks. The system has already decided that humanity is a container problem, and the room is waiting to prove it.