Murdering the Innocents — Hard Times

Thomas Gradgrind names himself at last: a man of facts and calculations who carries scales in his pocket and refuses to let two and two make anything over four. In his school he treats pupils like little pitchers to be filled, loaded to the muzzle with facts and ready to blow childhood away. Girl number twenty, Sissy Jupe, cannot give the approved definition of a horse. Bitzer can: quadruped, graminivorous, teeth counted, coat shed in spring. Sissy blushes deeper; Bitzer, pale and bloodless, wins the room.

A government gentleman runs the lesson like a boxing match. Would you paper a room with horses? Carpet it with flowers? The class learns to answer No on cue. Sissy alone says yes to flowers because she is fond of them. She tries to explain that pictures would not crush real blossoms. She is stopped cold: you must not fancy. Fact, fact, fact. Taste is only another name for fact. Soon a board of commissioners will force the people to be a people of fact, with walls and plates covered in primary-color mathematical figures because birds do not perch on crockery in reality.

Then Mr. M'Choakumchild begins. He is one of a hundred forty schoolmasters stamped from the same factory, fingertips crowded with every subject on the schedule. Dickens jokes that if he had learned less he might teach more. He inspects the children like Morgiana checking jars in the Forty Thieves. The chapter closes with the book's first honest question: when the boiling store fills each vessel to the brim, will the teacher always kill Fancy outright, or only maim and distort him?