‘OF course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. ‘Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’ Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.
‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the gentleman.* ‘Now, I’ll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?’
There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.
‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.
Sissy blushed, and stood up.*
* In Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), down-to-earth headmistress Mrs Goddard had no truck with “new principles and new systems”, with the consequence that her school was popular with children and parents alike. See A Proper Education.
* Has poor Sissy not suffered enough this morning? Mr Gradgrind has demanded that she answer only to Cecilia, as ‘Sissy is not a name’. Then she blurted out that her father worked as a circus equestrian or trick-rider, shocking Mr Gradgrind (who had no wish for the other children to know that there was so frivolous a thing as a circus) to the core, and forcing him to coach her into acknowledging that her father was in fact ‘a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horse-breaker’. Then Sissy compounded her shame by proving quite unable to supply a textbook definition of a horse. The abstract zoological checklist Gradgrind wanted was then smugly reeled off by young master Bitzer, who incidentally grows up to be a self-righteous paid informer at Bounderby’s Bank. Little could any of them guess that within days Sissy would be living under Thomas Gradgrind’s roof.