“SO you would carpet your room — or your husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband — with representations of flowers, would you?” said the gentleman. “Why would you?”
“If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,” returned the girl.*
“And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?”
“It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy — ”
“Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,” cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. “That’s it! You are never to fancy.”
“You are not, Cecilia Jupe,” Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, “to do anything of that kind.”
“Fact, fact, fact!” said the gentleman. And “Fact, fact, fact!” repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
“You are to be in all things regulated and governed,” said the gentleman, “by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.”*
* Sissy Jupe thus artlessly rebukes the gentleman from the Government for his gratingly patriarchal view of community property.
* Sixteen years after Dickens published his story, the Education Act of 1870 established some 2,000 rate-supported elected school boards, with powers to enforce attendance up to the age of 13. Control of the curriculum soon followed and it was not only pupils who could no longer think for themselves. “The State,” wrote former Inspector of Schools Edmond Holmes in 1911, “in prescribing a syllabus which was to be followed, in all the subjects of instruction, by all the schools in the country, without regard to local or personal considerations, was guilty of one capital offence. It did all his thinking for the teacher.” Dickens indicated that Mr M’Choakumchild (a Victorian way of writing a Scottish name such as McChesney) had already had all his own initiative trained out of him. “He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.”