A detail from a third-century mosaic of a scene from the circus — not the kind of circus in which Sissy Jupe’s father worked, but the races of the Circus Maximus in Rome — showing Pupillus, representing the Blues against the Whites, Greens and Reds. Readers of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) will recall how Wackford Squeers drew upon the horse for ‘practical education’ at Dotheboys Hall, his privately-run academy in Yorkshire, so the boys would do his chores for him: see The Squeers Method. Now in Hard Times (1854) we find a gentleman from the Government choosing the same topic to brainwash children with Government statistics in readiness for their chores in the nation’s factories. It is not hard to spot Dickens’s moral.
Part 1 of 3
NOW, let me ask you girls and boys [said the gentleman from the Government], Would you paper a room with representations of horses?’
After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, sir!’ Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, sir!’ — as the custom is, in these examinations.
‘Of course, No. Why wouldn’t you?’
A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would paint it.
‘You must paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.
‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind,* ‘whether you like it or not. Don’t tell us you wouldn’t paper it. What do you mean, boy?’
‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality — in fact? Do you?’
‘Yes, sir!’ from one half. ‘No, sir!’ from the other.
* Thomas Gradgrind, Dickens tells us, had all but retired after making his pile in hardware as a wholesaler; and now that he had built himself a substantial if darksome residence named Stone Lodge, he was now looking to be named as a candidate for election to Parliament. The school was of his own founding, intended as a model of progressive education.
Précis
In his 1854 novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens took us into Thomas Gradgrind’s model school, where ‘a gentleman from the Government’ invited the class to tell him whether they would decorate a room with a wallpaper emblazoned with horses. At first some children said Yes, others No, but by watching the gentleman’s facial expressions most learnt to answer No. (58 / 60 words)
Part Two
‘The New School’ by Thomas Brooks (1818-1892), painted in 1854. That same year, Dickens published Hard Times, hurling himself (as in his pro-life story The Chimes ten years earlier) at Utilitarianism, the political ideology which saw Government experts regulate everything from welfare and education to the birthrate, all for ‘the common good’ — crushing the spirit of the working man, but further lining some well-lined pockets and ushering in “the great public-office Millennium, when Commissioners should reign upon earth”. See A New Year’s Resolution. Dickens loathed Utilitarianism as the annihilation of enterprise, imagination and moral responsibility, and as one of those ‘monomanias’ that impel self-righteous campaigners to treat the public like an irresponsible child: see The Great Baby.
‘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.
Précis
Encouraged by his progress, the gentleman from the Government went on to the subject of floral carpets, and whether they were appropriate for the home. This time he was rewarded with a more gratifying chorus of ‘right answers’; but there were still some rebels, among them Sissy Jupe, who was ordered to stand up and explain herself. (57 / 60 words)
Part Three
‘Interior of Hjula Weaving Mill’ (1888) by Norwegian artist Wilhelm Peters (1851–1935). In Household Words for 1852, Dickens published an article by Theodore Buckley (1825-56) praising the Child-centred view of education at Gable College: “To mature the germs of natural thought, not to forcibly engraft a conventional set of ideas upon a repulsive stem”. Utilitarian policy, by contrast, was Society-centred, and unblushingly restated by Prime Minister James Callaghan in 1976: “To equip children to the best of their ability for a lively, constructive, place in society, and also to fit them to do a job of work.” In Hard Times, Dickens warned it would end in a conflicted, brainwashed public and a society where a man’s worth was his labour value.
“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.”
Précis
Sissy’s defence of floral carpets did not impress the gentleman from the Government; he was pleased, however, that she played into his hands by admitting to a penchant for ‘fancy’. She was, he scolded, to be ruled by Facts alone, and he looked forward to the day when a Government commission for fact would make all the public do likewise. (60 / 60 words)
