Dickens knew that an idea can be dangerous. Unlike George Eliot, he was familiar with the hold of abstractions on human flesh and blood; it is not surprising that Dostoievsky read him with eagerness and perhaps learned from him. Still, the incubus or succuba preying on Dickens’ people is usually nothing clearly identifiable as a theory or concise program. The great case to the contrary is Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times. From almost the first page, we see how the utilitarian doctrines that have taken possession of his brain are blighting the natural life of his family, how they wither any hope of instruction in the model school he has set up in Coketown. Here he is, in the schoolroom, lecturing the schoolmaster. “Now what I want 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. This is the principle upon which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle upon which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!” Then: “Girl number twenty...Give me your definition of a horse.” Sissy Jupe is too frightened to say anything. “Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!”
Mr. Gradgrind’s close friend and business associate is Mr. Bounderby, who has his own idée fixe and global explanation, “The turtle soup and the gold spoon. And the venison.” It is apparent that these two upholders of the social order are mad, just as mad as the terrorists of The Possessed. The reader is meant to understand that Gradgrind and Bounderby are dangerously insane and that at the same time they are perfectly normal, that is, that many other people share the maniacal ideas they express. Bounderby is a wicked bounder, but Gradgrind is not altogether a bad man—a philanthropist, even, according to his lights; he actually has girls in his school.
It seems odd at first glance that the idea that has got hold of Mr. Gradgrind should be named by him “Facts.” The nature of an idea, surely, is to be abstract, i.e., the polar opposite of the concrete, of the plurality of facts, living and dead, each different from the next, that the world consists of. But we soon understand that Mr. Gradgrind’s facts are peculiar, not like the ones we know. Here is a definition of a horse, given by a boy pupil, that he is able to commend: “Quadruped. Gramnivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in the mouth.” This sounds like the idea of a horse rather than the fact of a horse. It is as though a drawer labeled “Horse” containing miscellaneous pieces of information, dried and filleted for better storage, had been obediently opened in the filing-cabinet that constitutes the star pupil’s mind. The dehydrated facts Mr. Gradgrind favors add up to a flesh-less abstraction—horse in general.
The reason for this curious taste of his is evident in his character: he insists on being in control. And here something of importance for my subject emerges. Ideas are utilitarian. They have a purpose. They are formed in consciousness with a regulatory aim, which is to gain control of the swarming minutiae of experience, give them order and direction. That is Mr. Gradgrind to a T. He believes in education and the extension of knowledge. He wants to see laws formulated for every department of life that will push back the ever-shrinking areas of ignorance, light up dark corners with modern illumination, keep the streets of the mind patrolled. In the interests of thoroughgoing enlightenment, he has forbidden the reading of “idle story-books” in his house. “Idle imagination,” he and Bounderby have concluded, is the chief obstacle to the establishment of reason’s rule in the young.
Well, it is natural that he should be hostile to novels and natural, in turn, that the novel should be hostile to him, even when it happens that he is not a bad man and means well. If we take Mr. Gradgrind as representing in caricatural form not just his own utilitarian school of thinking (based, after all, on the greatest good of the greatest number) but the mental faculty that is continuously active in formulating ideas, laws, generalizations, then we can look on the novel, which is wedded to minutiae, as his sworn enemy. All art, of course, objects to the continuously active Mr. Gradgrind, but the novel is best armed to do battle with him in that it appears to have one foot in his camp because of the mass of particulars, resembling his “Facts,” that it mobilizes for its own purposes.