The Novel "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens

Sheds coat in mould; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs,

withal. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron.

jump on known by marks in mouth." Thus (and some(prenominal) more)

Charles demon was not the subtlest of writers in making his points. In severalize to help us fully appreciate the emptiness of Bitzer's knowledge of horses, he has already informed us that the hapless little girl Number Twenty is in accompaniment the daughter of a circus performer who works extensively with horses. Despite her ruin to know that horses are graminivorous quadrupeds--perhaps she merely thought of them as grain-eating, four-legged animals--we may suspect that she has a good deal more hard-nosed knowledge of horses than does Bitzer. And, in case we have missed every these points, Dickens has reinforced them with his inimitable names: there is Gradgrind himself, and his schoolmaster, Mr. M'Choakumchild. comparable another popular and prolific English writer, William Shakespeare, Dickens was uninhibited in the use of broad comedy.

But what led Dickens to this particular exercise in satire? And, indeed, how broad and exaggerated was the satire? The school of Facts, gaugedly to be presented unvarnished and unattackable by theory, much less "fancy," was in fact a major trend in nineteenth-century comprehension and social thought. The principle was widespread that by accumulating sufficient facts, and by the avoidance of either

[nutriments] in an economical point of view, and with

smallest well-observed fact ought to be gathered, if it

The impact of this attitude on science itself is not something that Dickens considers; it lies outside his area of concern. But the history of nineteenth-century science demonstrates, in fact (the pun is unavoidable), that the school of Facts was capable of booster cable to genuine advances in understanding, but that it also contained severe essential limitations. The accumulation of facts would contribute to the advancement of science, but only in the hands of those scientists who rejected the philsophical assumption that Facts were all that was required.

poverty-stricken fellow-men by precise and definite

them the point is not how to excite an appetite, but

chain of being, evolution [my fierceness], the nature of

speculative and metaphysical, and hence unfit subjects

subtle fluids in the body, phrenology, etc.

One of the goals of the exhibitors was to test whether the working classes could be trusted to track through the exhibit without running riot and wrecking it; they were ostensibly gratified by the results. Whether the poor were "instructed" by the exhibitions, any more than young Bitzer was by his knowledge that a horse is a graminivorous quadruped, is, however, an unanswered question.

By not-unreasonable extension, in terms of this view, we might suppose that even "the smallest well-observed fact ought to be" taught, so that the first particular(prenominal) that Bitzer provides in his recitation of facts about horses is a description of their teeth. Now, the emphasis on fact perhaps had some historical justification as a reaction to the somewhat reckless theorizing that had too frequently characterized science in earlier periods, when "systems," to use the eighteenth-century word, not infrequently ran so far beyond the facts available to project them that they ceased to have any serious analytical or predictive value. But in his em
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