“Now, what I want is, Facts.” So begins Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, with the words of Thomas Gradgrind, a semi-retired merchant and would-be politician. Gradgrind, who is also a school reformer, is speaking to the young pupils at his school about his pedagogical philosophy, which amounts to Facts, not Nonsense, where the latter is rather all-inclusive: folk tales, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, free will, a morality based on something other than self-interest – all Nonsense.
Published in 1854, was Dickens’ biting satire of those who used “figures and averages, and nothing else”. Those people were the representatives of what Dickens called “the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time” – namely, the utilitarian philosophy of the late Jeremy Bentham and his followers, which was at that time ascendant in Victorian Britain. Dickens’ satire was memorable enough
