“Yet, father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat in regard to them, I should have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more contented, more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes I have. Now, hear what I have come to say. With a hunger and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a moment appeased; with an ardent impulse toward some region where rules, and figures, and definitions were not quite absolute, I have grown up, battling every inch of my way.
“In this strife I have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel into a demon. What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting what I have not learned; and my dismal resource has been to think that life would soon go by, and that nothing in it could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest.”
When she had finished the story of her acquaintance with Mr. Harthouse and his influence over her, she said: “All that I know is, your philosophy and your teaching will not save me. Now, father, you have brought me to this. Save me by some other means.”
Dickens pictured Mr. Gradgrind as a good, earnest man, who desired to do only good for his family.
In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise rod, and in staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do great things. Within the limits of his short tether he had tumbled about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company he kept.
A careful study of what Louisa said to her father will show that Dickens had made a profound study of Froebel’s philosophy of the feelings and the imagination which is now the dominating theory of psychology, and that he clearly understood what Wordsworth meant when he wrote:
“Whose heart the holy forms of young imagination had kept pure.”
Sissy Jupe failed utterly to satisfy Mr. M’Choakumchild at school. She could not remember facts and dates. She could not be crammed successfully, and she had a very dense head for figures. “She actually burst into tears when required (by the mental process) to name immediately the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteen pence halfpenny,” so Mr. Gradgrind told her she would have to leave school.
“I can not disguise from you, Jupe,” said Mr. Gradgrind, knitting his brow, “that the result of your probation there has disappointed me—has greatly disappointed me. You have not acquired, under Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild, anything like that amount of exact knowledge which I look for. You are extremely deficient in your facts. Your acquaintance with figures is very limited. You are altogether backward, and below the mark.”
“I am sorry, sir,” she returned; “but I know it is quite true. Yet I have tried hard, sir.”