The results were, as might be expected, disastrous. His son Tom became a monster of selfishness, sensuality, and criminality. Dickens uses the name “whelp” to describe him, and, in a satirical manner, accounts for his meanness and weaknesses in the following summary:
It was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been brought up under one continuous system of unnatural restraint should be a hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom. It was very strange that a young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for five consecutive minutes should be incapable at last of governing himself; but so it was with Tom. It was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.
When Mr. Gradgrind became convinced that he had been altogether wrong in his educational ideals and was endeavouring to explain the matter to Mr. Bounderby, that gentleman gave expression to the views of many people of his time. Fortunately there are few Bounderbys now, but there are some even yet.
“Well, well!” returned Mr. Gradgrind, with a patient, even a submissive air. And he sat for a little while pondering. “Bounderby, I see reason to doubt whether we have ever quite understood Louisa.”
“What do you mean by we?”
“Let me say, I, then,” he returned, in answer to the coarsely blurted question; “I doubt whether I have understood Louisa. I doubt whether I have been quite right in the manner of her education.”
“There you hit it,” returned Bounderby. “There I agree with you. You have found it out at last, have you? Education! I’ll tell you what education is—to be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon the shortest allowance of everything except blows. That’s what I call education.”
In his last book—Edwin Drood—Dickens pictured Mr. Honeythunder as a type of coercive philanthropists, whom he regarded as intolerable as well as intolerant nuisances—people who would use force to compel everybody to think and act as they are told to think and act by the Honeythunders.
In speaking of Mr. Honeythunder and his class of philanthropists, Rev. Canon Crisparkle said:
It is a most extraordinary thing that these philanthropists are so given to seizing their fellow-creatures by the scruff of the neck, and (as one may say) bumping them into the paths of peace.