Mr. Gradgrind proceeded to ask a few questions of the pupils, who in this new school were to be known by numbers—so much more statistical and mathematical—and not by their names.
As he stood before the pupils, who were seated in rows on a gallery, “he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.”
In the last sentence Dickens reveals the true philosophy of sustaining and developing natural and therefore productive interest, and explains how, after destroying it, teachers try to galvanize it into spasmodic activity.
“Girl number twenty,” said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger. “I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?”
“Sissy Jupe, sir,” explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and courtesying.
“Sissy is not a name,” said Mr. Gradgrind. “Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.”
“It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,” returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another courtesy.
“Then he has no business to do it,” said Mr. Gradgrind. “Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?”
“He belongs to the horse riding, if you please, sir.”
Mr. Gradgrind frowned and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.