Dickens uses emphasis in a surprising way, in that he makes the reader completely aware of the reasons for using emphasis and its effects. Usually emphasis is made somewhat unconscious to the reader – words or phrases are used which highlight certain aspects that the writer would like the reader to pay closer attention to, but we are never told that this is happening. However, when describing Mr Gradgrind, Dickens does not just use emphasis – ‘the speaker’s square wall of a forehead…square coat, square legs, square shoulders’ – but also informs the reader of why these descriptions are important:
‘The speaker’s square forefinger emphasised his observations… the emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth… his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with and unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was – all helped the emphasis.’
In my opinion this shows how much dislike Dickens has for the character
of Mr Gradgrind. Dickens does not want to leave the reader in any doubt of Gradgrind’s monotonous, dry and inflexible personality, and therefore emphasises these qualities very blatantly and with the reader’s full knowledge.
Gradgrind’s role is to fill the children in his school with facts, and to
persuade them harshly to accept nothing that isn’t fact, to the extent that, when faced with Cecilia Jupe, he reprimands her for giving her name as ‘Sissy’ – what she is called at home – because Sissy is not a fact, whereas Cecilia, being her full name, is. Unable to relate to anything that is not basic fact, he also makes a point of categorising Sissy’s father into ‘a veterinary surgeon, a farrier and horse-breaker.’ This is not exactly the description that Sissy gives, but it is evident that Gradgrind has great difficulty in dealing with things that have not been properly categorised into the correct drawer of his brain first.
Chapter 2 is headed ‘murdering the innocents’, referring to murdering the imaginations of the children, by treating them as ‘little vessels…ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them’. However, facts are all the children are filled with. They are not given the opportunity to learn anything about the real world, as is seen when Sissy Jupe and Bitzer are brought into the story. Sissy is new to the school and lives with a travelling circus, where her father (as categorised by Gradgrind) looks after the horses. When asked, “Give me your definition of a horse”, however, she is unable to comply. She presumably knows everything about horses in reality – their likes and dislikes, how to care for and treat them etc. – and yet does not know one ‘fact’ as specified by Mr Gradgrind. Dissatisfied with Sissy’s inability to answer, Gradgrind calls on an older member of the class, Bitzer, who on command, much like a clockwork toy, recites a string of facts which describe horses in the abstract form:
“Quaduped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive…”
Sissy Jupe is new to the school, and the differences between her and the existing pupils – represented by Bitzer – are striking, in a physical way as well as a mental one. After Sissy sits down the reader is told that she and Bitzer are seated one at each end of a sunbeam. However, while Sissy’s beauty is illuminated – ‘the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a more lustrous colour from the sun’ – for Bitzer, on the other hand, the beam of light highlights his emptiness, in a way, and the sunbeam is described to ‘draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed.’
The ‘colour’ of Bitzer does not just refer to his pale complexion, but also to the little colour he now contains inside. Dickens writes that Bitzer ‘was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.’ It is almost as if all colour – all imagination, all curiosity, all childlike tendencies – have been forced out to make room for yet more of Mr Gradgrind’s facts.
Because of this, the reader is immediately sympathetic to Bitzer. One feels that his childhood mind has been stolen away from him, and replaced with photocopied pages from Gradgrind’s own mind.
The situation of Sissy Jupe evokes more worry than sympathy – worry that her innocent and free imagination and mind will soon too be broken by Mr Gradgrind, and rebuilt into another of his fact-processing machines. The reader is therefore encouraged to feel, although sympathetic to the whole class, particularly protective of Sissy because of the impending fate that will befall her carefree, imaginative and above all childlike world.
We are also encouraged to feel sympathy for Gradgrind’s own children, who are ‘educated’ in the same way as his other pupils. However, his daughter Louisa has somehow managed to retain at least some of her imagination, and takes her brother to peep through the fence at the circus that has arrived in town. (Bringing with it Sissy Jupe). She is reprimanded severely for this, and her father has an obvious complete inability to understand in any way what could have driven her to such a ‘degraded position’, as to be interested in something that was so clearly not fact.
The fact that Gradgrind educates his own children in this way shows how fervently he believes in his methods, although he gives the impression of believing because he has been programmed to, rather than because he thinks it will be best for the children.
All in all, Dickens’ view of the school as run by Mr Gradgrind is an extremely depressing one, of a place where children are stripped of their imaginations and childlike demeanours to make room for facts which are, as proved by Sissy Jupe, mostly useless in reality.
