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At a time when technology permits children’s books and picturebooks to be available online and through digital devices, when we have just learnt of Paddington stories downloadable from iTunes, and reports have revealed a lack of skills in digital technology among publishers, I have been reading a book which shows how little some things have changed since 1854.
The first chapters of Dickens’s Hard Times, a satire on Utilitarian principles of education, concern, as many of you will remember, Mr Gradgrind’s visit to a school, where he insists upon the importance of facts, and denounces “fancy” or imagination. We learn this about Gradgrind’s own children:
“No little Gradgrind had every learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear … No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.”
When two of the little (in fact teenage) Gradgrinds are caught by their father “peeping at the circus” through the back of a tent, their horrified parent says to his wife: “I should as soon have expected to find my children reading poetry.”
It would of course be nonsense to argue that the notion that children should encounter neither stories nor poems in schools has currency today. And yet there remains something oddly resonant about the idea, which the “eminently practical” Gradgrind espouses, of a quantifiable education – one in which we value what can be marked and measured. Hard Times is a warning against a Back-to-Basics notion of instilling facts in children, to the exclusion of fiction. Those children’s authors who are currently campaigning for books in schools, for stories over worksheets, might find inspiration in this novel and an echo of their political opponents in Gradgrind and Bounderby.
Dickens’s attitude is very much in the spirit of Michael Morpurgo and Michael Rosen. It is gratifying to know that Dickens thought about nursery rhymes and fairy tales, that he recognised the importance of introducing children to story, imagination and evocative language at a young age, and that he cared as much about this as he cared about the mechanisation of the factories. And his association of solely fact-based learning with the monotony and inhumanity of a production line is worth remembering 155 years on.
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