What happens in Book the First of Hard Times?
Chapter 2 begins in the schoolroom run by the unnamed schoolmaster, later revealed as M'Choakumchild, where Gradgrind's philosophy of Fact is immediately put into action. Gradgrind calls on "Girl number twenty" — Sissy Jupe, who is the daughter of a circus horse-rider — to define a horse. She struggles to do so. Bitzer, a pale boy sitting across the room in the sunlight, recites a zoological definition with robotic accuracy: "Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, including twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisors..." The contrast between the two children is starkly drawn. Gradgrind then invites a government inspector — a third man — to speak to the class, and together they quiz the children about wallpaper and carpet, insisting that rooms should never feature images of flowers or horses, because in reality, people don’t walk on flowers and horses don’t climb walls. Fancy, imagination, and wonder are systematically crushed. The chapter ends with M'Choakumchild starting his lesson, with Dickens comparing him to Morgiana from Ali Baba, poised to defeat forty thieves — except here, the thieves are the children's natural ability to imagine.
Analysis
Dickens titles this chapter with barely concealed outrage — "Murdering the Innocents" references the biblical massacre, presenting utilitarian education as state violence against childhood. The craft move showcases sustained irony: Sissy Jupe, who grows up around horses, struggles to define one to Gradgrind's satisfaction, while Bitzer, who has never interacted with a horse, recites its taxonomy flawlessly. Dickens frames this not as comedy but as a critique. The imagery is sharp and heavy with meaning: Sissy is portrayed as dark, warm, and colorful; Bitzer, in contrast, is washed out by the same sunlight, suggesting that the Gradgrind system has drained him of life. The schoolroom transforms into a factory floor, where children are numbered instead of named, and their inner lives are seen as flaws to be fixed.
The government inspector — "the third gentleman" — serves as a satirical representative of Benthamite policy, with his anonymity being intentional: he is interchangeable and institutional. The sequence involving wallpaper and carpet showcases Dickens at his most sharply humorous, revealing the absurdity of the argument (you must not imagine what you cannot literally do) and highlighting the philosophical shortcomings of strict empiricism when it comes to human experience.
The final simile about Morgiana marks the chapter's tonal shift — moving from satire to elegy. M'Choakumchild isn't inherently a villain but rather a product of the same system, educated in "one hundred and forty other subjects" yet potentially more dangerous because of it. Dickens holds the system accountable, not just the individual.
Key quotes from Book the First
“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”
Bitzer delivers his definition of a horse in response to the question Sissy Jupe could not answer, embodying the Gradgrind ideal of Fact stripped of all feeling or lived experience.
“You are never to fancy... You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets.”
The government inspector instructs the class on the proper principles of interior decoration, his logic a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarian literalism.
“He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one by one, to see what they contained. Say, good M'Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within?”
Dickens closes the chapter by addressing M'Choakumchild directly, the fairy-tale allusion casting the schoolmaster as an unwitting executioner of the children's imagination.