is in fact the daughter of a circus performer who works extensively with horses. Despite her failure to know that horses are graminivorous quadrupeds--perhaps she merely thought of them as grain-eating, four-legged animals--we may suspect that she has a good deal more practical knowledge of horses than does Bitzer. And, in case we have missed all these points, Dickens has reinforced them with his inimitable names: there is Gradgrind himself, and his schoolmaster, Mr. M'Choakumchild. Like another popular and prolific English writer, William Shakespeare, Dickens was uninhibited in the use of broad comedy.
But what led Dickens to this particular exercise in satire? And, indeed, how broad and exaggerated was the satire? The school of Facts, supposedly to be presented unvarnished and untroubled by theory, much less "fancy," was in fact a major trend in nineteenth-century science and social thought. The belief was widespread that by accumulating sufficient facts, and by the avoidance of either theoretical systems or sentimentality, that not only could the natural world be mastered, but the conditions of human life could be transformed and improved. Hard Times, originally published in 1854, was Dicken's attack on this attitude, which in so far as its application to social life was concerned he believed to be not only stifling, but in a broader sense unrealistic.
The impact of this attitude on science itself is not something that Dickens considers; it lies outside his area of concern. But the
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