ves a minute and hilarious recitation of his physical presence. He is a genuine square, from his forefinger to the cut of his coat, looking down on the roomful of schoolchildren, "the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim" (2). A few paragraphs later, Dickens has turned to a grimmer analogy: "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" (2). It is an amusing picture, but it is alarming at the same time, and this is precisely the author's point. For one whose youthful circumstances had blasted him prematurely from his own childhood and who had nevertheless managed to acquire a substantial education of much more than merely irrefutable facts, this kind of educational approach (prevalent in Dickens' day and still with its share of followers in the late 20th century) must have seemed particularly repugnant.
The speaker, Mr. Thomas Gradgrind of Coketown,
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