Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

46. Hope for the Greater Good--Dickens, Mill!

Ethics versus Utility in Dickens' Hard Times and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography

   The quotation from Westminster Review reads as follows:

        "Not what a boy or girl can repeat by rote, but what they have learned to love and admire, is what forms their character. The chivalrous spirit has almost disappeared from books of education, and the popular novels of the day teach nothing but . . . worldliness . . . and for the first time perhaps in history, the youth of both sexes of the educated classes are universally growing up unromantic. What will come in mature age from such a youth the world has not yet had time to see" (Fielding 113).

            Here, John Stuart Mill demonstrates the dramatic need for an educational system capable of not merely conveying to its students a factual, utilitarian training, but more especially a framework designed to stimulate the imagination and creativity of its youth. Without the joy and happiness from one's imagination, one can never experience the emotional and spiritual fulfillment essential in sustaining a meaningful existence. Unfortunately, both Mill and author Charles Dickens arrive at this tragic conclusion. Mill's Autobiography recounts his heartbreaking losses, and Dickens' persona Louisa in his educational satire Hard Times both suggest the need for man to break away from the strict utilitarian standards prevailing in British society. Their coming-of-age serves as a desperate appeal for reform. This pattern of maturation first manifests itself in the childhood instruction of both youngsters by each one's staunch "Benthamite" fathers, i. e. 1) famous philosopher James Mill as the father of John Stuart and 2) Sir Thomas Gradgrind as Louisa's factual paternal figure. As K. J. Fielding notes in his article "Mill and Gradgrind," the need for precisely such a synthesis between a harsh, analytic empiricism and a light, fanciful romanticism serves a vital function. Ultimately, Stuart and Louisa undergo their respective transformations in order to develop socially and emotionally. Thus, symbolically, both works contain similar patterns of action in which the basic conflict occurs between the mind, or intellect, and the heart. Critic F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition and Edgar H. Johnson in his "Critique on Materialism" both emphasize how Dickens deliberately satirizes Mill through the exaggerated antics of Gradgrind (Fielding 111-114).

           Stuart's and Louisa's corresponding maturational progress through their educational training, loneliness and isolation, consequent mental crises, emotional transformation and broadened life-view parallel the stages of loss and redemption. As both characters progress toward social and psychological stability, they undergo similar conflicts concerning mind-and-soul, and realism-and-idealism. In considering early educational training, Stuart recollects that education for his children posed one of his father's chief concerns. In fact, the nature of that system proved quite rigorous. Mill, at one point, cannot recollect when he initially began learning the Greek vocabulary because he was so young. Consequently, during the first twelve years of his life, he studied languages, literature, accounts of civilizations and even attempted an individual analysis, synthesis and translation of history from original Greek and Roman literature (Mill 3). Mill also traveled abroad to study in Europe (Mill 21).

           Louisa, similarly, develops in a highly rigid atmosphere in which one's mental faculties supersede all other attainments. Therefore, her educational indoctrination parallels the factual, scientific baptism into the "historical proofs" and laws concerning a mechanistic systemology, as taught by Gradgrind in his observatory-like chamber of his "matter-of-fact home" (Mill 19). Just as Millsianism, Gradgrind's philosophy encompasses only those empirically-proven "realities" verifiable solely through experiment, observation, or analysis. Dickens ridicules placing excessive emphasis on education at a time in a child's life when love and tenderness should predominate. Louisa remarks that there "were five young Gradgrinds, and they were model every one," presumably because "they had been lectured at from their tenderest years" and "coursed like little hares." In fact, she says "Almost as soon as they could run along, they had been made to run to the lecture room" (Dickens 18). Here, the satire proves evident because they should be running to their parents' arms for affection, not for educational instruction. In his Great Political Thinkers, William Ebenstein adeptly summarizes Mill's account of his early education from his father thus: