Book One Sowing

Chapter One
The One Thing Needed
“What I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.
Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals
upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any use to them. This is the principle on which I bring up
my own children, and this is the principie on which I bring up these children. Keep to Facts, sir!”
The scene was a plain, bare schoolroom, and the speaker’s square finger emphasised his remarks.
The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its
base, while his eyes were in two dark caves beneath this walt. The emphasis was helped by the
speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin and firm. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice,
which was hard, dry and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which stood up
on the side of his head like trees. The speaker’s square coat, square legs, squarc shoulders all helped
the emphasis. Even his collar seemed to take him by the throat, like a hard fact.
“In this life, sir, we want nothing but Facts, nothing but Facts.”
The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all moved back a little.
They looked along the desks full of éhildren, those little vessels arranged in order, ready to have
litres of facts poured into them until they were full to the top.
Chapter Two
Murdering the Innocents
In his mind, Thomas Gradgrind always introduced himself in the same terms:
“Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds
upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing extra left over. A man who will not even
allow the possibility of something left over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir. With a ruler and a pair of scales
always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you
exactly what it comes to. It is a matter of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to
get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, but into
the head of’ Thomas Gradgrind, no, sir!”
Thomas Gradgrind fixed his eyes eagerly on the children sitting before him, who were to be filled
so fuIl of facts. He was a kind of big gun loaded with facts, prepared to blow them out at the
children at one shot.
“Girl number twenty,” said Mr Gradgrind, squarely pointing with bis square finger. I don’t know
that girl. Who is that girl?”
“Sissy Jupe, sir,” explained number twenty, standing up with a very red face.
“Sissy is not a name,” said Mr Gradgrind.
“Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.”
“lt’s father who calls me Sissy, Sir,” replied the young girl in a trembling voice.
“Then he shouldn’t do it,” said Mr Gradgrind.
“Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?”
“He trains horses, if you please, sfr. For the circus.”
Mr Gradgrind looked annoyed, and waved off the objectionable profession with his hand.
 “We don’t want to know anything about circuses here. Now, Cecilia, give me your definítion of a
horse.”
Sissy Jupe was thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.
“Girl number twenty unable to define a horse,” said Mr Gradgrind. “Girl number twenty knows no
facts about one of the commonest of animals. Some boy’s definition of a horse, Bitzer, yours.”
The square finger, moving here and there,
Chapter Five
Coketown
Coketown was a town of red brick, or of brick that would be red if the smoke and ashes allowed it.
It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which srnoke wound round and round into the
air, endlessly.
It had a black canal in it, and a dirty river. There were huge factory buildings, full of windows,
where there was a knocking and a trembling all day long. The arm of the steam engine worked
steadily up and down like the head of a sad elephant in a state of madness.
Coketown contained several large streets, all very like each other, and many small streets still
more like one another, inhabited by people equally like each other. They all went in and out at the
same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavement, to do the same work. To them every
day was Se same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year was the same as the last and the next.
Coketown was a town of fact. There was no fancy in it. The churches were built like factories.
The hospital looked like the prison. All the public notices in the town were painted alike in plain
black and white letters.
Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material features of the town, and fact, fact, fact everywhere in
the immaterial. The school was all fact. Relations between master and man in the factories were all
fact, and everything was fact between birth and death. And what you couldn’t state in figures did
not exist. What you could not buy cheap and sell dear should not exist.
Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any likeness between the Çoketown people and the little
Gradgrinds? Is it possible that they, like the young Gradgrinds, needed some amusement?
On their way to find Mr Jupe, Mr Bounderby and Mr Gradgrincl met Cecilia Jupe. She had been
sent out by her father to buy some oil to rub himself with. He had hurt himself in the circus ring,
she said. She lcd them to a small inn, called the Pegasus’s Arms, where her father and the
other circus people were staying.