being alarming creatures to stalk about in any human society,
the eighteen denominations incessantly scratched one another's faces and pulled
one another's hair by way of agreeing on the steps to be taken for their
improvement - which they never did; a surprising circumstance, when the happy
adaptation of the means to the end is considered. Still, although they differed
in every other particular, conceivable and inconceivable (especially
inconceivable), they were pretty well united on the point that these unlucky
infants were never to wonder. Body number one, said they must take everything on
trust. Body number two, said they must take everything on political economy.
Body number three, wrote leaden little books for them, showing how the good
grown-up baby invariably got to the Savings-bank, and the bad grown-up baby
invariably got transported. Body number four, under dreary pretences of being
droll (when it was very melancholy indeed), made the shallowest pretences of
concealing pitfalls of knowledge, into which it was the duty of these babies to
be smuggled and inveigled. But, all the bodies agreed that they were never to
wonder.
    There was a library in Coketown, to which general access was easy. Mr.
Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library:
a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the
howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever got to any depth in and
came up sane. It was a disheartening circumstance, but a melancholy fact, that
even these readers persisted in wondering. They wondered about human nature,
human passions, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the
cares and joys and sorrows, the lives and deaths of common men and women! They
sometimes, after fifteen hours' work, sat down to read mere fables about men and
women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less like their
own. They took De Foe to their bosoms, instead of Euclid, and seemed to be on
the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker. Mr. Gradgrind was for ever
working, in print and out of print, at this eccentric sum, and he never could
make out how it yielded this unaccountable product.
    »I am sick of my life, Loo. I hate it altogether, and I hate everybody
except you,« said the unnatural young Thomas Gradgrind in the hair-cutting
chamber at twilight.
    »You don't hate Sissy, Tom?«
    »I hate to be obliged to call her Jupe. And she hates me,