# Gradgrind's changed strategy for controlling readers

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH07.P012](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH07.P012/#char=607,644): "the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory"

Gradgrind comes from Dickens's *Hard Times* (1854), where the opening schoolroom scene makes him the spokesman for education confined to facts and calculation. The factory-owning banker is his friend Bounderby: Chesterton uses Gradgrind's name more broadly for the commercial mentality. An especially revealing comparison occurs in Book I, chapter VIII. Coketown has an accessible library, and Gradgrind frets that exhausted workers choose imaginative stories over instructional works. Dickens makes their reading evidence that human feeling survives the system.

Chesterton reverses the relation: his modern Gradgrind can welcome extravagant reading because continually replaced philosophies leave the economic system secure. The contrast is between Dickens's facts-only disciplinarian and an employer who profits from unstable intellectual rebellion. That helps explain the startling phrase about being kept quiet by revolutionary literature: its supposed effect depends on the reader continually exchanging convictions, rather than acting on one. This is Chesterton's polemical adaptation, not a report of what Dickens's character does. The inspected witness is Gutenberg's transcription of the 1905 Chapman & Hall edition, not the original 1854 serial. [*Hard Times*, Book I, chapters I–II, IV, VIII](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/786/786-h/786-h.htm).

## Sources

- [Charles Dickens, Hard Times; Gutenberg transcription of Chapman & Hall, 1905](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/786/786-h/786-h.htm), Book I, chapters I–II (facts education), IV (Bounderby's occupations), VIII, Never Wonder (Coketown library)

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