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:

           James Mill had definite ideas on how to educate John Stuart from the moment he was born. At the age of three John began to learn Greek and Latin at the age of seven. By that time he had already acquired a sold knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy, including Plato, Herodotus, and Xenophon. He also learned arithmetic and ancient and modern philosophy (Ebenstein 530).

            By his eighth year, Mill had progressed "thoroughly through Latin literature and had broadened his knowledge of Greek literature by reading Thucydides, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, and Polybius." Mill recounted that he had by this time also "delved in algebra, geometry, the differential calculus . . . [and] began a course of study in logic, from Aristotle to Hobbes" (Ebenstein 530). In essence, just as Mill recalls his early childhood experiences, so does Dickens through his use of Louisa draw a comparison which further reinforces a tragic sense of loss in Mill's formative years. One cannot ignore the logical, systematic, and emotionless utilitarian strain running throughout both works. Thus, in Mill's and Louisa's pre-school years, both were exposed to an education entirely of the mind, in a system which, due to its nature, unfortunately deprived them of any degree of creativity. The adherence of Mill's father to his utilitarianism, plus his child's innate precocity, further contributed to Mill's introversion, subsequent loneliness, and isolation. His father's protectiveness also played a principal role, as Mill notes in the early pages of his Autobiography:

          It is evident that this, among many other purposes of my father's scheme of education, could not have been accomplished if he had not carefully kept me from having any great amount of intercourse with other boys . . . The deficiencies in my education were principally in the things which boys learn from being turned out to shift for themselves and from being brought together in large numbers (Mill 24).

           Mill also regrets that "neither selfish nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me," and that "there seemed no power in nature sufficient to begin the formulation of character anew, and create in a mind so irretrievably analytic, fresh associations of pleasure with any of the objects of human desire" (Mill 98). Thus, Mill's Autobiography and Dickens' fictional account both relate the tragic events in the life a great man, events which to Mill have left such an indelible impression that nothing can remedy. This, to Mills, is a life that is lost, a character irreparably impaired. Like Shelley's Frankenstein, he now lives as a product of isolation and neglect, forever separated from the love and compassion essential in establishing any degree of spiritual or emotional fulfillment. This is the tragic loss and betrayal which Dickens fears most.

         Dickens shows how Louisa experiences similar difficulties, as she confesses to Sissy Jupe her own inability to express emotions:

"First, Sissy, do you know what I am? I am so proud and so hardened, so confused and troubled, so resentful and unjust to everyone and to myself, that everything is stormy dark, and wicked to me . . . I am so unhappy, and all that should have made me otherwise is so laid waste that if I had been bereft of sense to this hour . . . I could not want a guide to peace, contentment, honor, all the good of which I am quite devoid "(Dickens 224).

           Louisa further echoes her despair, as she criticizes her father's harsh philosophy which has made her a type of monster as well because he has trained her from the cradle:

"What you have nurtured in me, you have never nurtured in yourself; but oh! If you had only done so, long ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a much better and much happier creature I should have been this day!" (Dickens 215).

The severe loneliness and isolation demands a change in both John's and Louisa's earlier beliefs, a transformation representing a shift from their utilitarian background to a philosophy of love and emotional involvement, a new ethics much like the clothes metaphor in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. Both Mill and Dickens suggest the need for man to formulate an ethics of faith and works. Mill's and Louisa's conflict symbolically represents their transformation from the cruel consequences of a personality entrenched with facts yet void of imagination and their subconscious struggle toward the acceptance of a new set of values which theoretically focus on the heart and soul. In their quests, they both experience mental breakdowns, which psychologically commence the separation phase of their initiation into the world of dreams and idealism. Mill recounts his collapse in Chapter Five entitled "A Crisis in My Mental History" (Mill 93), and Dickens describes Louisa's confession to Gradgrind that she despises life itself (Dickens 215). Comparing himself to the narrator within Coleridge's "Dejection," Mill says the following:

"Grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A dowry, stifled, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet or relief In word or sigh or tear" (Mill 94).

          Mill despairs because he "seemed to have nothing left to live for" (Mill 94), and now formulates a new philosophy upon which to base a new prospective on life. Psychologically, Mill's re-adjustment initiates the transformation stage; the former self has died, and the rebirth stage begins. Mill now casts aside his utilitarian past in favor of an emotional inner fulfillment based upon experience. In discarding his old form of life, he realizes that what I "thought I saw" was truly "what I had always before received with incredulity—that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings" (Mill 96). Mill's agony finds its solution in a new form of contentment from which he emerges relieved and optimistic. Much like Wordsworth, he finds hope in the pleasures of ordinary life. Mill expresses his new-found relief in the following passage:

"Relieved, from my ever-present sense of irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life could again give me some pleasure, that I could again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs"  (Mill 99).

Psychologically, this stage marks the end of his emotional struggle and the beginning of the final phase, what psychiatrists call the return to a period of stability and fulfillment. For Mill, this stage introduces a period of greater social awareness and purpose than he had ever known. Technically, these events denote the turning point in Mill's narrative; for the first time, he thinks and acts of his own will.

           Dickens also parallels Mill's struggle with Louisa's mental breakdown, when she cries, "I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny!" In her misery, she screams, "All that I know is, your philosophy and your teaching will not save me. Father, you have brought me to this. Save me by some other means!" (Dickens 218). Realizing that she, too, needs "some others means," Louisa begins re-assessing her philosophical position to one in which love and tenderness can be allowed into a heart so earlier filled with an emotionless creed. Louisa questions Gradgrind, as he asks, "How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death. Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart?"(Dickens 215). Here, Dickens reflects Louisa's turning point as well.

           Mill's new "ethical and philosophical creed" includes what he terms "the cultivation of the feelings." From this point, he expands into the realm of music and poetry, such as Weber's Oberon and the works of Mozart; the Romantic ideas of Wordsworth prove most enchanting as well. Mill observed that "this state of [his] thoughts and feelings made . . . reading Wordsworth for the first time . . . in the autumn of 1828, an important event in [his] life." Mill soon learned to love the "rural objects and natural scenery" from which he derived great "pleasure and relief from depression" (Mill 101-103). Similarly, Louisa's first overt act includes her singular refusal to return and live with the "self-made" Bounderby (Dickens 241-242). Thus, Louisa proves that minimal utility is clearly insufficient for adequate self-fulfillment, or a rewarding complementary relationship. In essence, Dickens presents Louisa here optimistically as she develops a more understanding view of life in general. Here, at last, Louisa "watched the fire as in the days of yore, though [this time] with a gentler and humbler face" (Dickens 291). On the final page, Dickens reaffirms Louisa's hope by stating that she "will be" humbler toward her fellow creatures and "beautify their lives" through imagination, as well as no longer "holding" to any "fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair, but simply as a duty to be done" (Dickens 292). Louisa's transformation completed, she too is reborn into a new way of life. Ironically, John Stuart meets and later marries Mrs. Taylor, whom he describes as "the most admirable person he had ever known." Mill later accredits his wife as the genius behind his subsequent works and the one who motivates him to complete the Autobiography.

          In closing, Dickens' Hard Times and Mill's Autobiography demonstrate the development of two distinct characters—one fictional, one real—who despite the consequences of a rigid utilitarian education, emerge as more rounded individuals with a broader emotional foundation from which to confront reality. Ultimately, both Mill and Dickens' persona Louisa realize how facts and data cannot replace emotion and idealism in creating a life of meaning. This realization served as their loss and redemption. In fact, both authors issue a warning, emphasizing how easily man can allow his imagination to ossify into a mechanistic system of laws (Fielding 114). Renowned biologist Charles Darwin expresses a similar sentiment in his own Autobiography:

The mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher taste depend, I cannot conceive . . . The loss of these taste is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature" (Darwin 74).

Thus, this comparison serves not merely as an indictment upon nineteenth-century utilitarianism, but also as an ethical plea for warmth and understanding within a world of harsh realities.

                              Works Cited for Dickens' Hard Times and Mill's Autobiography

Darwin, Charles, Autobiography of Charles Darwin, as cited in Thinker Library. 1929. P. 74 as      cited in Fielding, K. J. "Mill and Gradgrind" from Twentieth- Century Interpretations of Hard Times by Paul Gray. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: American Library, Inc., 1961.

Ebenstein, William. Great Political Thinkers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

Fielding, K. J. "Mill and Gradgrind" as cited in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Hard Times by Paul Gray. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969.

Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944.