How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
'Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn't this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn't this a prosperous nation, and a'n't you in a thriving state?'[…]'I thought I couldn't know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. [Then Mr. M'Choakumchild] said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five- and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year. What is your remark on that proportion? And my remark was — for I couldn't think of a better one — that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million. And that was wrong, too.' (1.9.22-26)
This passage should have a giant neon light above it with the word "IRONY" flashing in capital letters. This novel emphasizes individuality and the intimately personal above all else. But here, Mr. M'Choakumchild tells Sissy that she shouldn't worry about how wealth is distributed through the nation and that she should ignore individual deaths when they conform to a statistical ideal. Hardy har har – irony! We are clearly meant to laugh at the nonsense Mr. M'Choakumchild is slinging.
Quote #5
So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with the composed faces and the regulated actions.(1.11.3)
The narrator may be speaking here, but this is exactly how Louisa thinks about the factory workers. Check out the scene in Book 2, Chapter 6 when she goes to visit Stephen at his house, and her eyes are opened to the reality that workers are all actual people.
Quote #6
As if an astronomical observatory should be made without any windows, and the astronomer within should arrange the starry universe solely by pen, ink, and paper, so Mr. Gradgrind, in his Observatory (and there are many like it), had no need to cast an eye upon the teeming myriads of human beings around him, but could settle all their destinies on a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty little bit of sponge. (1.15.1)
A real science – astronomy – is being used to deflate and mock the social science that Gradgrind practices. This actually feeds into some of the anxiety of economists of that time. They were very concerned with making sure economics was seen as a hard science, like astronomy.