I finished volume 2 a couple of days ago. The book still seems more an attack on a too factual based education system than the critique on working class working and living conditions that I had expected. The book makes out that the education of both of Mr Gradgrind's eldest children left them unprepared for life. Young Tom Gradgrind has not turned out well. One of the characters, Mr Harthouse says that Tom's upbringing left him unprepared for the circles that he would have to move in. It is true that young Tom does lack polish, but that is not his main failing. Mr Harthouse's education was, no doubt, more humanities based than Tom's, but his character is hardly much better. At the end of volume 2, Louisa visits her father. In a rather unlikely sounding passage, she complains that her education had not prepared her for life. She made a bad mistake in marrying Mr Bounderby. Was it really the style of education that she received that led her to make this mistake? What syllabus would Dickens have suggested to prepare a child for life?
I wonder whether Victorian industrialists were actually dismissive of the arts. There is a pub in Reading called
Great Expectations after Charles Dickens' book. Charles Dickens visited it when it was the Literary, Scientific and Mechanics Institute. iirc he read extracts from A Christmas Carol there. The Keighley Mechanics Institute had a library, from which I gather the Brontė sisters borrowed books. Their father delivered a lecture there in 1833 (
linky). I would not mind betting these places were typical of mechanics institutes up and down the country.
Incidentally, I was listening to Jean Winterson (probably most famous for
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit) on the radio this morning. She criticised the present minister for education, Michael Gove, for the utilitarian aspect of his education policies. She said education was not about utility, but allowing people to be human beings. Otherwise you are back with [Friedrich] Engels, lurking about the slums of Manchester, saying this is what happens men regard each other only as useful objects (not an exact quote).