Some persons hold that there is a wisdom of the…

The line comes in the first chapter of the third and last book of Hard Times, titled “Another Thing Needful”. At the end of the previous book, Gradgrind’s daughter Louisa, unhappily married to the banker Josiah Bounderby, fled to her father’s house and collapsed at his feet. She wakes in her old room, and Mr Gradgrind, who raised her on facts alone, sits beside her. Hesitating, he confesses that he now mistrusts himself, speaks this sentence, and adds: “I have supposed the head to be all-sufficient.” The narrator notes that he would have been glad to see her cry.

Dickens wrote Hard Times in 1854 as a weekly serial for his magazine Household Words. Set in the mill town of Coketown, it attacks a philosophy that reduces people to figures. Its first chapter, “The One Thing Needful”, opens on Gradgrind’s creed: “Now, what I want is, Facts.” This chapter’s title answers it. The wisdom of the Heart, embodied by Sissy Jupe, the circus girl he took in, is what his system left out.

Hard Times, Book the Third, chapter 1 (Mr Gradgrind), 1854

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