Mr M'Choakumchild in Hard Times and Hazlitt's 'Mr. Bentham'

Abstract

A minor character in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, the alarming Mr M’Choakumchild is in charge of enforcing the muscular utilitarianism of Mr Gradgrind’s ‘model’ school for children. Like much else in the novel, objects and individuals alike, M’Choakumchild is the product of standard industrial processes. The novel’s second chapter relates that ‘He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs’.1 Given M’Choakumchild’s provenance in a particularly coercive version of Benthamite educational philosophy, it is perhaps not surprising to find a probable source for the woodturning image in William Hazlitt’s ironic portrait of Jeremy Bentham in The Spirit of the Age. Hazlitt was for a time Bentham’s next-door neighbour and tenant, and his essay ‘Mr. Bentham’ allows readers private glimpses of the philosopher against the more public backdrop of a social programme directed at ‘reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine’. Among the personal anecdotes retailed in the essay is Hazlitt’s wry observation that the father of English utilitarianism ‘turns wooden utensils in a lathe for exercise, and fancies he can turn men in the same manner’.2