In Charles Dickens's "Hard Times" (1854), when mill-worker Stephen Blackpool disappears, his friend and fellow mill-worker Rachael tells her confidante Sissy Jupe that she fears he might have been murdered, a thought she always tries to suppress: “I do all I can to keep it out, wi' counting on to high numbers as I work, and saying over and over again pieces that I knew when I were a child”. While her counting to control her thoughts may coincide with schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind's utilitarian pedagogy of "Facts" and "statistics", her recitation of poems is something Gradgrind's pupils could never turn to in a moment of distress, because they never learn any. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 March 2025)
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