How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
It was but a hurried parting in a common street, yet it was a sacred remembrance to these two common people. Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used up infidels, gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you. (2.6.95)
Here, the need for providing imaginative and creative outlets for the working class takes a somewhat shocking turn. The main reason they need distraction is so that they don't turn on their masters and agitate for a better kind of life? What about the misery of the way they are treated? Isn't the right to watch the circus kind of a useless band-aid?
Quote #8
Neither, as [Louisa] approached her old home now, did any of the best influences of old home descend upon her. The dreams of childhood — its airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond […] what had she to do with these? Remembrances of how she had journeyed to the little that she knew, by the enchanted roads of what she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how, first coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, she had seen it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as itself; not a grim Idol, cruel and cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big dumb shape set up with a sightless stare, never to be moved by anything but so many calculated tons of leverage — what had she to do with these?(2.9.32)
An alternate kind of educational principle here – the idea that if children are allowed to have their magical thinking, they will still eventually discover Facts and logic, and will be able to put them in the proper place in their overall education. As it is, however, Louisa is coming to the deathbed of her mother without a single warm memory or thought of home.
Quote #9
'I am a Coketown man. I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. I know the bricks of this town, and I know the works of this town, and I know the chimneys of this town, and I know the smoke of this town, and I know the Hands of this town. I know 'em all pretty well. They're real. When a man tells me anything about imaginative qualities, I always tell that man, whoever he is, that I know what he means. He means turtle-soup and venison, with a gold spoon, and that he wants to be set up with a coach and six. That's what your daughter wants.' (3.3.45)
Bounderby's speech is always marked by repetition (here, the phrase "I know") and firm statements of fact, which is ironic since so much of what he says is pure invention. Here, for instance, he does not in fact know anything about the "Hands," and the whole turtle soup thing is purely a figment of his imagination.