Wonders and ologies

摘要

Go and be somethingological directly," Mrs Gradgrind orders her children in Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854). The children are brought up on their fathers strict utilitarian principles - or rather, on Dickens's ferocious satire of them. So they have "a little concho-logical cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet; and all the specimens were all arranged and labelled", but they have no fairy tales or nursery rhymes - nothing that might encourage fancy or wonder.