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Thursday, November 08, 2007
M’Choakumchild
M’Choakumchild is the improbable surname of the grinding, fact-fact-fact school-teacher from the beginning of Dickens’s Hard Times.
Mr. M’Choakumchild began in his best manner. 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. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!
He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M’Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within-or sometimes only maim him and distort him! [Hard Times, 1:ii]
Nobody ever walked up and down this world of ours with so absurd a name as ‘M’Choakumchild’, a nominal invention of Dickens’s that seems to labour under its too obvious burden of satirical disapproval: where a teacher should nurture children, this Fact-obsessed monster will only choke them.
Then there’s the Scottish ‘Mc’ with which his name starts (the abbreviation of ‘Mc’ to ‘M’ was fairly common in the nineteenth-century). Here’s Stanford University’s ‘Rediscovering Literature page:
The teacher Mr. M’Choakumchild is essentially a briefly seen caricature, as indicated by his unrealistic name, but aspects of his name and personality refer to contemporary figures and philosophical debates. The Scottish “M’” (more familiarly rendered as “Mc") at the beginning of his name underscores the degree to which educational theory at the time, as well as Utilitarian thought, was derived from Scottish thinkers.
Moreover, Dickens may have had two Scotsmen—both named McCulloch—in mind as loose models when he chose the name. The lesser-known, J.M.M. M’Culloch, was a headmaster at an Edinburgh school and wrote practical and dry textbooks. The second, J. R. McCulloch, was a well-known political economist and statistician.
He’s a Mc, and he chokes children. Is there anything else necessary to understand this bizarre surname?
I think so, but after many years of reading Hard Times it has only just occurred to me. In fact ‘choking’ children may be entirely the wrong way to decode this name. After all, ‘choak’ was an strangely archaic spelling of ‘choke’ even by Dickens’s day (that’s not a spelling he uses himself); and I’ve always been a little thrown-out by the ‘um’ in the middle (a Native American reference, maybe? But why?)
Oakum, on the other hand, is a different matter.
Oakum is shreds or threads of fabric, picked manually out of old stretches of rope; it was used, mixed with tar, to patch and caulk holes in the sides of ships; or without tar as a dressing for wounds. It was, indeed, in high demand. Picking oakum, as Dickens knew very well, was work done often under compulsion, either in prisons by adults, or in workhouses by adults and children. It was tedious, and very hard on the fingers.
The Refractories were picking oakum, in a small room giving on a yard. They sat in line on a form, with their backs to a window; before them, a table, and their work..” [Dickens, Uncommercial Traveller ‘Wapping Workhouse’ (written 1860)]
OED doesn’t record ‘oakum-child’, but it does have ‘oakum-boy’ (a boy given the menial and repetitive job of picking oakum) from 1805.
Picking Oakum at Coldbath Fields Prison, in Clerkenwell, 1850s
from the Hulton Getty Picture Collection
‘M(u)ch oakum, child’ is a rather good metaphorical description of this particular schoolteachers limitations, and his mode of setting the principles of education on a similar footing to the principles of penal discipline. That image above has much in common with similar images of Victorian schooling, after all.
Comments
Adam, your conjecture seems sort of plausible, though a bit strained. As you point out, readers would have assumed the “M’” was short for “Mc.” At any rate, even if Dickens had “oakum” in mind, he would have known how the name sounded, and how readers would take it. So even if it could be demonstrated that “oakum” was a source, I don’t think that demonstrates that readers reading the name conventionally are reading against authorial intention. I’m not sure what this reading gets us.
In seeing that name, I’ve always thought of “M-choke-um-child” but also of “Mc-hokum-child.” Now that I check, though, the earliest citation in the OED for “hokum” is too late for Dickens.
James, yes: I thought hokum too, and was similarly disabused by the OED: too late, and too USA, for Dickens.
Gerrold: “I’m not sure what this reading gets us.” You’re right of course; it’s just that ... you know. Pull on that thread, and who knows how much criticism would remain ravelled?