In Book 1, Chapter 2, the narration describes M’Choakumchild’s approach to his preparatory lesson. The book uses both personification and allusion to compare more M'Choakumchild to Morgiana, a slave girl in the story of “Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves” (one of the stories from the Arabian Nights).
Say, good M’Choakumchild. When from thy burning 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 or distort him!
In the Arabian Nights, the leader of the forty thieves plots to ambush and kill Ali Baba by pretending to be an oil merchant (he conceals the other thirty-some thieves in giant jars, usually used for storing oil). Morgiana kills the thieves by pouring hot oil into these jars, foiling the plot.
In M’Choakumchild’s worldview, the “thief” from which he must defend himself is Fancy itself. The young students in the book are often compared to empty vessels. Imagination is personified as a “robber” lurking in his students’ minds, waiting to “steal" them from M’Choakumchild’s grasp. M’Choakumchild thinks to kill this thief with his lessons, themselves compared to scalding oil (“thy boiling store”).
This passage is meant to draw the reader’s attention to M’Choakumchild’s perspective on imagination, and as such treats “fancy” as its own entity, rather than a natural part of his students’ interior worlds. Imagination is characterized as an external influence, a thief loitering where he does not belong. This depiction follows easily from utilitarianism’s obsessive focus on material success and productivity to the exclusion of all else.
The personification of fancy also implies that imagination is capable of being killed, despite evidence to the contrary within the book itself (consider Louisa’s persistent interest in the world around her, despite her family’s disapproval). In the passage Dickens asks, mockingly, how much damage the schoolteacher really believes he can do to this “thief,” casting the success of M’Choakumchild’s methods into doubt.
In Book 1, Chapter 14, Louisa contemplates her future, and the narration uses metaphor and personification to describe her thoughts:
It seemed as if, first in her own fire within the house, and then in the fiery haze without, she tried to discover what kind of woof Old Time, that greatest and longest established Spinner of all, would weave from the threads he had already spun into a woman. But, his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.
Louisa wonders what kind of “woof” (an old-fashioned term for “fabric”) Time will weave from the “threads” of her life. The book describes Time in a manner that is both metaphorical and personified, as a weaver who creates the lives of the people in the narrative. However, Time is no average weaver, but one whose “factory” is secret, whose work is “noiseless,” and whose Hands (workers) are “mutes.” Interestingly, this metaphor describes Time in the terms of mechanized labor, which Dickens also uses to describe Coketown. But in this case, the metaphor could not be more at odds with the reality it references. The so-called “factory” of Time is silent, invisible, and undetectable, unlike the polluting, noisy factories of Coketown.
This contrast underscores Louisa’s helplessness in the face of time passing; the terms in which she might understand it are insufficient to describe it. In addition, the metaphor casts Louisa in the role of being the product of Time’s weaving, rather than a participant in shaping her own life.
