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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dickens As an Educator, by James L. (James
+Laughlin) Hughes
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Dickens As an Educator
+
+
+Author: James L. (James Laughlin) Hughes
+
+
+
+Release Date: August 31, 2011  [eBook #37284]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR***
+
+
+E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(http://www.pgdp.net) from paage images generously made available by
+Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/dickensaseducato00hughrich
+
+
+
+
+
+DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR
+
+by
+
+JAMES L. HUGHES
+
+Inspector of Schools, Toronto
+Author of Froebel's Educational Laws
+Mistakes in Teaching, etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York and London
+D. Appleton and Company
+1913
+
+Copyright, 1900,
+by D. Appleton and Company.
+
+Electrotyped and Printed
+at the Appleton Press, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+
+EDITOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+The following pages are sufficient to establish the claim of Mr. Hughes
+for Dickens as an educational reformer--the greatest that England has
+produced. It will be admitted that he has done more than any one else to
+secure for the child a considerate treatment of his tender age. "It is a
+crime against a child to rob it of its childhood." This principle was
+announced by Dickens, and it has come to be generally recognised and
+adopted. Gradually it is changing the methods of primary instruction and
+bringing into vogue a milder form of discipline and a more stimulative
+teaching--arousing the child's self-activity instead of repressing it.
+
+The child is born with animal instincts and tendencies, it is true, but he
+has all the possibilities of human nature. The latter can be developed
+best by a treatment which takes for granted the child's preference to
+adopt what is good rather than what is bad in social customs and usages.
+
+The child, it is true, is uneven in his proclivities, having some bad ones
+and some good ones. The true pedagogy uses the good inclinations as a
+lever by which to correct bad ones. The teacher recognises what is good in
+the child's disposition and endeavours to build on it a self-respect
+which may at all times be invoked against temptations to bad conduct.
+Child depravity sometimes exists, but it can generally be traced to
+injudicious methods of education in the family, the school, or the
+community. Dickens has laid so much emphasis on defects of method in these
+three directions that he has made the generation in which he lived and the
+next succeeding one sensitively conscious of them. He has even caricatured
+them with such vehemence of style as to make our ideals so vivid that we
+see at once any wrong tendency in its very beginning.
+
+Walter Scott, in his schoolmasters, has caricatured pedantry; so has
+Shakespeare. But Dickens has discovered a variety of types of pedantry and
+made them all easily recognisable and odious to us. More than this, he has
+attacked the evil of cramming, the evil of isolation from the family in
+the boarding school for too young children, and the evil of uninteresting
+instruction. Whatever is good and reasonable for the child to know should
+be made interesting to the child, and the teacher is to be considered
+incompetent who can not find in the life histories of his class threads of
+daily experience and present interest to which he can attach every point
+that the regular lesson contains.
+
+Dickens has done a great work in directing the attention of society to its
+public institutions--especially to its orphan asylums and poorhouses. The
+chill which the infant gets when it comes in direct contact with the
+formality of a state institution, or even a religious institution, without
+the mediation of the family, is portrayed so well that every reader of
+Dickens feels it by sympathy. So, too, in those families of public men or
+women or in those of the directors of industry or commerce who crush out
+the true family life by bringing home their unrelaxing business manners
+and trying to regulate the family as they regulate the details of a great
+business house--the reading world has imbibed a sympathy for the rights of
+the home. Free childhood and the culture of individuality has become a
+watchword.
+
+Above all, Dickens has introduced a reform as to the habit of terrorizing
+children. Corporal punishment has diminished to one fourth of its former
+amount, and Charles Dickens is the prophet to whom the reform owes its
+potency. In fact, the habit of finding in the good tendencies of the child
+the levers with which to move him to the repression of his bad impulses
+has placed in the hands of the professional teacher the means of governing
+the child without appeal to force except in the rarest cases.
+
+The tendency to caricature an evil has its dangers, of course, and
+Dickens, like all the other educational reformers, has often condemned as
+entirely unworthy of toleration what has really in it some good reason for
+its existence. It was the abuse that needed correction. Reform instead of
+revolution should have been recommended, but the reformer often gets so
+heated in his contest with superficial evil that he attacks what is
+fundamentally good. He cuts down the tree when it needed only the removal
+of a twig infested with caterpillars. This defect of the reformer renders
+necessary a new reformer, and thus arises a pendulum swing of educational
+method from one extreme to another.
+
+Dickens shares with all reformers some of their weaknesses, but he does
+not share his most excellent qualities with many of them. He stands apart
+and alone as one of the most potent influences of social reform in the
+nineteenth century, and therefore deserves to be read and studied by all
+who have to do with schools and by all parents everywhere in our day and
+generation.
+
+W. T. HARRIS.
+
+WASHINGTON, D. C., _October 12, 1900_.
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+This book has two purposes: to prove that Dickens was the great apostle of
+the "new education" to the English-speaking world, and to bring into
+connected form, under appropriate headings, the educational principles of
+one of the world's greatest educators, and one of its two most sympathetic
+friends of childhood.
+
+Dickens was the most profound exponent of the kindergarten and the most
+comprehensive student of childhood that England has yet produced. He was
+one of the first great advocates of a national system of schools, and his
+revelations of the ignorance and the intellectual and spiritual
+destitution of the children of the poor led to the deep interest which
+ultimately brought about the establishment of free schools in England.
+
+He was essentially a child trainer rather than a teacher. In the
+twenty-eight schools described in his writings, and in the training of his
+army of little children in institutions and homes, he reveals nearly every
+form of bad training resulting from ignorance, selfishness, indifference,
+unwise zeal, unphilosophic philosophy, and un-Christian theology. No other
+writer has attacked so many phases of wrong training, unjust treatment,
+and ill usage of childhood.
+
+He is the most distinctive champion of the rights of childhood. He struck
+the bravest blows against corporal punishment, and against all forms of
+coercive tyranny toward the child in homes, institutions, and schools,
+even condemning the dogmatic will control of such a placid, Christian
+woman as Mrs. Crisparkle. He demanded a free, real, joyous childhood, rich
+in all a child's best experiences and interests, so that "childhood may
+ripen in childhood." He pleaded for the development of the individuality
+of each child. He taught the wisdom of giving a child proper food, and he
+showed the vital importance of real sympathy with the child, not mere
+consideration for him. He was the English father of true reverence for the
+child.
+
+But Dickens studied the methods of cultivating the minds of children, as
+well as their character development. He exposed the evils of cramming more
+vigorously than any other writer. He taught the essential character of the
+imagination in intellectual and spiritual development. He showed the need
+of correlation of studies, and of apperceptive centres of feeling and
+thought in order to comprehend, and assimilate, and transform into
+definite power the knowledge and thought that is brought to our minds.
+
+It is said by some, who see but the surface of the work of Dickens, that
+his work is done. Much of the good work for which he lived has been done,
+but much more remains to be done. Men are but beginning the work of child
+study and of rational education. The twentieth century will understand
+Dickens better than the nineteenth has understood him. His profound
+philosophy is only partially comprehended yet, even by the leaders in
+educational work. Teachers and all students of childhood will find in his
+true feeling and rich thought revelation and inspiration.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE
+
+     I.--THE PLACE OF DICKENS AMONG EDUCATORS                          1
+
+    II.--INFANT GARDENS                                               15
+
+   III.--THE OVERTHROW OF COERCION                                    29
+
+    IV.--THE DOCTRINE OF CHILD DEPRAVITY                              87
+
+     V.--CRAMMING                                                     96
+
+    VI.--FREE CHILDHOOD                                              117
+
+   VII.--INDIVIDUALITY                                               128
+
+  VIII.--THE CULTURE OF THE IMAGINATION                              136
+
+    IX.--SYMPATHY WITH CHILDHOOD                                     162
+
+     X.--CHILD STUDY AND CHILD NATURE                                181
+
+    XI.--BAD TRAINING                                                188
+
+   XII.--GOOD TRAINING                                               218
+
+  XIII.--COMMUNITY                                                   235
+
+   XIV.--NUTRITION AS A FACTOR IN EDUCATION                          244
+
+    XV.--MINOR SCHOOLS                                               258
+
+   XVI.--MISCELLANEOUS EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES                        285
+
+  XVII.--THE TRAINING OF POOR, NEGLECTED, AND DEFECTIVE CHILDREN     304
+
+
+
+
+DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE PLACE OF DICKENS AMONG EDUCATORS.
+
+
+Dickens was England's greatest educational reformer. His views were not
+given to the world in the form of ordinary didactic treatises, but in the
+form of object lessons in the most entertaining of all stories. Millions
+have read his books, whereas but hundreds would have read them if he had
+written his ideals in the form of direct, systematic exposition. He is
+certainly not less an educator because his books have been widely read.
+
+The highest form of teaching is the informal, the indirect, the
+incidental. The fact that his educational principles are revealed chiefly
+by the evolution of the characters in his novels and stories, instead of
+by the direct philosophic statements of scientific pedagogy or psychology,
+gives Dickens higher rank as an educator, not only because it gives him
+much wider influence, but because it makes his teaching more effective by
+arousing deep, strong feeling to give permanency and propulsive force to
+his great thoughts.
+
+Was Dickens consciously and intentionally an educator? The prefaces to his
+novels; the preface to his Household Words; the educational articles he
+wrote; the prominence given in his books to child training in homes,
+institutions, and schools; the statements of the highest educational
+philosophy found in his writings; and especially the clearness of his
+insight and the profoundness of his educational thought, as shown by his
+condemnation of the wrong and his appreciation of the right in teaching
+and training the child, prove beyond question that he was not only broad
+and true in his sympathy with childhood, but that he was a careful and
+progressive student of the fundamental principles of education.
+
+Dickens deals with twenty-eight schools in his writings, evidently with
+definite purposes in each case: "Minerva House," in Sketches by Boz;
+"Dotheboys Hall," in Nicholas Nickleby; Mr. Marton's two schools, Miss
+Monflather's school, and Mrs. Wackles's school, in Old Curiosity Shop; Dr.
+Blimber's school and "The Grinders'" school, in Dombey and Son; Mr.
+Creakle's school, Dr. Strong's school, Agnes's school, and the school
+Uriah Heep attended, in David Copperfield; the school at which Esther was
+a day boarder and Miss Donney's school, in Bleak House; Mr.
+McChoakumchild's school, in Hard Times; Mr. Wopsle's great aunt's school,
+in Great Expectations; the evening school attended by Charley Hexam,
+Bradley Headstone's school, and Miss Peecher's school, in Our Mutual
+Friend; Phoebe's school, in Barbox Brothers; Mrs. Lemon's school, in
+Holiday Romance; Jemmy Lirriper's school, in Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings;
+Miss Pupford's school, in Tom Tiddler's Ground; the school described in
+The Haunted House; Miss Twinkleton's seminary, in Edwin Drood; the schools
+of the Stepney Union; The Schoolboy's Story; and Our School.
+
+In addition to these twenty-eight schools, he describes a real school in
+American Notes, and makes brief references to The Misses Nettingall's
+establishment, Mr. Cripples's academy, Drowvey and Grimmer's school, the
+Foundation school attended by George Silverman, Scrooge's school,
+Pecksniff's school for architects, Fagin's school for training thieves,
+and three dancing schools, conducted by Mr. Baps, Signor Billsmethi, and
+Mr. Turveydrop. He introduces Mr. Pocket, George Silverman, and Canon
+Crisparkle as tutors, and Mrs. General, Miss Lane, and Ruth Pinch as
+governesses. Mrs. Sapsea had been the proprietor of an academy in
+Cloisterham. One of the first sketches by "Boz" was Our Schoolmaster, and
+his books are full of illustrations of wrong training of children in
+homes, in institutions, and by professional child trainers such as Mrs.
+Pipchin.
+
+Clearly Dickens intended to reveal the best educational ideals, and to
+expose what he regarded as weak or wrong in school methods, and especially
+in child training.
+
+Dickens was the first great English student of the kindergarten. His
+article on Infant Gardens, published in Household Words in 1855, is one of
+the most comprehensive articles ever written on the kindergarten
+philosophy. It shows a perfect appreciation of the physical, intellectual,
+and spiritual aims of Froebel, and a clear recognition of the value of
+right early training and of the influence of free self-activity in the
+development of individual power and character.
+
+Dickens is beyond comparison the chief English apostle of childhood, and
+its leading champion in securing a just, intelligent, and considerate
+recognition of its rights by adulthood, which till his time had been
+deliberately coercive and almost universally tyrannical in dealing with
+children. He entered more fully than any other English author into
+sympathy with childhood from the standpoint of the child. Other educators
+and philanthropists have shown consideration for children, but Dickens had
+the perfect sympathy with childhood that sees and feels _with_ the child,
+not merely _for_ him.
+
+Dickens attacked all forms of coercion in child training. He discussed
+fourteen types of coercion, from the brutal corporal punishment of Squeers
+and Creakle in schools, of Bumble and the Christian philanthropist with
+the white waistcoat in institutions, and of the Murdstones and Mrs.
+Gargery in homes, to the gentle but dwarfing firmness of the dominant will
+of placid Mrs. Crisparkle. He condemned all coercion because it prevents
+the full development of selfhood, and makes men negative instead of
+positive.
+
+Among the many improvements made in child training none is more complete
+than the change in discipline. For this change the world is indebted
+chiefly to Froebel and Dickens. Froebel revealed the true philosophy,
+Dickens gave it wings; Froebel gave the thought, Dickens made the thought
+clear and strong by arousing energetic feeling in harmony with it.
+
+Thought makes slow progress without a basis of feeling. Dickens opened the
+hearts of humanity in sympathy for suffering childhood, and thus gave
+Froebel's philosophy definiteness and propulsive power. The darkest clouds
+have been cleared away from child life during the past fifty years.
+Teachers, managers of institutions for the care of children, and parents
+are now severely punished by the laws of civilized countries for offences
+against children that were approved by the most enlightened Christian
+philosophy at the time of Froebel and Dickens as necessary duties
+essential in the proper training of childhood.
+
+Dickens helped to break the bonds of the doctrine of child depravity. This
+doctrine had a most depressing influence on educators. It was not possible
+to reverence a child so long as he was regarded as a totally depraved
+thing. Froebel and Dickens did not teach that a child is totally divine,
+but they did believe that every child possesses certain elements of
+divinity which constitute selfhood or individuality, and that if this
+selfhood is developed in conscious unity with the Divine Fatherhood the
+child will attain to complete manhood. This thought gives the educator a
+new and a higher attitude toward childhood. The child is no longer a thing
+to be repressed, but a being to be developed. Men are not persistently
+dwarfed now by deliberate efforts to define a blighting consciousness of
+weakness; they are stimulated to broader effort and higher purpose by a
+true self-consciousness of individual power. The philosophy that trains
+men to recognise responsibility for the good in their nature is infinitely
+more productive educationally than that which teaches men responsibility
+for the evil in their nature.
+
+Dickens taught that loving sympathy is the highest qualification of a true
+teacher. He showed this to be true by both positive and negative
+illustrations. Mr. Marton, the old schoolmaster in Old Curiosity Shop, was
+a perfect type of a sympathetic teacher. Dr. Strong was "the ideal of the
+whole school, for he was the kindest of men." Phoebe's school was such a
+good place for the little ones, because she loved them. Like Mr. Marton,
+she had not studied the new systems of teaching, but loving sympathy gave
+her power and made her school a place in which the good in human hearts
+grew and blossomed naturally.
+
+"You are fond of children and learned in the new systems of teaching
+them," said Mr. Jackson.
+
+"Very fond of them," replied Phoebe, "but I know nothing of teaching
+beyond the pleasure I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they
+learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars sing some of their
+lessons has led you so far astray as to think me a good teacher? Ah, I
+thought so! No, I have only read and been told about that system. It seems
+so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry robins they
+are, that I took up with it in my little way."
+
+She had heard of the kindergarten and had caught some of its spirit of
+sympathy with the child, but she did not understand its methods. Jemmy
+Lirriper received perfectly sympathetic treatment from Mrs. Lirriper and
+the Major; Agnes loved her little scholars; Esther, who sympathized with
+everybody, loved her pupils, and was beloved by them; and the Bachelor,
+who introduced Mr. Marton to his second school, was a genuine boy in his
+comprehensive sympathy with real, boyish boyhood.
+
+So throughout all his books Dickens pleads for kindly treatment for the
+child, and for complete sympathy with him in his childish feelings and
+interests. He gave the child the place of honour in literature for the
+first time, and he aroused the heart of the Christian world to the fact
+that it was treating the child in a very un-Christlike way. He pleaded for
+a better education for the child, for a free childhood, for greater
+liberty in the home and in the school, for fuller sympathy especially at
+the time when childhood merges into youth and when the mysteries of life
+have begun to make themselves conscious to the young mind and heart. The
+poorer the child the greater the need he revealed.
+
+Canon Crisparkle, Esther Summerson, Mr. Jarndyce, Joe Gargery, Rose
+Maylie, Allan Woodcourt, Betty Higden, Mr. Sangsby, the Old Schoolmaster,
+the Bachelor, Mrs. Lirriper, Major Jackmann, Doctor Marigold, Agnes
+Wickfield, Mr. George, and Mr. Brownlow are types of the people with whom
+Dickens would fill the world--men and women whose hearts were overflowing
+with true sympathy. Esther Summerson is the best type of perfect sympathy
+to be met with in literature. She expressed the central principle of
+Dickens's philosophy regarding sympathy when she said: "When I love a
+person very tenderly indeed my understanding seems to brighten; my
+comprehension is quickened when my affection is."
+
+The need of sympathy with childhood was revealed by Dickens most strongly
+by the cruelty, the coercion, and the harshness of such characters as
+Squeers, Creakle, Bumble, the Murdstones, Mrs. Gargery, John Willet, Mrs.
+Pipchin, Mrs. Clennam, and the teachers in The Grinders' school.
+
+Dickens's description of Dr. Blimber's school is the most profound
+criticism of the cramming system of teaching that was ever written. He
+treats the same subject also in Hard Times, Christmas Stories, and A
+Holiday Romance.
+
+The vital importance of a free, rich childhood, the value of the
+imagination as the basis of intellectual and spiritual development, the
+folly of the Herbartian psychology relating to the soul, the error of
+regarding fact-storing as the chief aim of education, and the terrible
+evils resulting from the tyranny of adulthood in dealing with childhood
+are all treated very ably in Hard Times, the most advanced and most
+profound of Dickens's works from the standpoint of the educator.
+
+The need of a real childhood, so well expressed in Froebel's maxim, "Let
+childhood ripen in childhood," is shown also in Nicholas Nickleby, Old
+Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son, Great
+Expectations, and Edwin Drood.
+
+The true reverence for individual selfhood is shown in Dombey and Son,
+David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual
+Friend, and Edwin Drood.
+
+The wisdom of studying the subject of nutrition as one of the most
+important subjects connected with the development of children physically,
+intellectually, and morally, and the meanness or carelessness too
+frequently shown in feeding children, were taught in Oliver Twist, Old
+Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield,
+Bleak House, Great Expectations, Edwin Drood, Christmas Stories, and
+American Notes.
+
+Play as an essential factor in education is treated in Martin Chuzzlewit,
+Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and American Notes.
+
+The folly of the old practice of attempting to educate by polishing the
+surface of the character, of training from without instead of from within,
+is revealed in Bleak House and Little Dorrit.
+
+Bleak House discusses the contents of children's minds and the need of
+early experiences to form apperceptive centres of feeling and thought in a
+comprehensive and suggestive manner.
+
+The need of practising the fundamental law of co-operation and the sharing
+of responsibilities and duties, as the foundation for the true
+comprehension of the law of community, is shown in Barnaby Rudge, David
+Copperfield, Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit.
+
+The need of child study is suggested in David Copperfield and Bleak House.
+
+The value of joyousness in the development of true, strong character is
+discussed in Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, Old Curiosity Shop, Martin
+Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Little Dorrit,
+Great Expectations, and Edwin Drood.
+
+Dickens was one of the first Englishmen to see the need of normal schools
+to train teachers, and to advocate the abolition of uninspected private
+schools and the establishment of national schools. He taught these ideals
+in the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, issued in 1839, so that he very early
+caught the spirit of Mann and Barnard in America, and saw the wisdom of
+their efforts to establish schools supported, controlled, and directed by
+the state.
+
+He says, in his preface to Nicholas Nickleby:
+
+    Of the monstrous neglect of education in England, and the disregard of
+    it by the state as a means of forming good or bad citizens, and
+    miserable or happy men, this class of schools long afforded a notable
+    example. Although any man who had proved his unfitness for any other
+    occupation in life, was free, without examination or qualification, to
+    open a school anywhere; although preparation for the functions he
+    undertook was required in the surgeon who assisted to bring a boy into
+    the world, or might one day assist, perhaps, to send him out of it; in
+    the chemist, the attorney, the butcher, the baker, the
+    candlestick-maker; the whole round of crafts and trades, the
+    schoolmaster excepted; and although schoolmasters, as a race, were the
+    blockheads and impostors who might naturally be expected to spring
+    from such a state of things, and to flourish in it, these Yorkshire
+    schoolmasters were the lowest and most rotten round in the whole
+    ladder. Traders in the avarice, indifference, or imbecility of
+    parents, and the helplessness of children; ignorant, sordid, brutal
+    men, to whom few considerate persons would have intrusted the board
+    and lodging of a horse or a dog; they formed the worthy corner-stone
+    of a structure which, for absurdity and magnificent high-handed
+    _laissez-aller_ neglect, has rarely been exceeded in the world.
+
+    We hear sometimes of an action for damages against the unqualified
+    medical practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to
+    heal it. But what about the hundreds of thousands of minds that have
+    been deformed forever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended
+    to form them?
+
+    I make mention of the race, as of the Yorkshire schoolmasters, in the
+    past tense. Though it has not yet finally disappeared, it is dwindling
+    daily. A long day's work remains to be done about us in the way of
+    education, Heaven knows; but great improvements and facilities toward
+    the attainment of a good one have been furnished of late years.
+
+This leaves no doubt in regard to the conscious purpose of Dickens in
+writing with definite educational plans.
+
+Incidentally he discusses every phase of what is called the "new
+education." He was the first and the greatest English student of Froebel,
+and his writings gave wings to the profound thought of the greatest
+philosopher of childhood. Froebel revealed the truth that feeling is the
+basis of thought. In harmony with this great psychological principle, it
+may fairly be claimed that the works of Dickens so fully aroused the heart
+of the civilized world to the wrongs inflicted on childhood, and the
+grievous errors committed in training children, as to prepare the minds of
+all who read his books for the conscious revelation of the imperfections
+of educational systems and methods, and the imperative need of radical
+educational reforms.
+
+The intense feeling caused by the writings of Dickens prepared the way for
+the thought of Froebel. Dickens studied Froebel with great care. He was
+not merely a student of theoretical principles, but he was a very frequent
+visitor to the first kindergarten opened in England. Madame Kraus-Boelte,
+who assisted Madame Rongé in the first kindergarten opened in London, says
+in a recent letter: "I remember very distinctly the frequent visits made
+by Mr. Dickens to Madame Rongé's kindergarten. He always appeared to be
+deeply interested, and would sometimes stay during the whole session."
+
+The description of the schools of the Stepney Union in the Uncommercial
+Traveller shows how keenly appreciative Dickens was of all true new ideals
+in educational work. These were charity schools conducted on an excellent
+system. The pupils worked at industrial occupations half of their school
+hours, and studied the other half. They were taught music, and the boys
+had military drill and naval training. They had no corporal punishment in
+these schools.
+
+Dickens approved most heartily of everything he saw in his frequent visits
+to the schools of the Stepney Union except the work of one of the younger
+teachers, who would, in his opinion, have been better "if she had shown
+more geniality." He commended the industrial work, the military training,
+the naval training, the music, the discipline without corporal punishment,
+and the intellectual brightness of the children. He pointed out at some
+length the difference in interest shown by the pupils in these schools
+and by the pupils in the school he himself attended when a boy, and drew
+the conclusion very definitely that shorter hours of study, with a variety
+of interesting operations, were much better for the physical and
+intellectual development of children than long hours spent in monotonous
+work.
+
+The folly and wrong of trying to make children study beyond the fatigue
+point was never more clearly pointed out than by Dickens in the
+description of the school he attended when a boy, given as a contrast to
+the life and brightness and interest shown in the schools of the Stepney
+Union:
+
+    When I was at school, one of seventy boys, I wonder by what secret
+    understanding our attention began to wander when we had pored over our
+    books for some hours. I wonder by what ingenuity we brought on that
+    confused state of mind when sense became nonsense, when figures
+    wouldn't work, when dead languages wouldn't construe, when live
+    languages wouldn't be spoken, when memory wouldn't come, when dulness
+    and vacancy wouldn't go. I can not remember that we ever conspired to
+    be sleepy after dinner, or that we ever particularly wanted to be
+    stupid, and to have flushed faces and hot, beating heads, or to find
+    blank hopelessness and obscurity this afternoon in what would become
+    perfectly clear and bright in the freshness of to-morrow morning. We
+    suffered for these things, and they made us miserable enough. Neither
+    do I remember that we ever bound ourselves, by any secret oath or
+    other solemn obligation to find the seats getting too hard to be sat
+    upon after a certain time; or to have intolerable twitches in our
+    legs, rendering us aggressive and malicious with those members; or to
+    be troubled with a similar uneasiness in our elbows, attended with
+    fistic consequences to our neighbours; or to carry two pounds of lead
+    in the chest, four pounds in the head, and several active bluebottles
+    in each ear. Yet, for certain, we suffered under those distresses, and
+    were always charged at for labouring under them, as if we had brought
+    them on of our own deliberate act and deed.
+
+It was therefore out of a full heart and an enriched mind that Dickens
+wrought the wonderful plots into which he wove the most advanced
+educational ideals of his time and of our time relating to the blighting
+influence of coercion, the divinity in the child, the recognition of
+freedom as the truest process and highest aim of education, the value of
+real sympathy, the importance of self-activity, the true reverence for the
+child leading to faith in it, the need of child study, the effect of
+joyousness on the child's development, the benefits of play, the influence
+of nutrition, the ideal of community, the importance of the imagination as
+a basis for the best intellectual growth, the narrowness of
+utilitarianism, the absolute need of apperceptive centres to which shall
+be related the progressive enlargement and enrichment of feeling and
+thought throughout the life of the individual, the arrest of development
+and the sacrifice of power and life due to cramming, and the weakness of
+all educational systems and methods that regard fact-storing as the
+highest work of the teacher.
+
+It has been said by critics of Dickens that he exaggerated the defects and
+errors in the characters of those whom he described. Two things should be
+kept in mind, however. Dickens usually described the worst, not the best
+types, and he was justified in revealing a wrong principle or practice in
+the strongest possible light, in order to make it more easily recognisable
+and more completely repugnant to the aroused feeling and startled thought
+of humanity. He was writing with the definite purpose of making the world
+so thoroughly hate the wrong in education and child training as to lead to
+definite practical reforms.
+
+Dickens himself did not admit the justness of the charge of exaggeration.
+His coarsest, most ignorant, and most brutal teacher is Squeers, yet he
+says "Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an
+existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be
+deemed impossible. There are upon record trials at law in which damages
+have been sought as a poor recompense for lasting agonies and
+disfigurements inflicted upon children by the treatment of the master in
+these places, involving such offensive and foul details of neglect,
+cruelty, and disease as no writer of fiction would have the boldness to
+imagine. Since the author has been engaged upon these Adventures he has
+received, from private quarters far beyond the reach of suspicion or
+distrust, accounts of atrocities, in the perpetration of which upon
+neglected or repudiated children these schools have been the main
+instruments, very far exceeding any that appear in these pages."
+
+Dickens discusses the charge of exaggeration in the preface to Martin
+Chuzzlewit. He says:
+
+    What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain
+    truth to another. That which is commonly called a long-sight,
+    perceives in a prospect innumerable features and bearings nonexistent
+    to a shortsighted person. I sometimes ask myself whether there may
+    occasionally be a difference of this kind between some writers and
+    some readers; whether it is _always_ the writer who colours highly, or
+    whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for colour is a little
+    dull?
+
+    On this head of exaggeration I have a positive experience more curious
+    than the speculation I have just set down. It is this: I have never
+    touched a character precisely from the life, but some counterpart of
+    that character has incredulously asked me: "Now really, did I ever
+    really see one like it?"
+
+    All the Pecksniff family upon earth are quite agreed, I believe, that
+    Mr. Pecksniff is an exaggeration, and that no such character ever
+    existed.
+
+It is worth remembering, too, that it is impossible to exaggerate the
+description of the effects of the evils Dickens attacked. Coercion in any
+form blights and dwarfs the true selfhood of the child. The coercion of
+Mrs. Crisparkle's placid but unbending will, which she kept rigid from a
+deep conviction of Christian duty, is as clearly at variance with the
+elemental laws of individual freedom and growth by self-activity as the
+more dreadful forms of coercion practised by Squeers, Creakle, Bumble, or
+Murdstone.
+
+Doctor Blimber's cramming is not exaggerated. It would be quite possible
+to find in England or the United States or Canada not only private but
+public institutions in which similar processes of illogical cramming are
+still practised. Words are still given before the thought, and as a
+substitute for thought. "Mathematical gooseberries" are yet produced "from
+mere sprouts of bushes," the "words and grammar" of literature are still
+given instead of the life and glory of the author's revelations, children
+yet are "made to bear to pattern somehow or other."
+
+Whether Dickens exaggerated or not in regard to other spheres of work or
+of existence without work, he certainly did not exaggerate in regard to
+school conditions. He studied them faithfully, and described them truly.
+He saw wrongs more clearly than other men, and he made them stand out in
+their natural hideousness.
+
+It is frequently asserted that Dickens portrayed wrong training more than
+right, that he was destructive rather than constructive. In a sense, this
+is correct. His mission was to startle men, so that they would be made
+conscious of the awful crimes that were being committed by teachers and
+parents in the name of duty, as conceived by the highest Christian
+civilization of his time. He knew that a basis of strong feeling must be
+aroused against a wrong before it can be overthrown and right practices
+substituted for it. The only sure foundation for any reform is an
+energetic feeling of dislike for present conditions. The chief work of
+Dickens was to lay bare the injustice, the meanness, and the blighting
+coercion practised on helpless children not only by "ignorant, sordid,
+brutal men called schoolmasters," but in a less degree by the best
+teachers and parents of his time. His was a noble work, and it was well
+done.
+
+The grandest movement of the nineteenth century was the development of a
+profound reverence for the child, so deep and wide that his rights are
+beginning to be clearly recognised by individuals and by national laws,
+and that intelligent adulthood is studying him as the central element of
+power in the representation of God in the accomplishment of the
+progressive evolution of the race. Christ put "the child in the midst of
+his disciples"; men are learning to follow his example, and study the
+child as the surest way to secure industrial, social, and moral reforms.
+Froebel and Dickens were the men who revealed the child. They were the
+true apostles of childhood. It must not be supposed that Dickens was not
+conscious of the positive good while describing the evils. The expressions
+"child queller," "gospel of monotony," "bear to pattern," "taught as
+parrots are," etc., and the name "McChoakumchild," reveal the possession
+of the highest consciousness of child freedom, of individuality, and of
+child reverence yet given to humanity. So in all his wonderful pictures it
+would have been impossible for him to have so vividly described the wrong
+if he had not clearly understood the right. He had perfect sympathy with
+childhood, he was a great student of the child and of the existing methods
+of training and educating him, and his insights and judgment were so clear
+and true that, as Ruskin says, "in the last analysis he was always right."
+
+If he had never written anything but his article on the kindergarten,
+published July, 1855, he would have proved himself to be an educational
+philosopher.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+INFANT GARDENS.
+
+
+Dickens wrote the following article for Household Words in 1855. It
+reveals a surprising mastery of the vital principles of "the new
+education." He wrote the article to direct attention to the work of the
+Baroness Von Bülow, who had come to England to introduce the kindergarten
+system. Dickens's works show that he had long been a close student of
+Froebel's philosophy. The article must always take a front rank as a
+strikingly clear, comprehensive, and sympathetic exposition of the
+principles and processes of the kindergarten. Kindergartens were called
+"infant gardens" when first introduced into England.
+
+    Seventy or eighty years ago there was a son born to the Pastor
+    Froebel, who exercised his calling in the village of Oberweissbach, in
+    the principality of Schwartzburg-Rudolstadt. The son, who was called
+    Frederick, proved to be a child of unusually quick sensibilities,
+    keenly alive to all impressions, hurt by discords of all kinds; by
+    quarrelling of men, women, and children, by ill-assorted colours,
+    inharmonious sounds. He was, to a morbid extent, capable of receiving
+    delight from the beauties of Nature, and, as a very little boy, would
+    spend much of his time in studying and enjoying, for their own sake,
+    the lines and angles in the Gothic architecture of his father's
+    church. Who does not know what must be the central point of all the
+    happiness of such a child? The voice of its mother is the sweetest of
+    sweet sounds, the face of its mother is the fairest of fair sights,
+    the loving touch of her lip is the symbol to it of all pleasures of
+    the sense and of the soul. Against the thousand shocks and terrors
+    that are ready to afflict a child too exquisitely sensitive, the
+    mother is the sole protectress, and her help is all-sufficient.
+    Frederick Froebel lost his mother in the first years of his childhood,
+    and his youth was tortured with incessant craving for a sympathy that
+    was not to be found.
+
+    The Pastor Froebel was too busy to attend to all the little fancies of
+    his son. It was his good practice to be the peaceful arbiter of the
+    disputes occurring in the village, and, as he took his boy with him
+    when he went out, he made the child familiar with all the quarrels of
+    the parish. Thus were suggested, week after week, comparisons between
+    the harmony of Nature and the spite and scandal current among men. A
+    dreamy, fervent love of God, a fanciful boy's wish that he could make
+    men quiet and affectionate, took strong possession of young Frederick,
+    and grew with his advancing years. He studied a good deal. Following
+    out his love of Nature, he sought to become acquainted with the
+    sciences by which her ways and aspects are explained; his
+    contemplation of the architecture of the village church ripened into a
+    thorough taste for mathematics, and he enjoyed agricultural life
+    practically, as a worker on his father's land. At last he went to
+    Pestalozzi's school in Switzerland.
+
+    Then followed troublous times, and patriotic war in Germany, where
+    even poets fought against the enemy with lyre and sword. The quick
+    instincts, and high, generous impulses of Frederick Froebel were
+    engaged at once, and he went out to battle on behalf of Fatherland in
+    the ranks of the boldest, for he was one of Lützow's regiment--a troop
+    of riders that earned by its daring an immortal name. Their fame has
+    even penetrated to our English concert rooms, where many a fair
+    English maiden has been made familiar with the dare-devil patriots of
+    which it was composed by the refrain of the German song in honour of
+    their prowess--"Das ist Lützow's fliegende, wilde Jagd." Having
+    performed his duty to his country in the ranks of its defenders,
+    Froebel fell back upon his love of nature and his study of triangles,
+    squares, and cubes. He had made interest that placed him in a position
+    which, in many respects, curiously satisfied his tastes--that of
+    Inspector to the Mineralogical Museum in Berlin. The post was
+    lucrative, its duties were agreeable to him, but the object of his
+    life's desire was yet to be attained.
+
+    For the unsatisfied cravings of his childhood had borne fruit within
+    him. He remembered the quick feelings and perceptions, the incessant
+    nimbleness of mind proper to his first years, and how he had been
+    hemmed in and cramped for want of right encouragement and sympathy. He
+    remembered, too, the ill-conditioned people whose disputes had been
+    made part of his experience, the dogged children, cruel fathers,
+    sullen husbands, angry wives, quarrelsome neighbours; and surely he
+    did not err when he connected the two memories together. How many men
+    and women go about pale-skinned and weak of limb, because their
+    physical health during infancy and childhood was not established by
+    judicious management. It is just so, thought Froebel, with our minds.
+    There would be fewer sullen, quarrelsome, dull-witted men or women if
+    there were fewer children starved or fed improperly in heart and
+    brain. To improve society--to make men and women better--it is
+    requisite to begin quite at the beginning, and to secure for them a
+    wholesome education during infancy and childhood. Strongly possessed
+    with this idea, and feeling that the usual methods of education, by
+    restraint and penalty, aim at the accomplishment of far too little,
+    and by checking natural development even do positive mischief, Froebel
+    determined upon the devotion of his entire energy, throughout his
+    life, to a strong effort for the establishment of schools that should
+    do justice and honour to the nature of a child. He resigned his
+    appointment at Berlin, and threw himself, with only the resources of a
+    fixed will, a full mind, and a right purpose, on the chances of the
+    future.
+
+    At Keilhau, a village of Thuringia, he took a peasant's cottage, in
+    which he proposed to establish his first school--a village boys'
+    school. It was necessary to enlarge the cottage; and, while that was
+    being done, Froebel lived on potatoes, bread, and water. So scanty was
+    his stock of capital on which his enterprise was started, that, in
+    order honestly to pay his workmen, he was forced to carry his
+    principle of self-denial to the utmost. He bought each week two large
+    rye loaves, and marked on them with chalk each day's allowance.
+    Perhaps he is the only man in the world who ever, in so literal a way,
+    chalked out for himself a scheme of diet.
+
+    After labouring for many years among the boys at Keilhau,
+    Froebel--married to a wife who shared his zeal, and made it her labour
+    to help to the utmost in carrying out the idea of her husband's
+    life--felt that there was more to be accomplished. His boys came to
+    him with many a twist in mind or temper, caught by wriggling up
+    through the bewilderments of a neglected infancy. The first sproutings
+    of the human mind need thoughtful culture; there is no period of life,
+    indeed, in which culture is so essential. And yet, in nine out of ten
+    cases, it is precisely while the little blades of thought and buds of
+    love are frail and tender that no heed is taken to maintain the soil
+    about them wholesome, and the air about them free from blight. There
+    must be Infant Gardens, Froebel said; and straightway formed his
+    plans, and set to work for their accomplishment.
+
+    He had become familiar in cottages with the instincts of mothers, and
+    the faculties with which young children are endowed by Nature. He
+    never lost his own childhood from memory, and being denied the
+    blessing of an infant of his own, regarded all the little ones with
+    equal love. The direction of his boys' school--now flourishing
+    vigorously--he committed to the care of a relation, while he set out
+    upon a tour through parts of Germany and Switzerland to lecture upon
+    infant training and to found Infant Gardens where he could. He founded
+    them at Hamburg, Leipzig, Dresden, and elsewhere. While labouring in
+    this way he was always exercising the same spirit of self-denial that
+    had marked the outset of his educational career. Whatever he could
+    earn was for the children, to promote their cause. He would not spend
+    upon himself the money that would help in the accomplishment of his
+    desire, that childhood should be made as happy as God in his wisdom
+    had designed it should be, and that full play should be given to its
+    energies and powers. Many a night's lodging he took, while on his
+    travels, in the open fields, with an umbrella for his bedroom and a
+    knapsack for his pillow.
+
+    So beautiful a self-devotion to a noble cause won recognition. One of
+    the best friends of his old age was the Duchess Ida of Weimar, sister
+    to Queen Adelaide of England, and his death took place on the 21st of
+    June, three years ago, at a country seat of the Duke of Meiningen. He
+    died at the age of seventy, peaceably, upon a summer day, delighting
+    in the beautiful scenery that lay outside his window, and in the
+    flowers brought by friends to his bedside. Nature, he said, bore
+    witness to the promises of revelation. So Froebel passed away.
+
+        And Nature's pleasant robe of green,
+        Humanity's appointed shroud, enwraps
+        His monument and his memory.
+
+    Wise and good people have been endeavouring of late to obtain in this
+    country a hearing for the views of this good teacher, and a trial for
+    his system. Only fourteen years have elapsed since the first Infant
+    Garden was established, and already Infant Gardens have been
+    introduced into most of the larger towns of Germany. Let us now
+    welcome them with all our hearts to England.
+
+    The whole principle of Froebel's teaching is based on a perfect love
+    for children, and a full and genial recognition of their nature, a
+    determination that their hearts shall not be starved for want of
+    sympathy; that since they are by Infinite Wisdom so created as to find
+    happiness in the active exercise and development of all their
+    faculties, we, who have children round about us, shall no longer
+    repress their energies, tie up their bodies, shut their mouths, and
+    declare that they worry us by the incessant putting of the questions
+    which the Father of us all has placed in their mouths, so that the
+    teachable one forever cries to those who undertake to be its guide,
+    "What shall I do?" To be ready at all times with a wise answer to that
+    question, ought to be the ambition of every one upon whom a child's
+    nature depends for the means of healthy growth. The frolic of
+    childhood is not pure exuberance and waste. "There is often a high
+    meaning in childish play," said Froebel. Let us study it, and act upon
+    hints--or more than hints--that Nature gives. They fall into a fatal
+    error who despise all that a child does as frivolous. Nothing is
+    trifling that forms part of a child's life.
+
+        That which the mother awakens and fosters,
+          When she joyously sings and plays;
+        That which her love so tenderly shelters.
+          Bears a blessing to future days.
+
+    We quote Froebel again, in these lines, and we quote others in which
+    he bids us
+
+        Break not suddenly the dream
+        The blessed dream of infancy;
+        In which the soul unites with all
+        In earth, or heaven, or sea, or sky.
+
+    But enough has already been said to show what he would have done. How
+    would he do it?
+
+    Of course it must be borne in mind, throughout the following sketch of
+    Froebel's scheme of infant training, that certain qualities of mind
+    are necessary to the teacher. Let nobody suppose that any scheme of
+    education can attain its end, as a mere scheme, apart from the
+    qualifications of those persons by whom it is to be carried out. Very
+    young children can be trained successfully by no person who wants
+    hearty liking for them, and who can take part only with a proud sense
+    of restraint in their chatter and their play. It is in truth no
+    condescension to become in spirit as a child with children, and nobody
+    is fit to teach the young who holds a different opinion. Unvarying
+    cheerfulness and kindness, the refinement that belongs naturally to a
+    pure, well-constituted woman's mind are absolutely necessary to the
+    management of one of Froebel's Infant Gardens.
+
+    Then, again, let it be understood that Froebel never wished his system
+    of training to be converted into mere routine to the exclusion of all
+    that spontaneous action in which more than half of every child's
+    education must consist. It was his purpose to show the direction in
+    which it was most useful to proceed, how best to assist the growth of
+    the mind by following the indications Nature furnishes. Nothing was
+    farther from his design, in doing that, than the imposition of a check
+    on any wholesome energies. Blindman's buff, romps, puzzles, fairy
+    tales, everything in fact that exercises soundly any set of the
+    child's faculties, must be admitted as a part of Froebel's system. The
+    cardinal point of his doctrine is--take care that you do not exercise
+    a part only of the child's mind or body; but take thorough pains to
+    see that you encourage the development of its whole nature. If
+    pains--and great pains--be not taken to see that this is done,
+    probably it is not done. The Infant Gardens are designed to help in
+    doing it.
+
+    The mind of a young child must not be trained at the expense of its
+    body. Every muscle ought, if possible, to be brought daily into
+    action; and, in the case of a child suffered to obey the laws of
+    Nature by free tumbling and romping, that is done in the best manner
+    possible. Every mother knows that by carrying an infant always on the
+    same arm its growth is liable to be perverted. Every father knows the
+    child's delight at being vigorously danced up and down, and much of
+    this delight arises from the play then given to its muscles. As the
+    child grows, the most unaccustomed positions into which it can be
+    safely twisted are those from which it will receive the greatest
+    pleasure. That is because play is thus given to the muscles in a form
+    they do not often get, and Nature--always watchful on the child's
+    behalf--cries, We will have some more of that. It does us good. As it
+    is with the body, so it is with the mind, and Froebel's scheme of
+    infant education is, for both, a system of gymnastics.
+
+    He begins with the newborn infant, and demands that, if possible, it
+    shall not be taken from its mother. He sets his face strongly against
+    the custom of committing the child during the tenderest and most
+    impressible period of its whole life to the care and companionship of
+    an ignorant nursemaid, or of servants who have not the mother's
+    instinct, or the knowledge that can tell them how to behave in its
+    presence. Only the mother should, if possible, be the child's chief
+    companion and teacher during at least the first three years of its
+    life, and she should have thought it worth while to prepare herself
+    for the right fulfilment of her duties. Instead of tambour work, or
+    Arabic, or any other useless thing that may be taught at girls'
+    schools, surely it would be a great blessing if young ladies were to
+    spend some of their time in an Infant Garden, that might be attached
+    to every academy. Let them all learn from Froebel what are the
+    requirements of a child, and be prepared for the wise performance of
+    what is after all to be the most momentous business of their lives.
+
+    The carrying out of this hint is indeed necessary to the complete and
+    general adoption of the infant-garden system. Froebel desired his
+    infants to be taught only by women, and required that they should be
+    women as well educated and refined as possible, preferring amiable
+    unmarried girls. Thus he would have our maidens spending some part of
+    their time in playing with little ones, learning to understand them,
+    teaching them to understand; our wives he would have busy at home,
+    making good use of their experience, developing carefully and
+    thoughtfully the minds of their children, sole teachers for the first
+    three years of their life; afterward, either helped by throwing them
+    among other children in an Infant Garden for two or three hours every
+    day, or, if there be at home no lack of little company, having Infant
+    Gardens of their own.
+
+    Believing that it is natural to address infants in song, Froebel
+    encouraged nursery songs, and added to their number. Those contributed
+    by him to the common stock were of course contributed for the sake of
+    some use that he had for each; in the same spirit--knowing play to be
+    essential to a child--he invented games; and those added by him to the
+    common stock are all meant to be used for direct teaching. It does not
+    in the least follow, and it was not the case, that he would have us
+    make all nursery rhymes and garden sports abstrusely didactic. He
+    meant no more than to put his own teaching into songs and games, to
+    show clearly that whatever is necessary to be said or done to a young
+    child may be said or done merrily or playfully; and although he was
+    essentially a schoolmaster, he had no faith in the terrors commonly
+    associated with his calling.
+
+    Froebel's nursery songs are associated almost invariably with bodily
+    activity on the part of the child. He is always, as soon as he becomes
+    old enough, to do something while the song is going on, and the
+    movements assigned to him are cunningly contrived so that not even a
+    joint of a little finger shall be left unexercised. If he be none the
+    better, he is none the worse for this. The child is indeed unlucky
+    that depends only on care of this description for the full play of its
+    body; but there are some children so unfortunate, and there are some
+    parents who will be usefully reminded by those songs, of the necessity
+    of procuring means for the free action of every joint and limb. What
+    is done for the body is done in the same spirit for the mind, and
+    ideas are formed, not by song only. The beginning of a most ingenious
+    course of mental training by a series of playthings is made almost
+    from the very first.
+
+    A box containing six soft balls, differing in colour, is given to the
+    child. It is Froebel's "first gift." Long before it can speak the
+    infant can hold one of these little balls in its fingers, become
+    familiar with its spherical shape and its colour. It stands still, it
+    springs, it rolls. As the child grows, he can roll it and run after
+    it, watch it with sharp eyes, and compare the colour of one ball with
+    the colour of another, prick up his ears at the songs connected with
+    his various games with it, use it as a bond of playfellowship with
+    other children, practise with it first efforts at self-denial, and so
+    forth. One ball is suspended by a string, it jumps--it
+    rolls--here--there--over--up; turns left--turns
+    right--ding-dong--tip-tap--falls--spins; fifty ideas may be connected
+    with it. The six balls, three of the primary colours, three of the
+    secondary, may be built up in a pyramid; they may be set rolling, and
+    used in combination in a great many ways giving sufficient exercise to
+    the young wits that have all knowledge and experience before them.
+
+    Froebel's "second gift" is a small box containing a ball, cube, and
+    roller (the last two perforated), with a stick and string. With these
+    forms of the cube, sphere, and cylinder, there is a great deal to be
+    done and learned. They can be played with at first according to the
+    child's own humour: will run, jump, represent carts, or anything. The
+    ancient Egyptians, in their young days as a nation, piled three cubes
+    on one another and called them the three Graces. A child will, in the
+    same way, see fishes in stones, and be content to put a cylinder upon
+    a cube, and say that is papa on horseback. Of this element of ready
+    fancy in all childish sport Froebel took full advantage. The ball,
+    cube, and cylinder may be spun, swung, rolled, and balanced in so many
+    ways as to display practically all their properties. The cube, spun
+    upon the stick piercing it through opposite edges, will look like a
+    circle, and so forth. As the child grows older, each of the forms may
+    be examined definitely, and he may learn from observation to describe
+    it. The ball may be rolled down an inclined plane and the acceleration
+    of its speed observed. Most of the elementary laws of mechanics may be
+    made practically obvious to the child's understanding.
+
+    The "third gift" is the cube divided once in every direction. By the
+    time a child gets this to play with he is three years old--of age ripe
+    for admission to an Infant Garden. The Infant Garden is intended for
+    the help of children between three years old and seven. Instruction in
+    it--always by means of play--is given for only two or three hours in
+    the day; such instruction sets each child, if reasonably helped at
+    home, in the right train of education for the remainder of its time.
+
+    An Infant Garden must be held in a large room abounding in clear space
+    for child's play, and connected with a garden into which the children
+    may adjourn whenever weather will permit. The garden is meant chiefly
+    to assure, more perfectly, the association of wholesome bodily
+    exercise with mental activity. If climate but permitted, Froebel would
+    have all young children taught entirely in the pure, fresh air, while
+    frolicking in sunshine among flowers. By his system he aimed at
+    securing for them bodily as well as mental health, and he held it to
+    be unnatural that they should be cooped up in close rooms, and glued
+    to forms, when all their limbs twitch with desire for action, and
+    there is a warm sunshine out of doors. The garden, too, should be
+    their own; every child the master or mistress of a plot in it, sowing
+    seeds and watching day by day the growth of plants, instructed
+    playfully and simply in the meaning of what is observed. When weather
+    forbids use of the garden, there is the great, airy room which should
+    contain cupboards, with a place for every child's toys and implements;
+    so that a habit of the strictest neatness may be properly maintained.
+    Up to the age of seven there is to be no book work and no ink work;
+    but only at school a free and brisk, but systematic strengthening of
+    the body, of the senses, of the intellect, and of the affections,
+    managed in such a way as to leave the child prompt for subsequent
+    instruction, already comprehending the elements of a good deal of
+    knowledge.
+
+    We must endeavour to show in part how that is done. The third
+    gift--the cube divided once in every direction--enables the child to
+    begin the work of construction in accordance with its own ideas, and
+    insensibly brings the ideas into the control of a sense of harmony and
+    fitness. The cube divided into eight parts will manufacture many
+    things; and, while the child is at work helped by quiet suggestion now
+    and then, the teacher talks of what he is about, asks many questions,
+    answers more, mixes up little songs and stories with the play.
+    Pillars, ruined castles, triumphal arches, city gates, bridges,
+    crosses, towers, all can be completed to the perfect satisfaction of a
+    child, with the eight little cubes. They are all so many texts on
+    which useful and pleasant talk can be established. Then they are
+    capable also of harmonious arrangement into patterns, and this is a
+    great pleasure to the child. He learns the charm of symmetry,
+    exercises taste in the preference of this or that among the hundred
+    combinations of which his eight cubes are susceptible.
+
+    Then follows the "fourth gift," a cube divided into eight planes cut
+    lengthways. More things can be done with this than with the other.
+    Without strain on the mind, in sheer play, mingled with songs, nothing
+    is wanted but a liberal supply of little cubes, to make clear to the
+    children the elements of arithmetic. The cubes are the things
+    numbered. Addition is done with them; they are subtracted from each
+    other; they are multiplied; they are divided. Besides these four
+    elementary rules they cause children to be thoroughly at home in the
+    principle of fractions, to multiply and divide fractions--as real
+    things; all in good time it will become easy enough to let written
+    figures represent them--to go through the rule of three, square root,
+    and cube root. As a child has instilled into him the principles of
+    arithmetic, so he acquires insensibly the groundwork of geometry, the
+    sister science.
+
+    Froebel's "fifth gift" is an extension of the third, a cube divided
+    into twenty-seven equal cubes, and three of these further divided into
+    halves, three into quarters. This brings with it the teaching of a
+    great deal of geometry, much help to the lessons in number,
+    magnificent accessions to the power of the little architect, who is
+    provided, now, with pointed roofs and other glories, and the means of
+    producing an almost infinite variety of symmetrical patterns, both
+    more complex and more beautiful than heretofore.
+
+    The "sixth gift" is a cube so divided as to extend still farther the
+    child's power of combining and discussing it. When its resources are
+    exhausted and combined with those of the "seventh gift" (a box
+    containing every form supplied in the preceding series), the little
+    pupil--seven years old--has had his inventive and artistic powers
+    exercised, and his mind stored with facts that have been absolutely
+    comprehended. He has acquired also a sense of pleasure in the
+    occupation of his mind.
+
+    But he has not been trained in this way only. We leave out of account
+    the bodily exercise connected with the entire round of occupation, and
+    speak only of the mental discipline. There are some other "gifts" that
+    are brought into service as the child becomes able to use them. One is
+    a box containing pieces of wood, or pasteboard, cut into sundry forms.
+    With these the letters of the alphabet can be constructed; and, after
+    letters, words, in such a way as to create out of the game a series of
+    pleasant spelling lessons. The letters are arranged upon a slate ruled
+    into little squares, by which the eye is guided in preserving
+    regularity. Then follows the gift of a bundle of small sticks, which
+    represent so many straight lines; and, by laying them upon his slate,
+    the child can make letters, patterns, pictures; drawing, in fact, with
+    lines that have not to be made with pen or pencil, but are provided
+    ready made and laid down with the fingers. This kind of Stick-work
+    having been brought to perfection, there is a capital extension of the
+    idea with what is called Pea-work. By the help of peas softened in
+    water, sticks may be joined together, letters, skeletons of cubes,
+    crosses, prisms may be built; houses, towers, churches may be
+    constructed, having due breadth as well as length and height, strong
+    enough to be carried about or kept as specimens of ingenuity. Then
+    follows a gift of flat sticks, to be used in plaiting. After that
+    there is a world of ingenuity to be expended on the plaiting, folding,
+    cutting, and pricking of plain or coloured paper. Children five years
+    old, trained in the Infant Garden, will delight in plaiting slips of
+    paper variously coloured into patterns of their own invention, and
+    will work with a sense of symmetry so much refined by training as to
+    produce patterns of exceeding beauty. By cutting paper, too, patterns
+    are produced in the Infant Garden that would often, though the work of
+    very little hands, be received in schools of design with acclamation.
+    Then there are games by which the first truths of astronomy, and other
+    laws of Nature, are made as familiar as they are interesting. For our
+    own parts, we have been perfectly amazed at the work we have seen done
+    by children of six or seven--bright, merry creatures, who have all the
+    spirit of their childhood active in them, repressed by no parent's
+    selfish love of ease and silence, cowed by no dull-witted teacher of
+    the A B C and the pothooks.
+
+    Froebel discourages the cramping of an infant's hand upon a pen, but
+    his slate ruled into little squares, or paper prepared in the same
+    way, is used by him for easy training in the elements of drawing.
+    Modelling in wet clay is one of the most important occupations of the
+    children who have reached about the sixth year, and is used as much as
+    possible, not merely to encourage imitation, but to give some play to
+    the creative power. Finally, there is the best possible use made of
+    the paint-box, and children engaged upon the colouring of pictures and
+    the arrangement of nosegays are further taught to enjoy, not merely
+    what is bright, but also what is harmonious and beautiful.
+
+    We have not left ourselves as much space as is requisite to show how
+    truly all such labour becomes play to the child. Fourteen years'
+    evidence suffices for a demonstration of the admirable working of a
+    system of this kind; but as we think there are some parents who may be
+    willing to inquire a little further into the subject here commended
+    earnestly to their attention, we will end by a citation of the source
+    from which we have ourselves derived what information we possess.
+
+    At the educational exhibition in St. Martin's Hall last year, there
+    was a large display of the material used and results produced in
+    Infant Gardens which attracted much attention. The Baroness von
+    Marenholtz, enthusiastic in her advocacy of the children's cause, came
+    then to England, and did very much to procure the establishment in
+    this country of some experimental Infant Gardens. By her, several
+    months ago--and at about the same time by M. and Madame Rongé who had
+    already established the first English Infant Garden--our attention was
+    invited to the subject. We were also made acquainted with M. Hoffman,
+    one of Froebel's pupils, who explained the system theoretically at the
+    Polytechnic Institution. When in this country, the Baroness von
+    Marenholtz published a book called Woman's Educational Mission, being
+    an explanation of Frederick Froebel's System of Infant Gardens. We
+    have made use of the book in the preceding notice, but it appeared
+    without the necessary illustrations, and is therefore a less perfect
+    guide to the subject than a work published more recently by M. and
+    Madame Rongé: A Practical Guide to the English Kindergarten. This last
+    book we exhort everybody to consult who is desirous of a closer
+    insight into Froebel's system than we have been able here to give. It
+    not only explains what the system is, but, by help of an unstinted
+    supply of little sketches, enables any one at once to study it at home
+    and bring it into active operation. It suggests conversations, games;
+    gives many of Froebel's songs, and even furnishes the music (which
+    usually consists of popular tunes--Mary Blane, Rousseau's Dream, etc.)
+    to which they may be sung. Furthermore, it is well to say that any one
+    interested in this subject, whom time and space do not forbid, may see
+    an Infant Garden in full work by calling, on a Tuesday morning between
+    the hours of ten and one, on M. and Madame Rongé, at number 32
+    Tavistock Place, Tavistock Square. That day these earliest and
+    heartiest of our established infant gardeners have set apart, for the
+    help of a good cause, to interruptions and investigations from the
+    world without, trusting, of course, we suppose, that no one will
+    disturb them for the satisfaction of mere idle curiosity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE OVERTHROW OF COERCION.
+
+
+Dickens, in the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, states that, as Pickwick
+Papers had given him an audience, he determined to carry out a
+long-cherished plan and write for the purpose of driving out of existence
+a class of bad private schools, of which certain schools in Yorkshire were
+the worst types. He drew a picture of low cunning, avarice, ignorance,
+imposture, and brutality in Squeers that astounded his audience, and led
+to the closing of most of the Yorkshire private schools and to the
+overthrow of tyranny in schools throughout the civilized world. Tyranny
+and corporal punishment still exist, but not in the best schools. Not one
+child weeps now on account of corporal punishment for every hundred who
+wailed bitterly for the same reason when Froebel and Dickens began their
+loving work. Year by year the good work goes on. Men are learning the
+better ways of guiding and governing childhood. We can not yet say when
+men and women in the homes and schools everywhere shall understand the
+child and their own powers so thoroughly that there shall be no more
+corporal punishment inflicted, but we do know that the abatement of the
+terrible brutality began with the revelations of Froebel and Dickens.
+Froebel taught the new philosophy, Dickens sent it quivering through the
+hearts and consciences of mankind.
+
+Members of the highest classes in England have been imprisoned near the
+close of the nineteenth century for improper methods of punishing children
+that would have excited no comment when Dickens described Squeers a little
+more than half a century earlier. In the report to the British
+Government, at the close of his remarkable half-century of honourable and
+very able educational work, Sir Joshua Fitch said: "In watching the
+gradual development of the training colleges for women from year to year,
+nothing is more striking than the increased attention which is being paid
+in those institutions to the true principles of infant teaching and
+discipline. The circular which has recently been issued by your lordships,
+and which is designed to enforce and explain these principles, would, if
+put forth a few years ago, have fallen on unprepared soil, and would
+indeed have seemed to many teachers both in and out of training colleges
+to be scarcely intelligible. Now its counsels will be welcomed with
+sympathy and full appreciation."
+
+Dickens describes Squeers as a man "whose appearance was not
+prepossessing."
+
+    He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two.
+    The eye he had was unquestionably useful, but decidedly not
+    ornamental: being of a greenish gray, and in shape resembling the
+    fanlight of a street door. The blank side of his face was much
+    wrinkled and puckered up, which gave him a very sinister appearance,
+    especially when he smiled, at which times his expression bordered
+    closely on the villainous. His hair was very flat and shiny, save at
+    the ends, where it was brushed stiffly up from a low protruding
+    forehead, which assorted well with his harsh voice and coarse manner.
+
+He then proceeds to reveal the character of Squeers by a series of
+incidents:
+
+    Mr. Squeers was standing in a box by one of the coffee-room
+    fireplaces. In a corner of the seat was a very small deal trunk, tied
+    round with a scanty piece of cord; and on the trunk was perched--his
+    lace-up half-boots and corduroy trousers dangling in the air--a
+    diminutive boy, with his shoulders drawn up to his ears, and his hands
+    planted on his knees, who glanced timidly at the schoolmaster, from
+    time to time, with evident dread and apprehension.
+
+    "Half-past three," muttered Mr. Squeers, turning from the window, and
+    looking sulkily at the coffee-room clock. "There will be nobody here
+    to-day."
+
+    Much vexed by this reflection, Mr. Squeers looked at the little boy to
+    see whether he was doing anything he could beat him for. As he
+    happened not to be doing anything at all, he merely boxed his ears,
+    and told him not to do it again.
+
+    "At midsummer," muttered Mr. Squeers, resuming his complaint, "I took
+    down ten boys; ten twentys is two hundred pound. I go back at eight
+    o'clock to-morrow morning, and have got only three--three oughts is an
+    ought--three twos is six--sixty pound. What's come of all the boys?
+    what's parents got in their heads? what does it all mean?"
+
+    Here the little boy on the top of the trunk gave a violent sneeze.
+
+    "Halloa, sir!" growled the schoolmaster, turning round. "What's that,
+    sir?"
+
+    "Nothing, please, sir," said the little boy.
+
+    "Nothing, sir?" exclaimed Mr. Squeers.
+
+    "Please, sir, I sneezed," rejoined the boy, trembling till the little
+    trunk shook under him.
+
+    "Oh! sneezed, did you?" retorted Mr. Squeers. "Then what did you say
+    'nothing' for, sir?"
+
+    In default of a better answer to this question, the little boy screwed
+    a couple of knuckles into each of his eyes and began to cry, wherefore
+    Mr. Squeers knocked him off the trunk with a blow on one side of his
+    face, and knocked him on again with a blow on the other.
+
+    "Wait till I get you down into Yorkshire, my young gentleman," said
+    Mr. Squeers, "and then I'll give you the rest. Will you hold that
+    noise, sir?"
+
+    "Ye--ye--yes," sobbed the little boy, rubbing his face very hard with
+    the Beggar's Petition in printed calico.
+
+    "Then do so at once, sir," said Squeers. "Do you hear?"
+
+The waiter at this juncture announced a gentleman who wished to interview
+Mr. Squeers, and the schoolmaster, in an undertone, said to the poor boy:
+"Put your handkerchief in your pocket, you little scoundrel, or I'll
+murder you when the gentleman goes."
+
+Affecting not to see the gentleman when he entered, Mr. Squeers feigned to
+be mending a pen and trying to comfort the boy he had so grossly abused.
+
+"My dear child," said Squeers, "all people have their trials. This early
+trial of yours, that is fit to make your little heart burst and your very
+eyes come out of your head with crying, what is it? Nothing--less than
+nothing. You are leaving your friends, but you will have a father in me,
+my dear, and a mother in Mrs. Squeers."
+
+Our indignation is still further aroused when we hear the conversation
+between Mr. Squeers and his visitor, who is named Snawley, and who was "a
+sleek, flat-nosed man, bearing in his countenance an expression of much
+mortification and sanctity."
+
+He had brought with him two little boys, whose stepfather he was. Their
+mother had a little money in her own right and he was afraid she might
+squander it on her boys, so he wished to dispose of them. Our blood runs
+cold as we hear the two scoundrels plotting against the unfortunate boys.
+They are to be kept by Squeers till grown up. No questions are to be asked
+"so long as the payments are regular." "They are to be supplied with
+razors when grown up, and never allowed home for holidays, and not
+permitted to write home, except a circular at Christmas to say they never
+were so happy and hope they may never be sent for, and no questions are to
+be asked in case anything happens to them."
+
+We learn the unutterable selfishness of Squeers as he sits eating a
+sumptuous breakfast, while the five wretched and hungry little boys, who
+are to accompany him to Yorkshire to Dotheboys Hall, look at him. He had
+ordered bread and butter for three, which he cut into five portions, and
+"two-penn'orth of milk" for the five boys. While waiting for the bread to
+come he said, as he took a large mouthful of beef and toast, "Conquer your
+passions, boys, and don't be eager after vittles. Subdue your appetites,
+my dears, and you've conquered human natur."
+
+Nicholas Nickleby had been engaged to teach under Squeers in Dotheboys
+Hall. He was shocked at many things he heard and saw the night he arrived
+in Yorkshire.
+
+But the school itself and the appearance of the wretched pupils completed
+his discomfiture.
+
+    The pupils--the young noblemen! How the last faint traces of hope, the
+    remotest glimmering of any good to be derived from his efforts in this
+    den, faded from the mind of Nicholas as he looked in dismay around!
+    Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the
+    countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys
+    of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear
+    their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were
+    the bleared eye, the harelip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or
+    distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for
+    their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of
+    infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There
+    were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the
+    scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light
+    of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone
+    remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, with leaden eyes, like
+    malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins
+    of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary
+    nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With
+    every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every
+    young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every
+    revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil
+    way to their core in silence, what an incipient hell was breeding
+    here!
+
+It was Mr. Squeers's custom on the first afternoon after his return from
+London to call the school together to make announcements, and read letters
+written by himself, which he pretended had been written by the relatives
+of the boys. Accordingly, the first afternoon after the arrival of
+Nicholas, Squeers entered the schoolroom "with a small bundle of papers in
+his hand, and Mrs. S. followed with a pair of canes."
+
+"Let any boy speak a word without leave," said Mr. Squeers, "and I'll take
+the skin off his back."
+
+Two letters will serve as samples of the rest:
+
+"Graymarsh. Stand up, Graymarsh."
+
+Graymarsh stood up, while Squeers read his letter:
+
+    "Graymarsh's maternal aunt is very glad to hear he's so well and
+    happy, and sends her respectful compliments to Mrs. Squeers, and
+    thinks she must be an angel. She likewise thinks Mr. Squeers is too
+    good for this world; but hopes he may long be spared to carry on the
+    business. Would have sent the two pair of stockings as desired, but is
+    short of money, so forwards a tract instead, and hopes Graymarsh will
+    put his trust in Providence. Hopes, above all, that he will study in
+    every thing to please Mr. and Mrs. Squeers, and look upon them as his
+    only friends; and that he will love Master Squeers; and not object to
+    sleeping five in a bed, which no Christian should. Ah!" said Squeers,
+    folding it up, "a delightful letter. Very affecting indeed."
+
+"Mobbs" was next called, and his letter was read to him:
+
+    "Mobbs's stepmother," said Squeers, "took to her bed on hearing that
+    he wouldn't eat fat, and has been very ill ever since. She wishes to
+    know, by an early post, where he expects to go to, if he quarrels with
+    his vittles; and with what feelings he could turn up his nose at the
+    cow's-liver broth, after his good master had asked a blessing on it.
+    This was told her in the London newspapers--not by Mr. Squeers, for he
+    is too kind and too good to set anybody against anybody--and it has
+    vexed her so much, Mobbs can't think. She is sorry to find he is
+    discontented, which is sinful and horrid, and hopes Mr. Squeers will
+    flog him into a happier state of mind; with this view, she has also
+    stopped his halfpenny a week pocket-money, and given a double-bladed
+    knife with a corkscrew in it to the missionaries, which she had bought
+    on purpose for him."
+
+    "A sulky state of feeling," said Squeers, after a terrible pause,
+    during which he had moistened the palm of his right hand again, "won't
+    do. Cheerfulness and contentment must be kept up. Mobbs, come to me!"
+
+    Mobbs moved slowly toward the desk, rubbing his eyes in anticipation
+    of good cause for doing so; and he soon afterward retired by the side
+    door, with as good a cause as a boy need have.
+
+There are still school tyrants who talk with philosophic air of flogging
+children to make them happier, and others who say with hard tones and
+clenched hands that "the one thing they will not allow in their schools is
+a sulky boy or girl," and they mean, when they say so, that if a boy is
+sulky they take no steps to find out the cause of his disease or the
+natural remedy for it, but they apply the universal remedy of the
+old-fashioned quack trainer and whip the poor boy, who is already
+suffering from some physical or nervous derangement. Squeers and such
+teachers are brother tyrants. They practise the Squeers's doctrine--"A
+sulky state of feeling won't do. Cheerfulness and contentment must be kept
+up. Mobbs, come to me"--to make children cheerful and contented.
+
+One of the most heart-stirring cases in Dotheboys Hall was that of poor
+Smike. He had been sent to Squeers when an infant. He was a young man now,
+but he had been starved so that he wore still around his long neck the
+frill of the collar that loving hands had placed there when he was a
+little child. Ill treatment and lack of proper food had made him almost an
+imbecile, and he was the drudge of the institution. Nicholas was attracted
+by the anxious, longing looks of the boy, as his eyes followed Squeers
+from place to place on their arrival from London.
+
+    He was lame; and as he feigned to be busy in arranging the table,
+    glanced at the letters with a look so keen, and yet so dispirited and
+    hopeless, that Nicholas could hardly bear to watch him.
+
+    "What are you bothering about there, Smike?" cried Mrs. Squeers; "let
+    the things alone, can't you."
+
+    "Eh!" said Squeers, looking up. "Oh! it's you, is it?"
+
+    "Yes, sir," replied the youth, pressing his hands together, as though
+    to control, by force, the nervous wandering of his fingers; "is
+    there----"
+
+    "Well!" said Squeers.
+
+    "Have you--did anybody--has nothing been heard--about me?"
+
+    "Devil a bit," replied Squeers testily.
+
+    The lad withdrew his eyes, and, putting his hand to his face, moved
+    toward the door.
+
+    "Not a word," resumed Squeers, "and never will be."
+
+This is one of the pathetic pictures that awoke the heart of humanity.
+Nicholas was the first person who had ever sympathized with Smike, so the
+poor fellow naturally gave to Nicholas the pent-up love of his dwarfed
+nature, and kept near him whenever it was possible to do so.
+
+Dickens made Smike the centre of the terrible interest in Dotheboys Hall.
+
+Poor Smike was so badly treated that he ran away, but, after a long chase,
+he was brought home in triumph by Mrs. Squeers, bound like an animal.
+Squeers, of course, determined to flog him before all the boys as an
+example, and this led to the first great step toward the overthrow of the
+power of Squeers in Dotheboys Hall.
+
+    The news that Smike had been caught and brought back in triumph, ran
+    like wildfire through the hungry community, and expectation was on
+    tiptoe all the morning. On tiptoe it was destined to remain, however,
+    until afternoon; when Squeers, having refreshed himself with his
+    dinner, and further strengthened himself by an extra libation or so,
+    made his appearance (accompanied by his amiable partner) with a
+    countenance of portentous import, and a fearful instrument of
+    flagellation, strong, supple, wax-ended, and new--in short, purchased
+    that morning, expressly for the occasion.
+
+    "Is every boy here?" asked Squeers, in a tremendous voice.
+
+    Every boy was there, but every boy was afraid to speak; so Squeers
+    glared along the lines to assure himself; and every eye drooped, and
+    every head cowered down, as he did so.
+
+    "Each boy keep his place," said Squeers, administering his favourite
+    blow to the desk, and regarding with gloomy satisfaction the universal
+    start which it never failed to occasion. "Nickleby! to your desk,
+    sir."
+
+    It was remarked by more than one small observer that there was a very
+    curious and unusual expression in the usher's face; but he took his
+    seat, without opening his lips in reply. Squeers, casting a triumphant
+    glance at his assistant, and a look of most comprehensive despotism on
+    the boys, left the room, and shortly afterward returned, dragging
+    Smike by the collar--or rather by that fragment of his jacket which
+    was nearest the place where his collar would have been had he boasted
+    such a decoration.
+
+    In any other place the appearance of the wretched, jaded, spiritless
+    object would have occasioned a murmur of compassion and remonstrance.
+    It had some effect, even there; for the lookers-on moved uneasily in
+    their seats, and a few of the boldest ventured to steal looks at each
+    other, expressive of indignation and pity.
+
+    They were lost on Squeers, however, whose gaze was fastened on the
+    luckless Smike, as he inquired, according to custom in such cases,
+    whether he had anything to say for himself.
+
+    "Nothing, I suppose?" said Squeers, with a diabolical grin.
+
+    Smike glanced round, and his eye rested for an instant on Nicholas, as
+    if he had expected him to intercede; but his look was riveted on his
+    desk.
+
+    "Have you anything to say?" demanded Squeers again; giving his right
+    arm two or three flourishes to try its power and suppleness. "Stand a
+    little out of the way, Mrs. Squeers, my dear; I've hardly got room
+    enough."
+
+    "Spare me, sir!" cried Smike.
+
+    "Oh! that's all, is it?" said Squeers. "Yes, I'll flog you within an
+    inch of your life, and spare you that."
+
+    "Ha, ha, ha," laughed Mrs. Squeers, "that's a good 'un!"
+
+    "I was driven to do it," said Smike faintly, and casting another
+    imploring look on him.
+
+    "Driven to do it, were you?" said Squeers. "Oh! it wasn't your fault;
+    it was mine, I suppose--eh?"
+
+    "A nasty, ungrateful, pig-headed, brutish, obstinate, sneaking dog,"
+    exclaimed Mrs. Squeers, taking Smike's head under her arm, and
+    administering a cuff at every epithet; "what does he mean by that?"
+
+    "Stand aside, my dear," replied Squeers. "We'll try and find out."
+
+    Mrs. Squeers, being out of breath with her exertions, complied.
+    Squeers caught the boy firmly in his grip; one desperate cut had
+    fallen on his body--he was wincing from the lash, and uttering a
+    scream of pain--it was raised again, and again about to fall--when
+    Nicholas Nickleby suddenly starting up, cried: "Stop!" in a voice that
+    made the rafters ring.
+
+    "Who cried stop?" said Squeers, turning savagely round.
+
+    "I," said Nicholas, stepping forward. "This must not go on."
+
+    "Must not go on!" cried Squeers, almost in a shriek.
+
+    "No!" thundered Nicholas.
+
+    Aghast and stupefied by the boldness of the interference, Squeers
+    released his hold of Smike, and, falling back a pace or two, gazed
+    upon Nicholas with looks that were positively frightful.
+
+    "I say must not," repeated Nicholas, nothing daunted; "shall not. I
+    will prevent it."
+
+    Squeers continued to gaze upon him, with his eyes starting out of his
+    head; but astonishment had actually, for the moment, bereft him of
+    speech.
+
+    "You have disregarded all my quiet interference in the miserable lad's
+    behalf," said Nicholas; "you have returned no answer to the letter in
+    which I begged forgiveness for him, and offered to be responsible that
+    he would remain quietly here. Don't blame me for this public
+    interference. You have brought it upon yourself, not I."
+
+    "Sit down, beggar!" screamed Squeers, almost beside himself with rage,
+    and seizing Smike as he spoke.
+
+    "Wretch!" rejoined Nicholas fiercely, "touch him at your peril! I will
+    not stand by and see it done. My blood is up, and I have the strength
+    of ten such men as you. Look to yourself, for, by Heaven, I will not
+    spare you, if you drive me on!"
+
+    "Stand back!" cried Squeers, brandishing his weapon.
+
+    "I have a long series of insults to avenge," said Nicholas, flushed
+    with passion; "and my indignation is aggravated by the dastardly
+    cruelties practised on helpless infancy in this foul den. Have a care;
+    for, if you do raise the devil within me, the consequences shall fall
+    heavily upon your own head!"
+
+    He had scarcely spoken, when Squeers, in a violent outbreak of wrath,
+    and with a cry like the howl of a wild beast, spit upon him, and
+    struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture,
+    which raised up a bar of livid flesh as it was inflicted. Smarting
+    with the agony of the blow, and concentrating into that one moment all
+    his feelings of rage, scorn, and indignation, Nicholas sprang upon
+    him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat,
+    beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.
+
+    The boys--with the exception of Master Squeers, who, coming to his
+    father's assistance, harassed the enemy in the rear--moved not hand or
+    foot; but Mrs. Squeers, with many shrieks for aid, hung on to the tail
+    of her partner's coat, and endeavoured to drag him from his infuriated
+    adversary; while Miss Squeers, who had been peeping through the
+    keyhole in expectation of a very different scene, darted in at the
+    very beginning of the attack, and after launching a shower of
+    inkstands at the usher's head, beat Nicholas to her heart's content:
+    animating herself at every blow with the recollection of his having
+    refused her proffered love, and thus imparting additional strength to
+    an arm which (as she took after her mother in this respect) was, at no
+    time, one of the weakest.
+
+    Nicholas, in the full torrent of his violence, felt the blows no more
+    than if they had been dealt with feathers; but, becoming tired of the
+    noise and uproar, and feeling that his arm grew weak besides, he threw
+    all his remaining strength into half a dozen finishing cuts and flung
+    Squeers from him, with all the force he could muster. The violence of
+    his fall precipitated Mrs. Squeers completely over an adjacent form;
+    and Squeers, striking his head against it in his descent, lay at his
+    full length on the ground, stunned and motionless.
+
+    Having brought affairs to this happy termination, and ascertained, to
+    his thorough satisfaction, that Squeers was only stunned, and not dead
+    (upon which point he had had some unpleasant doubts at first),
+    Nicholas left his family to restore him and retired to consider what
+    course he had better adopt. He looked anxiously round for Smike, as he
+    left the room, but he was nowhere to be seen.
+
+    After a brief consideration, he packed up a few clothes in a small
+    leathern valise, and, finding that nobody offered to oppose his
+    progress, marched boldly out by the front door and started to walk to
+    London.
+
+    Near the school he met John Browdie, the honest corn factor.
+
+John saw that Nicholas had received a severe blow, and asked the reason.
+
+    "The fact is," said Nicholas, not very well knowing how to make the
+    avowal, "the fact is, that I have been ill-treated."
+
+    "Noa!" interposed John Browdie, in a tone of compassion; for he was a
+    giant in strength and stature, and Nicholas, very likely, in his
+    eyes, seemed a mere dwarf; "dean't say thot."
+
+    "Yes, I have," replied Nicholas, "by that man Squeers, and I have
+    beaten him soundly, and am leaving this place in consequence."
+
+    "What!" cried John Browdie, with such an ecstatic shout, that the
+    horse quite shied at it. "Beatten the schoolmeasther! Ho! ho! ho!
+    Beatten the schoolmeasther! who ever heard o' the loike o' that noo!
+    Giv' us thee hond agean, yongster. Beatten the schoolmeasther! Dang
+    it, I loove thee for't."
+
+And the world agreed, and still agrees, with John Browdie.
+
+Squeers and Smike began the real movement against cruelty and corporal
+punishment not only in schools, but in homes. Dickens described both
+characters so admirably that the world hated Squeers and pitied Smike to
+the limit of its power to hate and pity, and unconsciously the world
+associated cruelty and corporal punishment with Squeers. This was exactly
+what Dickens desired. The hatred of Squeers led to a strong disapproval of
+his practices. Corporal punishment was associated with an unpopular man,
+and it lost its respectable character and never regained it. The dislike
+for Squeers was accentuated by the long-continued sympathy and hopefulness
+felt for Smike as he gradually succumbed to the terrible disease,
+consumption, induced by poor food, neglect, and cruelty.
+
+Squeers and Smike are doing their good work still, and doing it well. They
+could do it much better if men and women when they have become acquainted
+with Squeers would candidly ask themselves the question, "In what respects
+am I like Squeers?" instead of yielding to the feeling of
+self-satisfaction that they are so very unlike him.
+
+Just before writing about the coercive tyranny of Squeers in his school,
+Dickens had written Oliver Twist, in which he had made a most vigorous
+attack upon two classes of characters for their tyrannical treatment of
+children, and especially on account of their frequent use of corporal
+punishment. Bumble represented the officials in institutions for children,
+and "the gentleman in the white waistcoat" was given as a type of the
+advanced Christian philanthropy of his time. He meant well, gave his time
+freely to attend the meetings of the board, and supposed he was doing
+right; but Dickens wished to let philanthropists see that they were
+terribly cruel to the helpless children, and that their good intentions
+could not condone their harshness, even though it resulted from ignorance
+and lack of reverence for childhood, and not from deliberate evil
+intentions.
+
+Poor, friendless little Oliver! His beautiful face and gentle spirit might
+have touched the hardest heart, but the institutional heart becomes hard
+easily, even two generations after the time of Bumble and "the gentleman
+in the immaculate white waistcoat."
+
+Dickens says:
+
+    It must not be supposed that Oliver was denied the benefit of
+    exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages of religious
+    consolation in the workhouse. As for exercise, it was nice cold
+    weather, and he was allowed to perform his ablutions every morning
+    under the pump, in a stone yard, in the presence of Mr. Bumble, who
+    prevented his catching cold, and caused a tingling sensation to
+    pervade his frame, by repeated applications of the cane. As for
+    society, he was carried every other day into the hall, where the boys
+    dined, and there sociably flogged as a public warning and example. And
+    so far from being denied the advantage of religious consolation, he
+    was kicked into the same apartment every evening at prayer time, and
+    there permitted to listen to, and console his mind with, a general
+    supplication of the boys, containing a special clause, therein
+    inserted by authority of the board, in which they entreated to be made
+    good, virtuous, contented, and obedient, and to be guarded from the
+    sins and vices of Oliver Twist.
+
+After Oliver had been sent to work for Mr. Sowerberry he was goaded to
+desperation one evening by the disrespectful remarks of Noah Claypole
+about his mother, and bravely gave the mean bully the personal
+chastisement he so richly deserved. Noah was sent to complain to the
+parish board, and the gentleman in the white waistcoat said:
+
+    "Bumble, just step up to Sowerberry's with your cane, and see what's
+    best to be done. Don't spare him, Bumble."
+
+    "No, I will not, sir," replied the beadle, adjusting the wax end which
+    was twisted round the bottom of his cane, for purposes of parochial
+    flagellation.
+
+    "Tell Sowerberry not to spare him either. They'll never do anything
+    with him without stripes and bruises," said the gentleman in the white
+    waistcoat.
+
+The innocent, manly child was beaten unmercifully and abused cruelly by
+Sowerberry and Bumble, yet he bore all their taunts and floggings without
+a tear until he was alone. Then, "when there was none to see or hear him,
+he fell upon his knees on the floor, and, hiding his face in his hands,
+wept such tears as, God send for the credit of our nature, few so young
+may ever have cause to pour out before him!"
+
+There are not many "gentlemen in white waistcoats" of the type described
+by Dickens now on charitable boards, and the enlightened sentiment of
+civilized countries turns the legal processes of nations upon officials
+who dare to treat children unkindly. Dickens made humane people everywhere
+sympathize with Mr. Meagles, who said: "Whenever I see a beadle in full
+fig coming down a street on a Sunday at the head of a charity school, I am
+obliged to turn and run away, or I should hit him."
+
+Ten years after Squeers began his good work Dickens produced Squeers's
+associate, Mr. Creakle, the master of Salem House.
+
+David Copperfield was sent to Salem House by his stepfather, Mr.
+Murdstone, because he bit his hand when he was punishing him unjustly. For
+this offence he was compelled to wear a placard on his back on which was
+written: "Take care of him. He bites." This dastardly practice of
+labelling youthful offenders persisted until very recent times. Children
+in schools are even yet in some places degraded by inconsiderate teachers
+by being compelled to wear some indication of their misconduct. Dickens
+vigorously condemned this outrage in 1849.
+
+David was sent to school during the holidays, and was soon brought before
+Mr. Creakle by Tungay, his servant with the wooden leg.
+
+    "So," said Mr. Creakle, "this is the young gentleman whose teeth are
+    to be filed! Turn him round."
+
+    Mr. Creakle's face was fiery, and his eyes were small and deep in his
+    head; he had thick veins in his forehead, a little nose, and a large
+    chin. He was bald on the top of his head; and had some thin,
+    wet-looking hair that was just turning gray brushed across each
+    temple, so that the two sides interlaced on his forehead.
+
+    "Now," said Mr. Creakle. "What's the report of this boy?"
+
+    "There's nothing against him yet," returned the man with the wooden
+    leg. "There has been no opportunity."
+
+    I thought Mr. Creakle was disappointed. I thought Mrs. and Miss
+    Creakle (at whom I now glanced for the first time, and who were, both,
+    thin and quiet) were not disappointed.
+
+    "Come here, sir!" said Mr. Creakle, beckoning to me.
+
+    "Come here!" said the man with the wooden leg, repeating the gesture.
+
+    "I have the happiness of knowing your stepfather," whispered Mr.
+    Creakle, taking me by the ear; "and a worthy man he is, and a man of
+    strong character. He knows me, and I know him. Do _you_ know me! Hey?"
+    said Mr. Creakle, pinching my ear with ferocious playfulness.
+
+    "Not yet, sir," I said, flinching with the pain.
+
+    "Not yet! Hey?" repeated Mr. Creakle. "But you will soon. Hey?"
+
+    "You will soon. Hey?" repeated the man with the wooden leg. I
+    afterward found that he generally acted, with his strong voice, as Mr.
+    Creakle's interpreter to the boys.
+
+    I was very much frightened, and said, I hoped so, if he pleased. I
+    felt all this while as if my ear were blazing; he pinched it so hard.
+
+    "I'll tell you what I am," whispered Mr. Creakle, letting it go at
+    last, with a screw at parting that brought the water to my eyes, "I'm
+    a Tartar."
+
+Mr. Creakle proved to be as good as his word. He was a Tartar.
+
+On the first day of school he revealed himself. His opening address was
+very brief and to the point.
+
+    "Now, boys, this is a new half. Take care what you're about in this
+    new half. Come fresh up to the lessons, I advise you, for I come fresh
+    up to the punishment. I won't flinch. It will be of no use your
+    rubbing yourselves; you won't rub the marks out that I shall give you.
+    Now get to work, every boy!"
+
+    When this dreadful exordium was over, Mr. Creakle came to where I sat,
+    and told me that if I were famous for biting, he was famous for
+    biting, too. He then showed me the cane, and asked me what I thought
+    of _that_, for a tooth? Was it a sharp tooth, hey? Was it a double
+    tooth, hey? Had it a deep prong, hey? Did it bite, hey? Did it bite?
+    At every question he gave me a fleshy cut with it that made me writhe.
+
+    Not that I mean to say these were special marks of distinction, which
+    only I received. On the contrary, a large majority of the boys
+    (especially the smaller ones) were visited with similar instances of
+    notice, as Mr. Creakle made the round of the schoolroom. Half the
+    establishment was writhing and crying before the day's work began; and
+    how much of it had writhed and cried before the day's work was over I
+    am really afraid to recollect, lest I should seem to exaggerate.
+
+    I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed his
+    profession more than Mr. Creakle did. He had a delight in cutting at
+    the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite. I am
+    confident that he couldn't resist a chubby boy especially; that there
+    was a fascination in such a subject which made him restless in his
+    mind until he had scored and marked him for the day. I was chubby
+    myself, and ought to know. I am sure when I think of the fellow now,
+    my blood rises against him with the disinterested indignation I should
+    feel if I could have known all about him without having ever been in
+    his power; but it rises hotly, because I know him to have been an
+    incapable brute, who had no more right to be possessed of the great
+    trust he held than to be Lord High Admiral or Commander-in-chief: in
+    either of which capacities it is probable that he would have done
+    infinitely less mischief.
+
+    Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless idol, how abject we
+    were to him! what a launch in life I think it now, on looking-back, to
+    be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!
+
+Twenty years after Dickens described Creakle a new teacher stood before a
+class in a large American city, and, holding a long rattan cane above his
+head, said in a fierce, threatening tone: "Do you see that cane? Would you
+like to feel it? Hey? Well, break any one of my forty-eight rules and you
+will feel it all right." The tyrant in adulthood dies hard. No wonder.
+Tyranny has been wrought into our natures by centuries of blind faith in
+corporal punishment as the supreme agency in saving the race from moral
+wreck and anarchy in childhood and youth. Men sought no agency for the
+development of the good in young lives. As they conceived it, their duty
+was done if they prevented their children from doing wrong, and the
+quickest, easiest, most effective way they knew to secure coercion was by
+corporal punishment. The most successful tyrant, he who could most
+thoroughly terrorize children and keep them down most completely, was
+regarded as the best disciplinarian. Squeers and Creakle were fair
+exponents of the almost universally recognised theory of their day, and
+they had many successors in the real schools of the generation that
+followed them. No man could remain a week in a school now if he began on
+the opening day in the way Creakle did.
+
+Dickens was right in revealing the position of the teacher as one of
+"great trust," and he was right, too, in insisting that Creakle was no
+more fitted to be a teacher "than to be Lord High Admiral or
+Commander-in-chief, in either of which capacities it is probable he would
+have done infinitely less mischief." This was another plea for good normal
+schools and for state supervision.
+
+Dickens makes a good point in his remark about the degradation of abject
+submission to a man of such parts and pretensions as Creakle.
+Subordination always dwarfs the human soul, but when the child is forced
+to a position of abject subordination to a coarse tyrant the degradation
+is more complete and more humiliating. It does not mend matters for the
+child when the tyrant is his father. The tyranny of parenthood is usually
+the hardest to escape from.
+
+In the same book in which Creakle is described--David Copperfield--Dickens
+deals with the tyranny of the home. David's widowed mother married Mr.
+Murdstone, a hard, severe, austere, religious man, with an equally
+dreadful sister--Jane Murdstone.
+
+    Firmness was the grand quality on which both Mr. and Miss Murdstone
+    took their stand. However I might have expressed my comprehension of
+    it at that time, if I had been called upon, I nevertheless did clearly
+    comprehend in my own way that it was another name for tyranny, and for
+    a certain gloomy, arrogant, devil's humour, that was in them both. The
+    creed, as I should state it now, was this: Mr. Murdstone was firm;
+    nobody in his world was to be so firm as Mr. Murdstone; nobody else in
+    his world was to be firm at all, for everybody was to be bent to his
+    firmness.
+
+There was no more depressing tyranny in the time of Dickens than the
+tyranny exercised in the name of a rigid and repressive religion.
+
+    The gloomy taint that was in the Murdstone blood darkened the
+    Murdstone religion, which was austere and wrathful. I have thought,
+    since, that its assuming that character was a necessary consequence of
+    Mr. Murdstone's firmness, which wouldn't allow him to let anybody off
+    from the utmost weight of the severest penalties he could find any
+    excuse for. Be this as it may, I well remember the tremendous visages
+    with which we used to go to church, and the changed air of the place.
+    Again, the dreaded Sunday comes round, and I file into the old pew
+    first, like a guarded captive brought to a condemned service. Again,
+    Miss Murdstone, in a black-velvet gown, that looks as if it had been
+    made out of a pall, follows close upon me; then my mother; then her
+    husband. Again, I listen to Miss Murdstone mumbling the responses, and
+    emphasizing all the dread words with a cruel relish. Again, I see her
+    dark eyes roll round the church when she says "miserable sinners," as
+    if she were calling all the congregation names. Again, I catch rare
+    glimpses of my mother, moving her lips timidly between the two, with
+    one of them muttering at each ear like low thunder. Again, I wonder
+    with a sudden fear whether it is likely that our good old clergyman
+    can be wrong, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone right, and that all the
+    angels in heaven can be destroying angels. Again, if I move a finger
+    or relax a muscle of my face, Miss Murdstone pokes me with her prayer
+    book, and makes my side ache.
+
+Mrs. Chillip said: "Mr. Murdstone sets up an image of himself and calls it
+the Divine Nature," and "what such people as the Murdstones call their
+religion is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance." Mild and cautious
+Mr. Chillip observed, "I don't find authority for Mr. and Miss Murdstone
+in the New Testament," and his good wife added, "The darker tyrant Mr.
+Murdstone becomes, the more ferocious is his religious doctrine."
+
+When David first learned that Mr. Murdstone had married his mother he
+relieved the swelling in his little heart by crying in his bedroom. His
+mother naturally felt a sympathy for her boy. Mr. Murdstone reproved her
+for her lack of "firmness," ordered her out of the room, and gave David
+his first lesson in "obedience."
+
+    "David," he said, making his lips thin, by pressing them together, "if
+    I have an obstinate horse or dog to deal with, what do you think I
+    do?"
+
+    "I don't know."
+
+    "I beat him."
+
+    I had answered in a kind of breathless whisper, but I felt, in my
+    silence, that my breath was shorter now.
+
+    "I make him wince, and smart. I say to myself, 'I'll conquer that
+    fellow;' and if it were to cost him all the blood he had, I should do
+    it."
+
+There are still a few schoolmaster tyrants who boast of their ability "to
+subdue children." They are barbarians, who understand neither the new
+education nor the new theology, who have not learned to recognise and
+reverence the individual selfhood of each child, who themselves fear God's
+power more than they feel his love.
+
+When David was at home for the holidays he remained in his own room a
+considerable part of the time reading. This aroused the anger of Mr.
+Murdstone, and he charged David with being sullen.
+
+    "I was sorry, David," said Mr. Murdstone, turning his head and his
+    eyes stiffly toward me, "to observe that you are of a sullen
+    disposition. This is not a character that I can suffer to develop
+    itself beneath my eyes without an effort at improvement. You must
+    endeavour, sir, to change it. We must endeavour to change it for you."
+
+    "I beg your pardon, sir," I faltered. "I have never meant to be sullen
+    since I came back."
+
+    "Don't take refuge in a lie, sir!" he returned so fiercely, that I saw
+    my mother involuntarily put out her trembling hand as if to interpose
+    between us. "You have withdrawn yourself in your sullenness to your
+    own room. You have kept your room when you ought to have been here.
+    You know now, once for all, that I require you to be here, and not
+    there. Further, that I require you to bring obedience here. You know
+    me, David. I will have it done."
+
+    Miss Murdstone gave a hoarse chuckle.
+
+    "I will have a respectful, prompt, and ready bearing toward myself,"
+    he continued, "and toward Jane Murdstone, and toward your mother. I
+    will not have this room shunned as if it were infected, at the
+    pleasure of a child. Sit down."
+
+    He ordered me like a dog, and I obeyed like a dog.
+
+David's lessons, which had been "along a path of roses" when his mother
+was alone with him, became a path of thorns after the Murdstones came.
+
+    The lessons were a grievous daily drudgery and misery. They were very
+    long, very numerous, very hard--perfectly unintelligible.
+
+    Let me remember how it used to be. I come into the parlour after
+    breakfast with my books, an exercise book and a slate. My mother is
+    ready for me, but not half so ready as Mr. Murdstone, or as Miss
+    Murdstone, sitting near my mother stringing steel beads. The very
+    sight of these two has such an influence over me, that I begin to feel
+    the words I have been at infinite pains to get into my head all
+    sliding away, and going I don't know where. I wonder where they _do_
+    go, by the bye?
+
+    I hand the first book to my mother. I take a last drowning look at
+    the page as I give it into her hand, and start off aloud at a racing
+    pace while I have got it fresh. I trip over a word. Mr. Murdstone
+    looks up. I trip over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden,
+    tumble over half a dozen words, and stop. I think my mother would show
+    me the book if she dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly:
+
+    "Oh, Davy, Davy!"
+
+    "Now, Clara," says Mr. Murdstone, "be firm with the boy. Don't say
+    'Oh, Davy, Davy!' That's childish. He knows his lesson, or he does not
+    know it."
+
+    "He does _not_ know it," Miss Murdstone interposed awfully.
+
+    "I am really afraid he does not," says my mother.
+
+    "Then you see, Clara," returns Miss Murdstone, "you should just give
+    him the book back, and make him know it."
+
+    "Yes, certainly," says my mother; "that's what I intended to do, my
+    dear Jane. Now, Davy, try once more, and don't be stupid."
+
+    I obey the first clause of the injunction by trying once more, but am
+    not so successful with the second, for I am very stupid. I tumble down
+    before I get to the old place, at a point where I was all right
+    before, and stop to think. But I can't think about the lesson. I think
+    of the number of yards of net in Miss Murdstone's cap, or of the price
+    of Mr. Murdstone's dressing-gown, or any such ridiculous problem that
+    I have no business with, and don't want to have anything at all to do
+    with. Mr. Murdstone makes a movement of impatience which I have been
+    expecting for a long time. Miss Murdstone does the same. My mother
+    glances submissively at them, shuts the book, and lays it by as an
+    arrear to be worked out when my other tasks are done.
+
+    There is a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a
+    rolling snowball. The bigger it gets the more stupid I get. The case
+    is so hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such a bog of
+    nonsense, that I give up all idea of getting out, and abandon myself
+    to my fate. The despairing way in which my mother and I look at each
+    other, as I blunder on, is truly melancholy. But the greatest effect
+    in these miserable lessons is when my mother (thinking nobody is
+    observing her) tries to give me the cue by the motion of her lips. At
+    that instant, Miss Murdstone, who has been lying in wait for nothing
+    else all along, says in a deep warning voice:
+
+    "Clara!"
+
+    My mother starts, colours, and smiles faintly. Mr. Murdstone comes out
+    of his chair, takes the book, throws it at me or boxes my ears with
+    it, and turns me out of the room by the shoulders.
+
+    It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if my unfortunate studies
+    generally took this course. I could have done very well if I had been
+    without the Murdstones; but the influence of the Murdstones upon me
+    was like the fascination of two snakes on a wretched young bird. Even
+    when I did get through the morning with tolerable credit, there was
+    not much gained but dinner; for Miss Murdstone never could endure to
+    see me untasked, and if I rashly made any show of being unemployed,
+    called her brother's attention to me by saying, "Clara, my dear,
+    there's nothing like work--give your boy an exercise."
+
+    One morning when I went into the parlour with my books, I found my
+    mother looking anxious, Miss Murdstone looking firm, and Mr. Murdstone
+    binding something round the bottom of a cane--a lithe and limber cane,
+    which he left off binding when I came in, and poised and switched in
+    the air.
+
+    "I tell you, Clara," said Mr. Murdstone, "I have been often flogged
+    myself."
+
+    "To be sure; of course," said Miss Murdstone.
+
+    "Certainly, my dear Jane," faltered my mother meekly. "But--but do you
+    think it did Edward good?"
+
+    "Do you think it did Edward harm, Clara?" asked Mr. Murdstone,
+    gravely.
+
+    "That's the point!" said his sister.
+
+    To this my mother returned "Certainly, my dear Jane," and said no
+    more.
+
+    I felt apprehensive that I was personally interested in this dialogue,
+    and sought Mr. Murdstone's eye as it lighted on mine.
+
+    "Now, David," he said--and I saw that cast again, as he said it--"you
+    must be far more careful to-day than usual." He gave the cane another
+    poise, and another switch; and having finished his preparation of it,
+    laid it down beside him, with an expressive look, and took up his
+    book.
+
+    This was a good freshener to my presence of mind, as a beginning. I
+    felt the words of my lesson slipping off, not one by one, or line by
+    line, but by the entire page. I tried to lay hold of them; but they
+    seemed, if I may so express it, to have put skates on, and to skim
+    away from me with a smoothness there was no checking.
+
+    We began badly, and went on worse. I had come in, with an idea of
+    distinguishing myself rather, conceiving that I was very well
+    prepared; but it turned out to be quite a mistake. Book after book was
+    added to the heap of failures, Miss Murdstone being firmly watchful of
+    us all the time. And when we came at last to the five thousand cheeses
+    (canes he made it that day, I remember), my mother burst out crying.
+
+    "Clara!" said Miss Murdstone, in her warning voice.
+
+    "I am not quite well, my dear Jane, I think," said my mother.
+
+    I saw him wink, solemnly, at his sister, as he rose and said, taking
+    up the cane.
+
+    "Why, Jane, we can hardly expect Clara to bear, with perfect firmness,
+    the worry and torment that David has occasioned her to-day. That would
+    be stoical. Clara is greatly strengthened and improved, but we can
+    hardly expect so much from her. David, you and I will go upstairs,
+    boy."
+
+They went upstairs. David was beaten unmercifully, notwithstanding his
+piteous cries, and in his desperation he bit the hand of Murdstone. For
+this it seemed as if Murdstone would have beaten him to death but for the
+interference of the women. "Then he was gone, and the door locked outside;
+and I was lying, fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, and raging in my
+puny way, upon the floor."
+
+Oh! Blind, self-satisfied "child-quellers," who so ignorantly boast of
+your ability to conquer children! Dickens described Murdstone for you.
+Think of that awful picture of the beautiful boy, created in the image of
+God, lying on the floor, "fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, and
+raging," with every element of sweetness and strength in his life turned
+to darkness and fury, and next time you propose to "conquer a child" who
+has been rendered partially insane, possibly by your treatment, and with
+whom you have unnecessarily forced a crisis, remember the Murdstone
+tragedy--a real tragedy, notwithstanding the fact that the boy's life was
+spared.
+
+Remember, too, that your very presence and manner may blight the young
+lives that you are supposed to develop.
+
+When Mr. Murdstone was sending David away to work he gave him his
+philosophy of coercion as his parting advice:
+
+    "David," said Mr. Murdstone, "to the young, this is a world for
+    action; not for moping and droning in."
+
+    --"As you do," added his sister.
+
+    "Jane Murdstone, leave it to me, if you please. I say, David, to the
+    young, this is a world for action, and not for moping and droning in.
+    It is especially so for a young boy of your disposition, which
+    requires a great deal of correcting; and to which no greater service
+    can be done than to force it to conform to the ways of the working
+    world, and to bend it and break it."
+
+    "For stubbornness won't do here," said his sister. "What it wants is
+    to be crushed. And crushed it must be. Shall be, too!"
+
+First he fills the boy as full as possible of self-depreciation, and then
+trains him to expect that his leading experiences in life will consist of
+being forced into submission, conforming to the plans of others, bending
+to authority, the breaking of his will, and the crushing of his interests
+and purposes. What a depressing outlook to give a child!
+
+John Willet, in Barnaby Rudge, is used as a means of convincing parents
+that they should respect the feelings and opinions of children. No two
+maxims relating to child training are more utterly wrong in principle,
+more devoid of the simplest elements of child sympathy and child
+reverence, than the time-honoured nonsense that "children should be seen
+and not heard," and "children should speak only when they are spoken to."
+
+Dickens exposes these maxims to deserved ridicule in John Willet's
+treatment of his son Joe. John kept the Maypole Inn. Joe was a fine,
+sturdy young man, but his father still ruled him with an unbending
+stubbornness that he believed to be a necessary exercise of authority.
+John was encouraged in his tyranny over his son by some of his old
+cronies, who were in the habit of sitting in the Maypole in the evenings
+and praising John for his firmness in training his son. One evening a
+stranger made a remark about a gentleman, to which Joe replied.
+
+    "Silence, sir!" cried his father.
+
+    "What a chap you are, Joe!" said Long Parkes.
+
+    "Such a inconsiderate lad!" murmured Tom Cobb.
+
+    "Putting himself forward and wringing the very nose off his own
+    father's face!" exclaimed the parish clerk metaphorically.
+
+    "What _have_ I done?" reasoned poor Joe.
+
+    "Silence, sir!" returned his father; "what do you mean by talking,
+    when you see people that are more than two or three times your age
+    sitting still and silent and not dreaming of saying a word?"
+
+    "Why that's the proper time for me to talk, isn't it?" said Joe
+    rebelliously.
+
+    "The proper time, sir!" retorted his father, "the proper time's no
+    time."
+
+    "Ah, to be sure!" muttered Parkes, nodding gravely to the other two
+    who nodded likewise, observing under their breaths that that was the
+    point.
+
+    "The proper time's no time, sir," repeated John Willet; "when I was
+    your age I never talked, I never wanted to talk. I listened and
+    improved myself, that's what I did."
+
+    "It's all very fine talking," muttered Joe, who had been fidgeting in
+    his chair with divers uneasy gestures. "But if you mean to tell me
+    that I'm never to open my lips----"
+
+    "Silence, sir!" roared his father. "No, you never are. When your
+    opinion's wanted, you give it. When you're spoke to you speak. When
+    your opinion's not wanted and you're not spoke to, don't give an
+    opinion and don't you speak. The world's undergone a nice alteration
+    since my time, certainly. My belief is that there an't any boys
+    left--that there isn't such a thing as a boy--that there's nothing now
+    between a male baby and a man--and that all the boys went out with his
+    blessed majesty King George the Second."
+
+On another occasion Joe had been hit with a whip by a stranger, and he
+expressed his opinion to Mr. Varden about the character of the man who hit
+him.
+
+    "Hold your tongue, sir," said his father.
+
+    "I won't, father. It's all along of you that he ventured to do what he
+    did. Seeing me treated like a child, and put down like a fool, _he_
+    plucks up a heart and has a fling at a fellow that he thinks--and may
+    well think, too--hasn't a grain of spirit. But he's mistaken, as I'll
+    show him, and as I'll show all of you before long."
+
+    "Does the boy know what he's saying of!" cried the astonished John
+    Willet.
+
+    "Father," returned Joe, "I know what I say and mean, well--better than
+    you do when you hear me. I can bear with you, but I can not bear the
+    contempt that your treating me in the way you do brings upon me from
+    others every day. Look at other young men of my age. Have they no
+    liberty, no will, no right to speak? Are they obliged to sit
+    mumchance, and to be ordered about till they are the laughingstock of
+    young and old? I am a byword all over Chigwell, and I say--and it's
+    fairer my saying so now, than waiting till you are dead, and I have
+    got your money--I say, that before long I shall be driven to break
+    such bounds, and that when I do, it won't be me that you'll have to
+    blame, but your own self, and no other."
+
+John never trusted his son, never entered into his plans, and treated even
+the most sacred things of Joe's life with contempt.
+
+Joe was about to start to London on business for his father, and he was to
+ride a mare that was so slow that a young man could not enjoy the prospect
+of riding her.
+
+    "Don't you ride hard," said his father.
+
+    "I should be puzzled to do that, I think, father," Joe replied,
+    casting a disconsolate look at the animal.
+
+    "None of your impudence, sir, if you please," retorted old John. "What
+    would you ride, sir? A wild ass or zebra would be too tame for you,
+    wouldn't he, eh, sir? You'd like to ride a roaring lion, wouldn't you,
+    sir, eh, sir? Hold your tongue, sir." When Mr. Willet, in his
+    differences with his son, had exhausted all the questions that
+    occurred to him, and Joe had said nothing at all in answer, he
+    generally wound up by bidding him hold his tongue.
+
+    "And what does the boy mean," added Mr. Willet, after he had stared at
+    him for a little time, in a species of stupefaction, "by cocking his
+    hat, to such an extent! Are you going to kill the wintner, sir?"
+
+    "No," said Joe tartly; "I'm not. Now your mind's at ease, father."
+
+    "With a military air, too!" said Mr. Willet, surveying him from top to
+    toe; "with a swaggering, fire-eating, biling-water drinking sort of
+    way with him! And what do you mean by pulling up the crocuses and
+    snowdrops, eh, sir?"
+
+    "It's only a little nosegay," said Joe, reddening. "There's no harm in
+    that, I hope?"
+
+    "You're a boy of business, you are, sir!" said Mr. Willet
+    disdainfully, "to go supposing that wintners care for nosegays."
+
+    "I don't suppose anything of the kind," returned Joe. "Let them keep
+    their red noses for bottles and tankards. These are going to Mr.
+    Varden's house."
+
+    "And do you suppose _he_ minds such things as crocuses?" demanded
+    John.
+
+    "I don't know, and to say the truth, I don't care," said Joe. "Come,
+    father, give me the money, and in the name of patience let me go."
+
+    "There it is, sir," replied John; "and take care of it; and mind you
+    don't make too much haste back, but give the mare a long rest. Do you
+    mind?"
+
+    "Ay, I mind," returned Joe. "She'll need it, Heaven knows."
+
+    "And don't you score up too much at the Black Lion," said John. "Mind
+    that too."
+
+    "Then why don't you let me have some money of my own?" retorted Joe
+    sorrowfully; "why don't you, father? What do you send me into London
+    for, giving me only the right to call for my dinner at the Black Lion,
+    which you're to pay for next time you go, as if I was not to be
+    trusted with a few shillings? Why do you use me like this? It's not
+    right of you. You can't expect me to be quiet under it."
+
+Dickens in this interview condemns several mistakes often made by parents
+in restraining instead of sympathizing with their children in the natural
+unfolding of their young manhood or womanhood. It was wrong for John
+Willet to ridicule Joe's desire to ride a smart horse. It was wrong to bid
+him "hold his tongue." It was wrong to criticise his method of dressing to
+look his very best. It was wrong to sneer at him because his consciousness
+of unfolding manhood and his hope of Dolly Varden's love made him carry
+himself with a "military air." What a difference it would make in the
+characters of young men if they all carried themselves with a military
+air, and walked with a consciousness of power and hope!
+
+It was especially wrong to make fun of the nosegay Joe had pulled for
+Dolly Varden. What a pity it is that so few fathers or mothers can truly
+sympathize with their boys and girls during the period of courtship! Why
+should the most sacred feelings that ever stir the soul be made the
+subject of jest and levity by those whose hearts should most truly beat in
+unison with the young hearts that are aflame? If there is a time in the
+life of young men or women when father or mother may enter the hearts of
+their children as benedictions and form a blessed unity that can never be
+broken or undone it is surely when young hearts are hallowed by love. Yet
+there are few parents to whom their children can speak freely about the
+mysteries and the deep experiences of love that come into their lives.
+
+It was wrong to treat Joe as if he was unworthy to be trusted with money.
+
+Every wrong revealed by Dickens in this interview had its root in John's
+feeling that it was his duty to keep Joe down, to prevent the outflow of
+his inner life.
+
+    Old John having long encroached a good standard inch, full measure, on
+    the liberty of Joe, and having snipped off a Flemish ell in the matter
+    of the parole, grew so despotic and so great, that his thirst for
+    conquest knew no bounds. The more young Joe submitted, the more
+    absolute old John became. The ell soon faded into nothing. Yards,
+    furlongs, miles arose; and on went old John in the pleasantest manner
+    possible, trimming off an exuberance in this place, shearing away some
+    liberty of speech or action in that, and conducting himself in this
+    small way with as much high mightiness and majesty as the most
+    glorious tyrant that ever had his statue reared in the public ways,
+    of ancient or of modern times.
+
+    As great men are urged on to the abuse of power (when they need
+    urging, which is not often) by their flatterers and dependents, so old
+    John was impelled to these exercises of authority by the applause and
+    admiration of his Maypole cronies, who, in the intervals of their
+    nightly pipes and pots, would shake their heads and say that Mr.
+    Willet was a father of the good old English sort; that there were no
+    newfangled notions or modern ways in him; that he put them in mind of
+    what their fathers were when they were boys; that there was no mistake
+    about him; that it would be well for the country if there were more
+    like him, and more was the pity that there were not; with many other
+    original remarks of that nature. Then they would condescendingly give
+    Joe to understand that it was all for his good, and he would be
+    thankful for it one day; and in particular, Mr. Cobb would acquaint
+    him, that when he was his age, his father thought no more of giving
+    him a parental kick, or a box on the ears, or a cuff on the head, or
+    some little admonition of that sort, than he did of any other ordinary
+    duty of life; and he would further remark, with looks of great
+    significance, that but for this judicious bringing up, he might have
+    never been the man he was at that present speaking; which was probable
+    enough, as he was, beyond all question, the dullest dog of the party.
+    In short, between old John and old John's friends, there never was an
+    unfortunate young fellow so bullied, badgered, worried, fretted, and
+    browbeaten; so constantly beset, or made so tired of his life, as poor
+    Joe Willet.
+
+The end came at last. One evening Mr. Cobb was more aggravating than
+usual, and Joe's patience could hold out no longer. He knocked the
+offending Cobb into a corner among the spittoons, and ran away from the
+unbearable tyranny of home.
+
+What a moral catastrophe occurs when a young man leaves home with a
+feeling of relief! Dickens develops this thought in the case of Tom
+Gradgrind. With the best of intentions, with a single desire of training
+his son in the best possible way, Mr. Gradgrind had repressed his natural
+tendencies and robbed him of the joys of childhood and youth to such an
+extent that when he was about to go to live with Mr. Bounderby, and his
+sister, Louisa, asked him "if he was pleased with his prospect?" he
+replied, "Well, it will be getting away from home." The boy is never to
+blame for such a catastrophe.
+
+Dickens attacked another phase of the flogging mania in Barnaby Rudge, in
+a brief but suggestive scene. Barnaby and his mother were travelling, and
+were resting at the gate of a gentleman's grounds, when the proprietor
+himself came along and demanded to know who they were.
+
+    "Vagrants," said the gentleman, "vagrants and vagabonds. Thee wish to
+    be made acquainted with the cage, dost thee--the cage, the stocks, and
+    the whipping post? Where dost come from?"
+
+Learning that Barnaby was weak-minded, he asked how long he had been
+idiotic.
+
+    "From his birth," said the widow.
+
+    "I don't believe it," cried the gentleman, "not a bit of it. It's an
+    excuse not to work. There's nothing like flogging to cure that
+    disorder. I'd make a difference in him in ten minutes, I'll be bound."
+
+    "Heaven has made none in more than twice ten years, sir," said the
+    widow mildly.
+
+    "Then why don't you shut him up? We pay enough for county
+    institutions, damn 'em. But thou'd rather drag him about to excite
+    charity--of course. Ay, I know thee."
+
+    Now, this gentleman had various endearing appellations among his
+    intimate friends. By some he was called "a country gentleman of the
+    true school," by some "a fine old country gentleman," by some "a
+    sporting gentleman," by some "a thoroughbred Englishman," by some "a
+    genuine John Bull"; but they all agreed in one respect, and that was,
+    that it was a pity that there were not more like him, and that because
+    there were not, the country was going to rack and ruin every day.
+
+Dickens always enjoyed ridiculing the people who long for the good old
+times and approve of the good old customs. There are some who even yet
+deplore the fact that children are not repressed and coerced as they used
+to be, and who prophesy untold evils unless the good old customs are
+re-established. They long for the recurrence of the days when "lickin' and
+larnin' went hand in hand," when "Wallop the boy, develop the man" was the
+popular motto, expressive of the general faith. Dickens pictured them in
+John Willet and this "country gentleman of the true school." He also
+criticised them severely in the Chimes.
+
+The depressing influence of another form of coercion is shown in Our
+Mutual Friend by the effect of Mr. Podsnap's character on his daughter
+Georgiana. Mr. Podsnap was one of the absolutely positive people who know
+everything about everything, who never allow other people to express
+opinions without contradicting them, and who take every possible
+opportunity of expressing their own opinions in a loud, emphatic, dogmatic
+manner. Of course, no woman should hold opinions, according to Mr.
+Podsnap's way of thinking, although Mrs. Podsnap, in her own way, did
+credit to her more Podsnappery master. It was therefore not to be dreamt
+of for a moment that a "young person" like their daughter Georgiana could
+have any views of her own regarding life or any of its conditions, past,
+present, or future. She was a "young person" to be protected, and kept in
+the background, and guarded from evil, and sheltered, so that she should
+not even hear of anything improper, and shielded from temptation to do
+wrong, or to do anything, indeed, right or wrong. Her father was rich; why
+should she wish to do anything but listen to him, and go away when he told
+her to do so, if he wished to speak of subjects that he deemed it unwise
+to let a "young person" hear discussed?
+
+    There was a Miss Podsnap. And this young rocking-horse was being
+    trained in her mother's art of prancing in a stately manner without
+    ever getting on. But the high parental action was not yet imparted to
+    her, and in truth she was but an undersized damsel, with high
+    shoulders, low spirits, chilled elbows, and a rasped surface of nose,
+    who seemed to take occasional frosty peeps out of childhood into
+    womanhood, and to shrink back again, overcome by her mother's
+    headdress and her father from head to foot--crushed by the mere dead
+    weight of Podsnappery.
+
+Georgiana explained the reason of her shyness to Mrs. Lammle, for, strange
+as it may seem, considering her heredity, Georgiana was shy. Podsnappery
+as environment is always much stronger than Podsnappery as heredity.
+
+    "What I mean is," pursued Georgiana, "that ma being so endowed with
+    awfulness, and pa being so endowed with awfulness, and there being so
+    much awfulness everywhere--I mean, at least, everywhere where I
+    am--perhaps it makes me who am so deficient in awfulness, and
+    frightened at it--I say it very badly--I don't know whether you can
+    understand what I mean?"
+
+Thoughtful people need no explanation regarding the influence of
+Podsnappery on children.
+
+The time will come when in normal schools character analysis will be the
+supreme qualification of those who are to decide who may and who may not
+teach. When that time comes, as come it must, no Podsnaps will be allowed
+to teach.
+
+It was no wonder that--
+
+    Whenever Georgiana could escape from the thraldom of Podsnappery;
+    could throw off the bedclothes of the custard-coloured phaeton, and
+    get up; could shrink out of the range of her mother's rocking, and (so
+    to speak) rescue her poor little frosty toes from being rocked over;
+    she repaired to her friend, Mrs. Alfred Lammle.
+
+Dickens fired another thunderbolt, in Our Mutual Friend, to set the world
+thinking about its method of teaching children, by his brief description
+of Pleasant Riderhood, the daughter of Rogue Riderhood.
+
+    Show her a christening, and she saw a little heathen personage having
+    a quite superfluous name bestowed upon it, inasmuch as it would be
+    commonly addressed by some abusive epithet; which little personage was
+    not in the least wanted by anybody, and would be shoved and banged out
+    of everybody's way, until it should grow big enough to shove and bang.
+    Show her a live father, and she saw but a duplicate of her own father,
+    who from her infancy had been taken with fits and starts of
+    discharging his duty to her, which duty was always incorporated in the
+    form of a fist or a leather strap, and being discharged hurt her.
+
+In Little Dorrit Dickens gives one of his most striking verbal
+descriptions of the effects of coercion in Arthur Clennam's account of his
+own early training. He said to Mr. Meagles, when the kind old gentleman
+spoke of working with a will:
+
+    "I have no will. That is to say," he coloured a little, "next to none
+    that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent;
+    heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which
+    was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I
+    was of age, and exiled there until my father's death there, a year
+    ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected
+    from me in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were
+    extinguished before I could sound the words."
+
+    "Light 'em up again!" said Mr. Meagles.
+
+    "Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr. Meagles, of a hard father and
+    mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and
+    priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and
+    priced had no existence. Strict people, as the phrase is, professors
+    of a stern religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of
+    tastes and sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part
+    of a bargain for the security of their possessions. Austere faces,
+    inexorable discipline, penance in this world and terror in the
+    next--nothing graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed
+    heart everywhere--this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word
+    as to apply it to such a beginning of life."
+
+When he returned to the presence of his mother, after an absence of many
+years in China, "the old influence of her presence, and her stern, strong
+voice, so gathered about her son that he felt conscious of a renewal of
+the timid chill and reserve of his childhood."
+
+It was a terrible indictment of all coercive, child-quelling,
+will-breaking training that Arthur made when he said to his stern mother:
+
+    "I can not say that I have been able to conform myself, in heart and
+    spirit, to your rules; I can not say that I believe my forty years
+    have been profitable or pleasant to myself, or any one; but I have
+    habitually submitted, and I only ask you to remember it."
+
+Speaking of her own training, Mrs. Clennam said: "Mine were days of
+wholesome repression, punishment, and fear," and she frankly avowed her
+deliberate purpose of "bringing Arthur up in fear and trembling."
+
+Those were the dreadful ideals that Dickens aimed to destroy. Repression,
+punishment, fear, and trembling are no longer the dominant ideals of the
+Christian world regarding child training. They are rapidly giving way to
+the new and true gospel of stimulation, happiness, freedom, and creative
+self-activity.
+
+Great Expectations was a valuable contribution to the literature of child
+training. Mrs. Gargery was a type of repressive, coercive, unsympathetic
+women, who regard children as necessarily nuisances, and who are
+continually thankful for the fact that by the free use of "the tickler"
+they may be subdued and kept in a state of bearable subjection.
+
+Mrs. Gargery had no children of her own, but she had a little brother,
+Pip, whom she "brought up by hand." Her husband, Joe Gargery, was an
+honest, affectionate, sympathetic man, who pitied poor Pip and tried to
+comfort him when his wife was not present. The dear old fellow said to Pip
+one evening, as they sat by the fire and he beat time to his kindly
+thoughts with the poker:
+
+    "Your sister is given to government."
+
+    "Given to government, Joe?" I was startled, for I had some shadowy
+    idea (and I am afraid I must add hope) that Joe had divorced her in
+    favour of the lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.
+
+    "Given to government," said Joe. "Which I meantersay the government of
+    you and myself."
+
+    "Oh!"
+
+    "And she ain't over partial to having scholars on the premises," Joe
+    continued, "and in particular would not be over partial to my being a
+    scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don't you
+    see?"
+
+    I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as "Why----"
+    when Joe stopped me.
+
+    "Stay a bit. I know what you're a-going to say, Pip? stay a bit! I
+    don't deny that your sister comes the mo-gul over us, now and again. I
+    don't deny that she do throw us back-falls, and that she do drop down
+    upon us heavy. At such times as when your sister is on the ram-page,
+    Pip," Joe sunk his voice to a whisper and glanced at the door,
+    "candour compels fur to admit that she is a buster....
+
+    "I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I wish there warn't no
+    tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all on myself; but
+    this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you'll
+    overlook shortcomings."
+
+Poor Joe! His father had been a blacksmith, but he took to drink, and, as
+Joe said, "Hammered at me with a wigour only to be equalled by the wigour
+with which he didn't hammer at his anwil."
+
+Dickens gives an illustration of Mrs. Gargery's training which reveals not
+only her coercive and unsympathetic tendencies, but points to other errors
+in training children that are yet too common. Pip was warming himself
+before going to bed one night, when a cannon sounded from the Hulks, or
+prison ships, near the Gargery home.
+
+    "Ah!" said Joe; "there's another conwict off."
+
+    "What does that mean?" said I.
+
+    Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said snappishly:
+    "Escaped. Escaped." Administering the definition like medicine.
+
+    "There was a conwict off last night," said Joe, aloud, "after sunset
+    gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it appears they're firing
+    warning of another."
+
+    "Who's firing?" said I.
+
+    "Drat that boy," interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work;
+    "what a questioner he is! Ask no questions and you'll be told no
+    lies."
+
+    It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should
+    be told lies by her, even if I did ask questions. But she never was
+    polite, unless there was company.
+
+    "Mrs. Joe," said I, as a last resort, "I should like to know--if you
+    wouldn't much mind--where the firing comes from?"
+
+    "Lord bless the boy!" exclaimed my sister, as if she didn't quite mean
+    that, but rather the contrary. "From the hulks!"
+
+    "And please, what's hulks?" said I.
+
+    "That's the way with this boy!" exclaimed my sister, pointing me out
+    with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. "Answer him
+    one question, and he'll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison
+    ships, right 'cross th' country."
+
+    "I wonder who's put into prison ships, and why they're put there?"
+    said I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.
+
+    It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. "I tell you what,
+    young fellow," said she, "I didn't bring you up by hand to badger
+    people's lives out. It would be blame to me, and not praise, if I had.
+    People are put in the hulks because they murder, and because they rob,
+    and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking
+    questions. Now, you get along to bed!"
+
+    I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went
+    upstairs in the dark, with my head tingling--from Mrs. Joe's thimble
+    having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words--I
+    felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were
+    handy for me. I was clearly on my way there.
+
+    Pip said later: "I suppose myself to be better acquainted than any
+    living authority with the ridgy effect of a wedding ring passing
+    unsympathetically over the human countenance."
+
+    My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in
+    which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there
+    is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may
+    be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the
+    child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands
+    as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.
+    Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict
+    with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my
+    sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I
+    had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by the
+    hand gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my
+    punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential
+    performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much
+    with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the
+    fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive.
+
+Mrs. Gargery's training was bad because she refused to answer the boy's
+questions, or abused him for asking them; and when she did condescend to
+answer she answered in a snappy, unsympathetic way. The cruelty of first
+scolding a child, then trying to terrify him from asking questions by
+telling him that "robbers, murderers, and all kinds of criminals began
+their downward career by asking questions," then rapping him on the head,
+and finally sending him to bed without a light, is admirably described.
+All these practices are terribly unjust to children. Parents and teachers,
+in the picture of Mrs. Gargery, are warned against scolding, against
+threatening, against falsehood and misrepresentation in order to reduce
+children to submission, against corporal punishment with "the tickler,"
+against the more dastardly and more exasperating corporal punishment by
+snapping and rapping the head, and against sending children to bed in the
+dark. He was especially careful to make the retiring hour in his own home
+a period of joyousness and freedom from all fear. He made the crime of
+sending children to bed without light and without sympathy one of the
+practices of that model of bad training--Mrs. Pipchin; and one of the most
+dreaded of little Oliver Twist's experiences was to be sent to sleep among
+the coffins in the dark at Sowerberry's.
+
+The hour of retiring is the special time when children most need the
+affectionate spirit of motherhood, and wise mothers try to use this sacred
+hour to form their closest unity with the hearts of the little ones, and
+to sow in their young lives the apperceptive seeds of sweetness, and joy,
+and faith.
+
+The wrong of making children sensitive, and then blaming them for being
+sensitive, is admirably shown in Pip's training.
+
+The revelation of the child's consciousness of the sense of injustice in
+the treatment of those who train it is worthy of most careful study and
+thought by parents and teachers. There can be no doubt that infants have a
+clear sense of wrongs inflicted on them, even before they can speak.
+
+The comparison of the child's rocking-horse with the big-boned Irish
+hunter reveals one of the most essential lessons for adulthood: that what
+may appear trifling to an adult may mean much to a child. Kind but
+thoughtless adulthood is often most grievously unjust to childhood,
+because it fails to consider how things appear to the child. However kind
+and good such adults are, they are utterly unsympathetic with the child.
+Many people are very considerate for childhood who are very unsympathetic
+with children. Consideration can never take the place of sympathy. An
+ounce of true sympathy is worth a ton of consideration to a child.
+Adulthood has measured a child's corn in the bushel of adulthood. Mr.
+Gradgrind, for instance, was a good man, and he meant to be kind and
+helpful to his children. He was most considerate for them, and spared no
+money to promote their welfare and happiness. But he did it in accordance
+with the tastes and opinions of adulthood, and totally ignored the fact
+that children have opinions and tastes, and he ruined the children whom he
+most loved. "The rocking-horse and the big-boned Irish hunter" suggest
+rich mines of child psychology.
+
+The pernicious habit of so many adults who fill the imaginations of
+children with bogies and terrors of an abnormal kind in order to keep them
+in the path of rectitude by falsehood, is exposed in Mrs. Gargery's method
+of stopping Pip's questions by telling him that asking questions was the
+first step in a career of crime. This habit leads parents insensibly into
+a most dishonest attitude toward their children. It leads, too, in due
+time, to a lack of reverence for adulthood. Falseness is certain to lead
+to the disrespect it deserves. Parents who make untruthfulness a basis
+for terror should not be surprised at the irreverence or the scepticism of
+their children.
+
+In The Schoolboy's Story, old Cheeseman was brought to school by a woman
+who was always taking snuff and shaking him.
+
+There is a great deal of pedagogical thought in Dombey and Son. At the
+period of its issue (1846-48) Dickens appears to have devoted more
+attention to the study of wrong methods of teaching than at any other
+time, so in Dr. Blimber, Cornelia Blimber, and Mr. Feeder he gave his best
+illustrations of what in his opinion should be condemned in the popular
+methods of teaching. But while this was evidently his chief educational
+purpose in writing the book, he gave a good deal of attention to wrong
+methods of training, especially to the most awful doctrine of the
+ages--that children must be coerced, and repressed, and checked, and
+subdued. He evidently accepted as his supreme duty the responsibility for
+securing a free childhood for children. Mrs. Pipchin is an admirable
+delineation of the worst features of what was regarded as respectable
+child training. Her training is treated at length in Chapter XI. It is
+sufficient here to deal with her coerciveness, and recall the epithet
+"child-queller" which Dickens applied to her. No more expressive term was
+ever used to describe the wickedness of the coercionists. It means more
+than most volumes. It has new meaning every day as our reverence for the
+divinity in the child grows stronger, and the absolute need of the
+development of his selfhood by his own self-activity becomes clearer. It
+reveals a perfect charnel house full of dwarfed souls and blighted
+selfhood, and weak characters that should have been strong, and false
+characters that should have been true, and wailings that should have been
+music, and tears that should have been laughter, and darkness that should
+have been light, and wickedness that should have been a blessing. The one
+awful word "child-queller" means all of evil that can result from daring
+to stand between the child and God in our self-satisfied ignorance to
+check the free, natural output of its selfhood which God meant to be
+wrought out with increasing power throughout its life. Our work is to
+change the direction of the outflowing selfhood when it is wrong, to
+direct it to new and better interest centres, but never to stop it or turn
+it back upon itself.
+
+There are thousands of child-quellers teaching still. Would that they
+could see truly the dwarfed souls they have blighted, and the ghosts of
+the selfhood they have sacrificed on the altar of what they call
+discipline!
+
+The term child-queller was the creation of genius.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin disdained the idea of reasoning with children. "Hoity-toity!"
+exclaimed Mrs. Pipchin, shaking out her black bombazine skirts, and
+plucking up all the ogress within her. "If she don't like it, Mr. Dombey,
+she must be taught to lump it." She would "shake her head and frown down a
+legion of children," and "the wild ones went home tame enough after
+sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof." She tamed them
+by robbing them of their power, as Froebel's boy tamed flies by tearing
+off their wings and legs, and then saying, "See how tame they are."
+
+Teachers used to boast about their ability to tame children, when their
+ability really meant the power to destroy the tendency to put forth
+effort, to substitute negativeness for positiveness.
+
+Susan Nipper, in her usual graphic style, expressed her views regarding
+the coercive practices of Mrs. Pipchin and the Blimbers.
+
+    "Goodness knows," exclaimed Miss Nipper, "there's a-many we could
+    spare instead, if numbers is a object; Mrs. Pipchin as a overseer
+    would come cheap at her weight in gold, and if a knowledge of black
+    slavery should be required, them Blimbers is the very people for the
+    sitiwation."
+
+One of Mrs. Pipchin's favourite methods of coercing, or taming, or
+child-quelling was to send children to bed.
+
+    "The best thing you can do is to take off your things and go to bed
+    this minute." This was the sagacious woman's remedy for all
+    complaints, particularly lowness of spirits and inability to sleep;
+    for which offence many young victims in the days of the Brighton
+    Castle had been committed to bed at ten o'clock in the morning.
+
+Another assault on coercion was made in Dombey and Son in the brief
+description of the Grinders' school.
+
+    Biler's life had been rendered weary by the costume of the Charitable
+    Grinders. The youth of the streets could not endure it. No young
+    vagabond could be brought to bear its contemplation for a moment
+    without throwing himself upon the unoffending wearer and doing him a
+    mischief. His social existence had been more like that of an early
+    Christian than an innocent child of the nineteenth century. He had
+    been stoned in the streets. He had been overthrown into gutters;
+    bespattered with mud; violently flattened against posts. Entire
+    strangers to his person had lifted his yellow cap off his head and
+    cast it to the winds. His legs had not only undergone verbal criticism
+    and revilings, but had been handled and pinched. That very morning he
+    had received a perfectly unsolicited black eye on his way to the
+    Grinders' establishment, and had been punished for it by the master: a
+    superannuated old Grinder of savage disposition, who had been
+    appointed schoolmaster because he didn't know anything and wasn't fit
+    for anything, and for whose cruel cane all chubby little boys had a
+    perfect fascination.
+
+Poor Biler went wrong, and when he was taken to task for it by Mr. Carker
+he gave his theory to account for the fact that he had not done better at
+school.
+
+    "You're a nice young gentleman!" said Mr. Carker, shaking his head at
+    him. "There's hemp-seed sown for _you_, my fine fellow!"
+
+    "I'm sure, sir," returned the wretched Biler, blubbering again, and
+    again having recourse to his coat cuff: "I shouldn't care, sometimes,
+    if it was growed too. My misfortunes all began in wagging, sir, but
+    what could I do, exceptin' wag?"
+
+    "Excepting what?" said Mr. Carker.
+
+    "Wag, sir. Wagging from school."
+
+    "Do you mean pretending to go there, and not going?" said Mr. Carker.
+
+    "Yes, sir, that's wagging, sir," returned the quondam Grinder, much
+    affected. "I was chivied through the streets, sir, when I went there,
+    and pounded when I got there. So I wagged and hid myself, and that
+    began it."
+
+When Mr. Dombey, by whose act of superior grace Biler had been sent to the
+Charitable Grinders' school, upbraided the boy's father for his failure to
+turn out well,
+
+    the simple father said that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder,
+    huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are,
+    by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness
+    for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan.
+
+Sagacious teachers and parents often blame and punish children for being
+what they made them.
+
+Still another illustration of the cruel coercion practised on children is
+found in Dombey and Son, in the training of Alice Marwood.
+
+    "There was a child called Alice Marwood," said the daughter, with a
+    laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself,
+    "born among poverty and neglect, and nursed in it. Nobody taught her,
+    nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her."
+
+    "Nobody!" echoed the mother, pointing to herself, and striking her
+    breast.
+
+    "The only care she knew," returned the daughter, "was to be beaten,
+    and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better
+    without that."
+
+The picture of George Silverman's early life is one of the most touching
+of all the appeals of Dickens on behalf of childhood. He lived in a
+cellar, and when he was removed at length he knew only the sensations of
+"cold, hunger, thirst, and the pain of being beaten." The poor child used
+to speculate on his mother's feet having a good or ill temper as she
+descended the stairs to their cellar home, and he watched her knees, her
+waist, her face, as they came into view, to learn whether he was likely to
+be abused or not. Many mothers realized their own cruelty by reading such
+descriptions of cruelty toward little children.
+
+The whole system of training of Mr. Gradgrind and his teacher, Mr.
+M'Choakumchild (the latter name contains volumes of coercion) was a
+scientific system of coerciveness and restraint, planned and carried out
+by a good man misguided by false ideas about child training and character
+building. Coercion was only one of several bad elements in his system, but
+he was terribly coercive. His children were lavishly supplied with almost
+everything they did not care for, and robbed of everything they should
+naturally be interested in.
+
+The results were, as might be expected, disastrous. His son Tom became a
+monster of selfishness, sensuality, and criminality. Dickens uses the name
+"whelp" to describe him, and, in a satirical manner, accounts for his
+meanness and weaknesses in the following summary:
+
+    It was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been brought up
+    under one continuous system of unnatural restraint should be a
+    hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom. It was very strange
+    that a young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for
+    five consecutive minutes should be incapable at last of governing
+    himself; but so it was with Tom. It was altogether unaccountable that
+    a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle
+    should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling
+    sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.
+
+When Mr. Gradgrind became convinced that he had been altogether wrong in
+his educational ideals and was endeavouring to explain the matter to Mr.
+Bounderby, that gentleman gave expression to the views of many people of
+his time. Fortunately there are few Bounderbys now, but there are some
+even yet.
+
+    "Well, well!" returned Mr. Gradgrind, with a patient, even a
+    submissive air. And he sat for a little while pondering. "Bounderby, I
+    see reason to doubt whether we have ever quite understood Louisa."
+
+    "What do you mean by we?"
+
+    "Let me say, I, then," he returned, in answer to the coarsely blurted
+    question; "I doubt whether I have understood Louisa. I doubt whether I
+    have been quite right in the manner of her education."
+
+    "There you hit it," returned Bounderby. "There I agree with you. You
+    have found it out at last, have you? Education! I'll tell you what
+    education is--to be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon
+    the shortest allowance of everything except blows. That's what _I_
+    call education."
+
+In his last book--Edwin Drood--Dickens pictured Mr. Honeythunder as a type
+of coercive philanthropists, whom he regarded as intolerable as well as
+intolerant nuisances--people who would use force to compel everybody to
+think and act as they are told to think and act by the Honeythunders.
+
+In speaking of Mr. Honeythunder and his class of philanthropists, Rev.
+Canon Crisparkle said:
+
+    It is a most extraordinary thing that these philanthropists are so
+    given to seizing their fellow-creatures by the scruff of the neck, and
+    (as one may say) bumping them into the paths of peace.
+
+Neville Landless described his training to Canon Crisparkle in telling
+words:
+
+    "And to finish with, sir: I have been brought up among abject and
+    servile dependents of an inferior race, and I may easily have
+    contracted some affinity with them. Sometimes I don't know but that it
+    may be a drop of what is tigerish in their blood."
+
+There is a profound philosophy of one phase of the evils of coercion in
+this statement. Coercion does not always destroy power by blighting it.
+Often the power that was intended to bless turns to poison when it is
+repressed, and makes men hypocritical and tigerish. It is true, too, that
+a child who is brought up with the idea of dominating a servile class, or
+even servile individuals, can never have a true conception of his own
+freedom.
+
+Dickens was not satisfied with his numerous and sustained attacks on the
+more violent forms of coercion and repression. He began in Edwin Drood to
+draw a picture of Mrs. Crisparkle, the mother of the Canon, to show that
+the placid firmness of her strong will had a baleful influence on
+character. Her character was not completed, but the outlines given are
+most suggestive. What could surpass the absolute indifference she showed
+to the slightest consideration for the individuality or opinions of other
+people when she spoke of her wards, who were grown up, it should be
+remembered, to young manhood and womanhood.
+
+    "I have spoken with my two wards, Neville and Helena Landless, on the
+    subject of their defective education, and they give in to the plan
+    proposed; as I should have taken good care they did, whether they
+    liked it or not."
+
+How exquisitely he reveals the character of the eminently dogmatic, though
+quiet, Christian lady by her remarking so definitely to her son, the
+Canon:
+
+    "I have no objection to discuss it, Sept. I trust, my dear, I am
+    always open to discussion." There was a vibration in the old lady's
+    cap, as though she internally added, "And I should like to see the
+    discussion that would change _my_ mind!"
+
+Dickens meant to show that whether the coercion partook of the nature of
+that exercised by Squeers or Mrs. Crisparkle, it resulted in forcing those
+compelled to submit to it to "give in," and that all children who are
+regularly made to "give in" acquire the habit of "giving in," and
+eventually become "give-iners" and hypocrites until circumstances make
+them rebels and anarchists. So he condemned every form of coercion, and
+taught the doctrine of true freedom for the child as a necessary element
+in his best development. When this doctrine is fully understood men will
+soon become truly free. All true education has been a movement toward
+freedom. All true national advancement has been toward more perfect
+freedom. The ideal of national, constitutional liberty has changed in
+harmony with the educational revelations of the broadening conception of
+freedom; and more progressive conceptions of national liberty have
+rendered it necessary for the educators to reveal truer, freer methods of
+training children in harmony with the higher national organization.
+
+When the ideal of national organization was the divine right of kings to
+rule their subjects by absolute authority, the system of national
+organization required passive obedience on the part of the subject. To
+secure this coercive discipline the prompt submission of the child to the
+immediate authority over him was the ideal process. Passive submission was
+required as the full duty of the citizen, and passive obedience was the
+desired product of the school. But the new ideal of government is rule by
+the people through their representatives, and national citizenship means
+the intelligent co-operation of independent individuals; so the true
+educational ideal is a free selfhood, and a free selfhood in maturity
+demands a free selfhood in childhood. To secure this it is essential that
+schools shall become "free republics of childhood."
+
+"But a free selfhood in childhood must lead to anarchy," say those who
+cling to the coercive ideal. Anarchy never springs from freedom. Anarchy
+is the foul son of coercion. True freedom does not include liberty to do
+wrong. The "perfect law of liberty" is the only basis for perfect
+happiness, because it is not freedom beyond law, but freedom within law,
+freedom because of law. Law should never be coercive to the child. When it
+becomes so the law is wrong and it makes the child wrong, and produces the
+apperceptive centres of anarchy in feeling and thought out of the very
+elements that should have produced joyous co-operation. Law should give
+the child consciousness of power, and not of restraint. Undirected
+selfhood, uncontrolled selfhood, is not true freedom. The exercise of
+power without limitations leads to confusion, indecision, and anarchy in
+everything except its spirit of rebellion. The guidance and control of
+adulthood and the limitations of law are necessary to the accomplishment
+of the best results in the immediate product of effort put forth by the
+child, in the effect on his character, and in the development of a true
+consciousness of freedom in his life.
+
+The terrible blunder of the past in child training has been to make law
+coercive instead of directive. Law has been prohibitive, not stimulative.
+Law has defined barriers to prevent effort, instead of outlining the
+direction effort should take. The limitations of law have been used to
+define the course the child should not take; they should have defined the
+course he ought to take, and within the range of which course he should
+use his selfhood in the freest possible way. Law has said "thou shalt not"
+when it should have said "thou shalt"; it has said "don't" when it should
+have said "do"; it has said "quit" when it should have said "go on"; it
+has said "be still" when it should have said "work"; it has stood in the
+way to check when it should have moved on to lead to victory and progress
+along the most direct lines; it has given a consciousness of weakness
+instead of a consciousness of power; it has developed moroseness instead
+of joyousness, self-depreciation instead of self-reverence; and children
+for these reasons have been led to dislike law, and the apperceptive
+centres of anarchy have been laid by a coercive instead of a stimulative
+use of law.
+
+By false ideals of coercive law adulthood has been made repressive instead
+of suggestive, depressive instead of helpful, dogmatic instead of
+reasonable, tyrannical instead of free, "child-quellers" instead of
+sympathetic friends of childhood, executors of penalties instead of wise
+guides, agents to keep children under instead of helping them up; and so
+children have learned to dislike school, and work, and teachers, and often
+home and parents. And the children have not been to blame for their
+dislike of law and their distrust of adulthood.
+
+And the children themselves by coercion have been made don'ters instead of
+doers, quitters instead of workers, give-iners instead of persevering
+winners, yielders to opposition instead of achievers of victory, negative
+instead of positive, apathetic instead of energetic, passive instead of
+active, imitative instead of original, followers instead of leaders,
+dependent instead of independent, servile instead of free, conscious of
+weakness instead of power, defect shunners instead of triumphant creative
+representatives of the God in whose image man was created.
+
+Every agency that robs a child of his originality and freedom and prevents
+the spontaneous output of his creative self-activity destroys the image of
+God in him. Man is most like God when he is freely working out the plans
+of his own creative selfhood for good purposes. Coercion has been the
+greatest destroyer of the image of God in the child, and anarchy is the
+product of the perversion of the very powers that should have made man
+hopefully constructive. The seeds of anarchy are sown in the child's life,
+when his selfhood is blighted and checked. The fountain that finds free
+outlet for its waters forms a pure stream that remains always a blessing,
+but the fountain that is obstructed forms a noisome marsh, wasting the
+good land it should have watered and destroying the plant life it should
+have nourished.
+
+The great salt seas and lakes and marshes of the world have been formed by
+the checking of beautiful fresh-water streams and rivers and the
+prevention of their outflow to the ocean they should have reached. So when
+the outflow of the soul of the child is checked the powers that should
+have ennobled his own life and enriched the lives of others turn to evil
+instead of good, and make a dangerous instead of a helpful character. So
+far as coercion can influence selfhood it destroys its power for good and
+makes it a menace to civilization, instead of a beneficent agency in the
+accomplishment of high purposes. The reason that coercion does not more
+effectively blight and dwarf the child is that childhood is not under the
+direct influence of adulthood all the time. The blessed hours of freedom
+in play and work have saved the race.
+
+The absurd idea that "anarchy will result from giving true freedom to the
+child" persists in the minds of so many people, partly through the
+strength of the race conception of the need of coercion, from which we
+have not yet been able fully to free ourselves; partly from a terrible
+misconception regarding the true function of law; partly through gross
+ignorance of the child and lack of reverence for him; and partly from
+failure to understand our own higher powers for guiding the child
+properly, or the vital relationships of adulthood to childhood.
+
+The child should recognise law as a beneficent guide in the accomplishment
+of his own plans. In Froebel's wonderful kindergarten system the child is
+always guided by law, but he is always perfectly free to work out his own
+designs, and in doing so he is aided by law, not kept back or down by law.
+Law is, to the truly trained child, a revealer of right outlets for power,
+and the supreme duties of adulthood in training childhood are to change
+the centre of its interest when from lack of wisdom its interest centre is
+wrong, and to reveal to it in logical sequence the laws of nature, of
+beauty, of harmony, and of life. With such training life and law will
+always be in harmony, and the seeds of anarchy will find no soil in human
+hearts or minds in which to take root.
+
+Dickens uses the French Revolution, in A Tale of Two Cities, to show that
+anarchy results from coercion, from the unreasoning subordination of a
+lower to a higher or ruling class. Against the reasoning of wisdom the
+Marquis said: "Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark
+deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to
+the whip as long as this roof shuts out the sky." The roof came off one
+wild night--burned off by an infuriated mob of the dogs who had been
+repressed and whipped into anarchy. Yet the aristocracy of France claimed,
+as coercionist educators claim, that the anarchy was the result of
+insufficient coercion, instead of the natural harvest of the seed they had
+sown.
+
+    It was too much the way of monseigneur under his reverses as a
+    refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy,
+    to talk of this terrible revolution as if it were the one only harvest
+    ever known under the skies that had not been sown--as if nothing had
+    ever been done that had led to it--as if the observers of the wretched
+    millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
+    should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
+    years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw.
+
+When the Revolution was at its fearful height, and the repressed dogs were
+having their wild carnival of revenge, Dickens says:
+
+    Along the Paris streets the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six
+    tumbrels carry the day's wine to la guillotine. All the devouring and
+    insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are
+    fused in the one realization, guillotine. And yet there is not in
+    France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a
+    root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under
+    conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.
+    Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it
+    will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of
+    rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield
+    the same fruit according to its kind.
+
+    Six tumbrels roll along the streets. Change these back again to what
+    they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be
+    the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles,
+    the toilets of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not My Father's
+    house but dens of thieves, and huts of millions of starving peasants!
+
+This is the most profound and most ably written exposition of the
+philosophy of anarchy.
+
+"But by coercion I can make the child do right, and in this way I can form
+habits of doing right that will control the child when he grows up."
+
+The habit that is really formed by coercion is the habit of submission, of
+passive yielding to authority, of subordination, and, in the last
+analysis, this means the degradation and enslavement of the soul. Two
+habits are thus wrought into the child's nature by coercion: the habit of
+doing things because ordered to do them, which is slavery; and the habit
+of doing things he does not like or wish to do, which is the basis of
+hypocrisy. The meanest products that can be made from beings created in
+God's image are slaves and hypocrites. One of the remarkable facts
+regarding coercionists is that they blame God for creating the
+monstrosities they have themselves produced by false methods of training.
+
+"We should break the child's will, if it is wrong, to set it right, just
+as we should break a crooked leg to make it straight."
+
+This is a statement that betrays a lack of modern surgical knowledge, and
+a carelessness of psychological thought. Modern treatment for the cure of
+deformity of body avoids harsh treatment whenever it is possible to do so.
+It has been found that many deformities of body may be cured by proper
+exercise of the undeveloped part or parts, and with wider knowledge of
+Nature's laws will come a wiser use of the law of self-transformation, and
+a smaller and smaller use of the severer methods of treatment. But no good
+child psychologist now doubts that a child's will possesses the power of
+self-development and self-adjustment under proper guidance, nor should any
+one be ignorant of the fact that all true will development comes from
+within outward.
+
+It is only necessary that man should study the child more thoroughly, and
+learn how to change his interest centres from wrong to right, and how to
+surround him with an environment suitable to his progressive stages of
+development, in order to keep his own will in operation along productive
+lines of self-reformation and self-regulation by creative self-activity.
+Thus the will can be set to work truly with undiminished power. When a
+will is broken, however, it can never regain its full power; the breaking
+process blights it forever. More rational processes retain its tendency to
+act and its energy of action while changing the purpose and direction of
+its action.
+
+One of the interesting anomalies of our language is the marvellous fact
+that the term "self-willed" should ever have been considered a term of
+reproach or a description of a defect in character. The child with
+strongest self-will may become the greatest champion for righteousness if
+properly trained. He needs a wise and sympathetic trainer, who will be
+reverently grateful for his strong self-will, and whose reverence will
+prevent him from doing anything that would weaken the strength or selfhood
+of the will. The attempt to break his will may make him a destroying force
+instead of a leader for truth and progress. If a strangled will ever
+regains vitality it rarely acts truly. There is perhaps no other relic of
+the theories of barbaric ignorance concerning child training still left
+that is so baneful and so illogical as the theory that justifies will
+breaking.
+
+"But God punishes the child. The child who touches the fire gets burned,
+and therefore it is right that coercive punishment should be used by
+adulthood in dealing with the child."
+
+The punishments referred to are the revelation of natural laws. There is
+no personal element of the punishing agency manifest to the child. God
+does not appear to the child as a punisher, and it is an astounding error
+in training to reveal such a consciousness of God to the child.
+Responsibility for the consequences of their acts is a law of which all
+children approve. This appeals to their sense of justice, and there is no
+other sense to which we can appeal with success so universally in children
+as the sense of justice. "Squareness" is the highest quality named in the
+lexicon of childhood. A boy would rather be deemed "square" than receive
+praise for any other characteristic or accomplishment. So he recognises
+the justice of being held accountable for the directly resulting
+consequences of his acts quite as readily as he accepts the fact, without
+blaming any one else, that he will be burned if he touches fire. There is
+no element of coercion in the law of consequences. It is a just and
+universal law in harmony with his moral responsibility; therefore he will
+respect it. Coercion is directly contrary to the fundamental laws of his
+happiness and his true growth, and therefore he naturally and properly
+dislikes and disapproves of it, and of the individual who outrages justice
+by using it.
+
+The wonderful stories of Dickens set the world thinking by first arousing
+the strongest feelings of sympathy for the child and then developing
+sentiment and thought against every form of coercion, more especially
+coercion by corporal punishment. The awakening has been most satisfactory
+in its results. When Dickens began his writing against corporal punishment
+the rod was the almost universal remedy for all defects in animals or
+human beings. Whatever the defect, the superior in the eyes of the law
+used the one agency to overcome it. Mothers used the rod to subdue their
+children. Husbands used the rod to keep their children and wives in order.
+Men whipped their horses with impunity, as they did their children or
+wives. They owned them, and their right to punish them as they chose was
+unquestioned. Men trained animals to perform tricks in menageries by
+beating them, and they trained dancing, or performing, or learning girls
+and boys quite as inhumanly. Ownership or subordination justified
+unspeakable cruelty. The weakness of the child, the helplessness of the
+animal, appealed to the hardness of human nature, and not to its chivalry
+or sympathy. Even the poor feeble-minded and idiotic, who were confined in
+asylums, were terribly flogged by the most advanced philanthropists of the
+highest Christian civilization. They were weak. It was the duty of the
+authorities to control them, and "stripes and bruises" were regarded as
+the only true agencies for securing obedience. The rod was the highest
+controlling and directing force in the world.
+
+What a change has been wrought! Horses and children and wives are
+protected from brutal treatment now by law. The insane are not flogged to
+make them sane in any well-conducted institutions. More than half the
+children in the schools of the civilized world are free from the terror
+and degradation of corporal punishment by law, or by the higher
+consciousness of more intelligent teachers. Parenthood everywhere is
+studying the child and trying to become conscious of its own higher powers
+of guiding character so that it may be able to train the children in truer
+and more productive and less dangerous ways than formerly. And Charles
+Dickens was the great apostle of these grand reforms.
+
+We shudder now as we read of the outrages practised on helpless children
+and on the insane half a century ago not by the heathen, but by earnest,
+conscientious Christians. The men who live half a century hence will
+shudder when they read that in some schools at the close of the nineteenth
+century children who were partially or temporarily insane from hereditary
+taint, or imperfect nutrition, or cruel treatment, or anger, or from some
+other removable or remediable cause were whipped, and that men, some of
+whom occupied respectable positions, advocated the breaking of children's
+wills! If these "will-breaking" educators were in charge of asylums they
+would resurrect the straitjacket and the whipping post for the insane.
+
+The few who advocate corporal punishment openly claim that they have the
+authority of the Bible for their faith in the rod. They should remember
+that good men have stood with Bibles in their hands misrepresenting God
+and attempting to stop the progress of every great movement toward freedom
+and reform. Galileo was imprisoned by the Church because he taught that
+the earth turns round. Men had no difficulty in showing that the Bible
+approved of slavery, or that it prohibited woman from the exercise of the
+right or the performance of the duties of responsible individuality. So
+men still quote Solomon to show that corporal punishment is approved by
+God, though such a conclusion would be rejected by the highest
+interpreters.
+
+"Whipping makes strong characters." No, it makes hard characters, and
+hardness is but one element of strength, and not the best element of
+strength. The strength of the English character has not been developed, as
+is claimed by some, by the whipping done in English schools and homes. It
+comes partly by race heredity from the sturdiness of the Saxon and Norman
+founders of the race, partly from the general practice of working hard
+from youth up, and largely from the fact that the English playgrounds are
+so universally used, and are the scenes of the severest struggles for
+supremacy in skill and power that are witnessed in any part of the world.
+The winning half inch or half length, the valorous struggle for
+leadership on track or river--these are the things that have preserved and
+developed English force and bravery, in spite of the fact that England in
+her schools and homes has done fully her share of whipping. A boy or girl
+who spends as much time in free strong play as the English boy, works out
+the effects of a great many evils from his or her life. When men see the
+futility of dependence on flogging for developing energetic strength of
+character they will study the influence of play to the great advantage of
+racial vigour, and courage, and moral energy.
+
+Corporal punishment, like all other forms of coercion, robs the child of
+joyousness, and joyousness is one of the most essential elements in the
+true growth of a child. Corporal punishment affects the nervous systems of
+children injuriously, and when applied to certain parts of the body it
+stimulates prematurely the action of the sexual nature, and leads to one
+of the worst forms of depravity.
+
+Corporal punishment is ineffective as a disciplinary agency. In one
+American city during the generation after Dickens began his great crusade
+against corporal punishment it was the practice to whip with a rawhide all
+children who came late, but the lateness steadily increased in defiance of
+the rawhide. It was reduced to less than one one-hundredth part of its
+former proportion when whipping for lateness was entirely abolished and
+more rational means adopted.
+
+The order and co-operation of pupils is best in those schools in which no
+corporal punishment is used. If in any school only one teacher relies on
+the rod as a stimulator to work and a restrainer of evil, her class is
+sure to be the most disorderly, the least co-operative, and the most
+defective in original power in the school. As the children throughout the
+school come from the same homes, play with the same companions, attend the
+same churches, and are subject to the same general influences, it is
+perfectly clear that the whipping is the distinctive feature of character
+training that deforms the children. They will become normal, reasonable
+children when they reach the next room. This illustration assumes that
+all the teachers are possessed of good natural ability to direct the child
+properly. The one who uses corporal punishment fails because she has been
+dwarfed by her faith in corporal punishment. She has believed in it so
+fully that she has not sought to understand higher and better means. She
+has studied neither the child nor her own powers of child guidance.
+
+Dickens taught the inefficiency of coercion to accomplish what men hoped
+to accomplish by it in his criticism of the revolting use of capital
+punishment in former times. In A Tale of Two Cities he says:
+
+    Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
+    was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death;
+    the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the
+    holder of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to
+    Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
+    three fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of crime were put to
+    Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention--it
+    might always have been worth remarking that the fact was _exactly the
+    reverse_.
+
+The great prophets of modern education--Pestalozzi, Froebel, Barnard, and
+Mann--strongly condemned corporal punishment. These were men of clear
+insight and correct judgment. The opinion of one such man is worth more
+than the views of ten thousand ordinary men in regard to the subject of
+their special study. They were prophet souls who saw the higher truth
+toward which the race had been slowly growing, and revealed it.
+
+Their revelations have been appreciated and adopted more and more fully as
+they have been understood more and more clearly. In the case of corporal
+punishment and all forms of coercion Dickens has been the John the Baptist
+and the Paul of the revelation of the gospel of sympathy for the child.
+
+Not one blow in a thousand is given to a child now as compared with the
+time of Dickens's childhood. Corporal punishment is prohibited in the
+schools of France, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, Brazil, New Jersey, and
+in the following cities: New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Albany, Syracuse,
+Toledo, and Savannah. In Washington and Philadelphia teachers voluntarily
+gave up the practice of whipping. This is true of the majority of
+individual teachers in the cities of America, and the number of those who
+do without all forms of coercive discipline is rapidly increasing.
+
+The whipping of girls is prohibited in Saxony, Hessen, Oldenburg, and in
+many cities. Few girls are now whipped in schools anywhere. Corporal
+punishment has been abolished for the higher grades in Norway and in the
+lower grades in Saxony, Hessen, Bremen, and Hamburg. In the last-named
+city the cane is kept under lock and key. In some places the consent of
+parents must be obtained before children may be whipped, in some places
+the number of strokes is limited; in other places a record is kept of
+every case of corporal punishment and reports made monthly to the school
+boards. Everywhere action has been taken to prohibit or restrict the use
+of the once universally respected and universally dominant rod.
+
+All wise trainers of children recognise the value of obedience, but truly
+wise trainers no longer aim to make children merely submissively obedient,
+nor even willingly responsive in their obedience. They try to make them
+independently, co-operatively, and reverently obedient; independent in
+free development of will, co-operative in unity of effort with their
+fellows and their adult guides, and reverent in their attitude to law. The
+substitution of independence for subserviency, of co-operation for formal,
+responsive obedience, and of reverence for law for fear of law are the
+most important development in child training.
+
+In Dickens's ideal school, Doctor Strong's, there was "plenty of liberty."
+
+Gladstone's criticism, when over seventy, of his own teachers was that
+they were afraid of freedom. He said: "I did not learn to set a due value
+on the imperishable and inestimable principles of human liberty. The
+temper which I think prevailed among them was that liberty was regarded
+with jealousy, and fear could not be wholly dispensed with." The true
+teacher is not afraid of freedom, but makes it the dominant element in his
+training and in his educational theory.
+
+May the profounder truth in regard to child training spread to the ends of
+the earth! May the time soon come when there shall be no disciples of
+Susan Nipper's doctrine, "that childhood, like money, must be shaken and
+rattled and jostled about a good deal to keep it bright"! May Christian
+civilization soon be free from such memories as the remembrance of Mr.
+Obenreizer, in No Thoroughfare, had of his parents: "I was a famished
+naked little wretch of two or three years when they were men and women
+with hard hands to beat me"! May Christ's teaching soon be so fully
+understood that there will be no child anywhere like the shivering little
+boy in The Haunted Man, who was "used already to be worried and hunted
+like a beast, who crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back
+again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow, and
+threatened to bite if he was hit"! May teachers and all trainers of
+children learn the underlying philosophy of the statement made by Dickens,
+in connection with the schools of the Stepney Union, in The Uncommercial
+Traveller: "In the moral health of these schools--where corporal
+punishment is unknown--truthfulness stands high"!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE DOCTRINE OF CHILD DEPRAVITY.
+
+
+Dickens heartily accepted Froebel's view of the doctrine of child
+depravity. They did not teach that the child is totally divine, but
+neither did they believe that a being created in God's image is entirely
+depraved.
+
+They recognised very clearly that the doctrine of child depravity was the
+logical (or illogical) basis of the theory of corporal punishment and all
+forms of coercion. What more natural or more logical than the practice of
+checking the outflow of a child's inner life if we believe his inner life
+to be depraved? The firm belief in the doctrine of child depravity
+compelled conscientious men to be repressive and coercive in their
+discipline. Dickens understood this fully, and therefore he gave the
+doctrine no place in his philosophy.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin's training was based squarely on the doctrine of child
+depravity, for "the secret of her management of children was to give them
+everything that they didn't like, and nothing that they did." If the
+training of children under the "good old _régime_," for which some
+reactionary philosophers are still pleading, is carefully analyzed, it
+will be found that Mrs. Pipchin's plan was the commonly approved plan, and
+it was the perfectly logical outcome of the doctrine that the child, being
+wholly depraved, desired everything it should not have and objected to
+everything it should have.
+
+That was a touching question addressed by a little boy to his father:
+"Say, papa, did mamma stop you from doing everything you wished to do when
+_you_ were a little boy?"
+
+How Dickens despised the awful theology of the Murdstones, who would not
+let David play with other children, because they believed "all children to
+be a swarm of little vipers [though there _was_ a child once set in the
+midst of the Disciples], and held that they contaminated one another"!
+
+How he laughed at Mrs. Varden and Miggs, her maid!
+
+    "If you hadn't the sweetness of an angel in you, mim, I don't think
+    you could abear it, I raly don't."
+
+    "Miggs," said Mrs. Varden, "you're profane."
+
+    "Begging your pardon, mim," returned Miggs with shrill rapidity, "such
+    was not my intentions, and such I hope is not my character, though I
+    am but a servant."
+
+    "Answering me, Miggs, and providing yourself," retorted her mistress,
+    looking round with dignity, "is one and the same thing. How dare you
+    speak of angels in connection with your sinful
+    fellow-beings--mere"--said Mrs. Varden, glancing at herself in a
+    neighbouring mirror, and arranging the ribbon of her cap in a more
+    becoming fashion--"mere worms and grovellers as we are!"
+
+    "I do not intend, mim, if you please, to give offence," said Miggs,
+    confident in the strength of her compliment, and developing strongly
+    in the throat as usual, "and I did not expect it would be took as
+    such. I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate and despise
+    myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable Christian
+    should."
+
+Oliver Twist was described by the philanthropists who cared for him as
+"under the exclusive patronage and protection of the powers of wickedness,
+and an article direct from the manufactory of the very devil himself."
+
+Mr. Grimwig had no faith in boys, and he tried hard to shake Mr.
+Brownlow's faith in Oliver.
+
+    "He is a nice-looking boy, is he not?" inquired Mr. Brownlow.
+
+    "I don't know," replied Mr. Grimwig pettishly.
+
+    "Don't know?"
+
+    "No. I don't know. I never see any difference in boys. I only know two
+    sorts of boys: mealy boys and beef-faced boys."
+
+    "And which is Oliver?"
+
+    "Mealy. I know a friend who has a beef-faced boy--a fine boy, they
+    call him; with a round head, and red cheeks, and glaring eyes; a
+    horrid boy; with a body and limbs that appear to be swelling out of
+    the seams of his blue clothes; with the voice of a pilot, and the
+    appetite of a wolf. I know him! The wretch!"
+
+    "Come," said Mr. Brownlow, "these are not the characteristics of young
+    Oliver Twist; so he needn't excite your wrath."
+
+    "They are not," replied Mr. Grimwig. "He may have worse. He is
+    deceiving you, my good friend."
+
+    "I'll swear he is not," replied Mr. Brownlow warmly.
+
+    "If he is not," said Mr. Grimwig, "I'll----" and down went the stick.
+
+    "I'll answer for that boy's truth with my life!" said Mr. Brownlow,
+    knocking the table.
+
+    "And I for his falsehood with my head!" rejoined Mr. Grimwig, knocking
+    the table also.
+
+    "We shall see," said Mr. Brownlow, checking his rising anger.
+
+    "We will," replied Mr. Grimwig, with a provoking smile; "we will."
+
+Dickens always pleaded for more faith in children.
+
+In Great Expectations poor Pip was continually reminded of the fact that
+he was "naterally wicious," and at the great Christmas dinner party Mr.
+Pumblechook took him as the illustration of his theological discourse on
+"swine" and Mrs. Hubble commiserated Mrs. Gargery about the trouble he had
+caused her by all his waywardness.
+
+    "Trouble?" echoed my sister, "trouble?" And then entered on a fearful
+    catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts
+    of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had
+    tumbled from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the
+    injuries I had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my
+    grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go there.
+
+Again, when Pip was just beginning his life away from home his guardian,
+Mr. Jaggers, said to him at their first interview: "I shall by this means
+be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you outrunning
+the constable. Of course you'll go wrong somehow, but that's no fault of
+mine."
+
+"Of course you'll go wrong somehow," was an inspiring start in life for a
+young gentleman.
+
+Abel Magwitch, Pip's friend, told him near the close of his career how he
+came to lead such a dissipated and criminal life. He evidently had ability
+and possessed a deep sense of gratitude, and might have developed the
+other virtues if he had been treated properly. Dickens used him as an
+illustration of the fact that society fails often to do the best for a boy
+and make the most out of him through sheer lack of faith in childhood, and
+that this lack of faith results from the belief that a boy is so depraved
+that he would rather do wrong than right, and that when he starts to do
+wrong there is no hope of his reform.
+
+    "Dear boy and Pip's comrade. I am not a-going fur to tell you my life,
+    like a song or a story-book. But to give it you short and handy, I'll
+    put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in
+    jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you've got it.
+    That's _my_ life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off,
+    arter Pip stood my friend.
+
+    "I've been done everything to, pretty well--except hanged. I've been
+    locked up, as much as a silver teakittle. I've been carted here and
+    carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that town, and
+    stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I've no more
+    notion where I was born, than you have--if so much. I first become
+    aware of myself, down in Essex, a-thieving turnips for my living.
+    Summun had run away from me--a man--a tinker--and he'd took the fire
+    with him, and left me wery cold.
+
+    "I know'd my name to be Magwitch, chrisen'd Abel. How did I know it?
+    Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch,
+    sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies altogether, only
+    as the birds' names come out true, I supposed mine did.
+
+    "So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel
+    Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at
+    him, and either drove him off or took him up. I was took up, took up,
+    took up, to that extent that I reg'larly grow'd up took up.
+
+    "This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as
+    much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for
+    there warn't many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the
+    name being hardened. 'This is a terrible hardened one,' they says to
+    prison wisitors, picking out me. 'May be said to live in jails, this
+    boy.' Then they looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured
+    my head, some on 'em--they had better a-measured my stomach--and
+    others on 'em giv' me tracts what I couldn't read, and made me
+    speeches what I couldn't understand. They always went on agen me about
+    the devil."
+
+Poor old Toby Veck, in The Chimes, reflected the theories that Dickens
+wished to overthrow.
+
+    "It seems as if we can't go right, or do right, or be righted," said
+    Toby. "I hadn't much schooling, myself, when I was young; and I can't
+    make out whether we have any business on the face of the earth, or
+    not. Sometimes I think we must have--a little; and sometimes I think
+    we must be intruding. I get so puzzled sometimes that I am not even
+    able to make up my mind whether there is any good at all in us, or
+    whether we are born bad. We seem to be dreadful things; we seem to
+    give a deal of trouble; we are always being complained of and guarded
+    against."
+
+The most realistic picture of the influence of the child-depravity ideal
+on the training of childhood is given in Mrs. Clennam, in Little Dorrit.
+She was a hard, malignant, dishonest, unsympathetic woman, who had
+deliberately driven Arthur's mother to madness and blighted his father's
+life in the name of her false religion, and blasphemously claimed that she
+was doing it in God's stead, as his devoted servant. Yet she was sure she
+was truly religious, and had a pious vanity in the fact that she was
+"filled with an abhorrence of evil doers." She was filled with gladness,
+too, at the prospect of marrying a man of like training with herself.
+Speaking of the training of herself and her husband she said:
+
+    "You do not know what it is to be brought up strictly and straitly. I
+    was so brought up. Mine was no light youth of sinful gaiety and
+    pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment, and
+    fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse
+    that is upon us, the terrors that surround us--these were the themes
+    of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me with an
+    abhorrence of evil doers. When old Mr. Gilbert Clennam proposed his
+    orphan nephew to my father for my husband, my father impressed upon me
+    that his bringing-up had been, like mine, one of severe restraint. He
+    told me, that besides the discipline his spirit had undergone, he had
+    lived in a starved house, where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and
+    where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last. He told me
+    that he had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged
+    him as one; and that from his school days to that hour, his uncle's
+    roof had been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious
+    and dissolute."
+
+Speaking of her training of Arthur, she said:
+
+    "I devoted myself to reclaim the otherwise predestined and lost boy;
+    to bring him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of practical
+    contrition for the sins that were heavy on his head before his
+    entrance into this condemned world."
+
+Dickens describes her religious character as such as might naturally be
+expected to develop in a woman whose childhood revealed to her only the
+self-abnegation and terrors of religion and the utter contempt for
+humanity shrouded in the doctrine of child depravity. She had seen God as
+an awful character of sleepless watchfulness to see her evil doing and
+record it, of wrathfulness, and of vengeance, but never of loving sympathy
+and forgiveness. So she fitted her religion to the character that such
+training had formed in her.
+
+    Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion, veiled in
+    gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and
+    destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts
+    as we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her.
+    Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I
+    would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower
+    of stone she built up to scale heaven.
+
+The old discipline and the old training were based on the belief that
+children like to do wrong better than to do right. There could be no
+greater error, or one more certain to lead to false principles of
+training, and prevent the recognition of the true methods of developing
+character in childhood.
+
+Children do not like to do wrong better than to do right. They like to do.
+They like to do the things they themselves plan to do. They like to do the
+things that are interesting to themselves. Their lack of wisdom leaves
+them at the mercy of their interests, and without guidance their
+constructiveness may turn to destructiveness. When it does so, it is
+because of the neglect of their adult guides to surround them with plenty
+of suitable material for construction or transformation adapted to their
+stage of development. With a sufficient variety of material for
+constructive plays the child will rarely exhibit destructive tendencies,
+and when he does so, the wisdom of his adult guide should find little
+trouble in changing his interest centre from the wrong to the right. The
+skilful trainer changes the interest centre without making the child
+conscious of adult interference.
+
+It costs little to supply the child with sand and blocks, and soft clay,
+and colors, and colored paper, and blunt scissors and gum, and other
+similar materials--much less than is usually spent for toys; yet such
+materials would save parents from much worry, and help them to get rid of
+the wrong ideals, and they would preserve the natural tendency of children
+to constructiveness, and afford them an opportunity for the comfort and
+the development of real self-activity.
+
+The child's most dominant tendency is activity in using the material
+things of his environment to transform them into new forms or
+relationships in harmony with his own plans. This tendency is intended to
+accomplish four great purposes in the child's development. It reveals the
+child's own powers to himself, it develops his originality, it trains him
+to use his constructive powers, and it gives him the habit of transforming
+his environment to suit his own plans. If he is not supplied with suitable
+material to play with he will appropriate the material he finds most
+available. In this way, through the absolute neglect of his adult guides,
+he has acquired a bad reputation.
+
+The instinct that leads the child to transform his material environment
+should lead to the conscious desire and determination to improve the
+physical, intellectual, and spiritual conditions around him at maturity.
+It is therefore a very essential element in his training, and to check or
+neglect it may weaken and warp his character as much as it was intended to
+strengthen and direct it.
+
+Thus the children have been coerced because men believed them to be
+depraved, and the coercion has developed the apparent depravity.
+
+The darkest clouds have been lifted from the vision of adults and from the
+lives of the little ones by the breaking of the power of the doctrine of
+child depravity. The teacher especially has a more hopeful field opened to
+him. His great work of training is no longer restricted to putting
+blinders on the eyes of children to prevent their seeing evil, and bits in
+their mouths to keep them from going wrong. He believes that every child
+has an element of divinity, however small and enfeebled by heredity or
+encrusted by evil environment, and that his chief duty is to arouse this
+divinity (his selfhood or individuality) to consciousness and start it on
+its conscious growth toward the divine. The revelation of this new and
+grander ideal has led to all intelligent child study for the purpose of
+discovering what adulthood can do, and especially what childhood itself
+can do, in accomplishing its most perfect training for its highest
+destiny.
+
+Dickens expressed his general faith in childhood in Mrs. Lirriper's remark
+to the Major about Jemmy:
+
+    "Ah, Major," I says, drying my eyes, "we needn't have been afraid. We
+    might have known it. Treachery don't come natural to beaming youth;
+    but trust and pity, love and constancy--they do, thank God!"
+
+He taught his philosophy of the origin of many of the evils that are
+attributed to child depravity in Nobody's Story. "Nobody" means the
+workingman. He says to the Master:
+
+    "The evil consequences of imperfect instruction, the evil consequences
+    of pernicious neglect, the evil consequences of unnatural restraint
+    and the denial of humanizing enjoyments, will all come from us, and
+    none of them will stop with us. They will spread far and wide. They
+    always do; they always have done--just like the pestilence. I
+    understand so much, I think, at last."
+
+There is profoundness in these doctrines.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+CRAMMING.
+
+
+Although Dickens paid much more attention in his writings to the methods
+of training than to the methods of teaching, he studied the methods of
+teaching sufficiently to recognise some of their gravest defects. Dombey
+and Son is unquestionably the greatest book ever written to expose the
+evils of cramming. Doctor Blimber, Cornelia, and Mr. Feeder, when closely
+studied, represent in the varied phases of their work all the worst forms
+of cramming.
+
+    Whenever a young gentleman was taken in hand by Doctor Blimber, he
+    might consider himself sure of a pretty tight squeeze. The doctor only
+    undertook the charge of ten young gentlemen, but he had always ready a
+    supply of learning for a hundred, on the lowest estimate; it was at
+    once the business and delight of his life to gorge the unhappy ten
+    with it.
+
+    In fact, Doctor Blimber's establishment was a great hothouse, in which
+    there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys blew
+    before their time. Mental green peas were produced at Christmas, and
+    intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries
+    (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere
+    sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber's cultivation. Every
+    description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the dryest twigs
+    of boys, under the frostiest circumstances. Nature was of no
+    consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to
+    bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern, somehow or other. This
+    was all very pleasant and ingenious, but the system of forcing was
+    attended with its usual disadvantages. There was not the right taste
+    about the premature productions, and they didn't keep well. Moreover,
+    one young gentleman, with a swollen nose and an excessively large head
+    (the oldest of the ten who had "gone through" everything) suddenly
+    left off blowing one day, and remained in the establishment a mere
+    stalk. And people did say that the doctor had rather overdone it with
+    young Toots, and that when he began to have whiskers he left off
+    having brains.
+
+    The doctor was a portly gentleman in a suit of black, with strings at
+    his knees, and stockings below them. He had a bald head, highly
+    polished; a deep voice, and a chin so very double that it was a wonder
+    how he ever managed to shave into the creases. He had likewise a pair
+    of little eyes that were always half shut up and a mouth that was
+    always half expanded into a grin, as if he had, that moment, posed a
+    boy, and were waiting to convict him from his own lips. Insomuch that
+    when the doctor put his right hand into the breast of his coat, and,
+    with his other hand behind him and a scarcely perceptible wag of his
+    head, made the commonest observation to a nervous stranger, it was
+    like a sentiment from the sphinx, and settled his business.
+
+    Miss Blimber, too, although a slim and graceful maid, did no soft
+    violence to the gravity of the house. There was no light nonsense
+    about Miss Blimber. She kept her hair short and crisp, and wore
+    spectacles. She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of
+    deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They
+    must be dead--stone dead--and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a
+    ghoul.
+
+    As to Mr. Feeder, B. A., Dr. Blimber's assistant, he was a kind of
+    human barrel organ, with a little list of tunes at which he was
+    continually working, over and over again, without any variation. He
+    might have been fitted up with a change of barrels, perhaps, in early
+    life, if his destiny had been favourable; but it had not been; and he
+    had only one, with which, in a monotonous round, it was his occupation
+    to bewilder the young ideas of Dr. Blimber's young gentlemen. The
+    young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew
+    no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage
+    noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of
+    exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing
+    system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in three
+    weeks. He had all the care of the world on his head in three months.
+    He conceived bitter sentiments against his parents or guardians in
+    four; he was an old misanthrope in five; envied Curtius that blessed
+    refuge in the earth in six; and at the end of the first twelvemonth
+    had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterward departed,
+    that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages, were a
+    mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the
+    world.
+
+    But he went on blow, blow, blowing, in the doctor's hothouse all the
+    time; and the doctor's glory and reputation were great when he took
+    his wintry growth home to his relations and friends.
+
+    Upon the doctor's doorsteps one day, Paul stood with a fluttering
+    heart, and with his small right hand in his father's. His other hand
+    was locked in that of Florence. How tight the tiny pressure of that
+    one; and how loose and cool the other!
+
+    The doctor was sitting in his portentous study, with a globe at each
+    knee, books all round him, Homer over the door, and Minerva on the
+    mantelshelf. "And how do you do, sir?" he said to Mr. Dombey; "and how
+    is my little friend?"
+
+    "Very well I thank you, sir," returned Paul, answering the clock quite
+    as much as the doctor.
+
+    "Ha!" said Dr. Blimber. "Shall we make a man of him?"
+
+    "Do you hear, Paul?" added Mr. Dombey; Paul being silent.
+
+    "Shall we make a man of him?" repeated the doctor.
+
+    "I had rather be a child," replied Paul.
+
+Paul's reply is one of the most touchingly beautiful of even Dickens's
+wonderful expressions--wonderful in their exquisite simplicity and their
+profound philosophy. When this book was written Dickens was beginning to
+get the conception of the great truth, which he illustrated at length in
+Hard Times and other works, that it is a crime against a child to rob it
+of its childhood.
+
+When Doctor Blimber in his cold, formal manner asked Paul "why he
+preferred to be a child," the little fellow was unable to answer, and as
+they stared at him, he at length put his hand on the neck of Florence and
+burst into tears.
+
+    "Mrs. Pipchin," said his father in a querulous manner, "I am really
+    very sorry to see this."
+
+    "Never mind," said the doctor blandly, nodding his head to keep Mrs.
+    Pipchin back. "Nev-er mind; we shall substitute new cares and new
+    impressions, Mr. Dombey, very shortly. You would still wish my little
+    friend to acquire----"
+
+    "Everything, if you please, doctor," returned Mr. Dombey firmly.
+
+    "Yes," said the doctor, who, with his half-shut eyes and his usual
+    smile, seemed to survey Paul with the sort of interest that might
+    attach to some choice little animal he was going to stuff. "Yes,
+    exactly. Ha! We shall impart a great variety of information to our
+    little friend, and bring him quickly forward, I dare say. I dare say.
+    Quite a virgin soil, I believe you said, Mr. Dombey?"
+
+On leaving, Mr. Dombey said to Paul:
+
+    "You'll try and learn a great deal here, and be a clever man, won't
+    you?"
+
+    "I'll try," returned the child wearily.
+
+    "And you'll soon be grown up now?" said Mr. Dombey.
+
+    "Oh! very soon!" replied the child. Once more the old, old look passed
+    rapidly across his features like a strange light.
+
+After his father and Florence had left him the doctor said to Cornelia:
+
+    "Cornelia, Dombey will be your charge at first. Bring him on,
+    Cornelia, bring him on. Take him round the house, Cornelia, and
+    familiarize him with his new sphere. Go with that young lady, Dombey."
+
+    Cornelia took him first to the schoolroom. Here there were eight young
+    gentlemen in various stages of mental prostration, all very hard at
+    work, and very grave indeed.
+
+    Mr. Feeder, B. A., had his Virgil stop on, and was slowly grinding
+    that tune to four young gentlemen. Of the remaining four, two, who
+    grasped their foreheads convulsively, were engaged in solving
+    mathematical problems; one, with his face like a dirty window from
+    much crying, was endeavouring to flounder through a hopeless number of
+    lines before dinner; and one sat looking at his task in stony
+    stupefaction and despair--which, it seemed, had been his condition
+    ever since breakfast time.
+
+After being shown through the dormitories, Cornelia told him dinner would
+be ready in fifteen minutes, and that in the meantime he had better go
+into the schoolroom among his "friends."
+
+    His friends were all dispersed about the room except the stony friend,
+    who remained immovable. Mr. Feeder was stretching himself in his gray
+    gown, as if, regardless of expense, he were resolved to pull the
+    sleeves off.
+
+    "Heigh-ho-hum!" cried Mr. Feeder, shaking himself like a cart horse
+    "oh dear me, dear me! Ya-a-a-ah!"
+
+    "You sleep in my room, don't you?" asked a solemn young gentleman,
+    whose shirt collar curled up the lobes of his ears.
+
+    "Master Briggs?" inquired Paul.
+
+    "Tozer," said the young gentleman.
+
+    Paul answered yes; and Tozer, pointing out the stony pupil, said that
+    it was Briggs. Paul had already felt certain that it must be either
+    Briggs or Tozer, though he didn't know why.
+
+    "Is yours a strong constitution?" inquired Tozer.
+
+    Paul said he thought not. Tozer replied that _he_ thought not also,
+    judging from Paul's looks, and that it was a pity, for it need be. He
+    then asked Paul if he were going to begin with Cornelia; and on Paul
+    saying "Yes," all the young gentlemen (Briggs excepted) gave a low
+    groan.
+
+At dinner no boy was allowed to speak; every one was compelled to listen
+to the tedious discourse of Doctor Blimber on the customs of the Romans.
+The cramming of youth was continued with great dignity even during meals.
+One boy, Johnson, was unfortunate enough to choke himself by too suddenly
+swallowing his water in order to catch Doctor Blimber's eye when he began
+an account of the dinners of Vitellius; and to punish him for his breach
+of manners, Doctor Blimber said before the boys were dismissed from the
+table:
+
+    "Johnson will repeat to-morrow morning before breakfast, without book,
+    and from the Greek Testament, the first chapter of the Epistle of
+    Saint Paul to the Ephesians. We will resume our studies, Mr. Feeder,
+    in half an hour."
+
+It used to be a common practice to cultivate a loving reverence for God by
+using the Bible as a means of punishment. This was in harmony with the old
+educational and the old theological ideal of punishment, as the supreme
+means available for guiding children properly. It was considered a
+perfectly appropriate use of the best book to use it for this best of
+purposes.
+
+    The young gentlemen bowed and withdrew; Mr. Feeder did likewise.
+    During the half hour the young gentlemen, broken into pairs, loitered
+    arm in arm up and down a small piece of ground behind the house. But
+    nothing happened so vulgar as play. Punctually at the appointed time
+    the gong was sounded, and the studies, under the joint auspices of
+    Doctor Blimber and Mr. Feeder, were resumed.
+
+    Tea was served in a style no less polite than dinner; and after tea
+    the young gentlemen, rising and bowing as before, withdrew to fetch up
+    the unfinished tasks of that day or to get up the already looming
+    tasks of to-morrow. After prayers and light refreshments at eight
+    o'clock or so, the "young gentlemen" were sent to bed by the doctor
+    rising and solemnly saying, "We will resume our studies at seven
+    to-morrow"; the pupils bowed again, and went to bed.
+
+    In the confidence of their own room upstairs, Briggs said his head
+    ached ready to split, and that he should wish himself dead if it
+    wasn't for his mother and a blackbird he had at home. Tozer didn't say
+    much, but he sighed a good deal, and told Paul to look out, for his
+    turn would come to-morrow. After uttering those prophetic words, he
+    undressed himself moodily and got into bed. Briggs was in his bed too,
+    and Paul in his bed too, before the weak-eyed young man appeared to
+    take away the candle, when he wished them good-night and pleasant
+    dreams. But his benevolent wishes were in vain as far as Briggs and
+    Tozer were concerned; for Paul, who lay awake for a long while, and
+    often woke afterward, found that Briggs was ridden by his lesson as a
+    nightmare; and that Tozer, whose mind was affected in his sleep by
+    similar causes, in a minor degree, talked unknown tongues, or scraps
+    of Greek and Latin--it was all one to Paul--which, in the silence of
+    night, had an inexpressibly wicked and guilty effect.
+
+As Paul was going downstairs in the morning Miss Blimber called him into
+her room, and, pointing to a pile of new books on her table, said:
+
+    "These are yours, Dombey."
+
+    "All of 'em, ma'am?" said Paul.
+
+    "Yes," returned Miss Blimber; "and Mr. Feeder will look you out some
+    more very soon, if you are as studious as I expect you will be,
+    Dombey."
+
+    "Thank you, ma'am," said Paul.
+
+    "I am going out for a constitutional," resumed Miss Blimber; "and
+    while I am gone--that is to say, in the interval between this and
+    breakfast, Dombey--I wish you to read over what I have marked in these
+    books, and to tell me if you quite understand what you have got to
+    learn. Don't lose time, Dombey, for you have none to spare, but take
+    them downstairs, and begin directly."
+
+    "Yes, ma'am," answered Paul.
+
+    There were so many of them, that although Paul put one hand under the
+    bottom book and his other hand and his chin on the top book, and
+    hugged them all closely, the middle book slipped out before he reached
+    the door, and then they all tumbled down on the floor. Having at last
+    amassed the whole library and climbed into his place, he fell to work,
+    encouraged by a remark from Tozer to the effect that he "was in for it
+    now"; which was the only interruption he received till breakfast time.
+    At that meal, for which he had no appetite, everything was quite as
+    solemn and genteel as at the others; and when it was finished, he
+    followed Miss Blimber upstairs.
+
+    "Now, Dombey," said Miss Blimber, "how have you got on with those
+    books?"
+
+    They comprised a little English, and a deal of Latin--names of things,
+    declensions of articles and substantives, exercises thereon, and
+    preliminary rules--a trifle of orthography, a glance at ancient
+    history, a wink or two at modern ditto, a few tables, two or three
+    weights and measures, and a little general information. When poor Paul
+    had spelled out number two, he found he had no idea of number one;
+    fragments whereof afterward obtruded themselves into number three,
+    which slided into number four, which, grafted itself on to number two.
+    So that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic hĉc hoc was troy
+    weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three
+    times four was Taurus a bull, were open questions with him.
+
+    "Oh, Dombey, Dombey!" said Miss Blimber, "this is very shocking."
+
+So Paul's cramming went on day by day. The delicate little boy, who should
+not have been sent to school at all, was forced to memorize confused
+masses of words that had no meaning to him, but he learned to repeat the
+words, and so got the credit of doing well, and because he learned easily
+was driven harder and harder. The more easily he carried his burden the
+higher it was piled on his back.
+
+    It was not that Miss Blimber meant to be too hard upon him, or that
+    Doctor Blimber meant to bear too heavily on the young gentlemen in
+    general. Cornelia merely held the faith in which she had been bred;
+    and the doctor, in some partial confusion of his ideas, regarded the
+    young gentlemen as if they were all doctors, and were born grown up.
+    Comforted by the applause of the young gentlemen's nearest relations,
+    and urged on by their blind vanity and ill-considered haste, it would
+    have been strange if Doctor Blimber had discovered his mistake, or
+    trimmed his swelling sails to any other tack.
+
+    Thus in the case of Paul. When Doctor Blimber said he made great
+    progress, and was naturally clever, Mr. Dombey was more bent than ever
+    on his being forced and crammed. In the case of Briggs, when Doctor
+    Blimber reported that he did not make great progress yet, and was not
+    naturally clever, Briggs senior was inexorable in the same purpose. In
+    short, however high and false the temperature at which the doctor kept
+    his hothouse, the owners of the plants were always ready to lend a
+    helping hand at the bellows and to stir the fire.
+
+    When the midsummer vacation approached, no indecent manifestations of
+    joy were exhibited by the leaden-eyed young gentlemen assembled at
+    Doctor Blimber's. Any such violent expression as "breaking up" would
+    have been quite inapplicable to that polite establishment. The young
+    gentlemen oozed away, semi-annually, to their own homes; but they
+    never broke up. They would have scorned the action.
+
+    Tozer, who was constantly galled and tormented by a starched white
+    cambric neckerchief, which he wore at the express desire of Mrs.
+    Tozer, his parent, who, designing him for the Church, was of opinion
+    that he couldn't be in that forward state of preparation too
+    soon--Tozer said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he thought
+    he would rather stay where he was, than go home. However inconsistent
+    this declaration might appear with that passage in Tozer's essay on
+    the subject, wherein he had observed "that the thoughts of home and
+    all its recollections awakened in his mind the most pleasing emotions
+    of anticipation and delight," and had also likened himself to a Roman
+    general, flushed with a recent victory over the Iceni, or laden with
+    Carthaginian spoil, advancing within a few hours' march of the
+    Capitol, presupposed, for the purposes of the simile, to be the
+    dwelling place of Mrs. Tozer, still it was very sincerely made. For it
+    seemed that Tozer had a dreadful uncle, who not only volunteered
+    examinations of him, in the holidays, on abstruse points, but twisted
+    innocent events and things, and wrenched them to the same fell
+    purpose. So that if this uncle took him to the play, or, on a similar
+    pretence of kindness, carried him to see a giant, or a dwarf, or a
+    conjurer, or anything, Tozer knew he had read up some classical
+    allusion to the subject beforehand, and was thrown into a state of
+    mortal apprehension; not foreseeing where he might break out, or what
+    authority he might not quote against him.
+
+    As to Briggs, _his_ father made no show of artifice about it. He never
+    would leave him alone. So numerous and severe were the mental trials
+    of that unfortunate youth in vacation time, that the friends of the
+    family (then resident near Bayswater, London) seldom approached the
+    ornamental piece of water in Kensington Gardens without a vague
+    expectation of seeing Master Briggs's hat floating on the surface and
+    an unfinished exercise lying on the bank. Briggs, therefore, was not
+    at all sanguine on the subject of holidays; and these two sharers of
+    little Paul's bedroom were so fair a sample of the young gentlemen in
+    general, that the most elastic among them contemplated the arrival of
+    those festive periods with genteel resignation.
+
+Dickens did not wish to lay all the blame for the stupid process of
+cramming on the teachers. He properly revealed to parents that they were
+even more to blame than the teachers, because they got what they
+demanded. Doctor Blimber summed up the whole philosophy of the adulthood
+of his time in regard to a child's education when he said to his daughter,
+"Bring him on, Cornelia! Bring him on!"
+
+The standard of knowledge cramming fixed by parents and school boards is
+changing very slowly. Even yet a teacher's success is measured and his
+chances of re-engagement decided in most places by the answer to the
+question, "How does he bring the children on?"
+
+When asked by Doctor Blimber what he wished his little sickly son to
+learn, Mr. Dombey answered, "Oh, everything."
+
+When Paul learned easily, his father pressed for more studies; and because
+Briggs was dull, his father demanded that he be driven harder at school,
+and made the poor boy's life miserable at home by tedious lessons during
+the holidays.
+
+The uncle who made Tozer wretched by asking him unexpected questions on
+all occasions is a type of an ogre who sometimes blights the lives of
+children still.
+
+Dickens had a beautiful sympathy with childhood in its sufferings not
+merely on account of deliberate cruelty and neglect, but because of the
+burdens placed upon it by adults who, with the best intentions, robbed it
+of its natural rights of joyousness and freedom.
+
+Whenever Doctor Blimber was informed that Paul was "old-fashioned" or
+"peculiar," he said, as he had said when Paul first came, that study would
+do much; and he also said, as he said on that occasion, "Bring him on,
+Cornelia! Bring him on!"
+
+Just before the close of the term Paul fainted and had to be carried to
+his room, and after an examination the physician advised Doctor Blimber to
+"release the young gentleman from his books just now, the vacation being
+so near at hand."
+
+It was so very considerate to release him from study, when he was utterly
+unable to study any longer.
+
+At the close of the school party when he was leaving--
+
+    Cornelia, taking both Paul's hands in hers, said, "Dombey, Dombey, you
+    have always been my favourite pupil. God bless you!" And it showed,
+    Paul thought, how easily one might do injustice to a person; for Miss
+    Blimber meant it--though she _was_ a Forcer.
+
+Paul never returned to school. His life was sacrificed to his father's
+desire to have him "learn everything."
+
+In a brief look at the results of Doctor Blimber's teaching, Dickens
+tersely outlines three common results of cramming:
+
+    Mr. Tozer, now a young man of lofty stature, in Wellington boots, was
+    so extremely full of antiquity as to be nearly on a par with a genuine
+    ancient Roman in his knowledge of English; a triumph that affected his
+    good parents with the tenderest emotions, and caused the father and
+    mother of Mr. Briggs (whose learning, like an ill-arranged luggage,
+    was so tightly packed that he couldn't get at anything he wanted) to
+    hide their diminished heads. The fruit laboriously gathered from the
+    tree of knowledge by this latter young gentleman, in fact, had been
+    subjected to so much pressure, that it had become a kind of
+    intellectual Norfolk Biffin, and had nothing of its original form or
+    flavour remaining. Master Bitherstone now, on whom the forcing system
+    had the happier and not uncommon effect of leaving no impression
+    whatever, when the forcing apparatus ceased to work was in a much more
+    comfortable plight; and being then on shipboard, bound for Bengal,
+    found himself forgetting with such admirable rapidity, that it was
+    doubtful whether his declensions of noun-substantives would hold out
+    to the end of the voyage.
+
+Dickens, in his very able description of Doctor Blimber's school, directs
+attention to nearly every phase of the evils of cramming. Toots is an
+illustration of the destruction of mental power by the "hard mathematics"
+and other subjects, when they are taught improperly. It is a serious
+result of an educational system, when the brightest young men "cease to
+have brains when they begin to have whiskers."
+
+Paul's experience is used to show the terrible physical evils of cramming
+in any life, especially in the life of a delicate child. Paul was killed
+by his father and Doctor Blimber. He should have lived.
+
+Cornelia's aversion to live languages and her delight in "digging up the
+dead languages like a ghoul," and the address presented to Doctor Blimber
+"which contained very little of the mother tongue, but fifteen quotations
+from the Latin and seven from the Greek," were intended as a protest
+against paying too much attention to the classics to the neglect of other
+studies. He returned to this subject again in Bleak House. Richard
+Carstone "could make Latin verses," but although his powers were naturally
+excellent he was a complete failure in life. He was not educated properly,
+notwithstanding his ability to make Latin verses.
+
+Mr. Feeder is the perfect type of a mechanical crammer, "a sort of barrel
+organ with a little list of tunes at which he was continually working,
+over and over again, without any variation." What suggestiveness there is
+in the sentence "Mr. Feeder had his Virgil stop on, and was grinding that
+tune to four young gentlemen"!
+
+"Bewilder the young ideas of Doctor Blimber's young gentlemen," used to be
+considered too strong a criticism, but modern psychology fully sustains
+Dickens in his view. "Arrested development" is well understood now to
+result from too much grinding at any one subject or department of a
+subject, from the monotonous drill of the crammer, or from directing the
+child's attention too much to any one study.
+
+The influence of uninteresting study on the spirits was clear to Dickens.
+There is inspiration and physical advantage of a decided character in the
+successful study of an interesting subject--interesting to the child, of
+course--if the process of study includes the true self-activity of the
+child. There is blight, and nervous irritation, and "carking anxiety," if
+the child works under compulsion at the dead matter of study. No wonder
+the young gentlemen at Doctor Blimber's took leave of their spirits in
+three weeks, and passed through the subsequent stages of deeper gloom
+described by Dickens. They had none of the joy of living interest in their
+study, none of the vital enthusiasm connected with independent thought,
+none of the health that comes from pleasant occupation, none of the
+happiness that is found in self-activity alone.
+
+One of the best criticisms of wrong methods of teaching done by Mr. Feeder
+is the criticism of the method of teaching literature. "At the end of the
+first twelvemonth the boys had arrived at the conclusion, from which they
+never afterward departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and the
+lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had
+no other meaning in the world." There are high schools yet in which more
+attention is paid to the "words and grammar" than to the sacred and
+inspiring thought of the author.
+
+A professor in one of the leading educational institutions of America
+travelled in Scotland with his daughters. They were graduates of a high
+school. He observed with deep regret that they visited the mountains, and
+valleys, and rivers, and islands, and battlefields, and cathedrals of the
+land, that to him had been filled with sacred interests by the writings of
+Scott, and saw them all without emotion. One day he said to them: "Why are
+you not interested here? To me every foot of ground here is full of living
+memories. Scott describes it in The Lady of the Lake." One of them
+explained the reason. "Oh!" she said, "we're sick of Scott; we had enough
+of him in the high school."
+
+There are Feeders yet who profane the temple of literature; who never
+connect the souls of their pupils with the soul life of the authors they
+study. Very few of the graduates of high schools have learned the high art
+of loving literature for its beauty and ennobling thought, fewer still
+have learned how to dig successfully in the rich mines of wealth that
+literature contains, and even a smaller number have learned to transmute
+the revelations of literature into character and new revelations in life
+or richer literature for the happiness and culture of coming generations.
+We may yet learn from Dickens.
+
+Tozer became an antique pedant, learned but not educated.
+
+Briggs grew to be dull and heavy-witted, and had his "knowledge so tightly
+packed that he couldn't get at anything he wanted."
+
+Bitherstone was one of the few fortunate fellows who are gifted with
+natural power to pass through the cramming system without being affected
+seriously in any way. They get little, if any, good, and they speedily
+forget the wrongs inflicted upon them and the learning with which their
+teachers attempted to cram them.
+
+Briggs showed the evil effects of cramming in the destruction of
+individuality. "His fruit had nothing of its original flavour remaining."
+This is one of the general charges made against Doctor Blimber's forcing
+establishment, or hothouse. "Nature was of no consequence at all. No
+matter what a young gentleman was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made
+him bear to pattern somehow or other." The destruction of selfhood was the
+great evil of the old system of teaching.
+
+Another important criticism made by Dickens of the hothouse system is
+worthy of special attention by educators. He recognised the evil effects
+of giving any study or work to children, that is naturally adapted to a
+later stage of their development. The development of children is always
+arrested when the work of a higher stage is forced into a lower stage of
+their growth. The true evolution of the child consists in a growth through
+a series of progressive and interdependent stages. This was not recognised
+in the educational system Dickens desired to improve. It is not yet
+recognised to a very large extent in practice. "All the boys blew before
+their time," in Doctor Blimber's school. "The doctor, in some partial
+confusion of ideas, regarded the young gentlemen as if they were all
+doctors, and were born grown up."
+
+Dickens was so careful to make his names and terms express volumes of
+meaning that he probably meant the phrase "mathematical gooseberries" to
+be especially significant. The fact that they were grown on "mere sprouts
+of bushes," and as a consequence were "very sour ones, too," reveals the
+philosophy since made so clear by Doctor Harris, that early "drilling" in
+arithmetic has been one of the prolific causes of arrested development in
+children. The appeal against the common practice of growing "every
+description of Greek and Latin vegetable" _from_ "_dry twigs of boys_" was
+comprehensive and timely. They were not merely twigs, but dry twigs in
+whom the sap had not begun to circulate freely. No expressions, no
+volumes, could state the evil of untimely cramming more clearly than this
+group of phrases used by Dickens in describing Doctor Blimber's school.
+
+"The frostiest circumstances" is another of the thought-laden phrases,
+which was evidently intended to warn teachers against the mistake of
+trying to produce any intellectual fruit at untimely periods of the
+child's development. "Wintry growth" means unseasonable or untimely
+development.
+
+The condemnation of the feeling shown by Paul in parting from Florence,
+and the Doctor's cold-blooded observation, "Never mind; we shall
+substitute new cares and new impressions, Mr. Dombey, very shortly," were
+intended to show how utterly the knowledge cramming ideal had prevented
+the recognition of the fundamental fact that feeling is the basis and the
+battery power of intellectual force and energy. The same principle is
+taught by Cornelia's shock at Paul's affection for old Glubb, and her
+father's summary settlement of the case, when he realized that the little
+child was intensely affectionate and sympathetic. "Ha!" said the Doctor,
+shaking his head, "this--is--bad, but study will do much."
+
+Dickens deals in a most thorough manner with the absolute wickedness of
+neglecting, or attempting to smother feeling in the training and education
+of children in Hard Times. He undoubtedly received his clear conceptions
+relating to the intellectual value of feeling from Froebel's writings.
+
+The bad effects of cramming on the physical constitution of children are
+pointed out in "the convulsive grasping of their foreheads" by the two
+boys engaged in solving mathematical problems. Nervous exhaustion is here
+plainly indicated. They were "very feverish," too, and poor Briggs was in
+even a worse condition, for "he was in a state of stupefaction and was
+flabby and quite cold." Both Briggs and Tozer frightened Paul the first
+night he tried to sleep in their room by talking Latin and Greek in their
+dreams. Paul thought they were swearing. Education should never interfere
+with a child's sleep, either with its soundness or its duration. Even the
+boys told Paul on the first day of his school life that he would need a
+good constitution to withstand the strain at Doctor Blimber's.
+
+The exhaustive and exasperating practice of piling up arrears of work, so
+naturally connected with cramming--in fact, so essential a part of the
+unnatural process--comes in for its share of condemnation, too. One of the
+boys, "whose face was like a dirty window, from much crying, was
+endeavouring to flounder through a hopeless number of lines." The friends
+of Briggs were constantly in terror "lest they should find his hat
+floating on a pond and an unfinished exercise on the bank."
+
+The same practice of charging up arrears of work is condemned in David
+Copperfield by associating it with the hateful Murdstones.
+
+The crammer's absolute indifference and contempt for any semblance of
+correlation in studies is revealed by Cornelia's action in giving him a
+collection of books on his first morning before school with instructions
+to study them at the places she had marked for him. No wonder that "when
+poor Paul had spelled out number two he found he had no idea of number
+one; fragments whereof afterward obtruded themselves into number three,
+which sidled into number four, which grafted itself on to number two--so
+that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic hĉc hoc was troy
+weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three times
+four was Taurus, a bull, were open questions with him."
+
+Whenever words are given before thought, or as a substitute for thought,
+and without definite relationship to the thought already in the mind, they
+lie in the mind as unrelated, and therefore unavailable knowledge.
+
+A boy in London had received considerable historical teaching, and his
+mind had made a certain kind of unity out of the confused mass. When asked
+at his final examination "What he knew about Cromwell," he answered:
+"Cromwell interfered with the Irish, and he was put in prison. When he was
+in prison he wrote the Pilgrim's Progress, and he afterward married Mrs.
+O'Shea."
+
+This was equalled by the other boy who wrote at an examination: "Wolsey
+was a famous general who fought in the Crimean War, and who, after being
+decapitated several times, said to Cromwell: 'If I had served you as you
+have served me I would not have been deserted in my old age.'"
+
+Paul's studies were always dark and crooked to him till Florence bought
+copies of his books and studied them, and by patient sympathy made all
+that had been dark light, and all that had been crooked straight.
+
+The habit of giving definitions of abstractions to children, and expecting
+the definitions alone to be comprehended by children, is held up to
+deserved ridicule in the explanation of the word "analysis" to Paul, when
+Cornelia proposed to read the analysis of his character.
+
+"If my recollection serves me, the word analysis, as opposed to synthesis,
+is thus defined by Walker: 'The resolution of an object, whether of the
+senses or of the intellect, into its first elements.' As opposed to
+synthesis, you observe. _Now_ you know what analysis is, Dombey."
+
+How perfectly simple and clear and expanding this would be to a child's
+mind! Dickens says: "Dombey didn't seem absolutely blinded by the light
+let in upon his intellect, but he made Miss Blimber a little bow."
+
+What loose habits of thought, and how much hypocrisy and mental vagueness
+are caused by using words instead of realities in the early teaching of
+children, and then asking them if they understand what we have been
+telling them! The "little bow" has usually a demoralizing effect.
+
+It is a mere farce to call the committing to memory of definitions
+"education."
+
+Whatever the subjects, it is a dwarfing process, whether the definitions
+are memorized at home or at school, silently, by oral repetition, or by
+singing them. All definition learning as the origin of thought is certain
+to destroy interest and arrest development and lead to inaccuracy of
+thought. Miss Le Row's collection of blunders made by children could never
+have been made if the children had been taught properly.
+
+Such mistakes as "The body is mostly composed of water, and about one half
+of avaricious tissue" or "Parasite, a kind of umbrella," or "Emphasis,
+putting more distress on one word than on another," should suggest to
+teachers the absurdity of committing definitions to memory. It is one of
+the weakest forms of cramming, and is most ridiculous and least useful
+when the memorizing is done by simultaneous oral repetition.
+
+Hard Times exposes the evils of cramming in the teaching practised in the
+normal school in which Mr. M'Choakumchild was trained, and in the
+definition repetition as given by Bitzer, and so highly praised by Mr.
+Gradgrind:
+
+    "Bitzer, your definition of a horse:"
+
+    "Quadruped, graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders,
+    four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in
+    marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be
+    shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth."
+
+How clear this would make the conception of a horse to a man who had never
+seen one! Sissy Jupe, too, is used to show the failure of cramming to
+educate a girl of quick intellect and strong emotions. She could not be
+crammed.
+
+    M'Choakumchild reported that she had a very dense head for figures;
+    that, once possessed with a general idea of the globe, she took the
+    smallest conceivable interest in its exact measurements; that she was
+    extremely slow in the acquisition of dates, unless some pitiful
+    incident happened to be connected therewith; that she would burst into
+    tears on being required (by the mental process) immediately to name
+    the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteenpence
+    half-penny; that she was as low down in the school as low as could be;
+    that after eight weeks of induction into the elements of political
+    economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler three
+    feet high, for returning to the question, "What is the first principle
+    of this science?" the absurd answer, "To do unto others as I would
+    that they should do unto me."
+
+    Mr. Gradgrind observed, shaking his head, that all this was very bad;
+    that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of
+    knowledge as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular
+    statements A to Z; and that Jupe "must be kept to it." So Jupe was
+    kept to it, and became low-spirited, but no wiser.
+
+Dickens makes the artist in Somebody's Luggage say:
+
+    "Who are you passing every day at your competitive excruciations? The
+    fortunate candidates whose heads and livers you have turned upside
+    down for life? Not you, you are really passing the crammers and
+    coaches."
+
+And Jemmy Lirriper, in describing his teacher, said: "Oh, he was a Tartar!
+Keeping the boys up to the mark, holding examinations once a month,
+lecturing upon all sorts of subjects at all sorts of times, and knowing
+everything in the world out of a book."
+
+Dickens saw the evils of competitive examinations more clearly than many
+educators do two generations after him.
+
+When educators in schools, colleges, and universities learn a better way
+to promote pupils, to classify men and women and to rank them at
+graduation, than by holding promotion and graduation examinations cramming
+will be of no use, and there shall be no more cramming.
+
+Dickens was right as usual. The crammers and coaches are those who are
+tested by "competitive excruciations"; and how those who force through
+most students boast and strut and lord it over the less successful
+crammers and coaches on commencement days and other public occasions! What
+a misleading mockery examinations are as tests of power and character!
+
+Few even of Dickens's phrases contain such a condensation of fact and
+philosophy as the phrase "whose heads and livers you have turned upside
+down for life." Few phrases deserve more careful consideration from
+educators.
+
+Dickens makes the effect on the head still more startling by the
+description of Miss Wozenham's brother in Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy. "Miss
+Wozenham out of her small income had to support a brother that had had the
+misfortune to soften his brain against the hard mathematics."
+
+In the same story he laughs at the practical results of language cramming
+usually done in the schools:
+
+    And the way in which Jemmy spoke his French was a real charm. It was
+    often wanted of him, for whenever anybody spoke a syllable to me I
+    says "Noncomprenny, you're very kind but it's no use--Now Jemmy!" and
+    then Jemmy he fires away at 'em lovely, the only thing wanting in
+    Jemmy's French being as it appeared to me that he hardly ever
+    understood a word of what they said to him, which made it scarcely of
+    the use it might have been.
+
+Dickens attempted to picture the feelings of a boy toward his teachers in
+the days when cramming was almost universally practised in the story of
+Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Redforth, aged nine. When the Latin master was
+captured, he was saved by Captain Boldheart from the punishment of death
+to which he was condemned by the crew of The Beauty. Captain Boldheart had
+been one of his pupils, and he said: "Without taking your life, I must yet
+forever deprive you of the power of spiting other boys. I shall turn you
+adrift in this boat. You will find in her two oars, a compass, a bottle of
+rum, a small cask of water, a piece of pork, a bag of biscuit, and my
+Latin grammar. Go! and spite the natives if you can find any."
+
+When he afterward released him from the savages who were about to eat him,
+he granted him his life for the second time on condition:
+
+"1. That he should never under any circumstances presume to teach any boy
+anything any more.
+
+"2. That, if taken back to England, he should pass his life in travelling
+to find out boys who wanted their exercises done, and should do their
+exercises for nothing, and never say a word about it."
+
+When it finally became necessary to hang the Latin master, Boldheart
+"impressively pointed out to him that this is what spiters come to."
+
+There are many kinds of cram that yet pass as fairly respectable in
+schools and universities. When the teachers or the professors give notes
+to be copied by the pupils and memorized, they are cramming. When teachers
+are storing the memories of children with facts, tables, dates, etc., to
+be used at some future time, they are cramming. All memorizing by
+repetition of words, even if they are understood, is cram, if the pupil
+can work the thought into his life by repetition of process or of
+operation. Words can never take the place of self-activity, nor even of
+activity.
+
+So long as knowledge storing is placed above character development,
+examinations by "examiners" will retain their power for evil, and so long
+as such examinations are held cramming will continue.
+
+All processes that attempt to educate from without inward, instead of from
+within outward, are in the last analysis cram. The selfhood must be active
+in going out for the new knowledge. The child must himself be originative,
+directive, and executive in the learning process if cram is to be avoided
+completely. This is the only sure way to secure perfect apperception, and
+without apperception the new knowledge lies dormant, if not dead, and
+unrelated in the memory until it disappears, as did Bitherstone's. His
+declensions, according to Dickens, were not likely to last out his journey
+from England to India.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+FREE CHILDHOOD.
+
+
+Adulthood can never be truly free till childhood is free. Perfect freedom
+can not be developed in a soul filled with the apperceptive experiences of
+tyranny. No man is fully free in the freest country in the world who
+wishes to dominate even his child. The practice of tyranny develops the
+tyrant. Guiding control is entirely different from domination.
+
+Dickens taught the doctrine of a rich, full, free childhood from the time
+he wrote Nicholas Nickleby in 1839.
+
+    Even the sunburned faces of gipsy children, half naked though they be,
+    suggest a drop of comfort. It is a pleasant thing to see that the sun
+    has been there; to know that the air and light are on them every day;
+    to feel that they _are_ children, and lead children's lives; that if
+    their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of heaven, and not with
+    tears; that the limbs of their girls are free, and that they are not
+    crippled by distortions, imposing an unnatural and horrible penance
+    upon their sex; that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least
+    among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which
+    make young children old before they know what childhood is, and give
+    them the exhaustion and infirmity of age, without, like age, the
+    privilege to die. God send that old nursery tales were true, and that
+    gipsies stole such children by the score!
+
+If he had written nothing but this exquisite quotation from Nicholas
+Nickleby he would have deserved recognition as an educator. It shows a
+clear insight into the great principles of physical freedom, intellectual
+freedom, and spiritual freedom.
+
+In The Old Curiosity Shop he made the world sympathize with a child who
+lived with an old man. He gives the keynote to this fundamental thought of
+the book in the opening chapter:
+
+    It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into
+    the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks
+    their confidence and simplicity--two of the best qualities that Heaven
+    gives them--and demands that they share our sorrows before they are
+    capable of entering into our enjoyments.
+
+Little Nell had the sadness of a lonely childhood, though her grandfather
+lived with but the one aim of making her happy.
+
+In Martin Chuzzlewit--
+
+    Tom Pinch's sister was governess in a family, a lofty family; perhaps
+    the wealthiest brass and copper founder's family known to mankind.
+    They lived at Camberwell; in a house so big and fierce that its mere
+    outside, like the outside of a giant's castle, struck terror into
+    vulgar minds and made bold persons quail.
+
+When Mr. Pecksniff and his daughters went to visit Miss Pinch she
+
+    was at that moment instructing her eldest pupil; to wit, a premature
+    little woman of thirteen years old, who had already arrived at such a
+    pitch of whalebone and education that she had nothing girlish about
+    her, which was a source of great rejoicing to all her relations and
+    friends.
+
+One of the unsolved mysteries is the fact that such a large proportion of
+parents are so anxious to have their children grow up. The desire may be
+understood when poverty longs for the time when the little hands may help
+to win bread, but that wealthy parents should hasten the premature state
+of adulthood in their children is incomprehensible.
+
+A great deal of attention is paid to the blunder of robbing children of
+real childhood in Dombey and Son, which is so rich in several departments
+of educational philosophy. Doctor Blimber regarded the young gentlemen "as
+if they were born grown up."
+
+Paul's life and death were intended as warnings to ambitious parents.
+Florence was robbed of a true childhood by her mother's death and her
+father's lack of sympathy. Briggs and Tozer had no childhood; they were
+persecuted by the ingenious and ignorantly learned adults at home during
+vacations, as well as by Doctor Blimber during school time; so that "Tozer
+said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he would rather stay at
+school than go home."
+
+Poor Bitherstone had no childhood. He was shipped away from his parents in
+India to the respectable hell conducted by that widely known and highly
+reputed child trainer Mrs. Pipchin.
+
+Poor little Miss Pankey spent a great deal of her time in Mrs. Pipchin's
+"correctional dungeon." What a mercy it would be if all such unfortunate
+children could be stolen by the gipsies!
+
+Mrs. Pipchin's theory taught "that it was wrong to encourage a child's
+mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by
+force like an oyster."
+
+When Doctor Blimber asked Paul, six-year-old Paul, "if he would like them
+to make a man of him," the child replied:
+
+"I had rather be a child."
+
+One of Dickens's most successful hits at the common philosophy, that the
+desired adult characteristics must be developed in childhood in their
+adult forms, was made in describing Mrs. Tozer's effort to qualify Tozer
+for the position of a clergyman by making him wear a stiff, starched
+necktie while he was a boy.
+
+When Edith upbraided her mother for practically compelling her to marry
+Mr. Dombey, her mother asked angrily:
+
+    "What do you mean? Haven't you from a child----"
+
+    "A child!" said Edith, looking at her; "when was I a child? What
+    childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman--artful, designing,
+    mercenary, laying snares for men--before I knew myself or you, or even
+    understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learned.
+    You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride
+    to-night."
+
+    "You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own mother."
+
+    "It seems so to me; stranger to me than to you," said Edith. "But my
+    education was completed long ago. I am too old now and have fallen too
+    low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to help
+    myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman's breast, and makes it
+    true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else to
+    sustain me when I despise myself."
+
+Later, on the night before she was to marry Mr. Dombey, she said:
+
+    "Oh, mother, mother, if you had but left me to my natural heart when I
+    too was a girl--a younger girl than Florence--how different I might
+    have been!"
+
+Bleak House gives Dickens's most striking picture of the deterioration
+resulting from giving no real childhood to children for a series of
+generations.
+
+    During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree,
+    the house of Smallweed, always early to go to business and late to
+    marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has
+    discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales,
+    fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the
+    gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it, and that the
+    complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed
+    to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their
+    minds.
+
+    There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several
+    generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child,
+    until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak in her
+    intellect, and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With
+    such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory,
+    understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall asleep
+    over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother has undoubtedly
+    brightened the family.
+
+There could be no more awful picture than that of a family in which for a
+series of generations the children had been, through heredity and
+training, made "little old men and women," who were never permitted to
+indulge in any childish plays, or to enjoy any stories, or in any way have
+a genuine childhood, so that they not only came to look like monkeys, but
+"like monkeys with something depressing on their minds"; and in which the
+only child for several generations had been Mr. Smallweed's grandmother,
+when she became weak in intellect and "fell (for the first time) into a
+childish state."
+
+In The Haunted House the wretched child who came to Mr. Redlaw's room is
+described as "a baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a
+child."
+
+Dickens made his greatest plea for a free childhood in Hard Times. The
+whole of the educational part of the book condemns the training of Mr.
+Gradgrind, although he was an earnest, high-minded gentleman, whose
+supreme purpose was to train his family in the best possible way. Indeed
+Mr. Gradgrind was so sure he was right in his views regarding child
+training that he founded a school to teach the children of Coketown in
+accordance with what he believed to be correct principles.
+
+Mr. Gradgrind is described as
+
+    a kind cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow
+    children clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He
+    seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical
+    substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed
+    away.
+
+    There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They
+    had been lectured at from their tenderest years; coursed, like little
+    hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone they had been made to
+    run to the lecture room. The first object with which they had an
+    association or of which they had a remembrance was a large blackboard
+    with a dry ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.
+
+    Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an ogre. Fact
+    forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing
+    castle, with heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking
+    childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the
+    hair.
+
+    No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the
+    moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever
+    learned the silly jingle, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder
+    what you are"; it had never known wonder on the subject, having at
+    five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen and
+    driven Charles's Wain like a locomotive engine driver. No little
+    Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow
+    with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who
+    killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who
+    swallowed Tom Thumb; it had never heard of those celebrities, and had
+    only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped
+    with several stomachs.
+
+The effect of preventing all kinds of enjoyment for his children in their
+own home was that they naturally sought for enjoyment surreptitiously in a
+way of which their father disapproved. But when a man disapproves of
+legitimate amusements in his family his condemnation of what is improper
+will have little weight with his children.
+
+When Mr. Gradgrind was going home from the school examination he had to
+pass near the circus, and he was amazed to find his daughter Louisa and
+his son Thomas stealing a view of the performance.
+
+    Phenomenon almost incredible though distinctly seen, what did he then
+    behold but his own metallurgical Louisa peeping with all her might
+    through a hole in a deal board, and his own mathematical Thomas
+    abasing himself on the ground to catch but a hoof of the graceful
+    equestrian Tyrolean flower act!
+
+    Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where his
+    family was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring child, and
+    said:
+
+    "Louisa! Thomas!"
+
+    Both rose, red and disconcerted. But Louisa looked at her father with
+    more boldness than Thomas did. Indeed, Thomas did not look at him, but
+    gave himself up to be taken home like a machine.
+
+    "In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!" said Mr. Gradgrind,
+    leading each away by a hand; "what do you do here?"
+
+    "Wanted to see what it was like," returned Louisa shortly.
+
+    "What it was like?"
+
+    "Yes, father."
+
+    There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in
+    the girl; yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face,
+    there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to
+    burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which
+    brightened its expression. Not with the brightness natural to cheerful
+    youth, but with uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had
+    something painful in them, analogous to the changes on a blind face
+    groping its way.
+
+    "You! Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the sciences is open,
+    Thomas and you, who may be said to be replete with facts, Thomas and
+    you, who have been trained to mathematical exactness, Thomas and you,
+    here!" cried Mr. Gradgrind. "In this degraded position! I am amazed."
+
+    "I was tired, father. I have been tired a long time," said Louisa.
+
+    "Tired? Of what?" asked the astonished father.
+
+    "I don't know of what--of everything, I think."
+
+When they reached home, Mr. Gradgrind in an injured tone said to Mrs.
+Gradgrind, after telling her where he had found the children:
+
+    "I should as soon have expected to find my children reading poetry."
+
+    "Dear me," whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind. "How can you, Louisa and Thomas!
+    I wonder at you. As if, with my head in its present throbbing state,
+    you couldn't go and look at the shells and minerals and things
+    provided for you, instead of circuses!" said Mrs. Gradgrind. "You know
+    as well as I do, no young people have circus masters, or keep circuses
+    in cabinets, or attend lectures about circuses. What can you possibly
+    want to know of circuses then? I am sure you have enough to do, if
+    that's what you want. With my head in its present state, I couldn't
+    remember the mere names of half the facts you have got to attend to."
+
+    "That's the reason!" pouted Louisa.
+
+    "Don't tell me that's the reason, because it can be nothing of the
+    sort," said Mrs. Gradgrind. "Go and be something-ological directly."
+
+After Louisa had married Mr. Bounderby, Tom and Mr. Harthouse were
+discussing her one evening, and Tom said she thought a great deal when she
+was alone:
+
+    "Ay, ay? Has resources of her own," said Harthouse.
+
+    "Not so much of that as you may suppose," returned Tom; "for our
+    governor had her crammed with all sorts of dry bones and sawdust. It's
+    his system."
+
+    "Formed his daughter on his own model?" suggested Harthouse.
+
+    "His daughter? Ah! and everybody else. Why, he formed me that way,"
+    said Tom.
+
+    "Impossible!"
+
+    "He did though," said Tom, shaking his head. "I mean to say, Mr.
+    Harthouse, that when I first left home and went to old Bounderby's, I
+    was as flat as a warming-pan, and knew no more about life than any
+    oyster does."
+
+Dickens describes a visit Louisa made to her father's house, and shows how
+little of the true home feeling was stirred in her heart, as she
+approached the place, where she should have had a happy childhood.
+
+    Neither, as she approached her old home now, did any of the best
+    influences of old home descend upon her. Her remembrances of home and
+    childhood were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and
+    fountain in her young heart as it gushed out. The golden waters were
+    not there. They were flowing for the fertilization of the land where
+    grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.
+
+When her father proposed to Louisa that she should marry Mr. Bounderby,
+she said:
+
+    "The baby preference that even I have heard of as common among
+    children has never had its innocent resting place in my breast. You
+    have been so careful of me, that I never had a child's heart. You have
+    trained me so well, that I never dreamed a child's dream. You have
+    dealt so wisely with me, father, from my cradle to this hour, that I
+    never had a child's belief or a child's fear."
+
+Mr. Gradgrind was delighted at his apparent success. He could not see, he
+was so practical and so self-opinionated, that her heart was breaking
+while she was yielding with external calmness.
+
+But the reaping time came soon. Mr. Harthouse, young, attractive, and
+unscrupulous, made love to Louisa, and finally persuaded her to run away
+with him. Unable to resist the temptation in her own strength, she fled to
+her father's house through an awful storm.
+
+    The thunder was rolling into distance, and the rain was pouring down
+    like a deluge, when the door of his room opened. He looked round the
+    lamp upon his table, and saw with amazement his eldest daughter.
+
+    "Louisa!"
+
+    "Father, I want to speak to you."
+
+    "What is the matter? What is it? I conjure you, Louisa, tell me what
+    is the matter."
+
+    She dropped into a chair before him, and put her cold hand on his arm.
+
+    "Father, you have trained me from my cradle."
+
+    "Yes, Louisa."
+
+    "I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny."
+
+    He looked at her in doubt and dread, vacantly repeating, "Curse the
+    hour! Curse the hour!"
+
+    "How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable
+    things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the
+    graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you
+    done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have
+    bloomed once, in this great wilderness here?"
+
+    She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.
+
+    "If it had ever been here, its ashes alone would save me from the void
+    in which my whole life sinks."
+
+    He tightened his hold in time to prevent her sinking on the floor, but
+    she cried out in a terrible voice, "I shall die if you hold me! Let me
+    fall upon the ground!" And he laid her down there, and saw the pride
+    of his heart and the triumph of his system lying, an insensible heap,
+    at his feet.
+
+In the Schoolboy's Story, the boy who was to have no holiday at home was
+invited to spend his holidays with "Old Cheeseman" and Mrs. Cheeseman.
+
+    So I went to their delightful house, and was as happy as I could
+    possibly be. They understand how to conduct themselves toward boys,
+    _they_ do. When they take a boy to the play, for instance, they _do_
+    take him. They don't go in after it's begun, or come out before it's
+    over. They know how to bring a boy up, too. Look at their own! Though
+    he is very little as yet, what a capital boy he is! Why, my next
+    favourite to Mrs. Cheeseman and Old Cheeseman is young Cheeseman.
+
+When Dickens came to his last book his heart was still full of sympathy
+with the child.
+
+Edwin Drood said to Mr. Jasper: "Life for you is a plum with the natural
+bloom on. It hasn't been over-carefully wiped off for _you_."
+
+In the same book Mr. Grewgious is described:
+
+    He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding
+    mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried
+    snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency
+    like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it
+    must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of
+    anybody's voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature
+    that his face presented was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves
+    that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his
+    forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them
+    into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away
+    the chisel, and said, "I really can not be worried to finish off this
+    man; let him go as he is."
+
+He tried to explain the reason for his peculiarities to Rosa:
+
+    "I mean," he explained, "that young ways were never my ways. I was the
+    only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I half believe I
+    was born advanced in life myself. No personality is intended toward
+    the name you will so soon change, when I remark that while the general
+    growth of people seem to have come into existence buds, I seem to have
+    come into existence a chip. I was a chip--and a very dry one--when I
+    first became aware of myself."
+
+Dickens takes a front rank among the educators who have tried to save the
+child from "child-quellers," and preserve for them the right to a free,
+rich, real childhood. The saddest sight in the world to him was a child
+such as he pictured in A Tale of Two Cities: "The children of St. Antoine
+had ancient faces and grave voices."
+
+In Barbox Brothers Mr. Jackson said of himself: "I am, to myself, an
+unintelligible book, with the earlier chapters all torn out and thrown
+away. My childhood had no grace of childhood, my youth had no charm of
+youth, and what can be expected from such a lost beginning?"
+
+Dickens tried to save all children from such a beginning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+INDIVIDUALITY.
+
+
+Dickens began to write definitely about individuality in Martin Chuzzlewit
+in 1844. Martin described a company he met in America "who were so
+strangely devoid of individual traits of character that any one of them
+might have changed minds with the other and nobody would have found it
+out."
+
+In David Copperfield he makes Traddles, who was trained by Mr. Creakle,
+say: "I have no invention at all, not a particle. I suppose there never
+was a young man with less originality than I have."
+
+David himself said sagely: "I have encountered some fine ladies and
+gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars."
+
+David emphasizes the phase of individuality that teaches the power of each
+individual to do some special good, when he said to Martha when she spoke
+of the river as the end of her useless life:
+
+"In the name of the great Judge, before whom you and all of us must stand
+at his dread time, dismiss that terrible idea! We can all do some good, if
+we will."
+
+In Bleak House Sir Leicester Dedlock is represented as of opinion that he
+should at least think for every one in connection with his estate.
+
+    The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He
+    supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual
+    characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born
+    to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a
+    discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned--would never
+    recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.
+
+The same absolute contempt for the individuality of the poor is ridiculed
+in The Chimes. Sir Joseph Bowley is a type of the English squire who used
+to act on the assumption that he had to care for the workmen on his
+estate, and the poor of his neighbourhood, as he did for his horses and
+other animals.
+
+    "I do my duty as the Poor Man's Friend and Father; and I endeavour to
+    educate his mind by inculcating on all occasions the one great moral
+    lesson which that class requires--that is, entire Dependence on
+    myself. They have no business whatever with--with themselves. If
+    wicked and designing persons tell them otherwise, and they become
+    impatient and discontented, and are guilty of insubordinate conduct
+    and black-hearted ingratitude--which is undoubtedly the case--I am
+    their Friend and Father still. It is so ordained. It is in the nature
+    of things. They needn't trouble themselves to think about anything. I
+    will think for them; I know what is good for them; I am their
+    perpetual parent. Such is the dispensation of an all-wise Providence."
+
+It is strange that men so commonly ascribe to Providence the dreadful
+conditions which have resulted from man's ignorance and selfishness, and
+which Providence intended man to reform.
+
+Esther, in Bleak House, speaking of the influence of the chancery suit on
+Richard Carstone, said:
+
+    "The character of much older and steadier people may be even changed
+    by the circumstances surrounding them. It would be too much to expect
+    that a boy's, in its formation, should be the subject of such
+    influences, and escape them."
+
+    I felt this to be true; though, if I may venture to mention what I
+    thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard's
+    education had not counteracted those influences or directed his
+    character. He had been eight years at a public school, and had
+    learned, I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts, in the
+    most admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody's
+    business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings
+    lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to _him_. _He_ had been adapted
+    to the verses, and had learned the art of making them to such
+    perfection, that if he had remained at school until he was of age I
+    suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over again,
+    unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it.
+    Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very
+    improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and
+    always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would
+    not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his
+    studying them quite so much.
+
+Richard was one of those unstable men who have good abilities, but who do
+not use them persistently in the accomplishment of any one purpose, and
+who never seem to find the sphere for which they are best fitted. They are
+man-products, not God-products. When Richard, after several attempts to
+work at other things with high enthusiasm for a few weeks, decided to be a
+physician, Esther said:
+
+    Mistrusting that he only came to this conclusion because, having never
+    had much chance of finding out for himself what he was fitted for, and
+    having never been guided to the discovery, he was taken with the
+    newest idea, and was glad to get rid of the trouble of consideration,
+    I wondered whether the Latin verses often ended in this, or whether
+    Richard's was a solitary case.
+
+    Richard very often came to see us while we remained in London (though
+    he soon failed in his letter writing), and with his quick abilities,
+    his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and freshness, was
+    always delightful. But though I liked him more and more the better I
+    knew him, I still felt more and more how much it was to be regretted
+    that he had been educated in no habits of application and
+    concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same
+    manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in
+    character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks,
+    always with fair credit, and often with distinction; but in a fitful,
+    dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities
+    in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They
+    were great qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously
+    won; but, like fire and water, though excellent servants, they were
+    very bad masters. If they had been under Richard's direction, they
+    would have been his friends; but Richard being under their direction,
+    they became his enemies.
+
+Any educational system that "addresses hundreds of boys exactly in the
+same manner" must destroy their individuality.
+
+In Hard Times Tom Gradgrind became a low, degraded, sensual, dissipated
+criminal, and Dickens accounts for his failure by the unnatural restraint,
+constant oversight, and the strangling of his imagination in his cradle
+and afterward. In other words, the boy's selfhood never had a chance to
+develop, and every power he had naturally to make him strong, true, and
+independent had helped to work his ruin.
+
+In Little Dorrit Mrs. General is herself a model to be avoided, and her
+system of training is ridiculed because she paid no attention whatever to
+the selfhood of her pupils except to conceal it artfully and prevent the
+recognition of any of the evils by which it was surrounded and which it
+should help to overcome.
+
+    Mrs. General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent
+    it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental
+    grooves or rails, on which she started little trains of other people's
+    opinions, which never overtook one another and never got anywhere.
+    Even her propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the
+    world; but Mrs. General's way of getting rid of it was to put it out
+    of sight, and make believe that there was no such thing. This was
+    another of her ways of forming a mind--to cram all articles of
+    difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no
+    existence. It was the easiest way and, beyond all comparison, the
+    properest.
+
+    Mrs. General was not to be told of anything shocking. Accidents,
+    miseries, and offences were never to be mentioned before her. Passion
+    was to go to sleep in the presence of Mrs. General, and blood was to
+    change to milk and water. The little that was left in the world, when
+    all these deductions were made, it was Mrs. General's province to
+    varnish. In that formation process of hers, she dipped the smallest of
+    brushes into the largest of pots, and varnished the surface of every
+    object that came under consideration. The more cracked it was, the
+    more Mrs. General varnished it.
+
+    There was varnish in Mrs. General's voice, varnish in Mrs. General's
+    touch, an atmosphere of varnish round Mrs. General's figure.
+
+Dickens wished the training of the real inner selfhood, not the varnishing
+of the surface merely. Not what George Macdonald describes as
+"sandpapering a boy into a saint," but genuine character development by
+the working out of the selfhood in the improvement of its environment,
+physically, intellectually, and spiritually.
+
+Briggs's education, in Dombey and Son, had been of such a character that
+"his intellectual fruit had nothing of its original flavour remaining."
+The character of his real selfhood had been destroyed, not developed, by
+his "education."
+
+In Our Mutual Friend Mr. Podsnap is used as a type of the men who not only
+see no need for any person else forming opinions, but who take pains to
+prevent others forming opinions, so far as possible.
+
+    As Mr. Podsnap stood with his back to the drawing-room fire, pulling
+    up his shirt collar, like a veritable cock of the walk literally
+    pluming himself in the midst of his possessions, nothing would have
+    astonished him more than an intimation that Miss Podsnap, or any young
+    person properly born and bred, could not be exactly put away like the
+    plate, brought out like the plate, polished like the plate, counted,
+    weighed, and valued like the plate. That such a young person could
+    possibly have a morbid vacancy in the heart for anything younger than
+    the plate, or less monotonous than the plate, or that such a young
+    person's thoughts could try to scale the region bounded on the north,
+    south, east, and west by the plate, was a monstrous imagination which
+    he would on the spot have flourished into space.
+
+Eugene Wrayburn's criticism of his father's habit of choosing professions
+for his sons almost as soon as they were born, or even before, without the
+slightest possible consideration for their natural aptitudes for the work
+to which they were assigned, is a severe attack on a condition which
+exists even yet through the failure of the schools or the homes to
+discover and reveal to boys and girls their highest powers, so that they
+may reach their best growth in school or college and choose the profession
+in which they can do most good and attain their most complete evolution.
+There is no better field for co-ordinate work by the home and the school
+than the joint study of the children to find their sphere of greatest
+power. Every child should be helped to find the sphere in which he can
+most successfully achieve the highest destiny for himself and for
+humanity.
+
+Eugene Wrayburn's father extended his paternal care and forethought for
+his children not only by choosing their professions without regard for
+their selfhood, but by considerately selecting partners for his sons
+without regard for their individual tastes.
+
+Eugene, speaking to Mortimer Lightwood, said:
+
+    "My respected father has found, down in the parental neighbourhood, a
+    wife for his not-generally-respected son."
+
+    "With some money, of course?"
+
+    "With some money, of course, or he would not have found her. My
+    respected father--let me shorten the dutiful tautology by substituting
+    in future M. R. F., which sounds military, and rather like the Duke of
+    Wellington."
+
+    "What an absurd fellow you are, Eugene!"
+
+    "Not at all. I assure you. M. R. F. having always in the clearest
+    manner provided (as he calls it) for his children by prearranging from
+    the hour of the birth of each, and sometimes from an earlier period,
+    what the devoted little victim's calling and course in life should be,
+    M. R. F. prearranged for myself that I was to be the barrister I am
+    (with the slight addition of an enormous practice, which has not
+    accrued), and also the married man I am not."
+
+    "The first you have often told me."
+
+    "The first I have often told you. Considering myself sufficiently
+    incongruous on my legal eminence, I have until now suppressed my
+    domestic destiny. You know M. R. F., but not as well as I do. If you
+    knew him as well as I do, he would amuse you."
+
+    "Filially spoken, Eugene!"
+
+    "Perfectly so, believe me; and with every sentiment of affectionate
+    deference toward M. R. F. But if he amuses me, I can't help it. When
+    my eldest brother was born, of course the rest of us knew (I mean the
+    rest of us would have known, if we had been in existence) that he was
+    heir to the family embarrassments--we call it before company the
+    family estate. But when my second brother was going to be born by and
+    by, 'This,' says M. R. F., 'is a little pillar of the church.' _Was_
+    born, and became a pillar of the church--a very shaky one. My third
+    brother appeared considerably in advance of his engagement to my
+    mother; but M. R. F., not at all put out by surprise, instantly
+    declared him a circumnavigator. Was pitchforked into the navy, but has
+    not circumnavigated. I announced myself, and was disposed of with the
+    highly satisfactory results embodied before you. When my younger
+    brother was half an hour old, it was settled by M. R. F. that he
+    should have a mechanical genius, and so on. Therefore I say M. R. F.
+    amuses me."
+
+In the same book Bradley Headstone's school is described as one of a
+system of schools in which "school buildings, school-teachers, and school
+pupils are all according to pattern, and all engendered in the light of
+the latest Gospel according to Monotony."
+
+Bradley Headstone himself was a mechanical product of a mechanical system
+of uniformity that destroyed independence and individuality of character.
+
+    Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent
+    white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of
+    pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its
+    decent hair guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man
+    of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there
+    was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there
+    were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics
+    in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store
+    of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically,
+    sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments
+    mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his
+    early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage.
+    The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always
+    ready to meet the demands of retail dealers--history here, geography
+    there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left--natural
+    history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics,
+    and what not, all in their several places--this care had imparted to
+    his countenance a look of care.
+
+    Suppression of so much to make room for so much had given him a
+    constrained manner over and above.
+
+The most remarkable description of a system of training that totally
+ignored individuality and chipped and battered and moulded and squeezed
+all students into the same pattern or mould is the description of the
+normal school in which Mr. Gradgrind's teacher, Mr. M'Choakumchild, was
+trained. "Mr. M'Choakumchild and 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 piano legs."
+
+Volumes could not make the sacrifice of individuality clearer than this
+sentence does.
+
+At "the grinders' school boys were taught as parrots are."
+
+Doctor Blimber was condemned because in his system "Nature was of no
+consequence at all; no matter what a boy was intended to bear, Doctor
+Blimber made him bear to pattern somehow or other."
+
+In Doctor Strong's school "we had plenty of liberty." The boys had also
+"noble games out of doors" in this model school of Dickens. Liberty and
+noble outdoor sports are the best agencies yet revealed to man for the
+development of full selfhood in harmony with the fundamental law of
+education, self-activity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE CULTURE OF THE IMAGINATION.
+
+
+In the preface to the first number of Household Words Dickens said that
+one of the objects he had in view in publishing the magazine was to aid in
+the development of the imagination of children.
+
+From the time of Barnaby Rudge his unconscious recognition of the right of
+the child to have his imagination made freer and stronger can be felt in
+his writings. His conscious recognition of the absolute necessity of child
+freedom included the ideal of the culture of the imagination.
+
+He reached his educational meridian in Hard Times, and the pedagogy of
+this book was devoted almost entirely to child freedom and the
+imagination; to revealing the fatal error of Mr. Gradgrind's philosophy,
+which taught that fact storing was the true way to form a child's mind and
+character, entirely ignoring the fact that feeling and imagination are the
+strongest elements of intellectual power and clearness.
+
+In Bleak House, which immediately preceded Hard Times, he gave a very able
+description of the effects of the neglect of the development of the
+imagination for several generations in the characteristics of the
+Smallweed family.
+
+    The Smallweeds had strengthened themselves in their practical
+    character, discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks,
+    fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities
+    whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to
+    it, and that the complete little men and women it has produced have
+    been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something
+    depressing on their minds.
+
+    Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is in a helpless condition as to his
+    lower, and nearly so as to his upper limbs; but his mind is
+    unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever held, the first four rules of
+    arithmetic, and a certain small collection of the hardest facts. In
+    respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and other such phrenological
+    attributes, it is no worse off than it used to be. Everything that Mr.
+    Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first,
+    and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single
+    butterfly.
+
+This alone is a treatise of great suggestiveness on the need of the
+development of the imagination and the means by which it should be
+developed.
+
+Hard Times was evidently intended to show the weakness of the Herbartian
+psychology. Dickens believed in the distinctive soul as the real selfhood
+of each child, and as the only true reality in his nature, the dominating
+influence in his life and character. He did not believe that knowledge
+formed the soul, but that the soul transformed knowledge. He did not
+believe that knowledge gave form, colour, and tone to the soul, but that
+the soul gave new form, colour, and tone to knowledge. He ridiculed the
+idea that the educator by using great care in the selection of his
+knowledge could produce a man of such a character as he desired; that ten
+pounds of yellow knowledge and ten pounds of blue knowledge judiciously
+mixed in a boy would certainly produce twenty pounds of green manhood.
+
+He believed that in every child there is an element "defying all the
+calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic than
+his Creator is." He did not agree with the psychology of which Mr.
+Gradgrind was the impersonation. Mr. Gradgrind believed that he could
+reduce human nature in all its complexities to statistics, and that "with
+his rule, and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table, he could
+weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it
+comes to."
+
+Mr. Gradgrind had established a school for the training of the children of
+Coketown, and had engaged Mr. M'Choakumchild to teach it. Dickens
+criticised the normal school training of his time in his description of
+Mr. M'Choakumchild's preparation for the work of stimulating young life
+to larger, richer growth.
+
+    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 as 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 through 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 watersheds 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! Mr. M'Choakumchild, rather overdone. If he had only learned a
+    little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!
+
+Dickens criticised the lack of professional training, and the fact-storing
+process which subordinated feeling and imagination.
+
+Mr. Gradgrind's school was to be opened. The government officer was
+present to examine it. Mr. Gradgrind made a short opening address:
+
+    "Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
+    facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root
+    out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals
+    upon facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is
+    the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the
+    principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to facts, sir!"
+
+    The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the
+    speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by
+    underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve.
+    The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead,
+    which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious
+    cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis
+    was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.
+    The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible,
+    dry, and dictatorial.
+
+    "In this life we want nothing but facts, sir; nothing but facts."
+
+    The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present,
+    all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of
+    little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have
+    imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the
+    brim.
+
+Most of the schoolrooms of the world are yet "plain, bare, monotonous
+vaults," although nearly fifty years after Dickens pointed out the need of
+artistic form and artistic decoration in schools we are beginning to awake
+to the idea that the architecture, the colouring, and the art on the walls
+and in the cabinets of schools may influence the characters of children
+more even than the teaching.
+
+Mr. Gradgrind proceeded to ask a few questions of the pupils, who in this
+new school were to be known by numbers--so much more statistical and
+mathematical--and not by their names.
+
+As he stood before the pupils, who were seated in rows on a gallery, "he
+seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to
+blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He
+seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical
+substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed
+away."
+
+In the last sentence Dickens reveals the true philosophy of sustaining and
+developing natural and therefore productive interest, and explains how,
+after destroying it, teachers try to galvanize it into spasmodic activity.
+
+    "Girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his
+    square forefinger. "I don't know that girl. Who is that girl?"
+
+    "Sissy Jupe, sir," explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and
+    courtesying.
+
+    "Sissy is not a name," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Don't call yourself Sissy.
+    Call yourself Cecilia."
+
+    "It's father as calls me Sissy, sir," returned the young girl in a
+    trembling voice, and with another courtesy.
+
+    "Then he has no business to do it," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Tell him he
+    mustn't. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?"
+
+    "He belongs to the horse riding, if you please, sir."
+
+    Mr. Gradgrind frowned and waved off the objectionable calling with his
+    hand.
+
+    "We don't want to know anything about that here. You mustn't tell us
+    about that here. Your father breaks horses, don't he?"
+
+    "If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break
+    horses in the ring, sir."
+
+    "You mustn't tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then, describe
+    your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?"
+
+    "Oh, yes, sir."
+
+    "Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and
+    horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse."
+
+    (Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
+
+    "Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!" said Mr. Gradgrind for
+    the general behoof of all the little pitchers. "Girl number twenty
+    possessed of no facts in reference to one of the commonest of animals!
+    Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours."
+
+    Bitzer: "Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four
+    grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the
+    spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring
+    to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth----" Thus (and much
+    more) Bitzer.
+
+    "Now, girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, "you know what a horse
+    is."
+
+The keen edge of Dickens's sarcasm will be felt when it is remembered that
+Sissy Jupe was born among horses, had lived with them, played with them,
+and ridden them all her life, but was "ignorant of the commonest facts
+regarding a horse." She could not define a horse.
+
+The government examiner then stepped forward:
+
+    "Very well," said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his
+    arms. "That's a horse. Now let me ask you girls and boys, would you
+    paper a room with representations of horses?"
+
+    After a pause, one half the children cried in chorus, "Yes, sir!" Upon
+    which the other half, seeing in the gentleman's face that "Yes" was
+    wrong, cried out in chorus, "No, sir!"--as the custom is in these
+    examinations.
+
+    "Of course, no. Why wouldn't you?"
+
+    A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing,
+    ventured the answer, because he wouldn't paper a room at all, but
+    would paint it.
+
+    "You _must_ paper it," said the gentleman rather warmly.
+
+    "You must paper it," said Thomas Gradgrind, "whether you like it or
+    not. Don't tell _us_ you wouldn't paper it. What do you mean, boy?"
+
+    "I'll explain to you, then," said the gentleman, after another and a
+    dismal pause, "why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of
+    horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms
+    in reality--in fact? Do you?"
+
+    "Yes, sir!" from one half, "No, sir!" from the other.
+
+    "Of course, no," said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the
+    wrong half. "Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don't see
+    in fact; you are not to have anywhere what you don't have in fact.
+    What is called taste is only another name for fact."
+
+    Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.
+
+    "This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery," said the
+    gentleman. "Now, I'll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet
+    a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon
+    it?"
+
+    There being a general conviction by this time that "No, sir!" was
+    always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of "No" was very
+    strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said "Yes," among them Sissy
+    Jupe.
+
+    "Girl number twenty," said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength
+    of knowledge.
+
+    Sissy blushed, and stood up.
+
+    "So you would carpet your room--or your husband's room, if you were a
+    grown woman and had a husband--with representations of flowers, would
+    you? Why would you?"
+
+    "If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers," said the girl.
+
+    "And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have
+    people walking over them with heavy boots?"
+
+    "It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They wouldn't crush and wither, if you
+    please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty, and
+    pleasant, and I would fancy----"
+
+    "Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy," cried the gentleman, quite elated
+    by coming so happily to this point. "That's it! You are never to
+    fancy."
+
+    "Fact, fact, fact," said the gentleman.
+
+    "Fact, fact, fact," repeated Mr. Gradgrind.
+
+    "You are to be in all things regulated and governed," said the
+    gentleman, "by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact,
+    composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a
+    people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word
+    Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have,
+    in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in
+    fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you can not be allowed to
+    walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and
+    butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you can not be
+    permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery.
+    You must use for all these purposes combinations and modifications (in
+    primary colours) of mathematical figures, which are susceptible of
+    proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This
+    is taste."
+
+Then Mr. M'Choakumchild was asked to teach his first lesson.
+
+    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?
+
+The "maiming and distorting" of the imagination filled Dickens with alarm.
+He recognised with great clearness the law that all evil springs from
+misused good, and he knew that if the imagination is not cultivated
+properly the child not only loses the many intellectual and spiritual
+advantages that would result from its true culture, but that it is exposed
+to the terrible danger of a distorted imagination. Tom Gradgrind is used
+as a type of the degradation that results from "the strangling of the
+imagination." Its ghost lived on to drag him down "in the form of
+grovelling sensualities." That which, truly used, has most power to
+ennoble, has also, when warped or dwarfed, most power to degrade.
+
+As Mr. Varden told his wife, "All good things perverted to evil purposes
+are worse than those which are naturally bad."
+
+The five young Gradgrinds had little opportunity to develop their
+imaginations. They were watched too closely to have any imaginative plays;
+they were not allowed to read poetry or fiction; they heard no stories;
+they had no fairies or genii in their lives; they heard nothing of giants
+or such false things; no little Boy Blue ever blew his horn for them; no
+Jack Horner took a plum out of any pie in their experience; no such
+ridiculous person as Santa Claus ever put anything in their stockings; no
+cow ever performed the impossible feat of jumping over the moon, so far as
+they knew; they had never even heard of the cow with the crumpled horn
+that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the
+malt that lay in the house that Jack built. They knew, or they could say,
+that a cow was "a graminivorous ruminating quadruped," and that was
+enough, in the philosophy of Mr. Gradgrind.
+
+Sissy Jupe's father got into difficulties in Coketown, and he became
+discouraged and ran away. Mr. Gradgrind was a good man, and meant to do
+right, so he adopted Sissy.
+
+He told her his intentions rather bluntly:
+
+    "Jupe, I have made up my mind to take you into my house, and, when you
+    are not in attendance at the school, to employ you about Mrs.
+    Gradgrind, who is rather an invalid. I have explained to Miss
+    Louisa--this is Miss Louisa--the miserable but natural end of your
+    late career; and you are to expressly understand that the whole of
+    that subject is past, and is not to be referred to any more. From
+    this time you begin your history. You are, at present, ignorant, I
+    know."
+
+    "Yes, sir, very," she answered, courtesying.
+
+    "I shall have the satisfaction of causing you to be strictly educated;
+    and you will be a living proof to all who come into communication with
+    you, of the advantages of the training you will receive. You will be
+    reclaimed and formed. You have been in the habit of reading to your
+    father and those people I found you among, I dare say?" said Mr.
+    Gradgrind, beckoning her nearer to him before he said so, and dropping
+    his voice.
+
+    "Only to father and Merrylegs, sir. At least, I mean to father, when
+    Merrylegs was always there."
+
+    "Never mind Merrylegs, Jupe," said Mr. Gradgrind with a passing frown.
+    "I don't ask about him. I understand you to have been in the habit of
+    reading to your father?"
+
+    "Oh, yes, sir, thousands of times. They were the happiest--oh, of all
+    the happy times we had together, sir!"
+
+    It was only now, when her grief broke out, that Louisa looked at her.
+
+    "And what," asked Mr. Gradgrind in a still lower voice, "did you read
+    to your father, Jupe?"
+
+    "About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the
+    Genies," she sobbed out.
+
+    "There," said Mr. Gradgrind, "that is enough. Never breathe a word of
+    such destructive nonsense any more."
+
+One night, in their study den,
+
+    Louisa had been overheard to begin a conversation with her brother by
+    saying, "Tom, I wonder--" upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person
+    overhearing, stepped forth into the light, and said, "Louisa, never
+    wonder!"
+
+    Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating
+    the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and
+    affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction,
+    multiplication, and division settle everything somehow, and never
+    wonder. "Bring to me," says Mr. M'Choakumchild, "yonder baby just able
+    to walk, and I will engage that it will never wonder."
+
+Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M'Choakumchild deliberately planned, as a result of
+a false psychology, to destroy all foolish dreamings and imaginings and
+wonderings by the children. This same wonder power is the mightiest
+stimulus to mental and spiritual effort, the source of all true interest,
+man's leader in his work of productive investigation.
+
+Wonder power should increase throughout the life of the child.
+Unfortunately, the Gradgrind philosophy is practised by many educators.
+The child's natural wonder power is dwarfed, and an unnatural interest is
+substituted for it. Teachers kill the natural interest, and then try to
+galvanize its dead body into temporary activity. The child who was made a
+wonderer and a problem finder by God is made a problem solver by teachers.
+His dreamings and fancies have been stopped, and he has been stored with
+facts and made "practical."
+
+Mr. Gradgrind was much exercised by the fact that the people of Coketown
+did not read the scientific and mathematical books in the library so much
+as poetry and fiction. It was a melancholy fact that after working for
+fifteen hours a day "they sat down to read mere fables about men and women
+more or less like themselves, and about children more or less like their
+own. They took De Foe to their bosoms instead of Euclid, and seemed to be,
+on the whole, more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker." This was very
+discouraging to Mr. Gradgrind.
+
+One night Louisa and Tom were sitting alone conversing about themselves
+and the way they were being trained by their father. In the course of
+their conversation Tom said:
+
+    "I am sick of my life, Loo; I hate it altogether, and I hate everybody
+    except you. As to me, I am a donkey, that's what I am. I am as
+    obstinate as one, I am more stupid than one, I get as much pleasure as
+    one, and I should like to kick like one."
+
+    "Not me, I hope, Tom."
+
+    "No, Loo, I wouldn't hurt _you_. I made an exception of you at first.
+    I don't know what this--jolly old--jaundiced jail"--Tom had paused to
+    find a sufficiently complimentary and expressive name for the parental
+    roof, and seemed to relieve his mind for a moment by the strong
+    alliteration of this one--"would be without you."
+
+    "Tom," said his sister, after silently watching the sparks a while,
+    "as I get older, and nearly growing up, I often sit wondering here,
+    and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can't reconcile you to
+    home better than I am able to do. I don't know what other girls know.
+    I can't play to you, or sing to you. I can't talk to you so as to
+    lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any
+    amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk
+    about, when you are tired."
+
+    "Well, no more do I. I am as bad as you in that respect; and I am a
+    mule too, which you're not. If father was determined to make me either
+    a prig or a mule, and I am not a prig, why, it stands to reason, I
+    must be a mule. And so I am."
+
+    "I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about," said
+    Tom, spitefully setting his teeth, "and all the Figures, and all the
+    people who found them out; and I wish I could put a thousand barrels
+    of gunpowder under them and blow them all up together."
+
+    Louisa sat looking at the fire so long that Tom asked, "Have you gone
+    to sleep, Loo?"
+
+    "No, Tom, I am looking at the fire."
+
+    "What do you see in it?"
+
+    "I don't see anything in it, Tom, particularly, but since I have been
+    looking at it I have been wondering about you and me, grown up."
+
+    "Wondering again?" said Tom.
+
+    "I have such unmanageable thoughts," returned his sister, "that they
+    _will_ wonder."
+
+    "Then I beg of you, Louisa," said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the
+    door without being heard, "to do nothing of that description, for
+    goodness' sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last
+    of it from your father. And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my
+    poor head continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you
+    have been, and whose education has cost what yours has, should be
+    found encouraging his sister to wonder, when he knows his father has
+    expressly said that she was not to do it."
+
+    Louisa denied Tom's participation in the offence; but her mother
+    stopped her with the conclusive answer, "Louisa, don't tell me, in my
+    state of health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and
+    physically impossible that you could have done it."
+
+    "I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking at the red
+    sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me
+    think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could
+    hope to do in it."
+
+    "Nonsense!" said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic. "Nonsense!
+    Don't stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you
+    know very well that if it was ever to reach your father's ears I
+    should never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been
+    taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the
+    experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the
+    whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master
+    about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say
+    every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to
+    hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes!"
+
+When a boy hates home, and a girl in her teens is rejoicing at the
+prospect of a short life, there has been some serious blunder in their
+training.
+
+When her father was proposing to her that she should marry old Bounderby,
+Louisa said:
+
+    "What do _I_ know, father, of tastes and fancies; of aspirations and
+    affections; of all that part of my nature in which such light things
+    might have been nourished? What escape have I had from problems that
+    could be demonstrated, and realities that could be grasped?" As she
+    said it, she unconsciously closed her hand, as if upon a solid object,
+    and slowly opened it as though she were releasing dust or ash.
+
+After her marriage to Bounderby Louisa rarely came home, and Dickens gives
+in detail a sequence of thought that passed through her mind on her
+approach to the old home after a long absence. None of the true feelings
+were stirred in her heart.
+
+    The dreams of childhood--its airy fables, its graceful, beautiful,
+    humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond, so good to be
+    believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown, for then the
+    least among them rises to the stature of a great charity in the heart,
+    suffering little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep
+    with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world,
+    wherein it were better for all the children of Adam that they should
+    oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and not
+    worldly-wise--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?
+
+This quotation shows how clearly Dickens saw the relationship between the
+imagination and the reason. Her imagination had been dwarfed and
+perverted; and her power to feel, and to think, and to appreciate beauty,
+and to love, and to see God and understand him, was dwarfed and perverted
+as a consequence.
+
+Her poor mother, who had always felt that there was something wrong with
+her husband's training, but dared not oppose him, and fully supported him
+for the sake of peace which never really came, was worn out, and had
+almost become a mental wreck. Her mind was struggling with the one great
+question. She tried and tried vainly to find what the great defect of her
+husband's system was, but she was very sure it had a great weakness
+somewhere. She tried to explain the matter to Louisa when she came to see
+her.
+
+    "You learned a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother. Ologies of
+    all kinds, from morning to night. If there is any ology left, of any
+    description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can
+    say is, I hope I shall never hear its name."
+
+    "I can hear you, mother, when you have strength to go on." This, to
+    keep her from floating away.
+
+    "But there's something--not an ology at all--that your father has
+    missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don't know what it is. I have often
+    sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its
+    name now. But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write
+    to him, to find out, for God's sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give
+    me a pen."
+
+When Louisa, unable to resist alone the temptation to go with Mr.
+Harthouse, fled to her father and told him in such earnest words that she
+cursed the hour she had been born to submit to his training, she said:
+
+    "I don't reproach you, father. What you have never nurtured in me, you
+    have never nurtured in yourself; but oh! if you had only done so long
+    ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a much better and much
+    happier creature I should have been this day!"
+
+    On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand
+    and groaned aloud.
+
+    "Father, if you had known, when we were last together here, what even
+    I feared while I strove against it--as it has been my task from
+    infancy to strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in
+    my heart; if you had known that there lingered in my breast
+    sensibilities, affections, weakness capable of being cherished into
+    strength, defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more
+    known to his arithmetic than his Creator is--would you have given me
+    to the husband whom I am now sure that I hate?"
+
+    He said, "No, no, my poor child."
+
+    "Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that
+    have hardened and spoiled me? Would you have robbed me--for no one's
+    enrichment--only for the greater desolation of this world--of the
+    immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my
+    refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my
+    school in which I should have learned to be more humble, and more
+    trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them
+    better?"
+
+    "Oh, no, no! No, Louisa."
+
+    "Yet, father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my
+    sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and
+    surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat in regard to them, I
+    should have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more
+    contented, more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am
+    with the eyes I have. Now, hear what I have come to say. With a hunger
+    and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a moment
+    appeased; with an ardent impulse toward some region where rules, and
+    figures, and definitions were not quite absolute, I have grown up,
+    battling every inch of my way.
+
+    "In this strife I have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel
+    into a demon. What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving,
+    despising, regretting what I have not learned; and my dismal resource
+    has been to think that life would soon go by, and that nothing in it
+    could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest."
+
+When she had finished the story of her acquaintance with Mr. Harthouse and
+his influence over her, she said: "All that I know is, your philosophy and
+your teaching will not save me. Now, father, you have brought me to this.
+Save me by some other means."
+
+Dickens pictured Mr. Gradgrind as a good, earnest man, who desired to do
+only good for his family.
+
+    In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise rod, and in
+    staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he
+    had meant to do great things. Within the limits of his short tether he
+    had tumbled about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater
+    singleness of purpose than many of the blatant personages whose
+    company he kept.
+
+A careful study of what Louisa said to her father will show that Dickens
+had made a profound study of Froebel's philosophy of the feelings and the
+imagination which is now the dominating theory of psychology, and that he
+clearly understood what Wordsworth meant when he wrote:
+
+  "Whose heart the holy forms of young imagination had kept pure."
+
+Sissy Jupe failed utterly to satisfy Mr. M'Choakumchild at school. She
+could not remember facts and dates. She could not be crammed successfully,
+and she had a very dense head for figures. "She actually burst into tears
+when required (by the mental process) to name immediately the cost of two
+hundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteen pence halfpenny," so Mr.
+Gradgrind told her she would have to leave school.
+
+    "I can not disguise from you, Jupe," said Mr. Gradgrind, knitting his
+    brow, "that the result of your probation there has disappointed
+    me--has greatly disappointed me. You have not acquired, under Mr. and
+    Mrs. M'Choakumchild, anything like that amount of exact knowledge
+    which I look for. You are extremely deficient in your facts. Your
+    acquaintance with figures is very limited. You are altogether
+    backward, and below the mark."
+
+    "I am sorry, sir," she returned; "but I know it is quite true. Yet I
+    have tried hard, sir."
+
+    "Yes," said Mr. Gradgrind, "yes, I believe you have tried hard; I have
+    observed you, and I can find no fault in that respect."
+
+    "Thank you, sir. I have thought sometimes"--Sissy very timid
+    here--"that perhaps I tried to learn too much, and that if I had asked
+    to be allowed to try a little less, I might have----"
+
+    "No, Jupe, no," said Mr. Gradgrind, shaking his head in his
+    profoundest and most eminently practical way. "No. The course you
+    pursued, you pursued according to the system--the system--and there is
+    no more to be said about it. I can only suppose that the circumstances
+    of your early life were too unfavourable to the development of your
+    reasoning powers, and that we began too late. Still, as I have said
+    already, I am disappointed."
+
+    "I wish I could have made a better acknowledgment, sir, of your
+    kindness to a poor forlorn girl who had no claim upon you, and of your
+    protection of her."
+
+    "Don't shed tears," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Don't shed tears. I don't
+    complain of you. You are an affectionate, earnest, good young woman,
+    and--and we must make that do."
+
+How blind a man must become when his faith in a system or a philosophy can
+make him estimate fact storing so much and character forming so little!
+Sissy could not learn facts, therefore Mr. Gradgrind mourned. The fact
+that she was "affectionate, earnest, good," was only a trifling matter--a
+very poor substitute for brilliant acquirements in dates and facts and
+mental arithmetic.
+
+Sissy became, however, the good angel of the Gradgrind household. She
+helped Louisa back to a partial hope and sweetness; she gave the younger
+children, with Mr. Gradgrind's permission, the real childhood of freedom
+and imagination, which the older children had lost forever; she
+brightened the lives even of Mrs. and Mr. Gradgrind, and she helped to
+save Tom from the disgrace of his crime.
+
+The closing picture of the book, one of the most beautiful Dickens ever
+painted, tells the story of Sissy's future:
+
+    But happy Sissy's happy children loving her; all children loving her;
+    she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty
+    fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler
+    fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality
+    with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of
+    infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally
+    stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show
+    will be the Writing on the Wall--she holding this course as part of no
+    fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or
+    covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair; but simply as a duty to be
+    done. Did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be!
+
+    Dear reader! It rests with you and me whether, in our two fields of
+    action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with
+    lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray
+    and cold.
+
+And the educational Gradgrinds of the present time sneer at Dickens
+because he puts the early training of a circus above the early training of
+a Christian home like Mr. Gradgrind's. "The logical consequence of such
+reasoning," they say, "would be that all children should be trained in
+circuses."
+
+Oh, no! Dickens did not recommend a circus as a good place to train
+children. But he did believe that even a circus is a thousand times better
+than a so-called Christian home for the true and complete development of a
+child, if in the circus the child is free and happy, and is allowed full
+play for her imagination, and is not arrested in her development by rote
+storing of facts and too early drill in arithmetic, and has the rich
+productive love of even one parent, and has blessed opportunities for
+loving service for her pets and her friends; and if in the so-called
+Christian home she is robbed of these privileges even in the name of
+religion.
+
+Sissy had a blessed, free childhood. She lived in her own imaginary world
+most of the time; she had the deep love of her kind-hearted father and of
+Merrylegs, the dog; she read poetry and fairy tales; she attended to her
+father's needs; she had many opportunities to show her love in loving
+service for Merrylegs and her father; and she was not dwarfed by fact
+cramming and formal drill. Her chances of reaching a true womanhood were
+excellent, and when she got the opportunity for the revelation of
+character, she had character to reveal, and her character developed in its
+revelation for the benefit and happiness of others. Hers was the true
+Christian training after all. Homes and schools with such training are
+centres of great power.
+
+One of the strongest pleas ever made for the cultivation of the
+imagination, "the fancies and affections," and for the teaching of
+literature, art, and music in the schools was given in Hard Times, which
+is an industrial as well as an educational story. Indeed, Dickens saw that
+the true solution of industrial questions was the proper training of the
+race. No attack on the meanness of utilitarianism and no exposition of its
+terrible dangers could be more incisive and philosophical than the
+following wonderful sentences:
+
+    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 moment 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!
+
+Altogether Hard Times is one of the most remarkable educational books ever
+written.
+
+Dickens made a plea for mental refreshment and recreation for the working
+classes in Nobody's Story, similar to that made in Hard Times:
+
+    The workingman appealed to the Bigwig family, and said: "We are a
+    labouring people, and I have a glimmering suspicion in me that
+    labouring people of whatever condition were made--by a higher
+    intelligence than yours, as I poorly understand it--to be in need of
+    mental refreshment and recreation. See what we fall into, when we rest
+    without it. Come! Amuse me harmlessly, show me something, give me an
+    escape!"
+
+Beautiful Lizzie Hexam, one of the latest and highest creations of
+Dickens, longed to read, but she did not learn to do so because her father
+objected so bitterly, and she wished to avoid everything that would weaken
+the bond of love between them, lest she might lose her influence for good
+over him.
+
+Her brother Charley said to her:
+
+    "You said you couldn't read a book, Lizzie. Your library of books is
+    the hollow down by the flare, I think."
+
+    "I should be very glad to be able to read real books. I feel my want
+    of learning very much, Charley. But I should feel it much more, if I
+    didn't know it to be a tie between me and father."
+
+Dickens was revealing the strange fact that at first many poor and
+ignorant parents strenuously objected to their children being educated;
+and he was at the same time showing that great character growth could take
+place even without the power to read. Lizzie's self-sacrifice for her
+father and Charley was a true revelation of the divinity in her nature.
+Though she had not read books, she had read a great deal by her
+imagination from "the hollow down by the flare."
+
+As Dickens grew older he saw more clearly the value of the dreaming of
+childhood while awake, of the deep reveries into which young people often
+fall, and ought to fall, so that they become oblivious to their
+environment, and sweep through the universe in strange imaginings, that
+after all are very real. He was fond of drawing pictures of young people
+giving free rein to their imaginations, unchecked by intermeddling
+adulthood, while they watched the glowing fire, or the ashes falling away
+from the dying coals. Lizzie's library from which she got her culture was
+in "the hollow down by the flare."
+
+Crippled little Jenny Wren, the doll's dressmaker, said to Lizzie Hexam
+one day, when Eugene Wrayburn was visiting them:
+
+    "I wonder how it happens that when I am work, work, working here, all
+    alone in the summer time, I smell flowers."
+
+    "As a commonplace individual, I should say," Eugene suggested
+    languidly--for he was growing weary of the person of the house--"that
+    you smell flowers because you _do_ smell flowers."
+
+    "No, I don't," said the little creature, resting one arm upon the
+    elbow of her chair, resting her chin upon that hand, and looking
+    vacantly before her; "this is not a flowery neighbourhood. It's
+    anything but that. And yet, as I sit at work, I smell miles of
+    flowers. I smell roses till I think I see the rose leaves lying in
+    heaps, bushels, on the floor. I smell fallen leaves till I put down my
+    hand--so--and expect to make them rustle. I smell the white and the
+    pink May in the hedges, and all sorts of flowers that I never was
+    among. For I have seen very few flowers indeed in my life."
+
+    "Pleasant fancies to have, Jennie dear!" said her friend, with a
+    glance toward Eugene as if she would have asked him whether they were
+    given the child in compensation for her losses.
+
+    "So I think, Lizzie, when they come to me. And the birds I hear! Oh!"
+    cried the little creature, holding out her hand and looking upward,
+    "how they sing!"
+
+How life in any stage might be filled with richness and joy, if
+imaginations were stored with apperceptive elements and allowed to
+reconstruct the universe in our fancies! How truly real our fancies might
+become!
+
+In A Child's Dream of a Star Dickens gives an exquisite picture of the
+influence of imagination in spiritual evolution.
+
+    There was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought
+    of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his
+    constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They
+    wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and
+    blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water;
+    they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely
+    world.
+
+    They used to say to one another, sometimes, Supposing all the children
+    upon earth were to die, would the flowers, and the water, and the sky
+    be sorry? They believed they would be sorry. For, said they, the buds
+    are the children of the flowers, and the little playful streams that
+    gambol down the hillsides are the children of the water; and the
+    smallest bright specks playing at hide and seek in the sky all night,
+    must surely be the children of the stars; and they would all be
+    grieved to see their playmates, the children of men, no more.
+
+    There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky
+    before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was
+    larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all the others, and
+    every night they watched for it, standing hand in hand at a window.
+    Whoever saw it first cried out, "I see the star!" And often they cried
+    out both together, knowing so well when it would rise, and where. So
+    they grew to be such friends with it, that, before lying down in their
+    beds, they always looked out once again to bid it good night; and when
+    they were turning round to sleep they used to say, "God bless the
+    star!"
+
+    But while she was still very young, oh very, very young, the sister
+    drooped, and came to be so very weak that she could no longer stand in
+    the window at night; and then the child looked sadly out by himself,
+    and when he saw the star, turned round and said to the patient pale
+    face on the bed, "I see the star!" and then a smile would come upon
+    the face, and a little weak voice used to say, "God bless my brother
+    and the star!"
+
+Dickens had shown his recognition of the inestimable value of the
+imagination, and the importance of giving it free play and of doing
+everything possible to stimulate its activity by freedom, and story, and
+play, and literature, music, and art, but his description of Jemmy Jackman
+Lirriper's training shows a keener appreciation than any of his other
+writings of the value of the child's games in which personation is the
+leading characteristic; in which spools, or spoons, or blocks, or sticks
+are people or animals, with regular names and distinct characteristics and
+responsible duties, and in which chairs and tables and boxes are coaches,
+or steamboats, or railway trains. No friends are ever more real than those
+of the child's creative imagination, with things to represent them; no
+rides ever give greater delight than those rides in trains that move only
+in the imaginations of the children, who construct them by placing the
+chairs in a row, and who act as engineers, conductors, and brakemen. Such
+games form the best elements out of which the child's life power can be
+made, especially if the adulthood of his home sympathizes with him in his
+enterprises. They afford an outlet for his imaginative plans. In them he
+forms new worlds of his own, which are adapted to his stage of
+development, and in which he can be the creator and the centre of
+executive influence.
+
+Jemmy Jackman Lirriper's training was ideal in most of his home life,
+though he had no father or mother to love and guide him.
+
+    The miles and miles that me and the Major have travelled with Jemmy in
+    the dusk between the lights are not to be calculated, Jemmy driving on
+    the coach box, which is the Major's brass-bound writing desk on the
+    table, me inside in the easy-chair, and the Major Guard up behind with
+    a brown-paper horn doing it really wonderful. I do assure you, my
+    dear, that sometimes when I have taken a few winks in my place inside
+    the coach and have come half awake by the flashing light of the fire
+    and have heard that precious pet driving and the Major blowing up
+    behind to have the change of horses ready when we got to the Inn, I
+    have believed we were on the old North Road that my poor Lirriper knew
+    so well. Then to see that child and the Major both wrapped up getting
+    down to warm their feet and going stamping about and having glasses of
+    ale out of the paper match boxes on the chimney piece, is to see the
+    Major enjoying it fully as much as the child I am very sure, and it's
+    equal to any play when Coachee opens the coach door to look in at me
+    inside and say "Wery 'past that 'tage.--'Prightened old lady?"
+
+Such plays as Dickens here describes make one of the greatest differences
+between a real childhood and a barren childhood. The lack of opportunities
+for such perfect plays and such complete sympathy in their plays gives to
+the faces of orphan children brought up in institutions the distinctive
+look which marks them everywhere, so that they can be easily recognised by
+experienced students of happy childhood.
+
+But Jemmy's make believe was not ruthlessly cut short with his early
+childhood. He continued his imaginative operations, or it might make it
+clearer to say his operative imaginations, after he went to school; and
+those beautiful old people, Mrs. Lirriper and Major Jackman, continued
+their interest, their real, perfectly sympathetic interest in his plans.
+
+    Neither should I tell you any news, my dear, in telling you that the
+    Major is still a fixture in the Parlours quite as much so as the roof
+    of the house, and that Jemmy is of boys the best and brightest, and
+    has ever had kept from him the cruel story of his poor pretty young
+    mother, Mrs. Edson, being deserted in the second floor and dying in my
+    arms, fully believing that I am his born Gran and him an orphan;
+    though what with engineering since he took a taste for it, and him and
+    the Major making Locomotives out of parasols, broken iron pots, and
+    cotton reels, and them absolutely a-getting off the line and falling
+    over the table and injuring the passengers almost equal to the
+    originals, it really is quite wonderful. And when I says to the Major,
+    "Major, can't you by _any_ means give us a communication with the
+    guard?" the Major says, quite huffy, "No, madam, it's not to be done";
+    and when I says, "Why not?" the Major says, "That is between us who
+    are in the Railway Interest, madam, and our friend, the Right
+    Honourable Vice-President of the Board of Trade"; and if you'll
+    believe me, my dear, the Major wrote to Jemmy at School to consult him
+    on the answer I should have before I could get even that amount of
+    unsatisfactoriness out of the man, the reason being that when we first
+    began with the little model and the working signals beautiful and
+    perfect (being in general as wrong as the real), and when I says,
+    laughing, "What appointment am I to hold in this undertaking,
+    gentlemen?" Jemmy hugs me round the neck and tells me, dancing, "You
+    shall be the Public, Gran," and consequently they put upon me just as
+    much as ever they like, and I sit a-growling in my easy-chair.
+
+    My dear, whether it is that a grown man as clever as the Major can
+    not give half his heart and mind to anything--even a plaything--but
+    must get into right down earnest with it, whether it is so or whether
+    it is not so, I do not undertake to say; but Jemmy is far outdone by
+    the serious and believing ways of the Major in the management of the
+    United Grand Junction Lirriper and Jackman Great Norfolk Parlour Line,
+    "for," says my Jemmy with the sparkling eyes when it was christened,
+    "we must have a whole mouthful of name, Gran, or our dear old
+    Public"--and there the young rogue kissed me--"won't stump up." So the
+    Public took the shares--ten at ninepence, and immediately when that
+    was spent twelve Preference at one and sixpence--and they were all
+    signed by Jemmy and countersigned by the Major, and between ourselves
+    much better worth the money than some shares I have paid for in my
+    time. In the same holidays the line was made and worked and opened and
+    ran excursions and collisions and had burst its boilers and all sorts
+    of accidents and offences all most regular, correct, and pretty. The
+    sense of responsibility entertained by the Major as a military style
+    of station master, my dear, starting the down train behind time and
+    ringing one of those little bells that you buy with the little coal
+    scuttles off the tray round the man's neck in the street, did him
+    honour; but noticing the Major of a night when he is writing out his
+    monthly report to Jemmy at school of the state of the Rolling Stock
+    and the Permanent Way, and all the rest of it (the whole kept upon the
+    Major's sideboard and dusted with his own hands every morning before
+    varnishing his boots), I notice him as full of thought and care, as
+    full can be, and frowning in a fearful manner; but, indeed, the Major
+    does nothing by halves, as witness his great delight in going out
+    surveying with Jemmy when he has Jemmy to go with, carrying a chain
+    and a measuring tape, and driving I don't know what improvements right
+    through Westminster Abbey, and fully believed in the streets to be
+    knocking everything upside down by Act of Parliament. As please Heaven
+    will come to pass when Jemmy takes to that as a profession!
+
+The Major's participation in the plans of Jemmy is a good illustration of
+the sympathy that Froebel and Dickens felt for childhood, a sympathy
+_with_, not _for_, the child. It meant more than approval--it meant
+co-operation, partnership.
+
+Some educators would criticise Dickens for allowing the Major to make the
+locomotives with parasols, broken pots, and cotton reels. They teach that
+Jemmy should have made these himself. Dickens was away beyond such a
+narrow view as this. The child at first has much more power to plan than
+to execute. To leave him to himself means the failure of his plans and the
+irritation of his temper. It is a terrible experience for a child to get
+the habit of failure. The wise adult will enter into partnership with the
+child to aid in carrying out the child's plans. He will not even make
+suggestions of changes in plans when he sees how they might be improved.
+The plans and the leadership should be absolutely the child's own. The
+adult should be an assistant, and that only, when skill is required beyond
+that possessed by the child--either when the mechanical work is too
+difficult for the child or when more than one person is needed to execute
+his plan.
+
+The adult may sometimes lead the child indirectly to a change of plan, but
+he should not do it by direct suggestion. The joy is lost for the child
+when he becomes conscious of the adult as interfering even sympathetically
+with his own personality. There is a great deal of well-intentioned
+dwarfing of childhood.
+
+The consciousness of partnership, of unity, of sympathetic co-operation,
+is the best result of such blessed work as the Major did with Jemmy in
+carrying out Jemmy's plans. He is the child's best friend who most wisely
+and most thoroughly develops his imagination as a basis for all
+intellectual strength and clearness, and for the highest spiritual growth.
+He is the wealthiest man who sees diamonds in the dewdrops and unsullied
+gold in the sunset tints.
+
+David Copperfield tells the names of the wonderful books he found in his
+father's blessed little room, and describes their influence upon his life.
+
+    They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something beyond that place
+    and time--they and the Arabian Nights and the Tales of the Genii. It
+    is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small
+    troubles (which were great troubles to me) by impersonating my
+    favourite characters in them, as I did, and by putting Mr. and Miss
+    Murdstone into all the bad ones, which I did, too. I have been Tom
+    Jones--a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature--for a week together.
+    I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a
+    stretch, I verily believe.
+
+    "Let us end with the Boy's story," said Mrs. Lirriper, "for the Boy's
+    story is the best that is ever told."
+
+There are no other stories so enchanting, or so stimulating, as the
+stories that fill the imaginations of childhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+SYMPATHY WITH CHILDHOOD.
+
+
+The dominant element in Dickens's character was sympathy _with_ childhood,
+not merely for it. He had the productive sympathy that feels and thinks
+from the child's standpoint.
+
+The illustration just given of Major Jackman's co-operative sympathy with
+Jemmy Lirriper in the perfect carrying out of what to most people would
+have been only "the foolish ideas" of a child, as sincerely as if he had
+been executing commissions from the prime minister, is an excellent
+exemplification of the true ideal of sympathy in practice. The Major was
+not working for Jemmy's amusement merely; he was a very active and
+genuinely interested partner with Jemmy. "Jemmy was far outdone by the
+serious and believing ways of the Major" in the imaginative plays which
+were the most real life of Jemmy. Such was the sympathy of Dickens with
+his own children; such sympathy he believed to be the most productive
+power in the teacher or child trainer for beneficent influence on the
+character of the child.
+
+There is no other characteristic of his writings so marked as his broad
+sympathy with childhood. Sympathy was the origin of all he wrote against
+coercion in all its dread forms, of all he wrote about robbing children of
+a real childhood, about the dwarfing of individuality, about the
+strangling of the imagination, about improper nutrition, about all forms
+of neglect, and cruelty, and bad training. The more fully his nature is
+known the more deeply he is loved, because of his great love for the
+child.
+
+From the beginning of his educational work his overflowing, practical
+sympathy is revealed.
+
+He tells us in the preface to Nickleby that his study of the Yorkshire
+schools and his delineation of the character of Squeers resulted from a
+resolution formed in childhood, which he was led to form by seeing a boy
+"with a suppurated abscess caused by its being ripped open by his
+Yorkshire guide, philosopher, and friend with an inky penknife."
+
+The sympathy of Nicholas, and John Browdie, and the Cheeryble brothers
+with Smike and all suffering childhood are strong features of the book.
+
+Dickens's own sympathy has cleared his mind of many fogs that still linger
+in some minds regarding a parent's rights in regard to his child, even
+though the parent has never recognised any of the child's rights. The
+movement in favour of the recognition of the rights of children even
+against their parents began with Dickens. When Nicholas discovered that
+Smike was the son of his uncle, Ralph Nickleby, he went to consult brother
+Charles Cheeryble in regard to his duty under the circumstances.
+
+    He modestly, but firmly, expressed his hope that the good old
+    gentleman would, under such circumstances as he described, hold him
+    justified in adopting the extreme course of interfering between parent
+    and child, and upholding the latter in his disobedience; even though
+    his horror and dread of his father might seem, and would doubtless be
+    represented, as a thing so repulsive and unnatural as to render those
+    who countenanced him in it fit objects of general detestation and
+    abhorrence.
+
+    "So deeply rooted does this horror of the man appear to be," said
+    Nicholas, "that I can hardly believe he really is his son. Nature does
+    not seem to have implanted in his breast one lingering feeling of
+    affection for him, and surely she can never err."
+
+    "My dear sir," replied brother Charles, "you fall into the very common
+    mistake of charging upon Nature matters with which she has not had the
+    smallest connection, and for which she is in no way responsible. Men
+    talk of Nature as an abstract thing, and lose sight of what is natural
+    while they do so. Here is a poor lad who has never felt a parent's
+    care, who has scarcely known anything all his life but suffering and
+    sorrow, presented to a man who he is told is his father, and whose
+    first act is to signify his intention of putting an end to his short
+    term of happiness by consigning him to his old fate, and taking him
+    from the only friend he has ever had--which is yourself. If Nature, in
+    such a case, put into that lad's breast but one secret prompting which
+    urged him toward his father and away from you, she would be a liar and
+    an idiot."
+
+    Nicholas was delighted to find that the old gentleman spoke so warmly,
+    and in the hope that he might say something more to the same purpose,
+    made no reply.
+
+    "The same mistake presents itself to me, in one shape or other, at
+    every turn," said brother Charles. "Parents who never showed their
+    love complain of want of natural affection in their children; children
+    who never showed their duty complain of want of natural feeling in
+    their parents; lawmakers who find both so miserable that their
+    affections have never had enough of life's sun to develop them are
+    loud in their moralizings over parents and children too, and cry that
+    the very ties of Nature are disregarded. Natural affections and
+    instincts, my dear sir, are the most beautiful of the Almighty's
+    works, but, like other beautiful works of his, they must be reared and
+    fostered, or it is as natural that they should be wholly obscured, and
+    that new feelings should usurp their place, as it is that the sweetest
+    productions of the earth, left untended, should be choked with weeds
+    and briers. I wish we could be brought to consider this, and,
+    remembering natural obligations a little more at the right time, talk
+    about them a little less at the wrong one."
+
+It was chiefly to break the power of ignorant and cruel parenthood over
+suffering childhood that Ralph Nickleby was painted with such dark and
+repellent characteristics, and that poor Smike's sufferings were detailed
+with such minuteness. The sympathy of the world was aroused against the
+one and in favour of the other, as a basis for the climax of thought which
+brother Charles expressed so truly and so forcefully.
+
+The same thought was driven home by the complaint of Squeers about one of
+the boys in Dotheboys Hall.
+
+    "The juniorest Palmer said he wished he was in heaven. I really don't
+    know, I do _not_ know what's to be done with that young fellow; he's
+    always a-wishing something horrid. He said once he wished he was a
+    donkey, because then he wouldn't have a father as didn't love him!
+    Pretty wicious that for a child of six!"
+
+It required the genius of Dickens to make such a clear picture of an
+unloving father.
+
+Even before Nicholas Nickleby was written Dickens had revealed his
+sympathetic nature. Oliver Twist's story was written to stir the hearts of
+his readers in favour of unfortunate children. What a contrast is made
+between the hardening effects of his treatment by Bumble and the
+"gentleman in the white waistcoat," and the humanizing influence of Rose
+Maylie's tear dropped on his cheek.
+
+Surely no sensitive little boy ever submitted to more unsympathetic
+treatment than poor Oliver.
+
+    When little Oliver was taken before "the gentlemen" that evening, and
+    informed that he was to go that night as general house lad to a coffin
+    maker's, and that if he complained of his situation, or ever came back
+    to the parish again, he would be sent to sea, there to be drowned or
+    knocked on the head, as the case might be, he evinced so little
+    emotion that they by common consent pronounced him a hardened young
+    rascal, and ordered Mr. Bumble to remove him forthwith.
+
+    For some time Mr. Bumble drew Oliver along, without notice or remark;
+    for the beadle carried his head very erect, as a beadle always should;
+    and, it being a windy day, little Oliver was completely enshrouded by
+    the skirts of Mr. Bumble's coat as they blew open and disclosed to
+    great advantage his flapped waistcoat and drab plush knee breeches. As
+    they drew near to their destination, however, Mr. Bumble thought it
+    expedient to look down and see that the boy was in good order for
+    inspection by his new master: which he accordingly did, with a fit and
+    becoming air of gracious patronage.
+
+    "Oliver!" said Mr. Bumble.
+
+    "Yes, sir," replied Oliver in a low, tremulous voice.
+
+    "Pull that cap off your eyes, and hold up your head, sir."
+
+    Although Oliver did as he was desired at once, and passed the back of
+    his unoccupied hand briskly across his eyes, he left a tear in them
+    when he looked up at his conductor. As Mr. Bumble gazed sternly upon
+    him, it rolled down his cheek. It was followed by another, and
+    another. The child made a strong effort, but it was an unsuccessful
+    one. Withdrawing his other hand from Mr. Bumble's, he covered his face
+    with both, and wept until the tears sprung out from between his chin
+    and bony fingers.
+
+    "Well!" exclaimed Mr. Bumble, stopping short, and darting at his
+    little charge a look of intense malignity. "Well! Of _all_ the
+    ungratefullest and worst-disposed boys as ever I see, Oliver, you are
+    the----"
+
+    "No, no, sir," sobbed Oliver, clinging to the hand which held the
+    well-known cane; "no, no, sir; I will be good indeed; indeed, indeed I
+    will, sir! I am a very little boy, sir; and it is so--so----"
+
+    "So what?" inquired Mr. Bumble in amazement.
+
+    "So lonely, sir! So very lonely!" cried the child. "Everybody hates
+    me. Oh, sir, don't, don't, pray, be cross to me!" The child beat his
+    hand upon his heart, and looked in his companion's face with tears of
+    real agony.
+
+The poor boy was put to bed by Sowerberry the first night. His master
+said, as they climbed the stairs:
+
+    "Your bed's under the counter. You don't mind sleeping among the
+    coffins, I suppose? But it doesn't much matter whether you do or
+    don't, for you can't sleep anywhere else. Come, don't keep me here all
+    night!"
+
+Dickens pitied children for the terrors with which they were threatened,
+as Oliver was threatened by the board, and he pitied them also for the
+terrors that their imaginations brought to them at night. Sowerberry's
+lack of sympathy was as great as Bumble's. When one of his own children
+showed evidence of dread of retiring alone, Dickens sat upstairs with his
+family in the evenings afterward. He did not tell the child the reason,
+but she was saved from terror.
+
+Oliver ran away from Sowerberry's, and when passing the workhouse he
+peeped between the bars of the gate into the garden. A very little boy was
+there who came to the gate to say "Good-bye" to him. He had been one of
+Oliver's little friends.
+
+    "Kiss me," said the child, climbing up the low gate and flinging his
+    little arms round Oliver's neck: "Good-bye, dear! God bless you!"
+
+    The blessing was from a young child's lips, but it was the first that
+    Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through the struggles
+    and sufferings and troubles and changes of his after-life he never
+    once forgot it.
+
+When Oliver was taken to commit burglary by Bill Sykes, and was wounded
+and brought into the home he was assisting to rob, the good lady of the
+house sent for a doctor. The doctor dressed the arm, and when the boy fell
+asleep he brought Mrs. Maylie and Rose to see the criminal.
+
+Rose sat down by Oliver's bedside and gathered his hair from his face.
+
+    As she stooped over him her tears fell upon his forehead.
+
+    The boy stirred and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity
+    and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and
+    affection he had never known. Thus a strain of gentle music, or the
+    rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the
+    mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim
+    remembrances of scenes that never were in this life; which vanish like
+    a breath; which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone
+    by, would seem to have awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the
+    mind can ever recall.
+
+    "What can this mean?" exclaimed the elder lady. "This poor child can
+    never have been the pupil of robbers!"
+
+    "Vice," sighed the surgeon, replacing the curtain, "takes up her abode
+    in many temples; and who can say that a fair outside shall not
+    enshrine her?"
+
+    "But at so early an age!" urged Rose.
+
+    "My dear young lady," rejoined the surgeon, mournfully shaking his
+    head, "crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered
+    alone. The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims."
+
+    "But can you, oh, can you really believe that this delicate boy has
+    been the voluntary associate of the worst outcasts of society?" said
+    Rose.
+
+    The surgeon shook his head in a manner which intimated that he feared
+    it was very possible, and, observing that they might disturb the
+    patient, led the way into an adjoining apartment.
+
+    "But even if he has been wicked," pursued Rose, "think how young he
+    is; think that he may never have known a mother's love, or the comfort
+    of a home; that ill usage and blows, or the want of bread, may have
+    driven him to herd with men who have forced him to guilt. Aunt, dear
+    aunt, for mercy's sake think of this, before you let them drag this
+    sick child to a prison, which in any case must be the grave of all his
+    chance of amendment. Oh! as you love me, and know that I have never
+    felt the want of parents in your goodness and affection, but that I
+    might have done so, and might have been equally helpless and
+    unprotected with this poor child, have pity upon him before it is too
+    late!"
+
+    "My dear love," said the elder lady, as she folded the weeping girl to
+    her bosom, "do you think I would harm a hair of his head?"
+
+    "Oh, no," replied Rose eagerly.
+
+    "No, surely," said the old lady; "my days are drawing to their close,
+    and may mercy be shown to me as I show it to others. What can I do to
+    save him, sir?"
+
+Dickens used the doctor to rebuke the large class of people who are ever
+ready to believe the worst about a boy, and who are always looking for his
+depravity instead of searching for the divinity in him.
+
+Rose's plea for kind treatment for the boy, "even if he has been wicked,"
+was a new doctrine propounded by Dickens. The worst boys at home or in
+school need most sympathy. Mrs. Maylie's attitude was in harmony with
+Christ's teaching, but quite out of harmony with much that was called
+Christian practice at the time Dickens wrote Oliver Twist. He taught the
+doctrine that children were turned into evil ways and confirmed in them
+through lack of sympathy. Poor Nancy said to Rose Maylie:
+
+    "Lady," cried the girl, sinking on her knees, "dear, sweet, angel
+    lady, you _are_ the first that ever blessed me with such words as
+    these; and if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me
+    from a life of sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!"
+
+In The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens gave a beautiful picture of a
+sympathetic teacher in Mr. Marton. His school was not well lighted or
+properly ventilated, the furniture was poor, there was no apparatus
+except a dunce's cap, a cane, and a ruler, his methods were old-fashioned,
+but he possessed the greatest qualification of a good teacher, deep
+sympathy with childhood. This was shown by the erasure of the blot from
+the sick boy's writing; by his asking Nell to pray for the boy; by his
+appreciation of the boy's love; by his hoping for his recovery against the
+unfavourable reports; by his favourable interpretation of the worst signs;
+by his absent-mindedness in school; by his giving the boys a half holiday
+because he could not teach; by his asking them to go away quietly so as
+not to disturb the sick scholar; by his saying "I'm glad they didn't mind
+me" when the jolly boys went shouting away; by his telling the sick boy
+that the flowers missed him and were less gay on account of his absence;
+by his hanging the boy's handkerchief out of the window at his request, as
+a token of his remembrance of the boys playing on the green; by the loving
+way in which he embraced the dying boy, and held his cold hand in his
+after he was dead, chafing it, as if he could bring back the life into it.
+
+Dombey and Son is full of appeals for the tender sympathy of adulthood for
+childhood. The story of Florence Dombey longing for the one look of
+tenderness, the one word of kindly interest, the one sympathetic caress
+from her father, which never came to her during her childhood, is one of
+the most touching stories ever written. It was written to show that
+children in the most wealthy homes need sympathy as much as any other
+children, and that they are often most cruelly neglected by their parents.
+
+Floy pleaded to be allowed to lay her face beside her baby brother's
+because "she thought he loved her."
+
+The love that is given back in exchange for loving interest is shown by
+Paul's loving gratitude to Floy for her interest in him, which led her to
+spend her pocket money in books, so that she might help him with his
+studies that confused him so.
+
+    And high was her reward, when one Saturday evening, as little Paul was
+    sitting down as usual to "resume his studies," she sat down by his
+    side and showed him all that was rough made smooth, and all that was
+    so dark made clear and plain, before him. It was nothing but a
+    startled look in Paul's wan face--a flush--a smile--and then a close
+    embrace; but God knows how her heart leaped up at this rich payment
+    for her trouble.
+
+    "Oh, Floy," cried her brother, "how I love you! How I love you, Floy!"
+
+    "And I you, dear!"
+
+    "Oh, I am sure, sure of that, Floy!"
+
+    He said no more about it, but all that evening sat close by her, very
+    quiet; and in the night he called out from his little room within
+    hers, three or four times, that he loved her.
+
+There is no higher reward than that of the sympathetic teacher who for the
+first time lets light into a dark mind or heart.
+
+The lady whom Florence overheard talking to her little orphaned niece
+about her father's cruel coldness toward her truly said: "Not an orphan in
+the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a
+living parent's care."
+
+As Dickens was one of the first to urge that children had rights, so he
+was one of the first to show that there had been altogether too much
+thought about the duty of children to parents, and too little about the
+duty of parents to children. Alice Marwood, one of the characters in
+Dombey and Son, said to Harriet Carker:
+
+    "You brought me here by force of gentleness and kindness, and made me
+    human by woman's looks and words and angel's deeds; I have felt, lying
+    here, that I should like you to know this. It might explain, I have
+    thought, something that used to help to harden me. I had heard so
+    much, in my wrongdoing, of my neglected duty, that I took up with the
+    belief that duty had not been done to me, and that as the seed was
+    sown the harvest grew."
+
+One other point in regard to sympathy was made in Dombey and Son, that a
+rough exterior may cover a sympathetic heart.
+
+    Long may it remain in this mixed world a point not easy of decision,
+    which is the more beautiful evidence of the Almighty's goodness: the
+    delicate fingers that are formed for sensitiveness and sympathy of
+    touch, and made to minister to pain and grief, or the rough, hard
+    Captain Cuttle hand, that the heart teaches, guides, and softens in a
+    moment!
+
+In the model school of Dickens Doctor Strong is said to have been "the
+idol of the whole school"; and David adds, "it must have been a badly
+composed school if he had been anything else, for he was the kindest of
+men." Doctor Strong's wife, who had been his pupil in early life, said:
+
+    "When I was very young, quite a little child, my first associations
+    with knowledge of any kind were inseparable from a patient friend and
+    teacher--the friend of my dead father--who was always dear to me. I
+    can remember nothing that I know without remembering him. He stored my
+    mind with its first treasures, and stamped his character upon them
+    all. They never could have been, I think, as good as they have been to
+    me, if I had taken them from any other hands."
+
+David said, when telling the story of his first introduction to Mr.
+Murdstone:
+
+    "God help me, I might have been improved for my whole life, I might
+    have been made another creature, perhaps, for life, by a kind word at
+    that season. A word of encouragement and explanation, of pity for my
+    childish ignorance, of welcome home, of reassurance to me that it was
+    home, might have made me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth,
+    instead of in my hypocritical outside, and might have made me respect
+    instead of hate him."
+
+In Bleak House Dickens gave in Esther the most perfect type of human
+sympathy, and by his pathetic pictures of poor Jo, Phil, the Jellyby
+children, the Pardiggle children, and others, stirred a great wave of
+feeling, which led to a recognition of the duty of adulthood to childhood,
+and taught the value of sympathy in the training of children.
+
+Esther laid down a new law, revealed by Froebel, but given to the English
+world by Dickens in the weighty sentence, "My comprehension is quickened
+when my affection is."
+
+The lack of sympathy in adulthood is revealed for the condemnation of his
+readers in Mrs. Rachael's parting from Esther.
+
+    Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was
+    not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to have known
+    her better after so many years, and ought to have made myself enough
+    of a favourite with her to make her sorry then. When she gave me one
+    cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw drop from the stone
+    porch--it was a very frosty day--I felt so miserable and
+    self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I
+    knew, that she could say good-bye so easily.
+
+    "No, Esther!" she returned. "It is your misfortune!"
+
+Poor child, she cried afterward because Mrs. Rachael was not sorry to part
+with her.
+
+What a different parting she had when leaving the Miss Donnys' school,
+where for six years she had been a pupil, and for part of the time a
+teacher!
+
+She received a letter informing her that she was to leave Greenleaf.
+
+    Oh, never, never, never shall I forget the emotion this letter caused
+    in the house! It was so tender in them to care so much for me; it was
+    so gracious in that Father who had not forgotten me, to have made my
+    orphan way so smooth and easy, and to have inclined so many youthful
+    natures toward me, that I could hardly bear it. Not that I would have
+    had them less sorry--I am afraid not; but the pleasure of it, and the
+    pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, and the humble regret of it,
+    were so blended, that my heart seemed almost breaking while it was
+    full of rapture.
+
+    The letter gave me only five days' notice of my removal. When every
+    minute added to the proofs of love and kindness that were given me in
+    those five days; and when at last the morning came, and when they took
+    me through all the rooms that I might see them for the last time; and
+    when some one cried, "Esther, dear, say good-bye to me here, at my
+    bedside, where you first spoke so kindly to me!" and when others asked
+    me only to write their names, "With Esther's love"; and when they all
+    surrounded me with their parting presents, and clung to me weeping,
+    and cried, "What shall we do when dear, dear Esther's gone!" and when
+    I tried to tell them how forbearing and how good they had all been to
+    me, and how I blessed and thanked them every one--what a heart I had!
+
+    And when the two Miss Donnys grieved as much to part with me as the
+    least among them; and when the maids said, "Bless you, miss, wherever
+    you go!" and when the ugly lame old gardener, who I thought had hardly
+    noticed me in all those years, came panting after the coach to give me
+    a little nosegay of geraniums, and told me I had been the light of his
+    eyes--indeed the old man said so!--what a heart I had then!
+
+This was intended to show the results of her sympathy toward the pupils
+and everybody connected with the school.
+
+Mrs. Jellyby is an immortal picture of the woman who neglects her family
+on account of her interest in Borrioboola Gha, or some other place for
+which her sympathy is aroused. Dickens held that a woman's first duty is
+to her children. The wretched Mr. Jellyby, almost distracted by the poor
+meals, the disorder of his home, and the wild condition of his unfortunate
+family, said to his daughter, "Never have a mission, my dear."
+
+Caddy emphasized the thought Dickens had given in Dombey and Son through
+Alice Marwood when she said to Esther:
+
+    "Oh, don't talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where's ma's duty
+    as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I suppose! Then
+    let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it's much more their
+    affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say! Very well, so am I
+    shocked, too; so we are both shocked, and there's an end of it!"
+
+On another occasion, overcome by emotion at the thought of her mother's
+neglect, she said to Esther:
+
+    "I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead. It would be a great deal
+    better for us."
+
+    In a moment afterward she kneeled on the ground at my side, hid her
+    face in my dress, passionately begged my pardon, and wept. I comforted
+    her, and would have raised her, but she cried, No, no; she wanted to
+    stay there!
+
+    "You used to teach girls," she said. "If you could only have taught
+    me, I could have learned from you! I am so very miserable, and like
+    you so much!"
+
+How the Jellyby children loved and trusted Esther! How all children loved
+and trusted her for her true sympathy!
+
+Poor Jo swept the steps at the graveyard where the friend who spoke kindly
+to him lay buried, and he always said of him, "He wos wery good to me, he
+wos."
+
+And Jo's other friends, Mr. Snagsby, whose sympathy drew half crowns from
+his pocket, and Mr. George, and Doctor Woodcourt, and Mr. Jarndyce, and
+Esther, showed their kindly sympathy for the wretched boy so fully that
+the reading world loved them as real friends, and this loving admiration
+led the Christian world to think more clearly in regard to Christ's
+teachings about the little ones.
+
+No heart can resist the plea for sympathy for such as Jo in the
+description of his last illness and death. When the end was very near, as
+Allan Woodcourt was watching the heavy breathing of the sufferer,
+
+    After a short relapse into sleep or stupor he makes of a sudden a
+    strong effort to get out of bed.
+
+    "Stay, Jo! What now?"
+
+    "It's time for me to go to that there berryin'-ground, sir," he
+    returns with a wild look.
+
+    "Lie down, and tell me. What burying-ground, Jo?"
+
+    "Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed,
+    he wos. It's time fur me to go down to that there berryin'-ground,
+    sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be
+    berried. He used fur to say to me, 'I am as poor as you to-day, Jo,'
+    he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now, and have
+    come there to be laid along with him."
+
+    "By and bye, Jo. By and bye."
+
+    "Ah! P'raps they wouldn't do it if I was to go myself. But will you
+    promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?"
+
+    "I will, indeed."
+
+    "Thank'ee, sir. Thank'ee, sir. They'll have to get the key of the gate
+    afore they can take me in, for it's allus locked. And there's a step
+    there, as I used for to clean with my broom.--It's turned wery dark,
+    sir. Is there any light a-comin'?"
+
+    "It is coming fast, Jo."
+
+    Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very
+    near its end.
+
+    "Jo, my poor fellow!"
+
+    "I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a-gropin'--a-gropin'--let me
+    catch hold of your hand."
+
+    "Jo, can you say what I say?"
+
+    "I'll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it's good."
+
+    "OUR FATHER."
+
+    "Our Father!--yes, that's wery good, sir."
+
+    "WHICH ART IN HEAVEN."
+
+    "Art in Heaven--is the light a-comin', sir?"
+
+    "It is close at hand. HALLOWED BE THY NAME!"
+
+    "Hallowed be--thy----"
+
+    The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!
+
+    Dead, your majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right
+    reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women,
+    born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us
+    every day.
+
+One of the best of Dickens's illustrations of gratitude for sympathy is
+the case of Phil Squod, Mr. George's assistant in the shooting gallery. He
+was a mere child in everything but years of hard experiences, but he was
+devoted heart and soul to Mr. George for a kindly word of hearty sympathy.
+So devoted was he that he attached himself to Mr. George and became his
+faithful servant, and found his truest happiness in his service of love.
+
+Phil recalled the story to Mr. George.
+
+    "It was after the case-filling blow-up when I first see you,
+    commander. You remember?"
+
+    "I remember, Phil. You were walking along in the sun."
+
+    "Crawling, guv'ner, again a wall----"
+
+    "True, Phil--shouldering your way on----"
+
+    "In a nightcap!" exclaims Phil, excited.
+
+    "In a nightcap----"
+
+    "And hobbling with a couple of sticks!" cries Phil, still more
+    excited.
+
+    "With a couple of sticks. When----"
+
+    "When you stops, you know," cries Phil, putting down his cup and
+    saucer, and hastily removing his plate from his knees, "and says to
+    me, 'What, comrade! You have been in the wars!' I didn't say much to
+    you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise that a person so
+    strong and healthy and bold as you was should stop to speak to such a
+    limping bag of bones as I was. But you says to me, says you,
+    delivering it out of your chest as hearty as possible, so that it was
+    like a glass of something hot: 'What accident have you met with? You
+    have been badly hurt. What's amiss, old boy? Cheer up, and tell us
+    about it!' Cheer up! I was cheered already! I says as much to you, you
+    says more to me, I says more to you, you says more to me, and here I
+    am, commander! Here I am, commander!" cries Phil, who has started from
+    his chair and unaccountably begun to sidle away. "If a mark's wanted,
+    or if it will improve the business, let the customers take aim at me.
+    They can't spoil _my_ beauty. _I'm_ all right. Come on! If they want a
+    man to box at, let 'em box at me. Let 'em knock me well about the
+    head. _I_ don't mind! if they want a light weight, to be throwed for
+    practice, Cornwall, Devonshire, or Lancashire, let 'em throw me. They
+    won't hurt _me_. I have been throwed all sorts of styles all my life!"
+
+Pip said in Great Expectations:
+
+    It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable,
+    honest-hearted, duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is
+    very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by, and I
+    know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my
+    apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restless
+    aspiring discontented me.
+
+Dear, simple-hearted Joe Gargery! When every one else was abusing Pip at
+the great dinner party, he showed his sympathy for him by putting some
+more gravy on his plate.
+
+In Our Mutual Friend Lizzie Hexam, sympathizing with her father so much
+that she would not learn to read because he was bitterly prejudiced
+against education, but sympathizing so much with her brother Charley that
+she had him educated secretly so that he might become a teacher, is an
+illustration of nearly perfect sympathy.
+
+The happiness of the little "minders" at old Betty Higden's is in sharp
+contrast to the misery of the boarders of the respectable (?)
+establishment of Mrs. Pipchin. In the one case was abject poverty and
+loving sympathy, in the other plenty and cruel selfishness. When Mr. and
+Mrs. Boffin were adopting Johnnie from Betty Higden's care, the brave old
+woman said:
+
+    "If I could have kept the dear child without the dread that's always
+    upon me of his coming to that fate I have spoken of, I could never
+    have parted with him, even to you. For I love him, I love him, I love
+    him! I love my husband long dead and gone, in him; I love my children
+    dead and gone, in him; I love my young and hopeful days dead and gone,
+    in him. I couldn't sell that love, and look you in your bright kind
+    face. It's a free gift."
+
+    Betty was not a logically reasoning woman, but God is good, and hearts
+    may count in heaven as high as heads.
+
+Dickens spoke with great enthusiasm in his American Notes of the practical
+sympathy of Doctor Howe with all afflicted children, especially with blind
+children, closing his sketch of the wonderful work he had done with the
+sentence: "There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who after
+reading these passages can ever hear that name with indifference." He
+noted that Laura Bridgman had a special desire for sympathy.
+
+    She is fond of having other children noticed and caressed by the
+    teachers, and those whom she respects; but this must not be carried
+    too far, or she becomes jealous. She wants to have her share, which,
+    if not the lion's, is the greater part; and if she does not get it,
+    she says, "_My mother will love me_."
+
+Dickens's types of sympathy with children grew more perfect as he grew
+older. In his later years his head began to catch up with his heart.
+Major Jackman, Mrs. Lirriper, and Doctor Marigold are among his most
+wonderfully sympathetic characters.
+
+What an ideal sending away to school Jemmy Lirriper had!
+
+    So the Major being gone out and Jemmy being at home, I got the child
+    into my little room here and I stood him by my chair and I took his
+    mother's own curls in my hand and I spoke to him loving and serious.
+    And when I had reminded the darling how that he was now in his tenth
+    year, and when I had said to him about his getting on in life pretty
+    much what I had said to the Major, I broke to him how that we must
+    have this same parting, and there I was forced to stop, for there I
+    saw of a sudden the well-remembered lip with its tremble, and it so
+    brought back that time! But with the spirit that was in him he
+    controlled it soon, and he says gravely, nodding through his tears: "I
+    understand, Gran--I knew it _must_ be, Gran--go on, Gran, don't be
+    afraid of _me_." And when I had said all that ever I could think of,
+    he turned his bright steady face to mine, and he says just a little
+    broken here and there: "You shall see, Gran, that I can be a man, and
+    that I can do anything that is grateful and loving to you; and if I
+    don't grow up to be what you would like to have me--I hope it will
+    be--because I shall die." And with that he sat down by me, and I went
+    on to tell him of the school, of which I had excellent
+    recommendations, and where it was and how many scholars, and what
+    games they played as I had heard, and what length of holidays, to all
+    of which he listened bright and clear. And so it came that at last he
+    says: "And now, dear Gran, let me kneel down here where I have been
+    used to say my prayers, and let me fold my face for just a minute in
+    your gown and let me cry, for you have been more than father--more
+    than mother--more than brothers, sisters, friends--to me!" And so he
+    did cry, and I too, and we were both much the better for it.
+
+Dear old Doctor Marigold, the travelling auctioneer, in his tender
+sympathy for his little girl when her mother was so cruel to her,
+whispering comforting words in her ear as he was calling for bids on his
+wares while she was dying, and afterward loving the deaf-mute child whom
+he adopted in memory of his own child whom he had lost, has made thousands
+more kindly sympathetic with children.
+
+In the novel that he was writing when he died Dickens makes Canon
+Crisparkle say to Helena Landless: "You have the wisdom of Love, and it
+was the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, remember."
+
+David Copperfield said, "I hope that real love and truth are stronger in
+the end than any evil or misfortune in the world."
+
+The effect of lack of true sympathy on the heart that should have felt and
+shown it is revealed in what Sydney Carton said to Mr. Lorry: "If you
+could say with truth to your own solitary heart to-night, 'I have secured
+to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude and respect, of no human
+creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done
+nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by,' your seventy-eight years
+would be seventy-eight curses; would they not?"
+
+The contrast between the coldness and heartlessness of his parents or
+guardians and the encouraging sympathy of his teacher is one of the
+strongest features in the story of Barbox Brothers (Mugby Junction).
+
+    "You remember me, Young Jackson?"
+
+    "What do I remember if not you? You are my first remembrance. It was
+    you who told me that was my name. It was you who told me that on every
+    20th of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called a
+    birthday. I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!"
+
+    "What am I like, Young Jackson?"
+
+    "You are like a blight all through the year to me. You hard-lined,
+    thin-lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on! You are
+    like the Devil to me--most of all when you teach me religious things,
+    for you make me abhor them."
+
+    "You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In another voice from another
+    quarter:
+
+    "Most gratefully, sir. You are the ray of hope and prospering ambition
+    in my life. When I attended your course I believed that I should come
+    to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy--even though I was
+    still the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate
+    and drank in silence and constraint with the mask before me every day.
+    As I had done every, every, every day through my school time and from
+    my earliest recollection."
+
+    "What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
+
+    "You are like a Superior Being to me. You are like Nature beginning to
+    reveal herself to me. I hear you again as one of the hushed crowd of
+    young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and
+    you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in
+    them."
+
+    "You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In a grating voice from quite
+    another quarter:
+
+    "Too well. You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and
+    announced that its course was to be suddenly and wholly changed. You
+    showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox
+    Brothers. You told me what I was to do, and what to be paid; you told
+    me afterward, at intervals of years, when I was to sign for the Firm,
+    when I became a partner, when I became the Firm. I know no more of it,
+    or of myself."
+
+    "What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
+
+    "You are like my father, I sometimes think. You are hard enough and
+    cold enough so to have brought up an acknowledged son. I see your
+    scanty figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brown wig; but
+    you, too, wear a wax mask to your death. You never by a chance remove
+    it; it never by a chance falls off; and I know no more of you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CHILD STUDY AND CHILD NATURE.
+
+
+Dickens was a profound student of children, and he revealed his
+consciousness of the need of a general study of childhood in all he wrote
+about the importance of a free childhood, individuality, the imagination,
+coercion, cramming, and wrong methods of training children.
+
+He criticised the blindness of those who saw boys as a class or in a
+limited number of classes, distinguished by external and comparatively
+unimportant characteristics, in Mr. Grimwig, "who never saw any difference
+in boys, and only knew two sorts of boys, mealy boys and beef-faced boys."
+
+He exposed the ignorance--the wilful ignorance--of vast numbers of parents
+and teachers who indignantly resent the suggestion that they need to study
+children, in Jane Murdstone. When Jane was interfering in the management
+of David, and with her brother totally misunderstanding him and
+misrepresenting him, his timid mother ventured to say:
+
+    "I beg your pardon, my dear Jane, but are you quite sure--I am certain
+    you'll excuse me, my dear Jane--that you quite understand Davy?"
+
+    "I should be somewhat ashamed of myself, Clara," returned Miss
+    Murdstone, "if I could not understand the boy, or any boy. I don't
+    profess to be profound, but I do lay claim to common sense."
+
+Many Jane Murdstones still claim that it is not necessary to study so
+common a thing as a boy. Yet a child is the most wonderful thing in the
+world, and, whether the Jane Murdstones in the schools and homes like it
+or not, the wise people _are_ studying the child with a view to finding
+out what he should be guided to do in the accomplishment of his own
+training.
+
+Richard Carstone had been eight years at school, and he was a miserable
+failure in life, although a man of good ability.
+
+"It had never been anybody's business to find out what his natural bent
+was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him."
+Esther wisely said: "I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited
+by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying Latin verses so
+much."
+
+Dickens studied every subject about which he wrote with great care and
+discrimination. As an instance of this careful study it may be stated that
+medical authorities say that the description of Smike's sickness and death
+is the best description of consumption ever written. Dickens had a
+wonderful imagination, but he never relied on his imagination for his
+facts or his philosophy. It is therefore reasonable to believe that as he
+wrote more about children than any other man or woman, he was the greatest
+and most reverent student of childhood that England has produced.
+
+In addition to the revelations of his conclusions given in the evolution
+of his child characters, and in the many illustrations of good and of bad
+training, he continually makes direct statements in regard to child nature
+and how to deal with it in its varied manifestations.
+
+His central motive was expressed by the old gentleman who found Little
+Nell astray in London: "I love these little people; and it is not a slight
+thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us."
+
+His ideal of unperverted child nature was entirely different from that
+which had been taught by theology and psychology. He believed the child to
+be pure and good, and that even when heredity was bad, its baneful
+influences need not blight the divinity in his life, if he was wisely
+trained and had a free life of self-activity, a suitable environment, and
+truly sympathetic friends.
+
+    "It would be a curious speculation," said I, after some restless turns
+    across and across the room, "to imagine her in her future life,
+    holding her solitary way among a crowd of wild, grotesque companions,
+    the only pure, fresh, youthful object in the throng."
+
+To keep children pure and fresh was the chief aim of his life work. He had
+no respect for those who treated children as if they were grown-up,
+reasonable beings; who judged children as they would judge adults, and
+therefore misjudged them. He always remembered that a child was a little
+stranger in a new world, and that his complex nature had to adjust itself
+to its environment. He had a perfect, reverent, considerate sympathy for
+the timid young soul venturing to look out upon its new conditions. One of
+the most pathetic things in the world to him was the fact that children
+are nearly universally misunderstood and misinterpreted. How he longed to
+tear down the barriers of formalism, and conventionality, and
+indifference, and misconception from the lives of parents and teachers, so
+that timid children might be true to their better natures in their
+presence.
+
+    When little Florence timidly presented herself, Mr. Dombey stopped in
+    his pacing up and down and looked toward her. Had he looked with
+    greater interest and with a father's eye, he might have read in her
+    keen glance the impulses and fears that made her waver; the passionate
+    desire to run clinging to him, crying, as she hid her face in his
+    embrace, "Oh, father, try to love me! there's no one else!" the dread
+    of a repulse; the fear of being too bold, and of offending him; the
+    pitiable need in which she stood of some assurance and encouragement;
+    and how her overcharged young heart was wandering to find some natural
+    resting place for its sorrow and affection.
+
+    But he saw nothing of this. He saw her pause irresolutely at the door
+    and look toward him; and he saw no more.
+
+    "Come in," he said, "come in; what is the child afraid of?"
+
+    She came in, and after glancing round her for a moment with an
+    uncertain air, stood pressing her small hands hard together, close
+    within the door.
+
+    "Come here, Florence," said her father coldly. "Do you know who I am?"
+
+    "Yes, papa."
+
+    "Have you nothing to say to me?"
+
+    The tears that stood in her eyes as she raised them quickly to his
+    face were frozen by the expression it wore. She looked down again and
+    put out her trembling hand.
+
+    Mr. Dombey took it loosely in his own, and stood looking down upon her
+    for a moment, as if he knew as little as the child what to say or do.
+
+    "There! Be a good girl," he said, patting her on the head, and
+    regarding her, as it were, by stealth with a disturbed and doubtful
+    look. "Go to Richards. Go!"
+
+    His little daughter hesitated for another instant as though she would
+    have clung about him still, or had some lingering hope that he might
+    raise her in his arms and kiss her. She looked up in his face once
+    more. He thought how like her expression was then to what it had been
+    when she looked round at the doctor--that night--and instinctively
+    dropped her hand and turned away.
+
+    It was not difficult to perceive that Florence was at a great
+    disadvantage in her father's presence. It was not only a constraint
+    upon the child's mind, but even upon the natural grace and freedom of
+    her actions.
+
+    The child, in her grief and neglect, was so gentle, so quiet and
+    uncomplaining, was possessed of so much affection that no one seemed
+    to care to have, and so much sorrowful intelligence that no one seemed
+    to mind or think about the wounding of, that Polly's heart was sore
+    when she was left alone again.
+
+The same lesson was given to parents and teachers in Murdstone's treatment
+of Davy. The sensitive, shy boy was regarded as sullen, and treated "like
+a dog" in consequence. Oh, what bitterness it puts into a child's life to
+be misunderstood by its dearest friends! If there were no other reason for
+the co-operative study of children by parents and teachers, it would be a
+sufficient reason that they might be understood and appreciated. Many
+lives are made barren and wicked by the failure of parents and teachers to
+understand them.
+
+It is so easy for children to get the impression that they are not liked
+by adults. When Walter started life in Mr. Dombey's great warehouse, his
+uncle, old Solomon Gills, with whom he lived, asked him on his return
+from work the first day:
+
+    "Has Mr. Dombey been there to-day?"
+
+    "Oh, yes! In and out all day."
+
+    "He didn't take any notice of you, I suppose?"
+
+    "Yes, he did. He walked up to my seat--I wish he wasn't so solemn and
+    stiff, uncle--and said, 'Oh! you are the son of Mr. Gills, the ships'
+    instrument maker.' 'Nephew, sir,' I said. 'I said nephew, boy,' said
+    he. But I could take my oath he said son, uncle."
+
+    "You're mistaken, I dare say. It's no matter."
+
+    "No, it's no matter, but he needn't have been so sharp, I thought.
+    There was no harm in it, though he did say son. Then he told me that
+    you had spoken to him about me, and that he had found me employment in
+    the house accordingly, and that I was expected to be attentive and
+    punctual, and then he went away. I thought he didn't seem to like me
+    much."
+
+    "You mean, I suppose," observed the instrument maker, "that you didn't
+    seem to like him much."
+
+    "Well, uncle," returned the boy, laughing, "perhaps so; I never
+    thought of that."
+
+This short selection reveals the disrespect for childhood which leads
+adulthood to flatly contradict what a child says, whether he is making a
+statement of fact or of opinion. This is most inconsiderate, and naturally
+leads to a corresponding disrespect for adulthood on the part of the
+child. The selection clearly intimates that childhood would be more happy,
+and like adulthood better, if adulthood was not so "solemn and stiff."
+Parents and teachers should learn from Solomon's philosophy that a child's
+feelings toward an adult partly determine his impressions regarding the
+attitude of adulthood toward him.
+
+The first thing necessary in training a child to be his real, best self is
+to win his affectionate regard and confidence. One has to be very true,
+very unconventional, and very joyous, to do this fully.
+
+Dickens pitied the child because, even when he is understood, his wishes,
+plans, and decisions are not treated with respect. This is a gross
+injustice to the child's nature. As Pip so truly said: "It may be only
+small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small,
+and its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as many hands high,
+according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter."
+
+Adulthood needs to learn no lesson more than that childhood lives a life
+of its own, that that life should not be tested by the scales and tape
+lines of adulthood, and that within its range of action its choice should
+be respected, and its opinions treated with reverent consideration.
+
+Mrs. Lirriper said that when she used to read the Bible to Mrs. Edson,
+when that lady was dying, "though she took to all I read to her, I used to
+fancy that next to what was taught upon the Mount she took most of all to
+his gentle compassion for us poor women, and to his young life, and to how
+his mother was proud of him, and treasured his sayings in her heart."
+
+The divinity in any child will grow more rapidly if his mother "treasures
+his sayings in her heart." We need more reverence for the child.
+
+Dickens tried to make parents regard the child as a sacred thing, which
+should always be the richest joy of his parents.
+
+Speaking of Mrs. Darnay, in The Tale of Two Cities, he says:
+
+    The time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among
+    the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the
+    sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they
+    would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those
+    coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh,
+    and the divine Friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had
+    confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as he took the
+    child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.
+
+Dickens had profound faith in children whose true development had not been
+arrested.
+
+    Doctor Strong had a simple faith in him that might have touched the
+    stone hearts of the very urns upon the wall.... He appealed in
+    everything to the honour and good faith of the boys, and relied on
+    their possession of those qualities unless they proved themselves
+    unworthy.
+
+Reliance begets reliance. Faith increases the qualities that merit faith.
+
+David said the doctor's reliance on the boys "worked wonders." No wonder
+it worked wonders. We can help a boy to grow no higher than our faith in
+him can reach.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+BAD TRAINING.
+
+
+In addition to the bad training found in so many of his best-known
+schools, to show the evils of coercion in all forms, of the child
+depravity ideal, of the loss of a free, real, rich childhood, of the
+dwarfing of individuality, of the deadening of the imagination, and other
+similar evils, Dickens's books, from Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood, contain
+many illustrations of utterly wrong methods of training children.
+
+The mean and cruel way in which children used to be treated by the
+managers of institutions is described in Oliver Twist. Dickens said that
+when Oliver was born he cried lustily.
+
+    If he could have known that he was an orphan, left to the tender
+    mercies of church wardens and overseers, perhaps he would have cried
+    the louder.
+
+    "Bow to the board," said Bumble, when he was brought before that
+    august body. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were
+    lingering in his eyes, and seeing no board but the table, fortunately
+    bowed to that.
+
+    "What's your name, boy?" said the gentleman in the high chair.
+
+    Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made
+    him tremble; and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made
+    him cry. These two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating
+    voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool.
+    Which was a capital way of raising his spirits and putting him quite
+    at his ease.
+
+    "Boy," said the gentleman in the high chair, "listen to me. You know
+    you're an orphan, I suppose?"
+
+    "What's that, sir?" inquired poor Oliver.
+
+    "The boy is a fool--I thought he was," said the gentleman in the white
+    waistcoat.
+
+    "Hush!" said the gentleman who had spoken first. "You know you've got
+    no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don't
+    you?"
+
+    "Yes, sir," replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.
+
+    "What are you crying for?" inquired the gentleman in the white
+    waistcoat. And, to be sure, it was very extraordinary. What _could_
+    the boy be crying for?
+
+    "I hope you say your prayers every night," said another gentleman in a
+    gruff voice, "and pray for the people who feed and take care of
+    you--like a Christian."
+
+    "Yes, sir," stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was
+    unconsciously right. It would have been _very_ like a Christian, and a
+    marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people
+    who fed and took care of _him_.
+
+The dreadful practices of first making children self-conscious and
+apparently dull by abuse and formalism, and then calling them "fools," or
+"stupid," or "dunces," are happily not so common now.
+
+In Barnaby Rudge he makes Edward Chester complain to his father about the
+way he had been educated.
+
+    From my childhood I have been accustomed to luxury and idleness, and
+    have been bred as though my fortune were large and my expectations
+    almost without a limit. The idea of wealth has been familiarized to me
+    from my cradle. I have been taught to look upon those means by which
+    men raise themselves to riches and distinction as being beyond my
+    breeding and beneath my care. I have been, as the phrase is, liberally
+    educated, and am fit for nothing.
+
+Dickens was in terrible earnest to kill all the giants that preyed on the
+lifeblood of the joy, the hope, the freedom, the selfhood, and the
+imagination of childhood. He waged unceasing warfare against the system
+which he described as
+
+    The excellent and thoughtful old system, hallowed by long
+    prescription, which has usually picked out from the rest of mankind
+    the most dreary and uncomfortable people that could possibly be laid
+    hold of, to act as instructors of youth.
+
+The selfish and mercenary ideal and its consequences are dealt with in the
+training of Jonas Chuzzlewit:
+
+    The education of Mr. Jonas had been conducted from his cradle on the
+    strictest principles of the main chance. The very first word he
+    learned to spell was "gain," and the second one (when he got into two
+    syllables) "money." But for two results, which were not clearly
+    foreseen perhaps by his watchful parent in the beginning, his training
+    may be said to have been unexceptionable. One of these flaws was, that
+    having been long taught by his father to overreach everybody, he had
+    imperceptibly acquired a love of overreaching that venerable monitor
+    himself. The other, that from his early habits of considering
+    everything as a question of property, he had gradually come to look
+    with impatience on his parent as a certain amount of personal estate
+    which had no right whatever to be going at large, but ought to be
+    secured in that particular description of iron safe which is commonly
+    called a coffin, and banked in the grave.
+
+When Charity Pecksniff reproved Jonas for speaking irreverently of her
+father, he said:
+
+    "Ecod, you may say what you like of _my_ father, then, and so I give
+    you leave," said Jonas. "I think it's liquid aggravation that
+    circulates through his veins, and not regular blood. How old should
+    you think my father was, cousin?"
+
+    "Old, no doubt," replied Miss Charity; "but a fine old gentleman."
+
+    "A fine old gentleman!" repeated Jonas, giving the crown of his hat an
+    angry knock. "Ah! It's time he was thinking of being drawn out a
+    little finer, too. Why, he's eighty!"
+
+    "Is he, indeed?" said the young lady.
+
+    "And ecod," cried Jonas, "now he's gone so far without giving in, I
+    don't see much to prevent his being ninety; no, nor even a hundred.
+    Why, a man with any feeling ought to be ashamed of being eighty, let
+    alone more. Where's his religion, I should like to know, when he goes
+    flying in the face of the Bible like that? Threescore and ten's the
+    mark; and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what's
+    expected of him, has any business to live longer."
+
+When Jonas was particularly brutal in the treatment of Chuffey, the old
+clerk, his father seemed to enjoy his son's sharpness.
+
+    It was strange enough that Anthony Chuzzlewit, himself so old a man,
+    should take a pleasure in these gibings of his estimable son at the
+    expense of the poor shadow at their table; but he did, unquestionably,
+    though not so much--to do him justice--with reference to their ancient
+    clerk, as in exultation at the sharpness of Jonas. For the same
+    reason, that young man's coarse allusions, even to himself, filled him
+    with a stealthy glee, causing him to rub his hands and chuckle
+    covertly, as if he said in his sleeve, "_I_ taught him. _I_ trained
+    him. This is the heir of my bringing up. Sly, cunning, and covetous,
+    he'll not squander my money. I worked for this; I hoped for this; it
+    has been the great end and aim of my life."
+
+    What a noble end and aim it was to contemplate in the attainment,
+    truly! But there be some who manufacture idols after the fashion of
+    themselves, and fail to worship them when they are made; charging
+    their deformity on outraged Nature. Anthony was better than these at
+    any rate.
+
+Exaggerated! Slightly exaggerated, but terribly true to Nature. Centring
+the life of a child on one base materialistic aim is certain to make a
+degraded if not a dangerous character. Every noble energy that should have
+given spiritual strength and beauty is devoured by the material monster as
+he grows in the heart. Respect for age, even for parents, is lost with all
+other virtues, and humanity becomes not a brotherhood to be co-operated
+with for noble purposes, but a horde to be entrapped and cheated. Jonas
+delighted his father with his rule in business: "Here's the rule for
+bargains--'Do other men, for they would do you.' That's the true business
+precept. All others are counterfeits."
+
+Speaking of the conversation heard by Martin Chuzzlewit at the boarding
+house in New York, he said:
+
+    It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater
+    part of it may be summed up in one word: Dollars. All their cares,
+    hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations seemed to be melted
+    down into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into
+    the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab
+    with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by
+    their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked
+    down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any
+    venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that
+    worthless ballast, honour and fair dealing, which any man cast
+    overboard from the ship of his good name and good intent, the more
+    ample stowage room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and
+    mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute
+    it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a
+    degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars! What is a flag to _them_!
+
+This was a solemn warning against the training of a race with such low
+ideals.
+
+In the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens shows that he deliberately
+planned Jonas Chuzzlewit as a psychological study. He says:
+
+    I conceive that the sordid coarseness and brutality of Jonas would be
+    unnatural, if there had been nothing in his early education, and in
+    the precept and example always before him, to engender and develop the
+    vices that make him odious. But, so born and so bred--admired for that
+    which made him hateful, and justified from his cradle in cunning,
+    treachery, and avarice--I claim him as the legitimate issue of the
+    father upon whom those vices are seen to recoil. And I submit that
+    their recoil upon that old man, in his unhonoured age, is not a mere
+    piece of poetical justice, but is the extreme exposition of a direct
+    truth.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin was described as a child trainer of great respectability. She
+adopted the business of child training because her husband lost his money.
+Dickens did great service to the world by ridiculing the outrageous
+practice of sending children to be trained by women or taught by men whose
+only qualification for the most sacred of all duties was the fact that
+they had lost their money, and were therefore likely to be bad tempered
+and severe. He had already introduced Squeers to the world, but he knew
+that many people who shuddered at Squeers would send their own children to
+such as Mrs. Pipchin, because she was respectable and poor. He wished to
+alarm such people; hence Mrs. Pipchin.
+
+Mrs. Chick, Mr. Dombey's sister, and Miss Tox called Mr. Dombey's
+attention to Mrs. Pipchin's establishment.
+
+    "Mrs. Pipchin, my dear Paul," returned his sister, "is an elderly
+    lady--Miss Tox knows her whole history--who has for some time devoted
+    all the energies of her mind, with the greatest success, to the study
+    and treatment of infancy, and who has been extremely well connected."
+
+    This celebrated Mrs. Pipchin was a marvellous, ill-favoured,
+    ill-conditioned old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face
+    like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard gray eye that looked as if it
+    might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any injury.
+    Forty years at least had elapsed since the Peruvian mines had been the
+    death of Mr. Pipchin; but his relict still wore black bombazine, of
+    such a lustreless, deep, dead, sombre shade that gas itself couldn't
+    light her up after dark, and her presence was a quencher to any number
+    of candles. She was generally spoken of as "a great manager" of
+    children; and the secret of her management was, to give them
+    everything that they didn't like and nothing that they did--which was
+    found to sweeten their dispositions very much.
+
+When Paul and Florence were taken to Mrs. Pipchin's establishment, Mrs.
+Pipchin gave them an opportunity to study her disciplinary system as soon
+as Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox went away. "Master Bitherstone was divested of
+his collar at once, which he had worn on parade," and Miss Pankey, the
+only other little boarder at present, was walked off to the castle dungeon
+(an empty apartment at the back, devoted to correctional purposes), for
+having sniffed thrice in the presence of visitors.
+
+    At one o'clock there was a dinner, chiefly of the farinaceous and
+    vegetable kind, when Miss Pankey (a mild little blue-eyed morsel of a
+    child, who was shampooed every morning, and seemed in danger of being
+    rubbed away altogether) was led in from captivity by the ogress
+    herself, and instructed that nobody who sniffed before visitors ever
+    went to heaven. When this great truth had been thoroughly impressed
+    upon her, she was regaled with rice; and subsequently repeated the
+    form of grace established in the castle, in which there was a special
+    clause thanking Mrs. Pipchin for a good dinner. Mrs. Pipchin's niece,
+    Berinthia, took cold pork. Mrs. Pipchin, whose constitution required
+    warm nourishment, made a special repast of mutton chops, which were
+    brought in hot and hot, between two plates, and smelled very nice.
+
+    As it rained after dinner and they couldn't go out walking on the
+    beach, and Mrs. Pipchin's constitution required rest after chops, they
+    went away with Berry (otherwise Berinthia) to the dungeon--an empty
+    room looking out upon a chalk wall and a water butt, and made ghastly
+    by a ragged fireplace without any stove in it. Enlivened by company,
+    however, this was the best place after all; for Berry played with them
+    there, and seemed to enjoy a game at romps as much as they did; until
+    Mrs. Pipchin knocking angrily at the wall, like the Cock Lane Ghost
+    revived, they left off, and Berry told them stories in a whisper until
+    twilight.
+
+    For tea there was plenty of milk and water, and bread and butter, with
+    a little black teapot for Mrs. Pipchin and Berry, and buttered toast
+    unlimited for Mrs. Pipchin, which was brought in, hot and hot, like
+    the chops. Though Mrs. Pipchin got very greasy outside over this dish,
+    it didn't seem to lubricate her internally at all; for she was as
+    fierce as ever, and the hard gray eye knew no softening.
+
+    After tea, Berry brought out a little workbox, with the Royal Pavilion
+    on the lid, and fell to working busily; while Mrs. Pipchin, having put
+    on her spectacles and opened a great volume bound in green baize,
+    began to nod. And whenever Mrs. Pipchin caught herself falling forward
+    into the fire, and woke up, she filliped Master Bitherstone on the
+    nose for nodding too.
+
+    At last it was the children's bedtime, and after prayers they went to
+    bed. As little Miss Pankey was afraid of sleeping alone in the dark,
+    Mrs. Pipchin always made a point of driving her upstairs herself, like
+    a sheep; and it was cheerful to hear Miss Pankey moaning long
+    afterward, in the least eligible chamber, and Mrs. Pipchin now and
+    then going in to shake her. At about half-past nine o'clock the odour
+    of a warm sweetbread (Mrs. Pipchin's constitution wouldn't go to sleep
+    without sweetbread) diversified the prevailing fragrance of the house,
+    which Mrs. Wickam said was "a smell of building," and slumber fell
+    upon the castle shortly after.
+
+    The breakfast next morning was like the tea overnight, except that
+    Mrs. Pipchin took her roll instead of toast, and seemed a little more
+    irate when it was over. Master Bitherstone read aloud to the rest a
+    pedigree from Genesis (judiciously selected by Mrs. Pipchin), getting
+    over the names with the ease and clearness of a person tumbling up the
+    treadmill. That done, Miss Pankey was borne away to be shampooed, and
+    Master Bitherstone to have something else done to him with salt water,
+    from which he always returned very blue and dejected. Paul and
+    Florence went out in the meantime on the beach with Wickam--who was
+    constantly in tears--and at about noon Mrs. Pipchin presided over some
+    Early Readings. It being a part of Mrs. Pipchin's system not to
+    encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young
+    flower, but to open it by force like an oyster, the moral of these
+    lessons was usually of a violent and stunning character; the hero--a
+    naughty boy--seldom, in the mildest catastrophe, being finished off by
+    anything less than a lion or a bear.
+
+    Sunday evening was the most melancholy evening in the week; for Mrs.
+    Pipchin always made a point of being particularly cross on Sunday
+    nights. Miss Pankey was generally brought back from an aunt's at
+    Rottingdean, in deep distress; and Master Bitherstone, whose relatives
+    were all in India, and who was required to sit, between the services,
+    in an erect position with his head against the parlour wall, neither
+    moving hand nor foot, suffered so acutely in his young spirits that he
+    once asked Florence, on a Sunday night, if she could give him any idea
+    of the way back to Bengal.
+
+    But it was generally said that Mrs. Pipchin was a woman of system with
+    children; and no doubt she was. Certainly the wild ones went home tame
+    enough, after sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof.
+
+    At this exemplary old lady Paul would sit staring in his little
+    armchair by the fire for any length of time. He never seemed to know
+    what weariness was when he was looking fixedly at Mrs. Pipchin. He
+    was not fond of her; he was not afraid of her; but in those old, old
+    moods of his, she seemed to have a grotesque attraction for him. There
+    he would sit, looking at her, and warming his hands, and looking at
+    her, until he sometimes quite confounded Mrs. Pipchin, ogress as she
+    was. Once she asked him, when they were alone, what he was thinking
+    about.
+
+    "You," said Paul, without the least reserve.
+
+    "And what are you thinking about me?" asked Mrs. Pipchin.
+
+    "I'm thinking how old you must be," said Paul.
+
+    "You mustn't say such things as that, young gentleman," returned the
+    dame. "That'll never do."
+
+    "Why not?" asked Paul.
+
+    "Because it's not polite," said Mrs. Pipchin snappishly.
+
+    "Not polite?" said Paul.
+
+    "No."
+
+    "It's not polite," said Paul innocently, "to eat all the mutton chops
+    and toast, Wickam says."
+
+    "Wickam," retorted Mrs. Pipchin, colouring, "is a wicked, impudent,
+    bold-faced hussy."
+
+    "What's that?" inquired Paul.
+
+    "Never you mind, sir," retorted Mrs. Pipchin. "Remember the story of
+    the little boy that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking
+    questions."
+
+    "If the bull was mad," said Paul, "how did he know that the boy had
+    asked questions? Nobody can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I
+    don't believe that story."
+
+    "You don't believe it, sir?" repeated Mrs. Pipchin, amazed.
+
+    "No," said Paul.
+
+    "Not if it should happen to have been a tame bull, you little
+    infidel?" said Mrs. Pipchin.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "Berry's very fond of you, ain't she?" Paul once asked Mrs. Pipchin
+    when they were sitting by the fire with the cat.
+
+    "Yes," said Mrs. Pipchin.
+
+    "Why?" asked Paul.
+
+    "Why?" returned the disconcerted old lady. "How can you ask such
+    things, sir? Why are you fond of your sister Florence?"
+
+    "Because she's very good," said Paul. "There's nobody like Florence."
+
+
+
+    "Well!" retorted Mrs. Pipchin shortly, "and there's nobody like me, I
+    suppose."
+
+    "Ain't there really, though?" asked Paul, leaning forward in his
+    chair, and looking at her very hard.
+
+    "No," said the old lady.
+
+    "I am glad of that," observed Paul, rubbing his hands thoughtfully.
+    "That's a very good thing."
+
+To which every one would say "Amen," if they could believe Mrs. Pipchin's
+statement to be actually true.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin combined in her "system" many of the evils of child training.
+
+She was not good-looking, and those who train children should be decidedly
+good-looking. They need not be handsome; they ought to be winsome. Her
+"mottled face like bad marble, and hard grey eye" meant danger to
+childhood.
+
+She was gloomy in appearance, in manner, and in dress, all
+disqualifications for any position connected with child development.
+
+She was "a bitter old lady," and children should be surrounded with an
+atmosphere of sweetness and joyousness.
+
+Her one diabolical rule was "to give children everything they didn't like
+and nothing they did like." This rule is the logical limit of the doctrine
+of child depravity.
+
+She was generally spoken of as a "great manager," simply because she
+compelled children to do her bidding by fear of punishment in the
+"dungeon," or of being sent to bed, or robbed of their meals, or by some
+other mean form of contemptible coercion. These processes were praised as
+excellent till Dickens destroyed their respectability. His title
+"child-queller" is admirable, and full of philosophy. Many a man has been
+able to form a truer conception regarding child freedom through the
+influence of the word "child-queller." Every teacher should ask himself
+every day, "Am I a child-queller?" It will be a blessed thing for the
+children when there shall be no more Pipchinny teachers.
+
+The environment of the ogress was not attractive. The gardens grew only
+marigolds, snails were on the doors, and bad odours in the house. "In the
+winter time the air couldn't be got out of the castle, and in the summer
+time it couldn't be got in." Dickens knew that the environment of children
+has a direct influence on their characters, and that ventilation is
+essential to good health. These lessons were needed fifty years ago.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin made children dishonest by putting on collars for parade.
+
+"The farinaceous and vegetable" diet, the "regaled with rice" criticisms
+show that Dickens anticipated by half a century the present interest in
+the study of nutrition as one of the most important educational subjects.
+
+The combination of coercion and religion is ridiculed in the theological
+constraint of Mrs. Pipchin, when she told little Miss Pankey "that nobody
+who sniffed before visitors ever went to heaven."
+
+The outrageous selfishness of adulthood was exposed by the description of
+Mrs. Pipchin's anger at the play of the children in the back room when it
+was raining and they could not go out.
+
+The injustice of the "child-queller" was shown because she filliped Master
+Bitherstone on the nose for nodding in the evening, whenever she woke up
+from her own nodding.
+
+The sacrilege of having prayers between two processes of cruelty is worthy
+of note. Religion should never be associated in the mind of a child with
+injustice, cruelty, or any meanness.
+
+The dreadful practice of driving timid children to sleep in the dark was
+another of Mrs. Pipchin's accomplishments. The retiring hour of childhood
+should be made the happiest and most nerve soothing of the day. Wise and
+sympathetic adulthood, especially motherhood, can then reach the central
+nature of the child most successfully.
+
+The formal reading of a meaningless selection from the Bible by
+Bitherstone tended to prevent the development of a true interest in that
+most interesting of all books.
+
+The Early Readings, with the bad boy in the story "being finished off
+generally by a lion or a bear," were a fit accompaniment to a system in
+which no child's mind was encouraged to expand like a flower naturally,
+but to be opened by force like an oyster.
+
+Dickens began with Mrs. Pipchin his revelation of the great blunder of
+checking the questions of children. "Remember the story of the little boy
+that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking questions," she said to
+Paul. The same evil is pointed out in the training of Pip in Great
+Expectations.
+
+Another common error is revealed by Mrs. Pipchin, when she called Paul "a
+little infidel," because he did not accept her statement about the mad
+bull, although she knew it to be false herself. Even when children doubt
+the truth they should not be called "infidels," unless, indeed, it is
+desired to make them definitely and consciously sceptical.
+
+The Puritan Sabbath was a part of Mrs. Pipchin's quelling system too.
+
+It was little wonder, therefore, that the wild children went home tame
+enough after a few months in her awful institution.
+
+Few men who have ever lived have studied the child and his training so
+thoroughly as to be able to condense into such brief space so many of the
+evils of bad training.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin and Mr. Squeers have been made to do good work for childhood.
+
+Biler was so badly treated at the grinders' school that he played hookey,
+but that was not the worst feature of his education. They did not feel any
+responsibility for character development in the school of the Charitable
+Grinders.
+
+    But they never taught honour at the grinders' school, where the system
+    that prevailed was particularly strong in the engendering of
+    hypocrisy; insomuch that many of the friends and masters of past
+    grinders said, if this were what came of education for the common
+    people, let us have none. Some more rational said, Let us have a
+    better one; but the governing powers of the grinders' company were
+    always ready for _them_, by picking out a few boys who had turned out
+    well in spite of the system, and roundly asserting that they could
+    have only turned out well because of it. Which settled the business of
+    those objectors out of hand, and established the glory of the
+    grinders' institution.
+
+In David Copperfield, Uriah Heep, utterly detestable in character, is the
+natural product of the system of training under which both he and his
+father were brought up. Uriah said:
+
+    "Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys;
+    and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of
+    charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness--not
+    much else that I know of--from morning to night. We was to be umble to
+    this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to
+    make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves
+    before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the
+    monitor medal by being umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by
+    being umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being
+    such a well-behaved man that they were determined to bring him on. 'Be
+    umble, Uriah,' says father, 'and you'll get on. It was what was always
+    being dinned into you and me at school; it's what goes down best. Be
+    umble,' says father, 'and you'll do!' And really it ain't done bad!"
+
+    It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that this detestable
+    cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I
+    had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed. I had never
+    doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended
+    now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful
+    spirit must have been engendered by this early, and this long,
+    suppression.
+
+David himself tells how he suffered after the death of his mother from the
+cold neglect of Mr. Murdstone and Jane Murdstone. No child can be so
+destitute as the child who is neglected through dislike.
+
+    And now I fell into a state of neglect, which I can not look back upon
+    without compassion. I fell at once into a solitary condition--apart
+    from all friendly notice, apart from the society of all other boys of
+    my own age, apart from all companionship but my own spiritless
+    thoughts--which seems to cast its gloom upon this paper as I write.
+
+    What would I have given to have been sent to the hardest school that
+    ever was kept! to have been taught something, anyhow, anywhere! No
+    such hope dawned upon me. They disliked me, and they sullenly,
+    sternly, steadily overlooked me. I think Mr. Murdstone's means were
+    straitened at about this time; but it is little to the purpose. He
+    could not bear me; and in putting me from him he tried, as I believe,
+    to put away the notion that I had any claim upon him--and succeeded.
+
+    I was not actively ill used. I was not beaten or starved; but the
+    wrong that was done to me had no intervals of relenting, and was done
+    in a systematic, passionless manner. Day after day, week after week,
+    month after month, I was coldly neglected. I wonder sometimes, when I
+    think of it, what they would have done if I had been taken with an
+    illness--whether I should have lain down in my lonely room and
+    languished through it in my usual solitary way, or whether anybody
+    would have helped me out.
+
+But the greatest lesson in wrong training given in David Copperfield is
+the character development of Steerforth. He was ruined by the misdirected
+love of his mother, and his life is a fine psychological study.
+
+He was a boy of unusually good ability and great attractiveness. He
+possessed by nature every element of power and grace required to make him
+a strong, true, and very successful man; but the love of his mother
+degenerated to pride and admiration, indulgence was substituted for
+guidance, and the strong woman became weak at the vital point of training
+her boy. She allowed him to become selfish and vain by yielding to his
+caprices. She thought she was making his character strong by allowing no
+restraint to be put upon it. She failed to distinguish between license and
+liberty. She had conceived the ideal of the need of freedom, but she knew
+naught of the true harmony between control and spontaneity. She allowed
+the spontaneity, and gloried in his resistance to control. She was blind
+to the balancing element in "the perfect law of liberty." She made her boy
+a powerful engine without a governor valve. So his selfhood became
+selfishness, and his character was wrecked. Among other immoral opinions
+that he gained from his mother's training was the idea that he belonged to
+a select class superior to common humanity. How Dickens hated this
+thought! Rosa Dartle asked Steerforth about
+
+    "That sort of people--are they really animals and clods, and beings of
+    another order? I want to know so much."
+
+    "Why, there's a pretty wide separation between them and us," said
+    Steerforth, with indifference. "They are not to be expected to be as
+    sensitive as we are. Their delicacy is not to be shocked or hurt very
+    easily. They are wonderfully virtuous, I dare say--some people contend
+    for that, at least, and I am sure I don't want to contradict them; but
+    they have not very fine natures, and they may be thankful that, like
+    their coarse, rough skins, they are not easily wounded."
+
+He was trained to despise work, which is a good start toward the utter
+loss of character. A boy who despises his fellow-beings whom he assumes to
+rank below him, and who also despises work, instead of recognising the
+duty of every man to be a producer or a distributor of power, may easily
+fall into moral degeneracy.
+
+    "Help yourself, Copperfield!" said Steerforth. "We'll drink the
+    daisies of the field, in compliment to you; and the lilies of the
+    valley that toil not, neither do they spin, in compliment to me--the
+    more shame for me!"
+
+His character lacked seriousness. He had the fatal levity that led him to
+discuss the most sacred subjects in a flippant manner.
+
+His mother knew that Creakle's school was not a proper place for him, but
+she wished to make him conscious of his superiority even over his teacher,
+and she knew that Creakle, tyrannical bully though he was, would yield to
+Steerforth, because his mother was wealthy.
+
+    "It was not a fit school generally for my son," said she; "far from
+    it; but there were particular circumstances to be considered at the
+    time, of more importance even than that selection. My son's high
+    spirit made it desirable that he should be placed with some man who
+    felt its superiority, and would be content to bow himself before it;
+    and we found such a man there."
+
+What a perversion of the ideal of freedom in the development of character,
+to suppose that it could only reach perfection by a consciousness of
+superiority; by having some one who should control him bow down before
+him! No man in the world is truly free who has a desire to dominate some
+one else--another man, a woman, or a child. Yet Mrs. Steerforth sacrificed
+her son's education in order that his manly spirit might be cultivated by
+the subordination of the man who should have governed him. She showed
+better judgment in deciding that a coercive tyrant like Creakle would make
+a subservient sycophant.
+
+    "My son's great capacity was tempted on there by a feeling of
+    voluntary emulation and conscious pride," the fond lady went on to
+    say. "He would have risen against all constraint; but he found himself
+    the monarch of the place, and he haughtily determined to be worthy of
+    his station. It was like himself."
+
+As Steerforth began consciously to feel his better nature surrendering to
+his sensuality, he experienced the pangs that all strong natures feel at
+the loss of moral power, and one time when he and David were visiting Mr.
+Peggotty at Yarmouth he seemed to be moody and disposed to sadness. He
+said suddenly to David when they were alone one day:
+
+    "David, I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last twenty
+    years!"
+
+    "My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?"
+
+    "I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!" he exclaimed. "I
+    wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!"
+
+    There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me.
+    He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.
+
+    "It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a
+    nephew," he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney
+    piece, with his face toward the fire, "than to be myself, twenty
+    times richer and twenty times wiser and be the torment to myself that
+    I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat, within the last half
+    hour!"
+
+He had already begun to poison the fountains of little Emily's purity.
+
+When Steerforth, after running away with Emily and deserting her, was
+drowned and brought home, Rosa Dartle, who had loved him, charged his
+mother with his ruin. She had a scar on her lip, made by a hammer thrown
+by Steerforth when he was a boy.
+
+    "Do you remember when he did this?" she proceeded. "Do you remember
+    when in his inheritance of your nature, and in your pampering of his
+    pride and passion, he did this, and disfigured me for life? Look at
+    me, marked until I die with his high displeasure, and moan and groan
+    for what you made him!"
+
+    "Miss Dartle," I entreated her, "for Heaven's sake----"
+
+    "I _will_ speak," she said, turning on me with her lightning eyes. "Be
+    silent you! Look at me, I say, proud mother of a proud false son! Moan
+    for your nurture of him, moan for your corruption of him, moan for
+    your loss of him, moan for mine!"
+
+    She clinched her hand, and trembled through her spare, worn figure, as
+    if her passion were killing her by inches.
+
+    "YOU resent his self-will!" she exclaimed. "YOU injured by his haughty
+    temper! YOU, who opposed to both, when your hair was gray, the
+    qualities which made both when you gave him birth! YOU, who from his
+    cradle reared him to be what he was, and stunted what he should have
+    been! Are you rewarded, _now_, for your years of trouble?"
+
+    "Miss Dartle," said I, "if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for
+    this afflicted mother----"
+
+    "Who feels for me?" she sharply retorted. "She has sown this. Let her
+    moan for the harvest that she reaps to-day!"
+
+To show that the seed for the harvest had been sown by his mother was
+Dickens's aim in the delineation of his character. Yet she loved him as a
+part of her own life. She said to Mr. Peggotty, when he came to plead with
+her for Emily:
+
+    "My son, who has been the object of my life, to whom its every thought
+    has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish,
+    from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth."
+
+There was a double sadness in David's soliloquy about Steerforth, who had
+been his friend:
+
+    In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought
+    more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more toward all that
+    was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have
+    made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had
+    done in the height of my devotion to him.
+
+In Bleak House a great deal of attention is paid to child training.
+
+Esther's sadness because of her neglected birthday touches a tender chord.
+
+    It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other birthdays;
+    none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as I
+    knew from what I heard the girls relate to one another; there were
+    none on mine. My birthday was the most melancholy day at home in the
+    whole year.
+
+There is more than mere sentiment in birthday celebrations both at home
+and in school. It develops a pleasant consciousness of individuality and
+community--two of the greatest educational ideals.
+
+The cruelty of telling children of any supposed blight of heredity or of
+any other shadow that arrogant conventionality dares to throw over them,
+is criticised in the hard, gloomy way in which Esther's godmother referred
+to her mother.
+
+Even worse than this in the refinement of its cruelty was her parting
+injunction. It is a shameful thing to make a child believe that she is
+different from other children in any sense of either badness or goodness.
+
+    "Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a
+    life begun with such a shadow on it. You are different from other
+    children, Esther, because you were not born, like them, in common
+    sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart."
+
+    I went up to my room and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek
+    against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon my
+    bosom cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my
+    sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy, at any time, to
+    anybody's heart, and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to
+    me.
+
+Dickens evidently meant to reveal more than her godmother's cruelty in her
+closing moralizings. She made the mistake of using self-denial and
+diligent work as curses instead of blessings. They were for the time none
+the less curses to the child, however.
+
+The gross negligence of parents in regard to the sacredness of the
+children's retiring hour is exposed in the management of the Jellyby
+children. Indeed, Mrs. Jellyby may be regarded as several volumes of
+treatises on how not to train children. Caddy expressed her views of the
+training they received by saying: "I wish I was dead. I wish we were all
+dead. It would be a great deal better for us." She wisely added: "Oh,
+don't talk of duty as a child! where's ma's duty as a parent?" Esther said
+wisely:
+
+    It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural
+    duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope
+    in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against
+    becoming absurd; but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to
+    myself.
+
+Esther describes the process of putting the children to bed one evening
+she was visiting at the Jellyby home:
+
+    Mrs. Jellyby stopped for a moment her conversation with Mr. Quale, on
+    the Brotherhood of Humanity, long enough to order the children to bed.
+
+    As Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs,
+    where the young woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst
+    of the little family like a dragon, and overturned them into cribs.
+
+    Peepy was the unfortunate child who had fallen downstairs, who now
+    interrupted the correspondence by presenting himself with a slip of
+    plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his wounded knees, in which Ada
+    and I did not know which to pity most, the bruises or the dirt. Mrs.
+    Jellyby merely added, with the serene composure with which she said
+    everything, "Go along, you naughty Peepy!" and fixed her fine eyes on
+    Africa again.
+
+Here Mrs. Jellyby was guilty of two wrongs, one of commission, the other
+of omission. She did a positive wrong in unjustly calling the child
+"naughty" when he was merely unfortunate. Even if children are so badly
+guided that they do wrong, it is a serious mistake to make them feel
+consciously "bad" by calling them unpleasant names. It is always wrong to
+define in the child's consciousness a passing wave of evil.
+
+Mrs. Jellyby's sin of omission was her neglect of the opportunity of
+sympathizing with the suffering boy, and of training him to bear suffering
+bravely by the suggestion that he was "a brave little soldier home from
+the war."
+
+Mr. Jarndyce, in speaking of Harold Skimpole's children, said, when
+Richard Carstone asked if he had any children:
+
+    "Yes, Rick! Half a dozen. More! Nearer a dozen, I should think. But he
+    has never looked after them. How could he? He wanted somebody to look
+    after _him_. He is a child, you know!" said Mr. Jarndyce.
+
+    "And have the children looked after themselves at all, sir?" inquired
+    Richard.
+
+    "Why, just as you may suppose," said Mr. Jarndyce, his countenance
+    suddenly falling. "It is said that the children of the very poor are
+    not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole's children have
+    tumbled up somehow or other----"
+
+Again Dickens was impressing the responsibility of parents for the care
+and proper training of their children.
+
+Mr. Jarndyce accounted for the utterly unpractical nature of Mr. Skimpole
+by saying:
+
+    "Why, he is all sentiment, and--and susceptibility, and--and
+    sensibility--and--and imagination. And these qualities are not
+    regulated in him, somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for
+    them in his youth attached too much importance to them, and too little
+    to any training that would have balanced and adjusted them; and so he
+    became what he is."
+
+Mrs. Pardiggle was given as a type of the philanthropic woman who does
+_not_ neglect her children, but whose training is worse--much worse than
+Mrs. Jellyby's neglect. The Jellyby children had as much motherly sympathy
+as the Pardiggles, and they had freedom. There is always this advantage in
+neglect. Louisa Gradgrind gave utterance to a philosophical principle when
+she said to her father: "Oh! if you had only neglected me, what a much
+better and much happier creature I should have been." Dickens did not
+teach that neglect is good training, but he did teach that it is a lighter
+curse than the Gradgrind or Pardiggle training.
+
+The Jellyby children had a slight chance to turn out moderately well, but
+the Pardiggle children were certain to be morose, hypocritical, and
+vicious. They were certain to hate all forms of Christian philanthropy.
+Mrs. Pardiggle's intentions were undoubtedly good, but she destroyed the
+character of her children, nevertheless.
+
+    "These, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility,
+    after the first salutations, "are my five boys. You may have seen
+    their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in
+    the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest
+    (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket money, to the amount of
+    five and threepence to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten
+    and a half), is the child who contributed two and ninepence to the
+    Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one and
+    sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the
+    Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily
+    enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never
+    through life to use tobacco in any form."
+
+    We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that
+    they were weazened and shrivelled--though they were certainly that
+    too--but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the
+    mention of the Tockahoopo Indians I could really have supposed Egbert
+    to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave me such a
+    savage frown. The face of each child as the amount of his contribution
+    was mentioned darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was
+    by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the
+    Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable.
+
+    "You have been visiting, I understand," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "at Mrs.
+    Jellyby's?"
+
+    We said yes, we had passed one night there.
+
+    "Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society, and deserves a helping hand.
+    My boys have contributed to the African project--Egbert, one and six,
+    being the entire allowance of nine weeks; Oswald, one and a penny
+    halfpenny, being the same; the rest, according to their little means.
+    Nevertheless, I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in all things. I do not go
+    with Mrs. Jellyby in her treatment of her young family. It has been
+    noticed. It has been observed that her young family are excluded from
+    participation in the objects to which she is devoted. She may be
+    right, she may be wrong; but, right or wrong, this is not my course
+    with _my_ young family. I take them everywhere."
+
+    I was afterward convinced (and so was Ada) that from the
+    ill-conditioned eldest child these words extorted a sharp yell. He
+    turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a yell.
+
+    "They attend matins with me (very prettily done) at half past six
+    o'clock in the morning all the year round, including, of course, the
+    depth of winter," said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, "and they are with me
+    during the revolving duties of the day. I am a school lady, I am a
+    visiting lady, I am a reading lady, I am a distributing lady; I am on
+    the local linen box committee, and many general committees; and my
+    canvassing alone is very extensive--perhaps no one's more so. But they
+    are my companions everywhere; and by these means they acquire that
+    knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing charitable business
+    in general--in short, that taste for the sort of thing--which will
+    render them in after life a service to their neighbours, and a
+    satisfaction to themselves. My young family are not frivolous; they
+    expend the entire amount of their allowance in subscriptions, under my
+    direction; and they have attended as many public meetings, and
+    listened to as many lectures, orations, and discussions as generally
+    fall to the lot of few grown people. Alfred (five), who, as I
+    mentioned, has of his own election joined the Infant Bonds of Joy, was
+    one of the very few children who manifested consciousness on one
+    occasion, after a fervid address of two hours from the chairman of
+    the evening."
+
+    Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the
+    injury of that night.
+
+    "You may have observed, Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "in some
+    of the lists to which I have referred, in the possession of our
+    esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family are
+    concluded with the name of O. A. Pardiggle, F. R. S., one pound. That
+    is their father. We usually observe the same routine. I put down my
+    mite first; then my young family enrol their contributions, according
+    to their ages and their little means; and then Mr. Pardiggle brings up
+    the rear. Mr. Pardiggle is happy to throw in his limited donation,
+    under my direction; and thus things are made, not only pleasant to
+    ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others."
+
+Mrs. Pardiggle invited Esther and Ada to go out with her to visit a
+"wicked brickmaker" in the neighbourhood. Ada walked ahead with Mrs.
+Pardiggle and Esther followed with the five children. She had an
+interesting experience.
+
+    I am very fond of being confided in by children, and am happy in being
+    usually favoured in that respect, but on this occasion it gave me
+    great uneasiness. As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert, with the
+    manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me, on the ground
+    that his pocket money was "boned" from him. On my pointing out the
+    great impropriety of the word, especially in connection with his
+    parent (for he added sulkily "By her!"), he pinched me and said, "Oh,
+    then! Now! Who are you? _You_ wouldn't like it, I think! What does she
+    make a sham for, and pretend to give me money, and take it away again?
+    Why do you call it _my_ allowance, and never let me spend it?" These
+    exasperating questions so inflamed his mind, and the minds of Oswald
+    and Francis, that they all pinched me at once, and in a dreadfully
+    expert way; screwing up such little pieces of my arms that I could
+    hardly forbear crying out. Felix at the same time stamped upon my
+    toes. And the Bond of Joy, who, on account of always having the whole
+    of his little income anticipated, stood, in fact, pledged to abstain
+    from cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we
+    passed a pastry-cook shop, that he terrified me by becoming purple. I
+    never underwent so much, both in body and mind, in the course of a
+    walk with young people, as from these unnaturally constrained
+    children, when they paid me the compliment of being natural.
+
+In the brickmaker's hovel they heard something of how the very poor
+brought up children, or failed to bring them up, in Dickens's time. The
+brickmaker was lying at full length on the floor, smoking his pipe. He
+gave them no welcome.
+
+    I wants a end of these liberties took with my place. I wants a end of
+    being drawed like a badger. Now you are a-going to poll-pry and
+    question according to custom--I know what you're a-going to be up to.
+    Well! You haven't got no occasion to be up to it. I'll save you the
+    trouble. Is my daughter a-washin'? Yes, she is a-washin'. Look at the
+    water. Smell it! That's wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do
+    you think of gin, instead? An't my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty--it's
+    nat'rally dirty, and it's nat'rally onwholesome; and we've had five
+    dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much
+    the better for them, and for us besides.
+
+The utter carelessness of some "society gentlemen" in regard to the
+education of their children is referred to in the description Caddy
+Jellyby gave of her lover, the son of the great Turveydrop.
+
+    Caddy told me that her lover's education had been so neglected that it
+    was not always easy to read his notes. She said if he were not so
+    anxious about his spelling, and took less pains to make it clear, he
+    would do better; but he put so many unnecessary letters into short
+    words that they sometimes quite lost their English appearance. "He
+    does it with the best intention," observed Caddy, "but it hasn't the
+    effect he means, poor fellow!" Caddy then went on to reason how could
+    he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole life in
+    the dancing school, and had done nothing but teach and fag, fag and
+    teach, morning, noon, and night! And what did it matter? She could
+    write letters enough for both, as she knew to her cost, and it was far
+    better for him to be amiable than learned. "Besides, it's not as if I
+    was an accomplished girl, who had any right to give herself airs,"
+    said Caddy. "I know little enough, I am sure, thanks to ma!"
+
+The products of the fashionable education of Dickens's time (there is not
+so much of it now, thanks largely to Dickens) were shown in the cousins of
+Sir Leicester Dedlock.
+
+    The rest of the cousins are ladies and gentlemen of various ages and
+    capacities; the major part, amiable and sensible, and likely to have
+    done well enough in life if they could have overcome their cousinship;
+    as it is, they are almost all a little worsted by it, and lounge in
+    purposeless and listless paths, and seem to be quite as much at a loss
+    how to dispose of themselves as anybody else can be how to dispose of
+    them.
+
+In Little Dorrit Mrs. General is used as a type of two varieties of false
+training. Her pupils were never to be allowed to know that there was
+anything vulgar or wrong in the world. She believed the good old theory,
+that adulthood had two duties in developing purity of character, one to
+prevent children knowing that there was any evil, the other to chain them
+back or beat them back from evil, if they accidentally found it and wished
+to investigate it. She never thought of training a child to do its part in
+reducing the evil around him. Seclusion and exclusion took the place of
+community in her perverted philosophy.
+
+She believed, too, in educating the surface. She did not work from within
+intellectually or spiritually. She varnished the surface that it might
+receive the proper society polish, therefore neither heart nor head
+required much attention. According to her theory, young ladies should
+never be so unladylike as to have great purposes or great ideas.
+Unfortunately some of her descendants are still living.
+
+    "Fanny," observed Mrs. General, "at present forms too many opinions.
+    Perfect breeding forms none, and is never demonstrative.
+
+    "I have conversed with Amy several times since we have been residing
+    here on the general subject of the formation of a demeanour. She has
+    expressed herself to me as wondering exceedingly at Venice. I have
+    mentioned to her that it is better not to wonder."
+
+Her father sent for Amy to reprove her for her lack of what Mrs. General
+regarded as true culture, and Amy said:
+
+    "I think, father, I require a little time."
+
+    "Papa is a preferable mode of address," observed Mrs. General. "Father
+    is rather vulgar, my dear. The word papa, besides, gives a pretty form
+    to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very
+    good words for the lips; especially prunes and prism. You will find it
+    serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to
+    yourself in company--on entering a room, for instance--papa, potatoes,
+    poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.
+
+    "If Miss Amy Dorrit will direct her own attention to, and will accept
+    of my poor assistance in, the formation of a surface, Mr. Dorrit will
+    have no further cause of anxiety. May I take this opportunity of
+    remarking, as an instance in point, that it is scarcely delicate to
+    look at vagrants with the attention which I have seen bestowed upon
+    them by a very dear young friend of mine? They should not be looked
+    at. Nothing disagreeable should ever be looked at. Apart from such a
+    habit standing in the way of that graceful equanimity of surface which
+    is so expressive of good breeding, it hardly seems compatible with
+    refinement of mind. A truly refined mind will seem to be ignorant of
+    the existence of anything that is not perfectly proper, placid, and
+    pleasant."
+
+Great Expectations has numerous illustrations of bad training. Mrs.
+Gargery had many of the worst characteristics of disrespectful and
+coercive adulthood. She abused Pip for asking questions, scolded him,
+thimbled him, and sent him to bed in the dark. She told him he was on the
+way to commit murder and a great variety of crimes, because criminals
+always "begin by asking questions." She kept him in a state of constant
+terror. She tried in every possible way to lower his opinion of himself,
+which is a crime against childhood. One of the worst features of the old
+education was its teaching of a spurious humility, a depreciation of
+selfhood. One of the greatest weaknesses of humanity is the general lack
+of true faith of men and women in their own powers. He was told that he
+was "naterally wicious," and made the butt of all the observations
+relating to boys who possessed any vices whatever.
+
+Dickens revealed all these characteristics to condemn them.
+
+Pip discussed a very grave question for students of children when he was
+accounting for the fact that he deliberately misstated facts so
+systematically in answering the questions of his sister and Mr.
+Pumblechook, in regard to Miss Havisham and the peculiarities of her
+mysterious home.
+
+    When I reached home my sister was very curious to know all about Miss
+    Havisham's, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found myself
+    getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the
+    small of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved against the
+    kitchen wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient
+    length.
+
+    If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other
+    young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden
+    in mine--which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to
+    suspect myself of having been a monstrosity--it is the key to many
+    reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham's as
+    my eyes had seen it I should not be understood.
+
+    Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy
+    perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my
+    obstinacy was adamantine.
+
+Two thoughts are worthy of note in this part of Pip's training: abuse,
+especially of the thumping, bumping, shaking variety, makes a child
+obstinate; and many of childhood's difficulties arise from not being
+understood, or the fear of being misunderstood.
+
+Pip resented, as all children do, more than they can show, the unpleasant
+habit of taking patronizing liberties with them.
+
+    And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he
+    considered it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and
+    poke it into my eyes. I can not conceive why everybody of his standing
+    who visited at our house should always have put me through the same
+    inflammatory process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to
+    mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our
+    social family circle, but some large-handed person took some such
+    ophthalmic steps to patronize me.
+
+And Mr. Pumblechook! What could a boy do but hate him?
+
+    Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with
+    almost insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That ass,
+    Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose of
+    discussing my prospects with my sister; and I really do believe (to
+    this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel) that if these
+    hands could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise cart, they would
+    have done it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity
+    of mind that he could not discuss my prospects without having me
+    before him--as it were, to operate upon--and he would drag me up from
+    my stool (usually by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and,
+    putting me before the fire as if I were going to be cooked, would
+    begin by saying, "Now, mum, here is this boy! Here is this boy which
+    you brought up by hand. Hold up your head, boy, and be forever
+    grateful unto them which so did so. Now, mum, with respections to this
+    boy!" And then he would rumple my hair the wrong way--which from my
+    earliest remembrance, as already hinted, I have in my soul denied the
+    right of any fellow-creature to do--and would hold me before him by
+    the sleeve: a spectacle of imbecility only to be equalled by himself.
+
+Mrs. Pocket's training was given as an illustration of the folly of giving
+girls no practical education.
+
+    Her father had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle
+    as one who, in the nature of things, must marry a title, and who was
+    to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge.
+
+    So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young
+    lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly
+    ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless.
+
+Her home proved that she had grown up a credit to her training. There
+never was a family more utterly without order, management, or system than
+Mrs. Pocket's. Servants and children indulged in unending turmoil and
+conflict. Dickens added a grim humour to the picture by saying:
+
+    Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for he was a most delightful lecturer on
+    domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and
+    servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But
+    Mrs. Pocket was at home and was in a little difficulty, on account of
+    the baby's having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him
+    quiet during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot
+    Guards) of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be
+    regarded as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either
+    to apply externally or to take as a tonic.
+
+Mrs. Pocket continued to read her one book about the dignities of the
+titled aristocracy, and prescribed "Bed" as a sovereign remedy for baby.
+
+Dickens believed a mother should find her highest joy and most sacred duty
+in training her own children. Mrs. Pocket was a type to be avoided.
+
+The description of the dinner at Mr. Pocket's, after which the six
+children were brought in, and Mrs. Pocket attempted to mind the baby, is
+one of the raciest bits of Dickens's humour. One observation in connection
+with the dinner is worth studying.
+
+    After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made
+    admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs--a sagacious way of
+    improving their minds.
+
+How few yet clearly understand this profound criticism of bad training!
+How many children are still made vain and frivolous by having their
+attention directed especially to their physical attributes and their
+dress, rather than to the things that would yield them much greater
+immediate happiness and a much truer basis for future development!
+
+In his last book, Edwin Drood, Dickens showed that he still hated the
+tyranny that dwarfs and distorts the souls of children.
+
+Neville Landless described his own training to his tutor, who had won his
+confidence as it had never been won before.
+
+    "We lived with a stepfather there. Our mother died there, when we were
+    little children. We have had a wretched existence. She made him our
+    guardian, and he was a miserly wretch who grudged us food to eat and
+    clothes to wear.
+
+    "This stepfather of ours was a cruel brute as well as a grinding one.
+    It was well he died when he did, or I might have killed him."
+
+    Mr. Crisparkle stopped short in the moonlight and looked at his
+    hopeful pupil in consternation.
+
+    "I surprise you, sir?" he said, with a quick change to a submissive
+    manner.
+
+    "You shock me; unspeakably shock me."
+
+    The pupil hung his head for a little while, as they walked on, and
+    then said: "You never saw him beat your sister. I have seen him beat
+    mine, more than once or twice, and I never forgot it.
+
+    "I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly
+    and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful. I have been
+    always tyrannically held down by the strong hand. This has driven me,
+    in my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean. I have been
+    stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of
+    life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest possessions
+    of youth. This has caused me to be utterly wanting in I do not know
+    what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts--I have not even a
+    name for the thing, you see--that you have had to work upon in other
+    young men to whom you have been accustomed."
+
+Hatred instead of love; product, a secret and revengeful character.
+"Tyrannically held down by a strong hand"; product, falseness and
+meanness. "Stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very
+necessaries of life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest
+possessions of youth"; product, a manhood utterly barren in true emotions,
+or pleasant memories, or good instincts.
+
+No other writer has described so many phases of bad training as Dickens.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+GOOD TRAINING.
+
+
+Dickens wrote much less about good training than about bad training. It
+was the part of a true philosopher and a profound student of human nature
+to do so. Pictures of wrong treatment of children accomplished a double
+purpose. They made men hate the wrong, and made them more clearly
+conscious of the right than pictures of the right alone could have done.
+Descriptions of ideal conditions can not make as deep impressions as
+descriptions of utterly bad conditions in the present stage of human
+evolution.
+
+His revelation of cruel tyranny, of will breaking, of cramming, of
+dwarfing of individuality, of distorting of imagination, of harshness, of
+lack of sympathy, of evil in a hundred hideous forms, made men more
+conscious of their corresponding opposites than attempts to reveal these
+opposites by direct effort could have done; and in addition it stirred in
+human hearts everywhere the determination to remove or remedy the wrong.
+
+Little Nell's grandfather gave her a good training. Omitting poverty and
+loneliness, and some strange companionships, she had a training calculated
+to make her the supremely pure and attractive child she was. Her
+grandfather loved her passionately; he had never been unkind to her, he
+had taught her carefully in the virtues that are learned by the unselfish
+performance of duty; she had the opportunity for simple, loving service,
+and she was trained to have profound reverence for and true faith in God.
+
+Her grandfather left her alone every night, yet she was never afraid.
+Dickens describes their usual parting in the evening.
+
+    Then she ran to the old man, who folded her in his arms and bade God
+    bless her.
+
+    "Sleep soundly, Nell," he said in a low voice, "and angels guard thy
+    bed! Do not forget thy prayers, my sweet."
+
+    "No, indeed," answered the child fervently, "they make me feel so
+    happy!"
+
+    "That's well; I know they do; they should," said the old man. "Bless
+    thee a hundred times! Early in the morning I shall be home."
+
+    "You'll not ring twice," returned the child. "The bell wakes me, even
+    in the middle of a dream."
+
+The Toodle family is painted in direct contrast to the Dombey family in
+the relationship of parents to children. Mrs. Toodle came to nurse Paul
+Dombey when his mother died. Mr. Toodle himself came too, and Mr. Dombey
+called him in to speak to him.
+
+    He was a strong, loose, round-shouldered, shuffling, shaggy fellow, on
+    whom his clothes sat negligently; with a good deal of hair and
+    whisker, deepened in its natural tint, perhaps, by smoke and
+    coal-dust; hard knotty hands; and a square forehead, as coarse in
+    grain as the bark of an oak. A thorough contrast in all respects to
+    Mr. Dombey, who was one of those close-shaved, close-cut moneyed
+    gentlemen who are glossy and crisp like new bank notes, and who seem
+    to be artificially braced and tightened as by the stimulating action
+    of golden shower baths.
+
+    "You have a son, I believe?" said Mr. Dombey.
+
+    "Four on 'em, sir. Four hims and a her. All alive!"
+
+    "Why, it's as much as you can afford to keep them!" said Mr. Dombey.
+
+    "I couldn't hardly afford but one thing in the world less, sir."
+
+    "What is that?"
+
+    "To lose 'em, sir."
+
+    "Can you read?" asked Mr. Dombey.
+
+    "Why, not partick'ler, sir."
+
+    "Write?"
+
+    "With chalk, sir?"
+
+    "With anything?"
+
+    "I could make shift to chalk a little bit, I think, if I was put to
+    it," said Toodle, after some reflection.
+
+    "And yet," said Mr. Dombey, "you are two or three and thirty, I
+    suppose?"
+
+    "Thereabout, I suppose, sir," answered Toodle, after more reflection.
+
+    "Then why don't you learn?" asked Mr. Dombey.
+
+    "So I'm agoing to, sir. One of my little boys is agoing to learn me,
+    when he's old enough, and been to school himself."
+
+What a beautiful picture of the true relationship that should exist
+between a mother and her children is given in the reception to Mrs. Toodle
+when she went home to visit her family!
+
+    "Why, Polly!" cried her sister. "You! what a turn you _have_ given me!
+    who'd have thought it! come along in, Polly! How well you do look, to
+    be sure! The children will go half wild to see you, Polly, that they
+    will."
+
+    That they did, if one might judge from the noise they made, and the
+    way in which they dashed at Polly and dragged her to a low chair in
+    the chimney corner, where her own honest apple face became immediately
+    the centre of a bunch of smaller pippins, all laying their rosy cheeks
+    close to it, and all evidently the growth of the same tree. As to
+    Polly, she was full as noisy and vehement as the children; and it was
+    not until she was quite out of breath, and her hair was hanging all
+    about her flushed face, and her new christening attire was very much
+    dishevelled, that any pause took place in the confusion. Even then,
+    the smallest Toodle but one remained in her lap, holding on tight with
+    both arms round her neck; while the smallest Toodle but two mounted on
+    the back of the chair, and made desperate efforts, with one leg in the
+    air, to kiss her round the corner.
+
+Unfortunately the eldest Toodle, nicknamed Biler, was sent to the
+grinders' school by Mr. Dombey, and he was so badly treated that he played
+truant and got into bad company; but his mother clung to him and treated
+him kindly, and hoped for him still. Mr. Carker went home with Biler to
+satisfy himself in regard to his family.
+
+    "This fellow," said Mr. Carker to Polly, giving him a gentle shake,
+    "is your son, eh, ma'am?"
+
+    "Yes, sir," sobbed Polly, with a courtesy; "yes, sir."
+
+    "A bad son, I am afraid?" said Mr. Carker.
+
+    "Never a bad son to me, sir," returned Polly.
+
+    "To whom, then?" demanded Mr. Carker.
+
+    "He has been a little wild, sir," replied Polly, checking the baby,
+    who was making convulsive efforts with his arms and legs to launch
+    himself on Biler, through the ambient air, "and has gone with wrong
+    companions; but I hope he has seen the misery of that, sir, and will
+    do well again."
+
+    When Mr. Carker had concluded his visit, as he made his way among the
+    crowding children to the door, Rob retreated on his mother, and took
+    her and the baby in the same repentant hug.
+
+    "I'll try hard, dear mother, now. Upon my soul I will!" said Rob.
+
+    "Oh, do, my dear boy! I am sure you will, for our sakes and your own!"
+    cried Polly, kissing him. "But you're coming back to speak to me, when
+    you have seen the gentleman away?"
+
+    "I don't know, mother." Rob hesitated, and looked down.
+    "Father--when's he coming home?"
+
+    "Not till two o'clock to-morrow morning."
+
+    "I'll come back, mother, dear!" cried Rob. And passing through the
+    shrill cry of his brothers and sisters in reception of this promise,
+    he followed Mr. Carker out.
+
+    "What!" said Mr. Carker, who had heard this. "You have a bad father,
+    have you?"
+
+    "No, sir!" returned Rob, amazed. "There ain't a better nor a kinder
+    father going than mine is."
+
+    "Why don't you want to see him, then?" asked his patron.
+
+    "There's such a difference between a father and a mother, sir," said
+    Rob, after faltering for a moment. "He couldn't hardly believe yet
+    that I was going to do better--though I know he'd try to; but a
+    mother--_she_ always believes what's good, sir; at least I know my
+    mother does, God bless her!"
+
+It was not the fault of his home that Biler went astray.
+
+Nor did Dickens fail to give a picture for the fathers too. Mr. Toodle was
+a workman on a train, and great was the joy in the family when father came
+home.
+
+    "Polly, my gal," said Mr. Toodle, with a young Toodle on each knee and
+    two more making tea for him, and plenty more scattered about--Mr.
+    Toodle was never out of children, but always kept a good supply on
+    hand--"you ain't seen our Biler lately, have you?"
+
+    "No," replied Polly, "but he's almost certain to look in to-night.
+    It's his right evening, and he's very regular."
+
+    "I suppose," said Mr. Toodle, relishing his meal infinitely, "as our
+    Biler is a-doin' now about as well as a boy _can_ do, eh, Polly?"
+
+    "Oh! he's a-doing beautiful!" responded Polly.
+
+    "He ain't got to be at all secretlike--has he, Polly?" inquired Mr.
+    Toodle.
+
+    "No!" said Mrs. Toodle plumply.
+
+    "I'm glad he ain't got to be at all secretlike, Polly," observed Mr.
+    Toodle in his slow and measured way, and shovelling in his bread and
+    butter with a clasp knife, as if he were stoking himself, "because
+    that don't look well; do it, Polly?"
+
+    "Why, of course, it don't, father. How can you ask?"
+
+    "You see, my boys and gals," said Mr. Toodle, looking round upon his
+    family, "wotever you're up to in a honest way, it's my opinion as you
+    can't do better than be open. If you find yourselves in cuttings or in
+    tunnels, don't you play no secret games. Keep your whistles going, and
+    let's know where you are."
+
+    The rising Toodles set up a shrill murmur, expressive of their
+    resolution to profit by the paternal advice.
+
+    "But what makes you say this along of Rob, father?" asked his wife
+    anxiously.
+
+    "Polly, old 'ooman," said Mr. Toodle, "I don't know as I said it
+    partickler along o' Rob, I'm sure. I starts light with Rob only; I
+    comes to a branch; I takes on what I finds there; and a whole train of
+    ideas gets coupled on to him afore I knows where I am, or where they
+    comes from. What a Junction a man's thoughts is," said Mr. Toodle, "to
+    be sure!"
+
+    This profound reflection Mr. Toodle washed down with a pint mug of
+    tea, and proceeded to solidify with a great weight of bread and
+    butter; charging his young daughters meanwhile to keep plenty of hot
+    water in the pot, as he was uncommon dry, and should take the
+    indefinite quantity of "a sight of mugs" before his thirst was
+    appeased.
+
+And as the jolly old fellow ate his supper he was surrounded by all his
+smaller children, some on his knees, and others under his arms, and all
+getting bites of bread and butter and sups of tea in turn, although they
+had had their own supper before he came home.
+
+Dickens did not wish to teach that such relationships should exist between
+parents and children in the homes of the labouring classes only. He used
+Toodle and his family as representing one extreme of society, as at
+present constituted, in sharp contrast with Mr. Dombey's family at the
+other extreme. How happy the one home with barely enough to secure the
+necessaries of life! how miserable the other with unlimited wealth! And
+the best things in the Toodle home were the children, and the love and
+unconventional freedom between them and their parents. With such a feeling
+of community and love in all homes, and with schools of a proper
+character, the children will be trained for higher, and progressively
+advancing manhood and womanhood.
+
+David Copperfield's training was not all coercive and degrading. Before
+the Murdstones came to blight his young life he had joy and sympathy to
+stimulate all that was good in him. His mother and Peggotty were kind and
+true. The three had perfect faith in each other. They formed a blessed
+unity. "The memory of his lessons in those happy days recalled no feeling
+of disgust or reluctance. On the contrary, he seemed to have walked along
+a path of flowers, and to have been cheered by the gentleness of his
+mother's voice and manner all the way."
+
+Again, after the Murdstone interval of terror and cruelty, David was
+kindly treated and well trained by his aunt. Her relationship toward him
+throughout his whole youth is well presented in her parting words, as she
+left him at Mr. Wickfield's house, where he was to live while at Doctor
+Strong's school.
+
+    She told me that everything would be arranged for me by Mr. Wickfield,
+    and that I should want for nothing, and gave me the kindest words and
+    the best advice.
+
+    "Trot," said my aunt in conclusion, "be a credit to yourself, to me,
+    and Mr. Dick, and Heaven be with you!"
+
+    I was greatly overcome, and could only thank her again and again, and
+    send my love to Mr. Dick.
+
+    "Never," said my aunt, "be mean in anything; never be false; never be
+    cruel. Avoid these three vices, Trot, and I can always be hopeful of
+    you."
+
+In Mr. Wickfield's home and in Doctor Strong's school he had ideal
+conditions of development. He received respectful consideration, fatherly
+interest, wise counsel, and generous hospitality from Mr. Wickfield. With
+Agnes he had the most delightful relationship of sympathetic and
+stimulating friendship. There is no better influence in the life of a boy
+opening into young manhood than the true friendship of a girl of the
+character of Agnes.
+
+In Doctor Strong's school David met with the best conditions of good
+training yet revealed by the "new education."
+
+The boys were taught politeness, courtesy, and consideration for the
+feelings of others in Doctor Strong's school.
+
+    About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when
+    we went in, but they rose to give the Doctor good morning, and
+    remained standing when they saw Mr. Wickfield and me.
+
+    "A new boy, young gentlemen," said the Doctor; "Trotwood Copperfield."
+
+    One Adams, who was the head boy, then stepped out of his place and
+    welcomed me. He looked like a young clergyman, in his white cravat,
+    but he was very affable and good-humoured; and he showed me my place,
+    and presented me to the masters in a gentlemanly way that would have
+    put me at my ease if anything could.
+
+Physical education received due attention at Doctor Strong's school. "We
+had noble games out of doors." These outdoor sports have done more than
+anything else to develop the strength and energy of the British character.
+Thoughtful educators everywhere recognise the value of play in the
+development of the physical, the intellectual, and the spiritual nature as
+taught by Froebel. The love of play has been one of the distinctive
+elements of the British people.
+
+Doctor Strong's personal influence was good. "He was the idol of the whole
+school." He was not coercive nor restrictive; he was an inspiration to
+effort and to manliness of conduct. "He was the kindest of men," full of
+sympathy with boyhood and with individual boys. "He had a simple faith in
+him that might have touched the stone hearts of the very urns upon the
+wall." Mr. Wickfield told David that he feared some of the boys might take
+advantage of his kindness and faith, but boys do not abuse the confidence
+of such teachers. "He appealed in everything to the honour and good faith
+of the boys, and avowed his intention to rely on the possession of these
+qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy." David says this "worked
+wonders." He had no spies in schoolroom or grounds. He trusted his boys in
+a frank, unconventional way, and they proved themselves worthy of trust.
+In such an atmosphere a boy grows to be reliable. He does not need to be
+hypocritical or false. "The boys all became warmly attached to the
+school--I am sure I did for one, and I never knew, in all my time, of any
+other boy being otherwise--and learned with a good will, desiring to do it
+credit."
+
+They had independent self-activity. "We had plenty of liberty." Without
+this no child can reach his best growth. The boys did not abuse their
+privilege. They respected themselves more because they had liberty. "As I
+remember, we were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace,
+by our appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor
+Strong's boys."
+
+The community ideal was wrought into the lives of the boys by their
+experience in this model school. "We all felt that we had a part in the
+management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity." The
+highest work of schools, colleges, and universities is to fill the lives
+of men and women with the apperceptive centres of the community ideal.
+Christian community can not be made clear by books or teaching or sermons
+unless its foundations are laid by experience, by "sharing in the
+management" of the conditions of the life of the boy, or girl, or student.
+Froebel pleaded for a college and university education in which students
+should "share in the management." Dickens applied this high ideal.
+
+There is another most important element in Doctor Strong's influence. He
+was not "a human barrel organ," like Mr. Feeder, "playing a little list of
+Greek and Latin tunes over and over again without any variation." He was
+an original investigator. He was preparing a dictionary of Greek roots. He
+was not merely an accumulator of knowledge as it had been prepared by some
+one else. He was not a mere canal through which knowledge slowly flowed
+through artificial channels, nor a marsh in which knowledge had become
+confused and stagnant, nor a dead sea into which knowledge flowed, but
+from which there was no outlet. He was a fresh fountain from which
+knowledge came clear and pure. So the boys gained knowledge readily from
+him, but, far beyond knowledge, they learned incidentally the habit of
+work, and were filled with the desire to add to the store of knowledge as
+a basis for the progressive evolution of humanity.
+
+What a farce it is to say that Dickens was not conscious of the pedagogic
+value of his work. He had great facility in learning, but he was also a
+hard student. No one could have written so much and so wisely about
+education unless he had studied carefully the thought of the most advanced
+educators.
+
+David's aunt had the wisdom to try to develop in him the characteristics
+of excellence that were lacking in his parents. This is a thought that is
+slowly making its way in the minds of educators.
+
+    "But what I want you to be, Trot," resumed my aunt--"I don't mean
+    physically, but morally; you are very well physically--is a firm
+    fellow. A fine firm fellow, with a will of your own. With resolution,"
+    said my aunt, shaking her cap at me, and clinching her hand. "With
+    determination. With character, Trot--with strength of character that
+    is not to be influenced, except on good reason, by anybody, or by
+    anything. That's what I want you to be. That's what your father and
+    mother might both have been, Heaven knows, and been the better for
+    it."
+
+    I intimated that I hoped I should be what she described.
+
+    "That you may begin, in a small way, to have a reliance upon yourself,
+    and to act for yourself," said my aunt, "I shall send you upon your
+    trip alone."
+
+    In pursuance of my aunt's kind scheme, I was shortly afterward fitted
+    out with a handsome purse of money and a portmanteau, and tenderly
+    dismissed upon my expedition. At parting, my aunt gave me some good
+    advice and a good many kisses; and said that as her object was that I
+    should look about me, and should think a little, she would recommend
+    me to stay a few days in London, if I liked it, either on my way down
+    into Suffolk, or in coming back. In a word, I was at liberty to do as
+    I would for three weeks or a month; and no other conditions were
+    imposed upon my freedom than the before-mentioned thinking and looking
+    about me, and a pledge to write three times a week and faithfully
+    report myself.
+
+Betsy Trotwood may safely be taken as a model in dealing with boys during
+the adolescent period, and with young men just about to start in the real
+work of life.
+
+Dickens puts into the words of David Copperfield a statement of the
+elements of character which he regarded as most essential to success in
+life, and which he would take pains to develop by the training in homes
+and schools.
+
+    I will only add to what I have already written of my perseverance at
+    this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which
+    then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong
+    part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on
+    looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very
+    fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and
+    not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have
+    done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without
+    the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no
+    matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I
+    then formed. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in
+    life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have
+    devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great
+    aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have
+    never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can
+    claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain,
+    hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such
+    thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some
+    fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which
+    some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to
+    stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thoroughgoing,
+    ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything on
+    which I could throw my whole self and never to affect depreciation of
+    my work, whatever it was, I find, now, to have been my golden rules.
+
+Bleak House, which is so rich in illustrations of bad training, contains
+little direct teaching regarding the proper training of children.
+
+The value of a doll in the training of a girl is shown in Esther's early
+experience. The doll had a real personal relationship to her. She made it
+her confidant, and in various ways gave it a distinct personal standing.
+She could pour out to it the joys and sorrows of her heart more fully than
+to any real person. The doll was an outlet for the pent-up emotions that
+were checked in their flow by the adults with whom she was associated. A
+doll is more than a mere plaything to a child; or perhaps it would be more
+exact to say play with a doll means much more than most people believe.
+Dickens was able to sympathize with even a little girl.
+
+Esther says:
+
+    I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to
+    my doll, when we were alone together, "Now, Dolly, I am not clever,
+    you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!" And
+    so she used to sit propped up in a great armchair, with her beautiful
+    complexion and rosy lips, staring at me--or not so much at me, I
+    think, as at nothing--while I busily stitched away, and told her every
+    one of my secrets.
+
+    My dear old doll! I was such a shy little thing that I seldom dared to
+    open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody else. It
+    almost makes me cry to think what a relief it used to be to me, when I
+    came home from school of a day, to run upstairs to my room, and say
+    "Oh you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!" and
+    then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the elbow of her great
+    chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we parted. I had always
+    rather a noticing way--not a quick way, oh, no!--a silent way of
+    noticing what passed before me, and thinking I should like to
+    understand it better. I have not by any means a quick understanding.
+    When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it seems to brighten.
+
+When on her lonely birthday she had been told by her godmother that a
+shadow hung over her life she says:
+
+    I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek
+    against mine wet with tears; and holding that solitary friend upon my
+    bosom cried myself to sleep.
+
+    Dear, dear, to think how much time we passed alone together afterward,
+    and how often I repeated to the doll the story of my birthday, and
+    confided to her that I would try, as hard as ever I could, to repair
+    the fault I had been born with (of which I confessedly felt guilty and
+    yet innocent), and would strive as I grew up to be industrious,
+    contented, and kind-hearted, and to do some good to some one, and win
+    some love to myself if I could.
+
+Mr. Jarndyce emphasized the opinion of David Copperfield when he gave
+advice to Richard Carstone:
+
+    "Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own efforts. Never
+    separate the two, like the heathen wagoner. Constancy in love is a
+    good thing; but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in
+    every kind of effort. If you had the abilities of all the great men,
+    past and present, you could do nothing well without sincerely meaning
+    it and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition that any
+    real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever
+    will or can be, wrested from fortune by fits and starts, leave that
+    wrong idea here."
+
+Mr. George gave Woolwich Bagnet kindly counsel regarding his duty to his
+mother:
+
+    "The time will come, my boy," pursues the trooper, "when this hair of
+    your mother's will be gray, and this forehead all crossed and
+    recrossed with wrinkles--and a fine old lady she'll be then. Take
+    care, while you are young, that you can think in those days, '_I_
+    never whitened a hair of her dear head--_I_ never marked a sorrowful
+    line in her face!' For of all the many things that you can think of
+    when you are a man, you had better have _that_ by you, Woolwich!"
+
+Mr. Meagles in Little Dorrit, good, kind Mr. Meagles, explained why Little
+Dorrit, amid all her trials and all her difficulties, had grown to be so
+true a woman, loved by so many people.
+
+    If she had constantly thought of herself, and settled with herself
+    that everybody visited this place upon her, turned it against her, and
+    cast it at her, she would have led an irritable and probably a useless
+    existence. Yet I have heard tell, Tattycoram, that her young life has
+    been one of active resignation, goodness, and noble service. Shall I
+    tell you what I consider those eyes of hers that were here just now,
+    to have always looked at, to get that expression?
+
+    "Yes, if you please, sir."
+
+    "Duty, Tattycoram. Begin it early, and do it well; and there is no
+    antecedent to it, in any origin or station, that will tell against us
+    with the Almighty, or with ourselves."
+
+Although Mr. Pocket was not able to manage his own household and family,
+chiefly owing to the hopeless incompetence of Mrs. Pocket, he was an
+excellent teacher, and knew how to treat his pupils. Pip found him a most
+satisfactory guide.
+
+    He advised my attending certain places in London for the acquisition
+    of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the
+    functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that
+    with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage
+    me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through
+    his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed
+    himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner: and I
+    may state at once that he was always so zealous and honourable in
+    fulfilling his compact with me that he made me zealous and honourable
+    in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master,
+    I had no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he
+    gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice.
+
+In Our Mutual Friend Betty Higden and Mrs. Boffin are given as true types
+of the proper spirit of adulthood toward childhood. Betty, poor as she
+was, wept at the thought of parting from Johnny, and Mrs. Boffin said to
+her:
+
+    "If you trust the dear child to me he shall have the best of homes,
+    the best of care, the best of education, the best of friends. Please
+    God, I will be a true good mother to him!"
+
+Jemmy Lirriper had an ideal training in many ways. He had freedom and
+love, and his imagination and individuality were developed as fully as
+Mrs. Lirriper and the Major could secure these desirable results. His
+boyish personality received respectful consideration. The Major's method
+of revealing mathematical conceptions and processes, while it did not
+fully reveal Froebel's processes in reaching the same results (even the
+great mathematicians have been slow in doing that), was much in advance of
+the pedagogy of his time, and it shows the spirit in which Dickens would
+have the child treated, and this is much more important than mathematics.
+
+Mrs. Lirriper tells the story:
+
+    My dear, the system upon which the Major commenced, and, as I may say,
+    perfected Jemmy's learning when he was so small that if the dear was
+    on the other side of the table you had to look under it instead of
+    over it to see him with his mother's own bright hair in beautiful
+    curls, is a thing that ought to be known to the Throne and Lords and
+    Commons, and then might obtain some promotion for the Major, which he
+    well deserves, and would be none the worse for (speaking between
+    friends, L. S. D-ically). When the Major first undertook his learning
+    he says to me:
+
+    "I'm going, Madam," he says, "to make our child a Calculating Boy."
+
+    "Major," I says, "you terrify me, and may do the pet a permanent
+    injury you would never forgive yourself."
+
+    "Madam," says the Major, "I would regret if this fine mind was not
+    early cultivated. But mark me, Madam," says the Major, holding up his
+    forefinger, "cultivated on a principle that will make it a delight."
+
+    "Major," I says, "I will be candid with you and tell you openly that
+    if ever I find the dear child fall off in his appetite I shall know it
+    is his calculations, and shall put a stop to them at two minutes'
+    notice. Or if I find them mounting to his head," I says, "or striking
+    anyways cold to his stomach or leading to anything approaching
+    flabbiness in his legs, the result will be the same, but, Major, you
+    are a clever man and have seen much, and you love the child and are
+    his own godfather, and if you feel a confidence in trying, try."
+
+    "Spoken, Madam," says the Major, "like Emma Lirriper. All I have to
+    ask, Madam, is that you will leave my godson and myself to make a week
+    or two's preparations for surprising you, and that you will give leave
+    to have up and down any small articles not actually in use that I may
+    require from the kitchen."
+
+    "From the kitchen, Major!" I says, half feeling as if he had a mind to
+    cook the child.
+
+    "From the kitchen," says the Major, and smiles and swells, and at the
+    same time looks taller.
+
+    So I passed my word, and the Major and the dear boy were shut up
+    together for half an hour at a time through a certain while, and never
+    could I hear anything going on betwixt them but talking and laughing
+    and Jemmy clapping his hands and screaming out numbers, so I says to
+    myself "It has not harmed him yet," nor could I, on examining the dear
+    find any signs of it anywhere about him, which was likewise a great
+    relief. At last one day Jemmy brings me a card in joke in the Major's
+    neat writing "The Messrs. Jemmy Jackman," for we had given him the
+    Major's other name too, "request the honour of Mrs. Lirriper's company
+    at the Jackman Institution in the front parlour this evening at five,
+    military time, to witness a few slight feats of elementary
+    arithmetic." And, if you'll believe me, there in the front parlour at
+    five punctually to the moment was the Major behind the Pembroke table
+    with both leaves up and a lot of things from the kitchen tidily set
+    out on old newspapers spread atop of it, and there was the Mite stood
+    up on a chair, with his rosy cheeks flushing and his eyes sparkling
+    clusters of diamonds.
+
+    "Now, Gran," says he, "oo tit down and don't oo touch ler poople"--for
+    he saw with every one of those diamonds of his that I was going to
+    give him a squeeze.
+
+    "Very well, sir," I says, "I am obedient in this good company, I am
+    sure." And I sits down in the easy-chair that was put for me, shaking
+    my sides.
+
+    But picture my admiration when the Major, going on almost as quick as
+    if he was conjuring, sets out all the articles he names, and says,
+    "Three saucepans, an Italian iron, a hand bell, a toasting fork, a
+    nutmeg grater, four potlids, a spice box, two egg cups, and a chopping
+    board--how many?" and when that Mite instantly cries "Tifteen, tut
+    down tive and carry ler 'topping board," and then claps his hands,
+    draws up his legs, and dances on his chair!
+
+    My dear, with the same astonishing ease and correctness, him and the
+    Major added up the tables, chairs, and sofy, the picters, fender and
+    fire irons, their own selves, me and the cat, and the eyes in Miss
+    Wozenham's head, and whenever the sum was done Young Roses and
+    Diamonds claps his hands and draws up his legs and dances on his
+    chair.
+
+    The pride of the Major! ("_Here's_ a mind, Ma'am!" he says to me
+    behind his hand.)
+
+    Then he says aloud, "We now come to the next elementary rule--which is
+    called----"
+
+    "Umtraction!" cries Jemmy.
+
+    "Right," says the Major. "We have here a toasting fork, a potato in
+    its natural state, two potlids, one egg-cup, a wooden spoon, and two
+    skewers, from which it is necessary, for commercial purposes, to
+    subtract a sprat gridiron, a small pickle jar, two lemons, one pepper
+    castor, a black-beetle trap, and a knob of the dresser drawer--what
+    remains?"
+
+    "Toatin fork!" cries Jemmy.
+
+    "In numbers, how many?" says the Major.
+
+    "One!" cries Jemmy.
+
+    ("_Here's_ a boy, Ma'am!" says the Major to me, behind his hand.)
+
+    "We now approach the next elementary rule--which is entitled----"
+
+    "Tickleication," cries Jemmy.
+
+    "Correct," says the Major.
+
+    But, my dear, to relate to you in detail the way in which they
+    multiplied fourteen sticks of firewood by two bits of ginger and a
+    larding needle, or divided pretty well everything else there was on
+    the table by the heater of the Italian iron and a chamber candlestick,
+    and got a lemon over, would make my head spin round and round and
+    round, as it did at the time. So I says, "If you'll excuse my
+    addressing the chair, Professor Jackman, I think the period of the
+    lecture has now arrived when it becomes necessary that I should take a
+    good hug of this young scholar." Upon which Jemmy calls out from his
+    station on the chair, "Gran, oo open oor arms and me'll make a 'pring
+    into 'em." So I opened my arms to him, as I had opened my sorrowful
+    heart when his poor young mother lay a-dying, and he had his jump and
+    we had a good long hug together, and the Major, prouder than any
+    peacock, says to me behind his hand, "You need not let him know it,
+    Madam" (which I certainly need not, for the Major was quite audible),
+    "but he is a boy!"
+
+Doctor Marigold's training of the little deaf-mute girl and "Old
+Cheeseman's" treatment of children are revelations of the mature ideals of
+Dickens regarding the proper attitude of adulthood toward childhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+COMMUNITY.
+
+
+While the opinions of Dickens on the subject of community may not seem
+very advanced to some of the most progressive men and women of the
+present, they were much ahead of his own time, and they are beyond the
+practice of our time.
+
+    I have had my share of sorrows--more than the common lot, perhaps, but
+    I have borne them ill. I have broken where I should have bent; and
+    have mused and brooded, when my spirit should have mixed with all
+    God's great creation. The men who learn endurance are they who call
+    the whole world brother. I have turned _from_ the world, and I pay the
+    penalty.
+
+Thus spoke Mr. Haredale to Edward Chester, in Barnaby Rudge.
+
+No one who has lived since the time of Dickens could write a more striking
+statement of the responsibility of every man for his brother, and of the
+terrific consequences of neglect of the duties of brotherhood both to him
+who is neglected and to him who neglects, than Dickens wrote in Dombey and
+Son. There is no phase of sociology that has stepped beyond the position
+taken by Dickens in the following selection:
+
+    Was Mr. Dombey's master vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an
+    unnatural characteristic? It might be worth while, sometimes to
+    inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether,
+    in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be
+    unnatural. Coop any son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow
+    range, and bind the prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile
+    worship of it on the part of the few timid or designing people
+    standing round, and what is Nature to the willing captive who has
+    never risen up upon the wings of a free mind--drooping and useless
+    soon--to see her in her comprehensive truth!
+
+    Alas! are there so few things in the world about us most unnatural,
+    and yet most natural in being so! Hear the magistrate or judge
+    admonish the unnatural outcast of society; unnatural in brutal habits,
+    unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all
+    distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice,
+    in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But
+    follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at
+    every breath he draws, goes down into their dens, lying within the
+    echoes of our carriage wheels and daily tread upon the pavement
+    stones. Look round upon the world of odious sights--millions of
+    immortal creatures have no other world on earth--at the lightest
+    mention of which humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living in the
+    next street, stops her ears, and lisps, "I don't believe it!" Breathe
+    the polluted air, foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health
+    and life; and have every sense conferred upon our race for its delight
+    and happiness, offended, sickened, and disgusted, and made a channel
+    by which misery and death alone can enter. Vainly attempt to think of
+    any simple plant, or flower, or wholesome weed that, set in this fetid
+    bed, could have its natural growth or put its little leaves off to the
+    sun as God designed it. And then, calling up some ghastly child, with
+    stunted form and wicked face, hold forth on its unnatural sinfulness,
+    and lament its being so early far away from heaven--but think a little
+    of its having been conceived, and born and bred, in hell!
+
+    Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the
+    health of man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from
+    vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering
+    in a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to
+    corrupt the better portions of a town. But if the moral pestilence
+    that rises with them, and in the eternal laws of outraged nature, is
+    inseparable from them, could be made discernible too, how terrible the
+    revelation! Then should we see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft,
+    murder, and a long train of nameless sins against the natural
+    affections and repulsions of mankind, overhanging the devoted spots,
+    and creeping on, to blight the innocent and spread contagion among
+    the pure. Then should we see how the same poisoned fountains that flow
+    into our hospitals and lazar houses, inundate the jails, and make the
+    convict ships swim deep, and roll across the seas, and overrun vast
+    continents with crime. Then should we stand appalled to know that
+    where we generate disease to strike our children down and entail
+    itself on unborn generations, there also we breed, by the same certain
+    process, infancy that knows no innocence, youth without modesty or
+    shame, maturity that is mature in nothing but in suffering and guilt,
+    blasted old age that is a scandal on the form we bear. Unnatural
+    humanity! When we shall gather grapes from thorns, and figs from
+    thistles; when fields of grain shall spring up from the offal in the
+    byways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom in the fat churchyards
+    that they cherish; then we may look for natural humanity and find it
+    growing from such seed.
+
+    Oh, for a good spirit who would take the housetops off, with a more
+    potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a
+    Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to
+    swell the retinue of the destroying angel as he moves forth among
+    them! For only one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the
+    scenes of our too long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air
+    where vice and fever propagate together, raining the tremendous and
+    social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming
+    thicker! Bright and blessed the morning that should rise on such a
+    night; for men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own
+    making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and
+    eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common
+    origin, owing one duty to the father of one family, and tending to one
+    common end to make the world a better place!
+
+    Not the less bright and blessed would that day be for rousing some who
+    never have looked out upon the world of human life around them to a
+    knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted
+    with a perversion of Nature in their own contracted sympathies and
+    estimates; as great and yet as natural in its development when once
+    begun as the lowest degradation known.
+
+This selection is worth rereading. The most advanced thinkers will
+understand it best.
+
+Dickens showed that he understood clearly that a man becomes marred and
+degraded by shutting the world out of his heart, even though the reason
+for the exclusion may in itself be good. Love is the highest of all
+sentiments, and Dickens used it in the case of Mr. Wickfield to show that
+even the tender love he had for his dead wife became a source of evil to
+him, when it made him cease to think of the sorrows of his fellows, and
+only of his own affliction. Either in joy or sorrow the benefit to the
+individual results from a deepening of his consciousness of unity with the
+whole of humanity. Mr. Wickfield said to David:
+
+    "Weak indulgence has ruined me. Indulgence in remembrance and
+    indulgence in forgetfulness. My natural grief for my child's mother
+    turned to disease; my natural love for my child turned to disease. I
+    have infected everything I touched. I have brought misery on what I
+    dearly love, I know--_You_ know! I thought it possible that I could
+    truly love one creature in the world, and not love the rest; I thought
+    it possible that I could truly mourn for one creature gone out of the
+    world, and not have some part in the grief of all who mourned. Thus
+    the lessons of my life have been perverted! I have preyed on my own
+    morbid coward heart, and it has preyed on me. Sordid in my grief,
+    sordid in my love, sordid in my miserable escape from the darker side
+    of both, oh, see the ruin I am, and hate me, shun me!"
+
+In Tom Tiddler's Ground Dickens attacks the ideal that there may be merit
+in seclusion. Mr. Traveller visits the hermit who had become famous, and
+who was so vain on account of his dirt and simplicity of living, and he
+tells him some plain truths regarding himself and the duty of man to his
+fellow-men.
+
+    "Now," said he, "that a man--even behind bars, in a blanket and a
+    skewer--should tell me that he can see from day to day any orders or
+    conditions of men, women, or children, who can by any possibility
+    teach him that it is anything but the miserablist drivelling for a
+    human creature to quarrel with his social nature--not to go so far as
+    to say, to renounce his common human decency, for that is an extreme
+    case, or who can teach him that he can in any wise separate himself
+    from his kind and the habits of his kind, without becoming a
+    deteriorated spectacle calculated to give the Devil (and perhaps the
+    monkeys) pleasure--is something wonderful!"
+
+    "You think yourself profoundly wise," said the Hermit.
+
+    "Bah," returned Mr. Traveller, "there is little wisdom in knowing that
+    every man must be up and doing, and that all mankind are made
+    dependent on one another.
+
+    "It is a moral impossibility," continued Mr. Traveller, "that any son
+    or daughter of Adam can stand on this ground that I put my foot on, or
+    on any ground that mortal treads, and gainsay the healthy tenure on
+    which we hold our existence."
+
+    "Which is," sneered the Hermit, "according to you----"
+
+    "Which is," returned the Traveller, "according to Eternal Providence,
+    that we must arise and wash our faces and do our gregarious work and
+    act and react on each other, leaving only the idiot and the palsied to
+    sit blinking in the corner."
+
+Dickens saves Little Emily from her great sorrow, and lifts the load of
+"shame" from her heart by giving her the opportunity of helping to care
+for others.
+
+    But theer was some poor folks aboard as had illness among 'em, and she
+    took care of _them_; and theer was the children in our company, and
+    she took care of _them_; and so she got to be busy, and to be doing
+    good, and that helped her.
+
+And in the same great book he ridicules the misuse of the sacred word
+"society" by applying it to the sham and mockery of all that should be
+truly helpful and ennobling in the social intercourse of mankind.
+
+    Or perhaps this _is_ the Desert of Sahara! for, though Julia has a
+    stately house, and mighty company, and sumptuous dinners every day, I
+    see no green growth near her; nothing that can ever come to fruit or
+    flower. What Julia calls "society," I see among it Mr. Jack Maldon,
+    from his Patent Place, sneering at the hand that gave it to him, and
+    speaking to me of the Doctor, as "so charmingly antique."
+
+    But when society is the name of such hollow gentlemen and ladies,
+    Julia, and when its breeding is professed indifference to everything
+    that can advance or can retard mankind, I think we must have lost
+    ourselves in the same Desert of Sahara, and had better find the way
+    out.
+
+When he spoke of Little Dorrit as "inspired" he proceeded to say:
+
+    She was inspired to be something which was not what the rest were, and
+    to be that something, different and laborious, for the sake of the
+    rest. Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a
+    priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the
+    lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!
+
+Dickens had reached the great conception that the duty of every individual
+is to add something by his life to the general good. That we should not
+leave the world as we found it; that our work is not done well if we spend
+our lives in digging among the richest treasures of the past and revealing
+them unselfishly to our fellow-men, but that each should make some
+existing thing or condition better, or reveal some new thought or
+principle, or plan, or process, so that humanity may climb more easily and
+more certainly from the mists and shadows to the higher glory of the
+clearer light.
+
+Mr. Doyce had made an invention, but had met with almost insuperable
+difficulties in getting it before the people.
+
+    "It is much to be regretted," said Clennam, "that you ever turned your
+    thoughts that way, Mr. Doyce."
+
+    "True, sir, true, to a certain extent. But what is a man to do? If he
+    has the misfortune to strike out something serviceable to the nation,
+    he must follow where it leads him."
+
+    "Hadn't he better let it go?" asked Clennam.
+
+    "He can't do it," said Doyce, shaking his head, with a thoughtful
+    smile. "It's not put into his head to be buried. It's put into his
+    head to be made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to
+    the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery
+    on the same terms."
+
+    "That is to say," said Arthur, with a growing admiration of his quiet
+    companion, "you are not fully discouraged even now?"
+
+    "I have no right to be, if I am," returned the other. "The thing is as
+    true as it ever was."
+
+Throughout his writings Dickens vigorously condemns the class distinctions
+that separate mankind into sections, and thus destroy the bond of unity
+and brotherhood that should exist between them.
+
+Miss Monflathers, in Old Curiosity Shop, drew the line very definitely
+between genteel children and the children of the poor.
+
+Mr. Dombey pompously consented to have the children of the poor educated,
+because "it is necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be
+taught to know their position." Fancy using education to prevent the unity
+of men, when its highest function should be the revelation of community
+and the qualification of individuals for the functions of brotherhood.
+
+In David Copperfield the pathetic side of the evil of class distinctions
+is shown by the appeals of Mr. Peggotty to Mrs. Steerforth that she would
+consent to her son's marriage with Little Emily, and her indignant refusal
+to allow her son to do so.
+
+In Bleak House Sir Leicester Dedlock was amazed at the audacity of Mr.
+Rouncewell's democratic ideas, and his mind was filled with gloomy
+forebodings of the evil that such principles as those held by Mr.
+Rouncewell would work in the social organization as planned and fixed by
+the Dedlock class. These were his thoughts:
+
+    From the village school of Chesney Wold, intact as it is this minute,
+    to the whole framework of society; from the whole framework of
+    society, to the aforesaid framework receiving tremendous cracks in
+    consequence of people (ironmasters, lead mistresses, and what not) not
+    minding their catechism, and getting out of the station unto which
+    they are called--necessarily and forever, according to Sir Leicester's
+    rapid logic, the first station in which they happen to find
+    themselves; and from that, to their educating other people out of
+    _their_ stations, and so obliterating the landmarks, and opening the
+    flood gates, and all the rest of it; this is the swift progress of the
+    Dedlock mind.
+
+In American Notes, after describing at length the admirable co-operative
+arrangements, and the varied means of culture, amusement, and refinement
+enjoyed by the young women in the factories at Lowell, Mass., he says:
+
+    The large class of readers, startled by these facts, will exclaim with
+    one voice, "How very preposterous!" On my deferentially inquiring why,
+    they will answer, "These things are above their station." In reply to
+    that objection, I would beg to ask what their station is.
+
+    It is their station to work. And they _do_ work. They labour in these
+    mills, upon an average, twelve hours a day, which is unquestionably
+    work. And pretty tight work too. Perhaps it is above their station to
+    indulge in such amusements on any terms. Are we quite sure that we in
+    England have not formed our ideas of the "station" of working people
+    from accustoming ourselves to the contemplation of that class as they
+    are, and not as they might be? I think that if we examine our own
+    feelings, we shall find that the pianos, and the circulating
+    libraries, and even the Lowell Offering, startle us with their
+    novelty, and not by their bearing upon any abstract question of right
+    or wrong.
+
+    For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of to-day
+    cheerfully done and the occupation of to-morrow cheerfully looked to,
+    any one of these pursuits is not most humanizing and laudable. I know
+    no station which is rendered more endurable to the person in it, or
+    more safe to the person out of it, by having ignorance for its
+    associate. I know no station which has a right to monopolize the means
+    of mutual instruction, improvement, and rational entertainment; or
+    which has ever continued to be a station very long, after seeking to
+    do so.
+
+Walter Wilding planned an ideal relationship between employer and employed
+in No Thoroughfare. He advertised for a housekeeper so that he "might sit
+daily at the head of the table at which the people in my employment eat
+together, and may eat of the same roast and boiled, and drink of the same
+beer, and one and all form a kind of family."
+
+He planned, too, to train his employees to sing "Handel, Mozart, Haydn,
+Kent, Purcell, Doctor Arne, Greene, Mendelssohn, to make music a part of
+the bond between us. We will form a Choir in some quiet church near the
+Corner."
+
+He touched the true chord of community when Joey Ladle used the word
+"they." Joey asked, when Mr. Wilding unfolded his plan:
+
+    "Is all to live in the house, Young Master Wilding? The two other
+    cellarmen, the three porters, the two 'prentices, and the odd men?"
+
+    "Yes. I hope we shall all be a united family, Joey."
+
+    "Ah!" said Joey. "I hope they may be."
+
+    "They? Rather say _we_, Joey."
+
+Not many employers have reached the ideals of Dickens yet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+NUTRITION AS A FACTOR IN EDUCATION.
+
+
+The influence of diet in the development not only of physical power, but
+of intellectual and spiritual power also, has now begun to attract general
+attention. There is no longer any doubt that the character of the bones,
+of the muscles, of the nerves, and of the brain itself, is decided to a
+considerable extent by the food that is eaten. There is no longer any
+doubt that many children have been urged to do work which becomes
+destructive beyond the fatigue point of their little brains, when their
+brains have not been properly nourished, either from lack of proper food
+or of properly cooked food, or from eating too much or too little.
+
+The deterioration of the physical system, and especially the deterioration
+of the neurological system, is one of the most startling subjects within
+the range of view of educators and psychologists. One of the most
+attractive departments of child study is that which investigates the means
+of deciding from external manifestations of form, proportion, action,
+voice, and attitude the nature and condition of the brain and neurological
+system of the child. When this discovery has been made, however, it but
+prepares the way for further investigation to discover in what way
+abnormal or weak systems may be helped to become normal and strong.
+
+One of the fundamental things to be done by scientists and educators is to
+discover the kinds of food adapted to different stages of the child's
+growth, and to the varied functions of study and work required of him. By
+proper nutrition and by proper exercise much may be done to increase the
+power and efficiency of the body and the brain and the rest of the
+neurological system.
+
+Dickens saw the need of attention to the problems of nutrition very
+clearly. He began to write about it in Oliver Twist.
+
+He first exposed the horrors of baby farming, with its terrible percentage
+of deaths, resulting almost entirely from the villainous indifference to
+the diet of the children. Children yet die in homes from similar causes,
+or, if they do not die, they go through life weakened and dwarfed.
+
+    For the next eight or ten months Oliver was the victim of a systematic
+    course of treachery and deception. He was brought up by hand. The
+    hungry and destitute situation of the infant orphan was duly reported
+    by the workhouse authorities to the parish authorities. The parish
+    authorities inquired with dignity of the workhouse authorities whether
+    there was no female then domiciled "in the house" who was in a
+    situation to impart to Oliver Twist the consolation and nourishment of
+    which he stood in need. The workhouse authorities replied with
+    humility that there was not. Upon this the parish authorities
+    magnanimously and humanely resolved that Oliver should be "farmed,"
+    or, in other words, that he should be despatched to a branch workhouse
+    some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders
+    against the poor laws rolled about the floor all day, without the
+    inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the
+    parental superintendence of an elderly female, who received the
+    culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence halfpenny per
+    small head per week. Sevenpence halfpenny's worth per week is a good
+    round diet for a child; a great deal may be got for sevenpence
+    halfpenny, quite enough to overload its stomach, and make it
+    uncomfortable. The elderly female was a woman of wisdom and
+    experience; she knew what was good for children; and she had a very
+    accurate perception of what was good for herself. So she appropriated
+    the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own use, and consigned
+    the rising parochial generation to even a shorter allowance than was
+    originally provided for them. Thereby finding in the lowest depth a
+    deeper still; and proving herself a very great experimental
+    philosopher.
+
+The system did not work well for the children.
+
+    For at the very moment when a child had contrived to exist upon the
+    smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did
+    perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it
+    sickened from want or cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got
+    half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable
+    little being was usually summoned into another world, and there
+    gathered to the fathers it had never known in this.
+
+    It can not be expected that this system of farming would produce any
+    very extraordinary or luxuriant crop. Oliver Twist's ninth birthday
+    found him a pale, thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and
+    decidedly small in circumference. It _was_ his ninth birthday; and he
+    was keeping it in the coal cellar with a select party of two other
+    young gentlemen, who, after participating with him in a sound
+    thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be hungry.
+
+The famous meal in the workhouse when Oliver asked for more was intended
+to direct attention to the way children were fed and treated in
+institutions. The boys were fed on gruel.
+
+    Of this festive composition each boy had one porringer, and no
+    more--except on occasions of great public rejoicing, when he had two
+    ounces and a quarter of bread besides. The bowls never wanted washing.
+    The boys polished them with their spoons till they shone again; and
+    when they had performed this operation (which never took very long,
+    the spoons being nearly as large as the bowls), they would sit staring
+    at the copper, with such eager eyes, as if they could have devoured
+    the very bricks of which it was composed; employing themselves,
+    meanwhile, in sucking their fingers most assiduously, with the view of
+    catching up any stray splashes of gruel that might have been cast
+    thereon. Boys have generally excellent appetites. Oliver Twist and his
+    companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months;
+    at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger that one boy who
+    was tall for his age, and hadn't been used to that sort of thing (for
+    his father had kept a small cookshop), hinted darkly to his companions
+    that unless he had another basin of gruel _per diem_, he was afraid he
+    might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next to him, who
+    happened to be a weakly youth of tender age. He had a wild, hungry
+    eye; and they implicitly believed him. A council was held; lots were
+    cast who should walk up to the master after supper that evening, and
+    ask for more; and it fell to Oliver Twist.
+
+    The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in his
+    cook's uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants
+    ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long
+    grace was said over a short commons. The gruel disappeared; the boys
+    whispered each other and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbours
+    nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless
+    with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master,
+    basin and spoon in hand, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:
+
+    "Please, sir, I want some more."
+
+    The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed
+    in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and
+    then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralyzed
+    with wonder; the boys with fear.
+
+    "What!" said the master at length, in a faint voice.
+
+    "Please, sir," replied Oliver, "I want some more."
+
+    The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle; pinioned his
+    arms; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.
+
+    The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into
+    the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high
+    chair, said:
+
+    "Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for
+    more."
+
+    There was a general start. Horror was depicted in every countenance.
+
+    "For _more_!" said Mr. Limbkins. "Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer
+    me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had
+    eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?"
+
+    "He did, sir," replied Bumble.
+
+    "That boy will be hung," said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. "I
+    know that boy will be hung."
+
+Having shown how infants were starved in "farming," and how boys were
+starved in the workhouses, he next directed attention to the way
+apprentices were treated.
+
+Mr. Sowerberry was an undertaker, who decided to take Oliver from the
+workhouse. He took Oliver "upon liking," which meant that "if he could get
+enough work out of him without putting too much food into him, he should
+keep him for a term of years to do what he liked with him."
+
+When Oliver had been driven to desperation by Noah Claypole, and had
+punished him as he deserved, Mrs. Sowerberry sent for Mr. Bumble. When Mr.
+Bumble asked Oliver if he was not afraid of him, Oliver bravely answered
+"No!" The Beadle was petrified with amazement, and he accounted for
+Oliver's wickedness by saying:
+
+    "It's meat."
+
+    "What?" exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.
+
+    "Meat, ma'am, meat," replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. "You've
+    overfed him, ma'am. You've raised a artificial soul and spirit in him,
+    ma'am, unbecoming a person of his condition; as the board, Mrs.
+    Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you. What have
+    paupers to do with soul or spirit? It's quite enough that we let 'em
+    have live bodies. If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma'am, this would
+    never have happened."
+
+    "Dear, dear!" ejaculated Mrs. Sowerberry, piously raising her eyes to
+    the kitchen ceiling; "this comes of being liberal!"
+
+    The liberality of Mrs. Sowerberry to Oliver had consisted in a profuse
+    bestowal upon him of all the dirty odds and ends which nobody else
+    would eat.
+
+By this conversation Dickens meant to teach that a well-fed child is a
+different type from one who is not properly nourished; that food has an
+influence on the spirit, as well as on the body. He did not disapprove of
+Oliver's spirit, but he heartily commended him for resenting the way he
+was treated. This lesson was needed too, as children were expected to
+submit uncomplainingly to those who were their legal guardians, whether
+strangers or parents. Now, largely through Dickens, children are not only
+encouraged to defend themselves against cruel and tyrannical guardians or
+parents, and to run away from them, but the state itself will take them
+away, if cruelty is proved against those who should be their protectors.
+
+Dickens also revealed by this incident the meanness of adults not only in
+institutions but in homes, in giving to the children the "odds and ends,"
+the scraps, the parts of the fowl or the meat that older people do not
+care for. He brought the matter up again in Great Expectations. At the
+Christmas dinner Pip "was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of
+the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when
+living, had least reason to be vain."
+
+One of the reasons given by Snawley to Squeers to induce him to take his
+stepsons at a lower rate was that "they were not great eaters."
+
+The selfishness of adulthood toward childhood, and the stupidity of the
+general idea, that children do not require good food because they are
+young and do not have to work hard, were held up to deserved ridicule, in
+Squeers's manner of breakfasting in London, and the food he provided for
+the five hungry little boys to strengthen them for their long ride to
+Yorkshire in cold weather.
+
+    He found that learned gentleman sitting at breakfast, with the three
+    little boys before noticed, and two others who had turned up by some
+    lucky chance since the interview of the previous day, ranged in a row
+    on the opposite seat. Mr. Squeers had before him a small measure of
+    coffee, a plate of hot toast, and a cold round of beef; but he was at
+    that moment intent on preparing breakfast for the little boys.
+
+    "This is two penn'orth of milk, is it, waiter?" said Mr. Squeers,
+    looking down into a large blue mug, and slanting it gently, so as to
+    get an accurate view of the quantity of liquid contained in it.
+
+    "That's two penn'orth, sir," replied the waiter.
+
+    "What a rare article milk is, to be sure, in London!" said Mr. Squeers
+    with a sigh. "Just fill that mug up with lukewarm water, William, will
+    you?"
+
+    "To the wery top, sir?" inquired the waiter. "Why, the milk will be
+    drownded."
+
+    "Never you mind that," replied Mr. Squeers. "Serve it right for being
+    so dear. You ordered that thick bread and butter for three, did you?"
+
+    "Coming directly, sir."
+
+    "You needn't hurry yourself," said Squeers; "there's plenty of time.
+    Conquer your passions, boys, and don't be eager after vittles." As he
+    uttered this moral precept, Mr. Squeers took a large bite out of the
+    cold beef, and recognised Nicholas.
+
+    "Sit down, Mr. Nickleby," said Squeers. "Here we are, a-breakfasting
+    you see!"
+
+    Nicholas did _not_ see that anybody was breakfasting, except Mr.
+    Squeers; but he bowed with all becoming reverence, and looked as
+    cheerful as he could.
+
+    "Oh! that's the milk and water, is it, William?" said Squeers. "Very
+    good; don't forget the bread and butter presently."
+
+    At this fresh mention of the bread and butter the five little boys
+    looked very eager, and followed the waiter out, with their eyes;
+    meanwhile Mr. Squeers tasted the milk and water.
+
+    "Ah!" said that gentleman, smacking his lips, "here's richness! Think
+    of the many beggars and orphans in the streets that would be glad of
+    this, little boys. A shocking thing hunger is, isn't it, Mr.
+    Nickleby?"
+
+    "Very shocking, sir," said Nicholas.
+
+    "When I say number one," pursued Mr. Squeers, putting the mug before
+    the children, "the boy on the left hand nearest the window may take a
+    drink; and when I say number two, the boy next him will go in, and so
+    till we come to number five, which is the last boy. Are you ready?"
+
+    "Yes, sir," cried the little boys with great eagerness.
+
+    "That's right," said Squeers, calmly getting on with his breakfast;
+    "keep ready till I tell you to begin. Subdue your appetites, my dears,
+    and you've conquered human natur. This is the way we inculcate
+    strength of mind, Mr. Nickleby," said the schoolmaster, turning to
+    Nicholas, and speaking with his mouth very full of beef and toast.
+
+    Nicholas murmured something--he knew not what--in reply; and the
+    little boys, dividing their gaze between the mug, the bread and butter
+    (which had by this time arrived), and every morsel which Mr. Squeers
+    took into his mouth, remained with strained eyes in torments of
+    expectation.
+
+    "Thank God for a good breakfast," said Squeers, when he had finished.
+    "Number one may take a drink."
+
+    Number one received the mug ravenously, and had just drunk enough to
+    make him wish for more, when Mr. Squeers gave the signal for number
+    two, who gave up at the same interesting moment to number three; and
+    the process was repeated until the milk and water terminated with
+    number five.
+
+    "And now," said the schoolmaster, dividing the bread and butter for
+    three into as many portions as there were children, "you had better
+    look sharp with your breakfast, the horn will blow in a minute or two,
+    and then every boy leaves off."
+
+    Permission being thus given to fall to, the boys began to eat
+    voraciously, and in desperate haste, while the schoolmaster (who was
+    in high good humour after his meal) picked his teeth with a fork, and
+    looked smilingly on. In a very short time the horn was heard.
+
+    "I thought it wouldn't be long," said Squeers, jumping up and
+    producing a little basket from under the seat; "put what you haven't
+    had time to eat in here, boys! You'll want it on the road!"
+
+Young Wackford Squeers was fed on the fattest meats, so that he might be
+kept plump and energetic, in order that he might be taken to London to
+show intending patrons how well the boys were fed in Dotheboys Hall.
+
+Again, in The Old Curiosity Shop, the starving of child servants is
+condemned by the way Sally Brass fed the Marchioness. Dick Swiveller's
+curiosity led him to peep through a crack in the kitchen door one day
+while Sally was giving the little servant her dinner.
+
+    Everything was locked up; the coal cellar, the candle box, the salt
+    box, the meat safe were all padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle
+    could have lunched upon. The pinched and meagre aspect of the place
+    would have killed a chameleon; he would have known, at the first
+    mouthful, that the air was not eatable, and must have given up the
+    ghost in despair.
+
+    The small servant stood with humility in presence of Miss Sally, and
+    hung her head.
+
+    "Are you there?" said Miss Sally.
+
+    "Yes, ma'am," was the answer, in a weak voice.
+
+    "Go farther away from the leg of mutton, or you'll be picking it, I
+    know," said Miss Sally.
+
+    The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass took a key from her
+    pocket, and opening the safe, brought from it a dreary waste of cold
+    potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge. This she placed before the
+    small servant, ordering her to sit down before it, and then, taking up
+    a great carving knife, made a mighty show of sharpening it upon the
+    carving fork.
+
+    "Do you see this?" said Miss Brass, slicing off about two square
+    inches of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and holding it out
+    on the point of the fork.
+
+    The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to see
+    every shred in it, small as it was, and answered, "Yes."
+
+    "Then don't you ever go and say," retorted Miss Sally, "that you
+    hadn't meat here. There, eat it up."
+
+    This was soon done. "Now, do you want any more?" said Miss Sally.
+
+    The hungry creature answered with a faint "No." They were evidently
+    going through an established form.
+
+    "You've been helped once to meat," said Miss Brass, summing up the
+    facts; "you have had as much as you can eat, you're asked if you want
+    any more, and you answer 'No!' Then don't you ever go and say you were
+    allowanced, mind that."
+
+Dickens showed the evil effects of eating too rapidly in his description
+of the dinner in Mrs. Pawkins's boarding house in New York, where Martin
+Chuzzlewit boarded for a short time after reaching America.
+
+    It was a numerous company, eighteen or twenty perhaps. Of these, some
+    five or six were ladies, who sat wedged together in a little phalanx
+    by themselves. All the knives and forks were working away at a rate
+    that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody
+    seemed to eat his utmost in self-defence, as if a famine were expected
+    to set in before breakfast time to-morrow morning, and it had become
+    high time to assert the first law of Nature. The poultry, which may
+    perhaps be considered to have formed the staple of the
+    entertainment--for there was a turkey at the top, a pair of ducks at
+    the bottom, and two fowls in the middle--disappeared as rapidly as if
+    every bird had had the use of its wings, and had flown in desperation
+    down a human throat. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from
+    their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the
+    assembly. The sharpest pickles vanished, whole cucumbers at once, like
+    sugarplums, and no man winked his eye. Great heaps of indigestible
+    matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and an awful
+    thing to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted their food in wedges;
+    feeding not themselves, but broods of nightmares, who were continually
+    standing at livery within them. Spare men, with lank and rigid cheeks,
+    came out unsatisfied from the destruction of heavy dishes, and glared
+    with watchful eyes upon the pastry. What Mrs. Pawkins felt each day at
+    dinner time is hidden from all human knowledge. But she had one
+    comfort. It was very soon over.
+
+Dickens repeats this criticism of rapid eating in his American Notes, when
+specifying the causes of disease among American people. He says: "The
+custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food three times a
+day and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal must be
+changed."
+
+Poor Paul Dombey was sacrificed to his father's pride. Mrs. Toodle was
+dismissed by Mr. Dombey because she dared to take his infant son with her
+when she went to see her own children. Paul was thus robbed of the natural
+food, which his sensitive nature needed so much. This was largely
+responsible for the fact that Paul was delicate. By first depriving him of
+proper food, and then sending him to Doctor Blimber's school "to learn
+everything," Mr. Dombey led directly to Paul's death. His pride and vanity
+overreached themselves.
+
+In Mrs. Pipchin's meals Dickens tried to show two things: First, the
+selfishness of adulthood in regard to children's diet as compared with its
+own; second, the absolute insufficiency of the kind of food commonly
+supplied to children for building up strong, energetic, and well-developed
+men and women.
+
+She regaled the children with a repast of "farinaceous and vegetable
+foods--chiefly rice," but she herself had a good hot dinner with mutton
+chops.
+
+The children were required to repeat a form of grace thanking Mrs.
+Pipchin for a good dinner. Oliver was told he must be thankful to the kind
+gentlemen who provided food for him in the workhouse. The same mockery of
+religion by mixing it up with the starvation of childhood is made
+ridiculous in the letter which Squeers read to the unfortunate children in
+Dotheboys Hall, pretending that it had been written by the stepmother of
+Mobbs.
+
+"Mobbs's stepmother," said Squeers, "took to her bed on hearing that he
+wouldn't eat fat, and has been very ill ever since. She wishes to know, by
+an early post, where he expects to go to if he quarrels with his vittles;
+and with what feelings he could turn up his nose at the cow's liver's
+broth, after his good master had asked a blessing on it." "Cow's liver's
+broth" would not be a very strengthening diet for children even with the
+blessing of so good a man as Squeers upon it.
+
+Dickens makes a characteristic hit at the fashionable idea which was
+popular at one time, that it was rather indelicate, especially in a lady,
+to have a good robust constitution and a vigorous digestion in describing
+Mr. Vholes in Bleak House. "His digestion was impaired, which is always
+highly respectable."
+
+Mrs. Cruncher, in A Tale of Two Cities, objected to the questionable ways
+in which Mr. Cruncher earned his money sometimes. Her husband charged her
+with flying in the face of Providence by refusing the "wittles and drink"
+he provided for her, and especially for neglecting to give it to their
+son. "With you flying into the face of your own wittles and drink! I don't
+know how scarce you mayn't make the wittles and drink here by your
+flopping tricks and your unfeeling conduct. Look at your boy: he is yourn,
+ain't he? He's as thin as a lath. Do you call yourself a mother, and not
+know a mother's first duty is to blow her son out."
+
+Abel Magwitch, when describing the terrible training he received at the
+hands of a Christian community in the most advanced Christian civilization
+of the world, said that when he was in jail some philanthropists "measured
+his head to find out the cause of his wickedness," and added with great
+wisdom, "they had better a-measured my stomach."
+
+The folly of hoping that healthy infants can be nourished by mothers who
+are compelled to labour continuously through long hours without rest is
+shown in the description of the child whose mother was a waitress, in
+Somebody's Luggage. Incidentally, too, Dickens reveals in this case the
+facts that the power of assimilation of little children is usually
+impaired, and that, as a consequence, they become more peevish, and
+therefore get shaken and otherwise abused for the ignorance of the adults
+responsible for their care. Speaking of the treatment of the baby, he
+says:
+
+    You were conveyed--ere yet your dawning powers were otherwise
+    developed than to harbour vacancy in your inside--you were conveyed by
+    surreptitious means into a pantry adjoining the Admiral Nelson, Civic
+    and General Dining-Rooms, there to receive by stealth that healthful
+    sustenance which is the pride and boast of the British female
+    constitution. Under the combined influence of the smells of roast and
+    boiled, and soup, and gas, and malt liquors, you partook of your
+    earliest nourishment; your unwilling grandmother sitting prepared to
+    catch you when your mother was called and dropped you; your
+    grandmother's shawl ever ready to stifle your natural complainings;
+    your innocent mind surrounded by uncongenial cruets, dirty plates,
+    dish covers, and cold gravy; your mother calling down the pipe for
+    veals and porks, instead of soothing you with nursery rhymes. Under
+    these untoward circumstances you were early weaned. Your unwilling
+    grandmother, ever growing more unwilling as your food assimilated
+    less, then contracted habits of shaking you till your system curdled,
+    and your food would not assimilate at all.
+
+The schoolmaster in Jemmy Lirriper's original story was captured and put
+into confinement for his treatment of the boys, and he was to have nothing
+to eat but the boys' dinners, and was to drink half a cask of their beer
+every day.
+
+The schoolboy in The Schoolboy's Story describes the food given to the
+boys as one of the grievances they had against the institution.
+
+    As to the beef, it's shameful. It's _not_ beef. Regular beef isn't
+    veins. You can chew regular beef. Besides which, there's gravy to
+    regular beef, and you never see a drop to ours. Another of our fellows
+    went home ill, and heard the family doctor tell his father that he
+    couldn't account for his complaint unless it was the beer. Of course
+    it was the beer, and well it might be!
+
+    However, beef and Old Cheeseman are two different things. So is beer.
+    It was Old Cheeseman I meant to tell about; not the manner in which
+    our fellows get their constitutions destroyed for the sake of profit.
+
+    Why, look at the pie crust alone. There's no flakiness in it. It's
+    solid--like damp lead. Then our fellows get nightmares, and are
+    bolstered for calling out and waking other fellows. Who can wonder!
+
+    Old Cheeseman one night walked in his sleep, put his hat on over his
+    nightcap, got hold of a fishing rod and a cricket bat, and went down
+    into the parlour, where they naturally thought from his appearance he
+    was a Ghost. Why, he never would have done that if his meals had been
+    wholesome. When we all begin to walk in our sleeps, I suppose they'll
+    be sorry for it.
+
+At Doctor Blimber's school they used "to crib the boys' dinners." There is
+no more outrageous practice than that of depriving a child of food as a
+means of punishment.
+
+Dickens ended his sketch entitled A Walk in a Workhouse with a plea on
+behalf of the inmates for "a little more liberty--and a little more
+bread," and even in his last book, Edwin Drood, he was still directing
+attention to the poor food supplied in boarding schools.
+
+Mrs. Billickin was very plain in her hints about the poor board supplied
+to Rosa at Miss Twinkleton's when she received the schoolmistress in her
+own home. Referring to Rosa, who was now residing with Mrs. Billickin, she
+said:
+
+    "I did think it well to mention to my cook, which I 'ope you will
+    agree with, Miss Twinkleton, was a right precaution, that the young
+    lady being used to what we should consider here but poor diet, had
+    better be brought forward by degrees. For a rush from scanty feeding
+    to generous feeding, and from what you may call messing to what you
+    may call method, do require a power of constitution, which is not
+    often found in youth, particularly when undermined by boarding school!
+    I was put in youth to a very genteel boarding school, the mistress
+    being no less a lady than yourself, of about your own age, or, it may
+    be some years younger, and a poorness of blood flowed from the table
+    which has run through my life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+MINOR SCHOOLS.
+
+
+The schools of Squeers, Doctor Blimber, Mr. Creakle, Doctor Strong, and
+Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M'Choakumchild are the most celebrated schools of
+Dickens, and they contain the greater part of his pedagogical teaching.
+His other schools are, however, worthy of very careful study.
+
+One of the first of the Sketches by Boz described a man who had passed
+through many vicissitudes, and at length was reduced to such poverty that
+he applied to the parish board for charity. This led to his appointment as
+a schoolmaster. Dickens clearly intended to teach the lesson, afterward
+emphasized in Nicholas Nickleby and other books, that poverty should not
+establish a claim to the position of a school-teacher.
+
+Minerva Hall, also in Sketches by Boz, reveals "one of those public
+nuisances, a spoiled child," spoiled because his papa was too busy with
+public duties and his mamma with society duties to train him properly. It
+also shows the reason Mrs. Cornelius Brook Dingwall had for sending her
+daughter to school. She said: "One of my principal reasons for parting
+with my daughter is that she has lately acquired some sentimental ideas,
+which it is most desirable to eradicate from her young mind." Here the
+public nuisance fell out of a chair, and mamma and papa showed their usual
+mode of training him. Mamma called him "a naughty boy," and threatened "to
+send for James to take him away"--both name and threat being wrong. Papa
+merely excused the cherub on the ground of "his great flow of spirits."
+The school also shows the silly training of so-called "finishing
+schools," as chiefly intended to teach young ladies the small
+conventionalities of "society."
+
+In The Old Curiosity Shop there are four schools: Mr. Marton's two
+schools, Mrs. Wackles's school, and Miss Monflathers's school. Mr.
+Marton's first school was introduced to reveal all the good qualities that
+Mr. Squeers lacked, especially sympathy. Mr. Marton was the immediate
+successor of Mr. Squeers, and they possessed directly opposite traits of
+character in their relationship to childhood. Mr. Squeers was coarse,
+unsympathetic, and coercive. Mr. Marton was kind, considerate, and a
+perfect type of true sympathy with the child. It is reasonable to believe
+that Mr. Marton and Mr. Squeers were drawn as companion pictures to
+illustrate and enforce the same truth--that sympathy with the child is the
+fundamental element in the character of a true teacher.
+
+The old bachelor emphasized this when he said to Mr. Marton, "You are none
+the worse teacher for having learned humanity."
+
+There is a great deal of food for psychological and pedagogical study in
+the introduction of the boys he was to teach in his second school, given
+by the bachelor to Mr. Marton. The bachelor was as full of genuine boyish
+spirit as it is possible for any adult to be, and was in some respects a
+more perfect type for an ideal teacher than Mr. Marton. Mr. Marton had the
+tender, spiritual sympathy of a true woman, the motherhood spirit that
+constitutes the atmosphere in which all right elements of childhood find
+their richest development; the bachelor had the perfect manly sympathy
+that enabled him to enter heartily into boy life. He had especially the
+power of recognising in the things for which boys are often rebuked the
+best evidences of their strength, and he could remember his own boyhood so
+well as to fully sympathize _with_ the boys. Mr. Marton and the bachelor
+reveal the whole range of sympathetic possibilities.
+
+    When nothing more was left to be done he charged the boy to run off
+    and bring his schoolmates to be marshalled before their new master and
+    solemnly reviewed.
+
+    "As good a set of fellows, Marton, as you'd wish to see," he said,
+    turning to the schoolmaster when the boy was gone; "but I don't let
+    'em know I think so. That wouldn't do at all."
+
+    The messenger soon returned at the head of a long row of urchins,
+    great and small, who, being confronted by the bachelor at the house
+    door, fell into various convulsions of politeness; clutching their
+    hats and caps, squeezing them into the smallest possible dimensions,
+    and making all manner of bows and scrapes, which the little old
+    gentleman contemplated with excessive satisfaction, and expressed his
+    approval of by a great many nods and smiles. Indeed, his approbation
+    of the boys was by no means so scrupulously disguised as he had led
+    the schoolmaster to suppose, inasmuch as it broke out in sundry loud
+    whispers and confidential remarks which were perfectly audible to them
+    every one.
+
+    "This first boy, schoolmaster," said the bachelor, "is John Owen; a
+    lad of good parts, sir, and frank, honest temper; but too thoughtless,
+    too playful, too light-headed by far. That boy, my good sir, would
+    break his neck with pleasure, and deprive his parents of their chief
+    comfort--and between ourselves, when you come to see him at hare and
+    hounds, taking the fence and ditch by the finger post, and sliding
+    down the face of the little quarry, you'll never forget it. It's
+    beautiful!"
+
+    John Owen having been thus rebuked, and being in perfect possession of
+    the speech aside, the bachelor singled out another boy.
+
+    "Now look at that lad, sir," said the bachelor. "You see that fellow?
+    Richard Evans his name is, sir. An amazing boy to learn, blessed with
+    a good memory and a ready understanding, and moreover with a good
+    voice and ear for psalm singing, in which he is the best among us.
+    Yet, sir, that boy will come to a bad end; he'll never die in his bed;
+    he's always falling asleep in sermon time--and to tell you the truth,
+    Mr. Marton, I always did the same at his age, and feel quite certain
+    that it was natural to my constitution, and I couldn't help it."
+
+    This hopeful pupil edified by the above terrible reproval, the
+    bachelor turned to another.
+
+    "But if we talk of examples to be shunned," said he, "if we come to
+    boys that should be a warning and a beacon to all their fellows,
+    here's the one, and I hope you won't spare him. This is the lad, sir;
+    this one with the blue eyes and light hair. This is a swimmer, sir,
+    this fellow--a diver, Lord save us! This is a boy, sir, who had a
+    fancy for plunging into eighteen feet of water, with his clothes on,
+    and bringing up a blind man's dog, who was being drowned by the weight
+    of his chain and collar, while his master stood wringing his hands
+    upon the bank, bewailing the loss of his guide and friend. I sent the
+    boy two guineas anonymously, sir," added the bachelor, in his peculiar
+    whisper, "directly I heard of it; but never mention it on any account,
+    for he hasn't the least idea that it came from me."
+
+    Having disposed of this culprit, the bachelor turned to another, and
+    from him to another, and so on through the whole array, laying, for
+    their wholesome restriction within due bounds, the same cutting
+    emphasis on such of their propensities as were dearest to his heart,
+    and were unquestionably referable to his own precept and example.
+    Thoroughly persuaded, in the end, that he had made them miserable by
+    his severity, he dismissed them with a small present, and an
+    admonition to walk quietly home, without any leapings, scufflings, or
+    turnings out of the way; which injunction, he informed the
+    schoolmaster in the same audible confidence, he did not think he could
+    have obeyed when he was a boy had his life depended on it.
+
+What a model he was for teachers, this glorious bachelor, in his sympathy
+_with_ the boys, and in his unconventionality! When teachers begin to feel
+the grip of formalism on their better natures and begin to lose faith in
+so-called bad boys, they should read this introduction of the pupils by
+the bachelor. Bless his memory! he will always rank among the greatest
+child trainers.
+
+His pretence of not letting the boys know that he thought they were good
+fellows was a pleasant rebuke of the miserable old doctrine that a boy
+should always be told his faults, but never be spoken to about his
+virtues. This false doctrine having been so carefully applied in homes and
+schools for centuries as a religious duty, based on the unscriptural
+doctrine of child depravity, has made a large portion of humanity in
+Christian countries mere defect dodgers, instead of making them conscious
+of power to do independent work for God and their fellow-men. Dickens had
+no faith in this doctrine, and he taught that one of the highest things a
+teacher can do for a child is to recognise and show honest appreciation of
+his best powers and qualities. When superintendents search as carefully
+for the good qualities and powers of their teachers as some yet do for
+their weaknesses, and when they are so unconventional as to be able to
+show genuine appreciation frankly to the teachers themselves, the schools
+will reach their proper rate of progressive development.
+
+Through the whole series of criticisms of the boys, Dickens is showing the
+full rich sympathy of his own great heart for the whole race of boys in
+the unreasonable and unjust criticism to which they are subjected by
+forgetful and ignorant adulthood. Those who should be wisest in these
+matters--and especially many who think themselves wise--are still very
+forgetful of their own early life, and very ignorant of boyhood.
+
+Mrs. Wackles's school was called a "Ladies' Seminary," but it was in
+reality "a very small day school for young ladies of proportionate
+dimensions."
+
+    The several duties of instruction in this establishment were thus
+    discharged: English grammar, composition, geography, and the use of
+    the dumb-bells, by Miss Melissa Wackles; writing, arithmetic, dancing,
+    music, and general fascination, by Miss Sophy Wackles; the art of
+    needlework, marking, and samplery, by Miss Jane Wackles; corporal
+    punishment, fasting, and other tortures and terrors, by Mrs. Wackles.
+    Miss Melissa Wackles was the eldest daughter, Miss Sophy the next, and
+    Miss Jane the youngest. Miss Melissa might have seen five-and-thirty
+    summers or thereabout, and verged on the autumnal, Miss Sophy was a
+    fresh, good-humoured, buxom girl of twenty; and Miss Jane numbered
+    scarcely sixteen years. Mrs. Wackles was an excellent, but rather
+    venomous old lady of threescore.
+
+Mrs. Wackles's school is described to show the frivolous nature of such
+so-called private educational institutions, and to strike again the
+abominable practice of abusing children by "corporal punishment, fasting,
+and other tortures and terrors" by "a venomous old lady of threescore."
+
+Miss Monflathers's school was a boarding establishment for young ladies,
+in which they were duly impressed with the dignity of their social
+position; with the terrible danger of yielding in any way to their natural
+impulses, all of which were assumed to be very wicked; with the sinfulness
+of sympathizing with or in any way recognising the lower classes; with the
+impropriety of knowing the fact that there was any wrong in the world to
+be righted or any suffering to be relieved; with the inestimable value of
+aristocratic birth; and with the most important truth that men are very
+dangerous animals, to be carefully shunned.
+
+Little Nell was sent to the establishment of Miss Monflathers with notices
+of Mrs. Jarley's waxworks, being temporarily in the employ of that lady.
+
+    Nell had no difficulty in finding out Miss Monflathers's Boarding and
+    Day Establishment, which was a large house, with a high wall, and a
+    large garden gate with a large brass plate, and a small grating
+    through which Miss Monflathers's parlour maid inspected all visitors
+    before admitting them; for nothing in the shape of a man--no, not even
+    a milkman--was suffered, without special license, to pass that gate.
+    Even the taxgatherer, who was stout, and wore spectacles and a
+    broadbrimmed hat, had the taxes handed through the grating. More
+    obdurate than gate of adamant or brass, this gate of Miss
+    Monflathers's frowned on all mankind. The very butcher respected it as
+    a gate of mystery, and left off whistling when he rang the bell.
+
+    As Nell approached the awful door, it turned slowly upon its hinges
+    with a creaking noise, and forth from the solemn grove beyond came a
+    long file of young ladies, two and two, all with open books in their
+    hands, and some with parasols likewise. And last of the goodly
+    procession came Miss Monflathers, bearing herself a parasol of lilac
+    silk, and supported by two smiling teachers, each mortally envious of
+    the other, and devoted unto Miss Monflathers.
+
+    Confused by the looks and whispers of the girls, Nell stood with
+    downcast eyes and suffered the procession to pass on, until Miss
+    Monflathers, bringing up the rear, approached her, when she courtesied
+    and presented her little packet; on receipt whereof Miss Monflathers
+    commanded that the line should halt.
+
+    "You're the waxwork child, are you not?" said Miss Monflathers.
+
+    "Yes, ma'am," replied Nell, colouring deeply, for the young ladies had
+    collected about her, and she was the centre on which all eyes were
+    fixed.
+
+    "And don't you think you must be a very wicked little child," said
+    Miss Monflathers, who was of rather uncertain temper, and lost no
+    opportunity of impressing moral truths upon the tender minds of young
+    ladies, "to be a waxwork child at all?"
+
+    Poor Nell had never viewed her position in this light, and not knowing
+    what to say, remained silent, blushing more deeply than before.
+
+    "Don't you know," said Miss Monflathers, "that it's very naughty and
+    unfeminine, and a perversion of the properties wisely and benignantly
+    transmitted to us, with expansive powers to be roused from their
+    dormant state through the medium of cultivation?"
+
+    "Don't you feel how naughty it is of you," resumed Miss Monflathers,
+    "to be a waxwork child, when you might have the proud consciousness of
+    assisting, to the extent of your infant powers, the manufactures of
+    your country; of improving your mind by the constant contemplation of
+    the steam engine; and of earning a comfortable and independent
+    subsistence of from two and ninepence to three shillings per week?
+    Don't you know that the harder you are at work, the happier you are?"
+
+    "'How doth the little----'" murmured one of the teachers in quotation
+    from Dr. Watts.
+
+    "Eh?" said Miss Monflathers, turning smartly round. "Who said that?"
+
+    "The little busy bee," said Miss Monflathers, drawing herself up, "is
+    applicable only to genteel children.
+
+        'In books, or work, or healthful play'
+
+    is quite right as far as they are concerned; and the work means
+    painting on velvet, fancy needlework, or embroidery. In such cases as
+    these," pointing to Nell with her parasol, "and in the case of all
+    poor people's children, we should read it thus:
+
+        'In work, work, work. In work alway
+          Let my first years be passed,
+        That I may give for ev'ry day
+          Some good account at last.'"
+
+    Just then somebody happened to discover that Nell was crying, and all
+    eyes were again turned toward her.
+
+    There were indeed tears in her eyes, and drawing out her handkerchief
+    to brush them away, she happened to let it fall. Before she could
+    stoop to pick it up, one young lady of about fifteen or sixteen, who
+    had been standing a little apart from the others, as though she had no
+    recognised place among them, sprang forward and put it in her hand.
+    She was gliding timidly away again, when she was arrested by the
+    governess.
+
+    "It was Miss Edwards who did that, I _know_," said Miss Monflathers
+    predictively. "Now I am sure that was Miss Edwards."
+
+    It was Miss Edwards, and everybody said it was Miss Edwards, and Miss
+    Edwards herself admitted that it was.
+
+    "Is it not," said Miss Monflathers, putting down her parasol to take a
+    severer view of the offender, "a most remarkable thing, Miss Edwards,
+    that you have an attachment to the lower classes which always draws
+    you to their sides; or, rather, is it not a most extraordinary thing
+    that all I say and do will not wean you from propensities which your
+    original station in life has unhappily rendered habitual to you, you
+    extremely vulgar-minded girl?"
+
+    "I really intended no harm, ma'am," said a sweet voice. "It was a
+    momentary impulse, indeed."
+
+    "An impulse!" repeated Miss Monflathers scornfully. "I wonder that you
+    presume to speak of impulses to me"--both the teachers assented--"I am
+    astonished"--both the teachers were astonished--"I suppose it is an
+    impulse which induces you to take the part of every grovelling and
+    debased person that comes in your way"--both the teachers supposed so
+    too.
+
+    "But I would have you know, Miss Edwards," resumed the governess, in a
+    tone of increased severity, "that you can not be permitted--if it be
+    only for the sake of preserving a proper example and decorum in this
+    establishment--that you can not be permitted, and that you shall not
+    be permitted, to fly in the face of your superiors in this extremely
+    gross manner. If _you_ have no reason to feel a becoming pride before
+    waxwork children, there are young ladies here who have, and you must
+    either defer to those young ladies or leave the establishment, Miss
+    Edwards."
+
+    This young lady, being motherless and poor, was apprenticed at the
+    school--taught for nothing--teaching others what she learned for
+    nothing--boarded for nothing--lodged for nothing--and set down and
+    rated as something immeasurably less than nothing, by all the dwellers
+    in the house. The servant maids felt her inferiority, for they were
+    better treated; free to come and go, and regarded in their stations
+    with much more respect. The teachers were infinitely superior, for
+    they had paid to go to school in their time, and were paid now. The
+    pupils cared little for a companion who had no grand stories to tell
+    about home; no friends to come with post horses, and be received in
+    all humility, with cake and wine, by the governess; no deferential
+    servant to attend and bear her home for the holidays; nothing genteel
+    to talk about, and nothing to display. But why was Miss Monflathers
+    always vexed and irritated with the poor apprentice--how did that come
+    to pass?
+
+    Why, the gayest feather in Miss Monflathers's cap, and the brightest
+    glory of Miss Monflathers's school, was a baronet's daughter--the real
+    live daughter of a real live baronet--who, by some extraordinary
+    reversal of the laws of Nature, was not only plain in features but
+    dull in intellect, while the poor apprentice had both a ready wit and
+    a handsome face and figure. It seems incredible. Here was Miss
+    Edwards, who only paid a small premium which had been spent long ago,
+    every day outshining and excelling the baronet's daughter, who learned
+    all the extras (or was taught them all), and whose half yearly bill
+    came to double that of any other young lady's in the school, making no
+    account of the honour and reputation of her pupilage. Therefore, and
+    because she was a dependent, Miss Monflathers had a great dislike to
+    Miss Edwards, and was spiteful to her, and aggravated by her, and,
+    when she had compassion on Little Nell, verbally fell upon and
+    maltreated her, as we have already seen.
+
+    "You will not take the air to-day, Miss Edwards," said Miss
+    Monflathers. "Have the goodness to retire to your own room, and not to
+    leave it without permission."
+
+    The poor girl was moving hastily away, when she was suddenly, in a
+    nautical phrase, "brought to" by a subdued shriek from Miss
+    Monflathers.
+
+    "She has passed me without any salute!" cried the governess, raising
+    her eyes to the sky. "She has actually passed me without the slightest
+    acknowledgment of my presence!"
+
+    The young lady turned and courtesied. Nell could see that she raised
+    her dark eyes to the face of her superior, and that their expression,
+    and that of her whole attitude for the instant, was one of mute but
+    most touching appeal against this ungenerous usage. Miss Monflathers
+    only tossed her head in reply, and the great gate closed upon a
+    bursting heart.
+
+In addition to the gross evils of such institutions already suggested,
+Dickens exposed the cruelty of Miss Monflathers, as a type of Christian
+rectitude, toward Nell, whom she assumed to be very wicked, and the
+tendency of society to treat teachers with contempt, if they are not rich.
+The standard based on mere wealth is happily changing.
+
+The tone of Miss Monflathers's lofty criticism in language and thought,
+quite incomprehensible to the person admonished, is very true to the life
+in cases of conventional people, who take no pains to understand child
+nature or human nature in any phase, except its depravity.
+
+The heartlessness of the distinction between the "genteel" children and
+poor children is clearly pointed out. There could scarcely be a more
+unchristlike thought than the one that would prohibit the children of the
+poor from the enjoyment of their natural tendency to play. No civilization
+in which either by deliberate purpose or by criminal negligence the
+children of the poorest are left without the privilege and the means for
+full free play should dare to call itself Christian. Yet Miss
+Monflathers's parody aptly represented the practical outworking of
+civilization at the time of Dickens, and long since, too, in regard to
+poor children.
+
+Miss Monflathers told Miss Edwards majestically that she "must not take
+the air to-day," and contemptuously ordered her to remain in her room all
+day. This was written to condemn the common punishment of keeping children
+in at recess or confining them as a means of punishment. Dickens always
+thought it a crime against childhood to punish a child by robbing it of
+any of its natural rights to food, or fresh air, or free exercise.
+
+The ecstasy of passion reached by Miss Monflathers because Miss Edwards
+passed her without saluting her showed Dickens's attitude toward those who
+insisted and still insist on obeisance from those whom they are pleased to
+regard as "inferiors." Public school education has been criticised because
+"it does not train poor children to courtesy to their superiors." Any
+system deserves the support of all right-thinking people if it trains the
+children of the poorest to hold their heads up respectfully, and look the
+world squarely in the face without a debasing consciousness of
+inferiority. The greatest aim of education, so far as the individual is
+concerned, is freedom--spiritual freedom. Respect for properly constituted
+authority should become a part of every child's consciousness, but this
+properly involves contempt for the arrogant assumption of certain people
+that certain other people should bow down in servile humility to them.
+Education must always be the enemy of tyranny, slavery, and all kinds of
+abasement.
+
+The grinders' school was introduced to ridicule the practice of forcing
+all children in charitable institutions to wear a uniform dress, and to
+attack corporal punishment, neglect of moral training, and the practice of
+placing ignorant men in the high position of a teacher. The teacher in the
+grinders' school was "a superannuated old grinder of savage disposition,
+who had been appointed schoolmaster because he didn't know anything, and
+wasn't fit for anything, and for whose cruel cane all chubby little boys
+had a perfect fascination." The practice of dressing all children alike,
+and of dressing them all without taste, is continued in most homes for
+orphan children still. Surely the poor orphans have suffered enough
+without subjecting them to the indignity of tasteless dressing. There
+might at least be a difference of taste in colour, for instance, for the
+blondes and the brunettes.
+
+The school taught by Agnes in David Copperfield is mentioned to show that
+if a teacher works with a true spirit (Agnes was a splendid character for
+women to study with great care), teaching is a pleasant instead of an
+unhappy profession.
+
+David said: "It is laborious, is it not?" "The labour is so pleasant," she
+returned, "that it is scarcely grateful in me to call it by that name."
+
+The school attended by Uriah Heep and his father before him was described
+as an attack on the practice of instilling into the minds of poor children
+the consciousness of subserviency. David says: "I fully comprehended now
+for the first time (after hearing Uriah describe his training at school)
+what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit must have been engendered
+by this early, and this long, suppression."
+
+The first school attended by Esther in Bleak House is apparently
+introduced to point out four evils in the social training of little
+children. The other children were all older than Esther; her godmother
+refused to allow her to accept invitations to go to the homes of the other
+girls; she was never allowed out to play; and while holidays were given on
+the birthdays of other girls, none were ever given on hers. The cruelty of
+two of these evils was made still more bitter by the revelation of the
+fact that she was not treated like other girls because of some wrong her
+mother was supposed to have done.
+
+Miss Donny's school at Greenleaf was a charming place, conducted in a
+"precise, exact, and orderly way." Esther was taught well, and trained
+well. She was to be a governess, and so she taught as she learned. Her
+barren childhood made her sympathize with the girls whom she taught,
+especially the new girls, and she naturally won their love, and was
+therefore happy. Esther possessed every essential characteristic of a good
+teacher and a true woman. Miss Donny's school is one of the schools in
+which Dickens was approving, not condemning.
+
+Mr. Cripple's academy is merely mentioned in Little Dorrit to complain
+about the habit of scribbling over buildings and on desks and walls in
+which boys used to indulge, and of which many evidences may yet be found
+on the fences and walls of the present day.
+
+"The pupils of Mr. Cripple's appeared to have been making a copy book of
+the street door, it was so extensively scribbled over in pencil."
+
+Pip's early education, in Great Expectations, was received in Mr. Wopsle's
+great-aunt's school.
+
+    Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is
+    to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited
+    infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in
+    the society of youth, who paid twopence per week each, for the
+    improving opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage,
+    and Mr. Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we students used to
+    overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner,
+    and occasionally bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction that Mr.
+    Wopsle "examined" the scholars once a quarter. What he did on those
+    occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us
+    Mark Antony's oration over the body of Cĉsar.
+
+    Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr.
+    Wopsle's great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had
+    been a bramble bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by
+    every letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures,
+    who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves
+    and baffle recognition. But at last I began, in a purblind groping
+    way, to read, write, and cipher on the very smallest scale.
+
+    Biddy was Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's granddaughter; I confessed myself
+    quite unequal to the working out of the problem, what relation she was
+    to Mr. Wopsle.
+
+    The educational scheme or course established by Mr. Wopsle's
+    great-aunt may be resolved into the following synopsis: The pupils ate
+    apples and put straws down one another's backs, until Mr. Wopsle's
+    great-aunt collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter
+    at them with a birch rod. After receiving the charge with every mark
+    of derision, the pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged
+    book from hand to hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures
+    and tables, and a little spelling--that is to say, it had had once. As
+    soon as this volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt fell
+    into a state of coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic
+    paroxysm. The pupils then entered among themselves upon a competitive
+    examination on the subject of boots, with the view of ascertaining who
+    could tread the hardest upon whose toes. This mental exercise lasted
+    until Biddy made a rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles
+    (shaped as if they had been unskilfully cut off the chumped end of
+    something), more illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of
+    literature I have since met with, speckled all over with iron mould,
+    and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between their
+    leaves. This part of the course was usually lightened by several
+    single combats between Biddy and refractory students. When the fights
+    were over, Biddy gave out the number of a page, and then we all read
+    aloud what we could--or what we couldn't--in a frightful chorus; Biddy
+    leading with a high shrill monotonous voice, and none of us having the
+    least notion of, or reverence for, what we were reading about. When
+    this horrible din had lasted a certain time, it mechanically awoke Mr.
+    Wopsle's great-aunt, who staggered at a boy fortuitously, and pulled
+    his ears. This was understood to terminate the course for the evening,
+    and we emerged into the air with shrieks of intellectual victory.
+
+The reasons for describing this school were to renew the attack on bad
+private schools, conducted without any state control and no supervision or
+inspection by competent officers, to show the need of better appliances
+and text-books, and to teach the utter folly of allowing pupils to try to
+read any book, especially the Bible, without understanding what they were
+reading. Incidentally Dickens taught that to use the Bible as it was used
+in Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's school develops a lack of reverence for it.
+The evil of corporal punishment of the indiscriminate and irregular kind
+comes in for a share of condemnation in this wretched school.
+
+Dickens returned to the attack on bad private schools in Our Mutual
+Friend. He had made a thorough study of the evening schools conducted in
+London--conducted many of them by organizations with good intentions.
+
+There are a good many Sunday schools yet which in some respects are open
+to the criticisms made of Charley Hexam's first school.
+
+    The school at which young Charley Hexam had first learned from a
+    book--the streets being, for pupils of his degree, the great
+    preparatory establishment, in which very much that is never unlearned
+    is learned without and before book--was a miserable loft in an
+    unsavoury yard. Its atmosphere was oppressive and disagreeable; it was
+    crowded, noisy, and confusing; half the pupils dropped asleep, or fell
+    into a state of stupefaction; the other half kept them in either
+    condition by maintaining a monotonous droning noise, as if they were
+    performing, out of time and tune, on a ruder sort of bagpipe. The
+    teachers, animated solely by good intentions, had no idea of
+    execution, and a lamentable jumble was the upshot of their kind
+    endeavours.
+
+    It was a school for all ages and for both sexes. The latter were kept
+    apart, and the former were partitioned off into square assortments.
+    But all the place was pervaded by a grimly ludicrous pretence that
+    every pupil was childish and innocent. This pretence, much favoured by
+    the lady visitors, led to the ghastliest absurdities. Young women, old
+    in the vices of the commonest and worst life, were expected to profess
+    themselves enthralled by the good child's book, the Adventures of
+    Little Margery, who resided in the village cottage by the mill;
+    severely reproved and morally squashed the miller, when she was five
+    and he was fifty; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied
+    herself a new nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not
+    wear nankeen bonnets, neither did the sheep, who ate them; who plaited
+    straw and delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts
+    of unseasonable times. So unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks
+    were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having
+    resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his
+    particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came
+    into supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a
+    shining light ever afterward. (Note, that the benefactor came to no
+    good.) Several swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in
+    the same strain; it always appearing from the lessons of those very
+    boastful persons that you were to do good, not because it _was_ good,
+    but because you were to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the
+    adult pupils were taught to read (if they could learn) out of the New
+    Testament; and by dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping
+    their bewildered eyes on the particular syllables coming round to
+    their turn, were as absolutely ignorant of the sublime history as if
+    they had never seen or heard of it. An exceedingly and confoundingly
+    perplexing jumble of a school, in fact, where black spirits and gray,
+    red spirits and white, jumbled, jumbled, jumbled, jumbled, jumbled
+    every night. And particularly every Sunday night. For then an inclined
+    plane of unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and
+    worst of all the teachers with good intentions, whom nobody older
+    would endure. Who, taking his stand on the floor before them, as chief
+    executioner, would be attended by a conventional volunteer boy as
+    executioner's assistant. When and where it first became the
+    conventional system that a weary or inattentive infant in a class must
+    have its face smoothed downward with a hot hand, or when or where the
+    conventional volunteer boy first beheld such system in operation, and
+    became inflamed with a sacred zeal to administer it, matters not. It
+    was the function of the chief executioner to hold forth, and it was
+    the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping infants, yawning
+    infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth their
+    wretched faces, sometimes with one hand, as if he were anointing them
+    for a whisker; sometimes with both hands, applied after the fashion of
+    blinkers. And so the jumble would be in action in this department for
+    a mortal hour; the exponent drawling on to my dearerr childerrenerr,
+    let us say for example, about the beautiful coming to the sepulchre;
+    and repeating the word sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five
+    hundred times and never once hinting what it meant; the conventional
+    boy smoothing away right and left, as an infallible commentary; the
+    whole hotbed of flushed and exhausted infants exchanging measles,
+    rashes, whooping-cough, fever, and stomach disorders, as if they were
+    assembled in High Market for the purpose.
+
+    Even in this temple of good intentions, an exceptionally sharp boy
+    exceptionally determined to learn, could learn something, and, having
+    learned it, could impart it so much better than the teachers; as being
+    more knowing than they, and not at the disadvantage in which they
+    stood toward the shrewder pupils. In this way it had come about that
+    Charley Hexam had risen in the jumble, taught in the jumble, and been
+    received from the jumble into a better school.
+
+Dickens slaughtered evils by wholesale in this brief description. The
+influence of the great preparatory establishment, the street, was brought
+to the notice of thinking people.
+
+The need of ventilation was pointed out, and the evil of crowding a large
+number of pupils into poorly ventilated rooms was made very clear. "Half
+the pupils dropped asleep, or fell into a state of waking stupefaction."
+
+The teachers were untrained. "They were animated solely by good
+intentions, and had no idea of execution." The consequence was a
+lamentable jumble.
+
+The separation of the sexes was not approved.
+
+The stupid blunder of treating all pupils alike, without regard to
+heredity, environment, or past experience, is aptly caricatured in giving
+the Adventures of Little Margery and the Experiences of Thomas Twopence to
+young women old in vice and to young male criminals in order to reform
+them.
+
+Incidentally he disapproves of such literature for any children, and also
+of the autobiographies of "swaggering sinners."
+
+The error pointed out in Pip's education of using the New Testament as a
+book from which pupils should be taught how to read is emphasized. "By
+dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on
+the particular syllables coming round to their turn, they were as
+absolutely ignorant of the sublime history as if they had never seen or
+heard of it."
+
+He criticised severely the old custom of giving least attention to the
+choice of a teacher for the little ones. The old theory was: they can not
+learn much any way; anybody will do to teach them. "The inclined plane of
+unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all
+the teachers of good intentions, whom nobody older would endure."
+
+The dreadful practice, still kept up in some heathen-producing Sunday
+schools, of having an "executioner's assistant to keep order," is severely
+condemned. "It was the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping
+infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth, their wretched
+faces." The irritating influence of this operation on the suffering
+infants and the degrading effect on the executioner's assistant himself
+are clearly indicated.
+
+But the greatest cruelty was in having the infants talked at in a droning
+voice for an hour by the chief executioner in a voice that would sometimes
+deaden, sometimes irritate their nervous systems, and in language they
+could not comprehend, about subjects entirely foreign to their
+experiences.
+
+The danger of spreading contagious diseases in such badly ventilated
+schools was shown. Dickens was a leader in the department of sanitation
+both in homes and in schools.
+
+The schools taught by Bradley Headstone and Miss Peecher were
+
+    newly built, and there were so many like them all over the country,
+    that one might have thought the whole were but one restless edifice
+    with the locomotive gift of Aladdin's palace.
+
+    All things in these schools--buildings, teachers, and pupils--were
+    according to pattern, and engendered in the light of the latest Gospel
+    according to Monotony.
+
+These brief descriptions contained volumes of protest against the dead
+uniformity of school architecture, and against the sacrifice of
+individuality in schools. There are no other buildings in which there
+should be more care taken to have truly artistic architecture than in
+schools, because the children are influenced so much by their environment.
+Correct taste may be formed more easily and more definitely by making the
+places in which children spend so much of their lives truly artistic than
+by studying the best authorities. The child's spirits should be toned by
+the colouring of the walls of the schoolroom, and by the pictures,
+statues, and other artistic articles around them.
+
+The phrase "Gospel according to Monotony" is one of the most effective
+phrases ever used to describe the destruction of individuality.
+
+The Peecher-Headstone schools were described as one of several protests
+against separating little girls from little boys in schools.
+
+Phoebe, the happy young woman, who had never been able to sit up since
+she had been dropped by her mother when she was in a fit, is one of the
+sweetest of the characters of Dickens. She lay on a couch as high as the
+window and enjoyed the view as she made lace. She taught a little school
+part of the day, and when Barbox Brothers was at Mugby Junction he heard
+the children singing in the school, and watched them trooping home happily
+till he became so interested in what was going on in the little cottage
+that he went in to investigate. He found a small but very clean room, with
+no one there but Phoebe lying on her couch. He asked her if she was
+learned in the new system of teaching, meaning the kindergarten system,
+because he had heard her children singing as he passed.
+
+    "No," she said, "I am very fond of children, but I know nothing of
+    teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure it gives
+    me, when they learn. I have only read and been told about the new
+    system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like
+    the merry robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way. My
+    school is a pleasure to me. I began it, when I was but a child,
+    because it brought me and other children into company, don't you see?
+    I carry it on still, because it keeps children about me. I do it as
+    love, not as work."
+
+What a beautiful school! What an ideal spirit for every true teacher! What
+a wise man Dickens was to reveal so much sweetness and trueness in the
+life of such a woman as Phoebe! When Phoebe had overcome her
+restrictions so triumphantly, surely every one who dares to teach should
+try to rise above personal infirmities, and treat children like the "merry
+robins that they are."
+
+The Holiday Romance, in which three young children write romances for the
+edification of their adult friends and relatives, to show how adult
+treatment impresses young children, is usually regarded as merely an
+exquisite piece of humour. In writing to Mr. Fields about the story
+Dickens said: "It made me laugh to that extent, that my people here
+thought I was out of my wits, until I gave it to them to read, when they
+did likewise."
+
+There is more philosophy than fun in these stories, however, and when
+carefully studied they should aid in the "education of the grown-up
+people"--not merely the "grown-ups" for whom they were intended, but all
+"grown-ups." This is especially true of the last story, written by Miss
+Nettie Ashford, aged "half-past-six."
+
+The story is about Mrs. Lemon's school and Mrs. Orange's family.
+
+"The grown-up people" were the children in Nettie's story, and the
+children were the managers of all things at home and at school.
+
+Mrs. Orange went to Mrs. Lemon's and told her that "her children were
+getting positively too much for her." She had two parents, two intimate
+friends of theirs, one godfather, two godmothers, and an aunt. She wished
+to send them to school, because they were "getting too much for her." Many
+real mothers give the same reason.
+
+    "Have you as many as eight vacancies?"
+
+    "I have just eight, ma'am," said Mrs. Lemon.
+
+    "Corporal punishment dispensed with?"
+
+    "Why, we do occasionally shake," said Mrs. Lemon, "and we have
+    slapped. But only in extreme cases."
+
+Mrs. Orange was shown through the school, and had the bad "grown-ups"
+pointed out to her and their evil propensities explained to her in their
+hearing, as naturally as in a real school. She decided to send her family,
+and went home with her baby--which was a doll--saying, "These troublesome
+troubles are got rid of, please the pigs."
+
+A small party for the grown-up children was given by Mrs. Alicumpaine, and
+the arrangements made for the adults, and the ways in which they were
+treated by their child masters, and the criticisms on the way the seniors
+behaved are all instructive to thoughtful parents. The real things that
+adult people say and do appear delightfully stupid or exquisitely silly
+when made to appear as said and done by children.
+
+    When Mr. and Mrs. Orange were going home they passed the establishment
+    of Mrs. Lemon, and necessarily thought of their eight adult pupils who
+    were there.
+
+    "I wonder, James, dear," said Mrs. Orange, looking up at the window,
+    "whether the precious children are asleep!"
+
+    "I don't care much whether they are or not, myself," said Mr. Orange.
+
+    "James, dear!"
+
+    "You dote upon them, you know," said Mr. Orange. "That's another
+    thing."
+
+    "I do," said Mrs. Orange rapturously. "Oh, I do!"
+
+    "I don't," said Mr. Orange.
+
+    "But, I was thinking, James, love," said Mrs. Orange, pressing his
+    arm, "whether our dear, good, kind Mrs. Lemon would like them to stay
+    the holidays with her."
+
+    "If she was paid for it, I dare say she would," said Mr. Orange.
+
+    "I adore them, James," said Mrs. Orange, "but _suppose_ we pay her,
+    then."
+
+    This was what brought the country to such perfection, and made it such
+    a delightful place to live in. The grown-up people (that would be in
+    other countries) soon left off being allowed any holidays after Mr.
+    and Mrs. Orange tried the experiment; and the children (that would be
+    in other countries) kept them at school as long as ever they lived,
+    and made them do whatever they were told.
+
+This story was written about two years before the death of Dickens, so it
+represents his maturest thought. Its great fundamental motive was
+Froebel's motto, "Come, let us live with our children." It was a
+trenchant, though humorous criticism of the methods of treating children
+practised by adults, at home and at school. Mrs. Orange's adoration for
+children, while at the same time she was proposing to keep them at school
+during the holidays, is very suggestive to those mothers who in society
+talk so much about their "precious darlings," but who keep them in the
+nursery so that they have no share in the family life. The practice of
+calling children bad and describing their supposed evil propensities in
+the presence of others is also condemned in this story.
+
+One of the very best of the stories of Dickens to show his perfect
+sympathy with boyhood is the story told by Jemmy Jackman Lirriper about
+"the boy who went to school in Rutlandshire."
+
+It reveals the feelings of boys to the "Tartars" who teach school, as the
+boys, when they got control, put the Tartar into confinement and "forced
+him to eat the boys' dinners and drink half a cask of their beer every
+day."
+
+It reveals, too, the psychological condition of a healthy boy just
+entering the adolescent period, if he has been fortunate enough to have
+had a life of love and freedom at home; with his heart filled with love
+for the schoolmaster's daughter Seraphina, and his mind filled with
+hopeful dreams of success, and triumph, and fortune, and happiness ever
+afterward, not excluding those who had nurtured him, but sharing all with
+them, and finding his greatest joy in their affectionate pride at his
+success. Blessed is the boy who has such glorious experiences and such
+hopeful dreams in his later boyhood and onward, and thrice blessed is he
+who finds in parenthood hearts so reverently sympathetic that it is
+natural for the young heart to overflow into them.
+
+"But such dreams can never come true." They are true. Nothing is ever more
+true for the stage of evolution in which they naturally fill the life of
+the child. To stop them is a crime; to shut them up in the heart of the
+boy or girl makes them a source of great danger instead of an essential
+element in the ennoblement of character.
+
+Let the boy dream on, and help him to dream by sympathetically sharing his
+visions with him. His own visions and the most wonderful visions of
+heroism and adventure dreamed by the best authors should fill his life
+during the most important stage of his growth, adolescence, when the
+elements of his manhood are rushing into his life and require an outlet in
+the ideal life as a preparation for the real life of later days.
+
+Dickens recognises, too, in this story the great truth so little used by
+educators, that the child's imagination is not restricted by any
+conditions of impossibility or by any laws of Nature or of man. The ideal
+transcends the real, the desired is accomplished. Development is rapid
+under such conditions.
+
+    "And was there no quarrelling," asked Mrs. Lirriper, "after the boy
+    and his boy friend had gained high renown, and unlimited stores of
+    gold, and had married Seraphina and her sister, and had come to live
+    with Gran and Godfather forever, and the story was ended?"
+
+    "No! Nobody ever quarrelled."
+
+    "And did the money never melt away?"
+
+    "No! Nobody could ever spend it all."
+
+    "And did none of them ever grow older?"
+
+    "No! Nobody ever grew older after that."
+
+    "And did none of them ever die?"
+
+    "O, no, no, no, Gran!" exclaimed our dear boy, laying his cheek upon
+    her breast, and drawing her closer to him. "Nobody ever died."
+
+    "Ah, Major, Major!" says Mrs. Lirriper, smiling benignly upon me,
+    "this beats our stories. Let us end with the Boy's Story, Major, for
+    the Boy's Story is the best that is ever told."
+
+Miss Pupford's school in Tom Tiddler's Ground reveals the foolish
+conventional formalism of some teachers before their pupils; exposes the
+pretences of some teachers in private schools--"Miss Pupford's assistant
+with the Parisian accent, who never conversed with a Parisian and never
+was out of England"; and condemns the practice of sending mere children
+long distances from home to be trained and educated: "Kitty Kimmeens had
+to remain behind in Miss Pupford's school during the holidays, because her
+friends and relations were all in India, far away."
+
+In Edwin Drood Dickens had begun a description of the school: "On the trim
+gate inclosing the courtyard of which is a resplendent brass plate
+flashing forth the legend: 'Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.'"
+
+The chief thing revealed by the brief description given of it is the
+formal conventionality of most teachers in such institutions, the
+unreality of manner and tone and character shown by most teachers in the
+schoolroom.
+
+How much greater Miss Twinkleton's power would have been to help in
+developing human hearts and heads, if she could have been more truly human
+during the day! She did not deceive the young ladies either by her
+formalism. They merely said, "What a pretending old thing Miss Twinkleton
+is!"
+
+When the rumour of the quarrel between Neville Landless and Edwin Drood
+reached the seminary, and began to cause dangerous excitement among the
+young ladies, Miss Twinkleton deemed it her duty to quiet their minds.
+
+    It was reserved for Miss Twinkleton to tone down the public mind of
+    the Nuns' House. That lady, therefore, entering in a stately manner
+    what plebeians might have called the schoolroom, but what, in the
+    patrician language of the head of the Nuns' House, was euphuistically,
+    not to say roundaboutedly, denominated "the apartment allotted to
+    study," and saying with a forensic air, "Ladies!" all rose. Mrs.
+    Tisher at the same time grouped herself behind her chief, as
+    representing Queen Elizabeth's first historical female friend at
+    Tilbury Fort. Miss Twinkleton then proceeded to remark that Rumour,
+    ladies, had been represented by the Bard of Avon--needless were it to
+    mention the immortal Shakespeare, also called the Swan of his native
+    river, not improbably with some reference to the ancient superstition
+    that that bird of graceful plumage (Miss Jennings will please stand
+    upright) sung sweetly on the approach of death, for which we have no
+    ornithological authority--Rumour, ladies, had been represented by that
+    bard--hem!--
+
+          "Who drew
+        The celebrated Jew,"
+
+    as painted full of tongues. Rumour in Cloisterham (Miss Ferdinand will
+    honour me with her attention) was no exception to the great limner's
+    portrait of Rumour elsewhere. A slight _fracas_ between two young
+    gentlemen occurring last night within a hundred miles of these
+    peaceful walls (Miss Ferdinand, being apparently incorrigible, will
+    have the kindness to write out this evening, in the original language,
+    the first four fables of our vivacious neighbour, Monsieur La
+    Fontaine) had been very grossly exaggerated by Rumour's voice. In the
+    first alarm and anxiety arising from our sympathy with a sweet young
+    friend, not wholly to be dissociated from one of the gladiators in
+    the bloodless arena in question (the impropriety of Miss Reynolds's
+    appearing to stab herself in the hand with a pin is far too obvious,
+    and too glaringly unladylike to be pointed out), we descended from our
+    maiden elevation to discuss this uncongenial and this unfit theme.
+    Responsible inquiries having assured us that it was but one of those
+    "airy nothings" pointed at by the poet (whose name and date of birth
+    Miss Giggles will supply within half an hour), we would now discard
+    the subject, and concentrate our minds upon the grateful labours of
+    the day.
+
+The unnatural formalism of her manner and her language are properly held
+up to ridicule by Dickens.
+
+He incidentally shows the great blunder of interrupting a lesson to
+censure a pupil, the weakness of having to demand attention, and the error
+of punishing by impositions to be memorized or written. What a terrible
+misuse it is of the literature that should always be attractive and
+inspiring to have it associated with punishment! He exposes the greater
+crime of making children commit to memory selections from the Bible as a
+punishment in Dombey and Son, and the association of the Bible with tasks
+in Our Mutual Friend.
+
+The Schoolboy's Story deals with the problems of nutrition, coercion,
+robbing a boy of his holidays, the declaration of perpetual warfare
+between pupils and teachers in the olden days, and the surprise of the
+boys when they found that one of their teachers had a true and tender
+heart (what a commentary on teachers that boys should be surprised at
+their being true and good!), and how to treat children as Old Cheeseman
+did, when he inherited his fortune and married Jane, and took the
+disconsolate boys home to his own house, when they were condemned to spend
+their holidays at school.
+
+In Our School the chief pedagogical lessons are: the man's remembrance of
+the pug dog in the entry at the first school he attended, and his utter
+forgetfulness of the mistress of the establishment; the folly of external
+polishing or memory polishing on which "the rust has long since
+accumulated"; the gross wrong of allowing an ignorant and brutal man to be
+a teacher--"The only branches of education with which the master showed
+the least acquaintance were ruling and corporally punishing"; the
+deadening injustice of showing partiality, whether on account of a boy's
+parentage or for any other reason; sympathy for "holiday stoppers"; the
+interest all children should take in keeping and training pet animals; the
+advantages to boys of having to construct "houses and instruments of
+performance" for these pets--"some of those who made houses and invented
+appliances for their performing mice in school have since made railroads,
+engines, and telegraphs, the chairman has erected mills and bridges in
+Australia"; the fact that "we all liked Maxby the tutor, for he had a good
+knowledge of boys"; and that teachers should be very particular about
+their personal neatness, because children note so accurately every detail
+of dress and manner. This is shown by the reminiscences about Maxby, the
+Latin master, and the dancing master. The ungenerous rivalry often
+existing between schools, and schools of thought, too, was pointed out:
+"There was another school not far off, and of course our school could have
+nothing to say to that school. It is mostly the way with schools, whether
+of boys or men."
+
+"The world had little reason to be proud of Our School, and has done much
+better since in that way, and will do far better yet." This closing
+sentence of the sketch is very suggestive.
+
+Dickens described one school that he visited in America in his American
+Notes, evidently in order to show the need of more care than was then
+taken in the choice of matter for the pupils to read.
+
+    I was only present in one of these establishments during the hours of
+    instruction. In the boys' department, which was full of little urchins
+    (varying in their ages, I should say, from six years old to ten or
+    twelve), the master offered to institute an extemporary examination of
+    the pupils in algebra, a proposal which, as I was by no means
+    confident of my ability to detect mistakes in that science, I declined
+    with some alarm. In the girls' school reading was proposed, and as I
+    felt tolerably equal to that art I expressed my willingness to hear a
+    class. Books were distributed accordingly, and some half dozen girls
+    relieved each other in reading paragraphs from English history. But it
+    seemed to be a dry compilation, infinitely above their powers; and
+    when they had blundered through three or four dreary passages
+    concerning the treaty of Amiens, and other thrilling topics of the
+    same nature (obviously without comprehending ten words), I expressed
+    myself quite satisfied. It is very possible that they only mounted to
+    this exalted stave in the ladder of learning for the astonishment of a
+    visitor, and that at other times they keep upon its lower rounds; but
+    I should have been much better pleased and satisfied if I had heard
+    them exercised in simpler lessons, which they understood.
+
+"The world has done better since, and will do far better yet" in the
+choice of reading matter for children.
+
+The school recalled by memory in connection with the other ghosts of his
+childhood in The Haunted House was described briefly, but the description
+is full of suggestiveness.
+
+    Then I was sent to a great cold, bare school of big boys; where
+    everything to eat and wear was thick and clumpy, without being enough;
+    where everybody, large and small, was cruel; where the boys knew all
+    about the sale before I got there [his father's furniture had been
+    sold for debt], and asked me what I had fetched, and who had bought
+    me, and hooted at me, "Going, going, gone."
+
+The inartistic bareness of the school, the tasteless clothing, the
+unattractive, unsatisfying food, the pervading atmosphere of cruelty, and
+the heartlessness of the boys in tearing open the wounds of the sensitive
+new boy--are all condemned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+MISCELLANEOUS EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES.
+
+
+The need of apperception and correlation are shown in the result of Paul
+Dombey's first lessons under Miss Cornelia Blimber, and in the same book
+in the description of the learning Briggs carried away with him. It was
+like an ill-arranged luggage, so tightly packed that he couldn't get at
+anything he wanted. The absolute necessity for fixing apperceptive centres
+of emotion and thought in the lives of children by experience is shown in
+the case of Neville Landless in Edwin Drood. His early life had been so
+barren that, as he told his tutor, "It has caused me to be utterly wanting
+in I don't know what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts--I have
+not even a name for the thing, you see--that you have had to work upon in
+other young men to whom you have been accustomed."
+
+Dickens emphasized the fact that the lack of apperceptive centres of an
+improper kind is a great advantage.
+
+    That heart where self has found no place and raised no throne is slow
+    to recognise its ugly presence when it looks upon it. As one possessed
+    of an evil spirit was held in old time to be alone conscious of the
+    lurking demon in the breasts of other men, so kindred vices know each
+    other in their hiding places every day, when virtue is incredulous and
+    blind.
+
+There is no more suggestive work on the contents of children's minds than
+Bleak House. When Poor Jo was summoned to give evidence at the inquest he
+was questioned in regard to himself and his theology. The results were
+startling.
+
+    Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that everybody has
+    two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don't know that Jo is short
+    for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for _him_. _He_ don't find no
+    fault with it. Spell it? No. _He_ can't spell it. No father, no
+    mother, no friends. Never been to school. What's home? Knows a broom's
+    a broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect who told
+    him about the broom, or about the lie, but knows both. Can't exactly
+    say what'll be done to him after he's dead if he tells a lie to the
+    gentlemen here, but believes it'll be something wery bad to punish
+    him, and serve him right--and so he'll tell the truth.
+
+    Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any
+    link there be. He sums up his mental condition, when asked a question,
+    by replying that he "don't know nothink." He knows that it's hard to
+    keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to
+    live by doing it. Nobody taught him, even that much; he found it out.
+
+    Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone's, meeting the tardy morning, which is
+    always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of bread
+    as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and the houses
+    not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the doorstep of the
+    Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and gives
+    it a brush when he has finished, as an acknowledgment of the
+    accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice, and wonders what
+    it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual
+    destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific, or what it costs to look
+    up the precious souls among the cocoanuts and breadfruits.
+
+    He goes to his crossing, and begins to lay it out for the day. The
+    town awakes; the great teetotum is set up for its daily spin and
+    whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been
+    suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo and the other lower animals
+    get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is market day. The
+    blinded oxen, overgoaded, overdriven, never guided, run into wrong
+    places and are beaten out; and plunge, red-eyed and foaming, at stone
+    walls; and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt
+    themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!
+
+    A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog--a
+    drover's dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher's shop, and
+    evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for some
+    hours, and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three or
+    four; can't remember where he left them; looks up and down the street,
+    as half expecting to see them astray; suddenly pricks up his ears and
+    remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low
+    company and public houses; a terrific dog to sheep; ready at a whistle
+    to scamper over their backs, and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but
+    an educated, improved, developed dog, who has been taught his duties
+    and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music,
+    probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise,
+    as to awakened association, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or
+    joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a
+    par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute!
+
+    Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years
+    they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark--but not
+    their bite.
+
+When Lady Dedlock met Jo, she asked him:
+
+    "Are you the boy I've read of in the papers?"
+
+    "I don't know," says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, "nothink about
+    no papers. I don't know nothink about nothink at all."
+
+When Guster, Mr. Snagsby's servant, got him some food, she said:
+
+    "Are you hungry?"
+
+    "Jist!" says Jo.
+
+    "What's gone of your father and your mother, eh?"
+
+    Jo stops in the middle of a bite, and looks petrified. For this orphan
+    charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting, has patted
+    him on the shoulder; and it is the first time in his life that any
+    decent hand had been so laid upon him.
+
+    "I never know'd nothink about 'em," says Jo.
+
+    "No more didn't I of mine," cries Guster.
+
+When Allan Woodcourt took him to Mr. George's and had his wants attended
+to, he told Jo to be sure and tell him the truth always.
+
+"Wishermaydie, if I don't," said Jo. "I never was in no other trouble at
+all, sir--'cept knowin' nothink and starvation."
+
+When Allan saw that Jo was nearing the end, he said:
+
+    "Jo! Did you ever know a prayer?"
+
+    "Never know'd nothink, sir."
+
+    "Not so much as one short prayer?"
+
+    "No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr. Chadband he was a-prayin' wunst at Mr.
+    Snagsby's and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-speakin' to
+    hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but _I_ couldn't make out
+    nothink on it. Different times, there was other genlmen come down
+    Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin', but they all mostly sed as the t'other wuns
+    prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talkin' to theirselves,
+    or a-passin' blame on the t'others, and not a-talkin' to us. _We_
+    never know'd nothink. _I_ never know'd what it wos all about."
+
+No? Mr. Chadband, your long sermon about "the Terewth" found no place in
+Jo in which to rest; nothing to which it could attach itself. No wonder he
+went asleep. He had no apperceptive centres in his experience or his
+training to which your kind of religious teaching was related.
+
+Poor Jo! He was the first great illustration, and he is still the best, of
+the great pedagogical truth, that we see, and hear, and understand in all
+that is around us only what corresponds to what we are within; that our
+power to see, and hear, and understand increases as our inner life is
+cultured and developed; and that a life as barren as that of the great
+class of whom Jo was made the type makes it impossible to comprehend any
+teaching of an abstract kind. This revelation is of course most valuable
+to primary teachers in cities.
+
+Dickens showed his wonderful insight into the most profound problems of
+psychology in his great character sketch of poor Jo. He agreed with
+Herbart regarding the philosophy of apperception so far as it related to
+intellectual culture, but he painted Jo entirely out of harmony with
+Herbart's psychology in relation to soul development. After describing Mr.
+Chadband's sermon on "Terewth" Dickens says:
+
+    All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, ever
+    picking his cap, and putting bits of fur in his mouth. He spits them
+    out with a remorseful air, for he feels that it is in his nature to be
+    an unimprovable reprobate, and it's no good _his_ trying to keep
+    awake, for _he_ won't never know nothink. Though it may be, Jo, that
+    there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near
+    the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common
+    men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light,
+    would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it
+    unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their
+    modest aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it
+    yet!
+
+    Jo never heard of any such book. Its compilers, and the Reverend
+    Chadband, are all one to him--except that he knows the Reverend
+    Chadband, and would rather run away from him for an hour than hear him
+    talk for five minutes.
+
+When Jo was eating at Mr. Snagsby's he stopped in the middle of his bite
+and looked petrified, because Guster patted him on the shoulder. "It was
+the first time in his life that any decent hand had been so laid upon
+him."
+
+In The Haunted Man the six-year-old child was described as "a baby savage,
+a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might
+live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and
+perish a mere beast."
+
+Hugh, the splendid young animal who was John Willet's stable boy in
+Barnaby Rudge, was as deficient of most intellectual and spiritual
+apperceptive centres as poor Jo. When Mr. Chester asked him his name he
+replied:
+
+    "I'd tell it if I could. I can't. I have always been called Hugh;
+    nothing more. I never knew nor saw, nor thought about a father; and I
+    was a boy of six--that's not very old--when they hung my mother up at
+    Tyburn for a couple of thousand of men to stare at. They might have
+    let her live. She was poor enough."
+
+Little George Silverman's mind was almost a blank when his mother and
+father died. He had been brought up in a cellar at Preston. He hardly knew
+what sunlight was. His mother's laugh in her fever scared him, because it
+was the first laugh he had ever heard. When discovered alone with the
+bodies of his father and mother in the cellar, one of the horrified
+bystanders said to him:
+
+"Do you know your father and mother are both dead of fever?" and he
+replied:
+
+"I don't know what it is to be dead. I am hungry and thirsty."
+
+After he had been supplied with food and drink he told Mr. Hawkyard that
+"he didn't feel cold, or hungry, or thirsty," and in relating the story in
+manhood he said:
+
+    That was the whole round of human feelings, as far as I knew, except
+    the pain of being beaten. To that time I had never had the faintest
+    impression of duty. I had no knowledge whatever that there was
+    anything lovely in this life. When I had occasionally slunk up the
+    cellar steps into the street, and glared in at shop windows, I had
+    done so with no higher feelings than we may suppose to animate a mangy
+    young dog or wolf cub. It is equally the fact that I had never been
+    alone, in the sense of holding unselfish converse with myself. I had
+    been solitary often enough, but nothing better.
+
+Redlaw, in The Haunted Man, said to the poor boy who came to his room:
+
+    "What is your name?"
+
+    "Got none."
+
+    "Where do you live?"
+
+    "Live! What's that?"
+
+Such pictures were not drawn to entertain, or to add artistic effect to
+his stories. They were written to teach the world of wealth and culture
+that all around it were thousands of human souls with as little
+opportunity for development as young animals have; with defined
+apperceptive centres of cold, hunger, thirst, and pain only.
+
+Dickens makes a strong contrast between the condition of the mental and
+spiritual apperceptive centres in the city boy as compared with the
+country boy, in a conversation between Phil Squod and Mr. George.
+
+    "And so, Phil," says George of the Shooting Gallery, after several
+    turns in silence, "you were dreaming of the country last night?"
+
+    Phil, by the bye, said as much, in a tone of surprise, as he scrambled
+    out of bed.
+
+    "Yes, guv'ner."
+
+    "What was it like?"
+
+    "I hardly know what it was like, guv'ner," said Phil, considering.
+
+    "How did you know it was the country?"
+
+    "On account of the grass, I think. And the swans upon it," says Phil,
+    after further consideration.
+
+    "What were the swans doing on the grass?"
+
+    "They was a-eating of it, I expect," says Phil.
+
+    "The country," says Mr. George, plying his knife and fork; "why, I
+    suppose you never clapped your eyes on the country, Phil?"
+
+    "I see the marshes once," said Phil, contentedly eating his breakfast.
+
+    "What marshes?"
+
+    "_The_ marshes, commander," returns Phil.
+
+    "Where are they?"
+
+    "I don't know where they are," says Phil; "but I see 'em, guv'ner.
+    They was flat. And miste."
+
+    Governor and commander are interchangeable terms with Phil, expressive
+    of the same respect and deference, and applicable to nobody but Mr.
+    George.
+
+    "I was born in the country, Phil."
+
+    "Was you, indeed, commander?"
+
+    "Yes. And bred there."
+
+    Phil elevates his one eyebrow, and after respectfully staring at his
+    master to express interest, swallows a great gulp of coffee, still
+    staring at him.
+
+    "There's not a bird's note that I don't know," says Mr. George. "Not
+    many an English leaf or berry that I couldn't name. Not many a tree
+    that I couldn't climb yet, if I was put to it. I was a real country
+    boy once. My good mother lived in the country. Do you want to see the
+    country, Phil?"
+
+    "N-no, I don't know as I do, particular."
+
+    "The town's enough for you, eh?"
+
+    "Why, you see, commander," says Phil, "I ain't acquainted with
+    anythink else, and I doubt if I ain't a-getting too old to take to
+    novelties."
+
+    "How old are you, Phil?"
+
+Phil's answer is intended to indicate the lack of even mathematical power
+in those who, like Phil, never had any training of the imagination, nor
+any other training to define their apperceptive centres of number beyond
+ten.
+
+    "I'm something with a eight in it. It can't be eighty. Nor yet
+    eighteen. It's betwixt 'em somewheres. I was just eight, agreeable to
+    the parish calculation, when I went with the tinker. That was April
+    Fool Day. I was able to count up to ten; and when April Fool Day came
+    round again I says to myself, 'Now, old chap, you're one and a eight
+    in it.' April Fool Day after that I says, 'Now, old chap, you're two
+    and a eight in it.' In course of time I come to ten and a eight in it;
+    two tens and a eight in it. When it got so high it got the upper hand
+    of me; but this is how I always know there's a eight in it."
+
+The folly of trying to make a man moral by precept alone; the fact that
+character is developed by what we do, by true living, by what goes out in
+action, not by what comes in in maxims or theories, is shown in Martin
+Chuzzlewit.
+
+    It has been remarked that Mr. Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was.
+    Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff,
+    especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of
+    him by a homely admirer that he had a Fortunatus's purse of gold
+    sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in
+    the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which
+    fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste and shone
+    prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept
+    than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction post, which
+    is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there.
+
+    The best of architects and land surveyors kept a horse, in whom the
+    enemies already mentioned more than once in these pages pretended to
+    detect a fanciful resemblance to his master. Not in his outward
+    person, for he was a raw-boned, haggard horse, always on a much
+    shorter allowance of corn than Mr. Pecksniff; but in his moral
+    character, wherein, said they, he was full of promise, but of no
+    performance. He was always, in a manner, going to go, and never going.
+
+One of the worst results that can follow a system of training is to make a
+man a hypocrite. It is nearly as bad to store a mind with good thoughts
+or fill a heart with good feelings without giving the character the
+tendency by practical experience to carry into effect so far as possible
+its good feelings and high purposes. Mr. Pecksniff was a moral
+monstrosity. We should create no more Pecksniffs. A different ideal is
+taught in the remark made by Martin Chuzzlewit to Mary, "Endeavouring to
+be anything that's good, and being it, is, with you, all one."
+
+Executive training is emphasized in Nicholas Nickleby. Old Ralph Nickleby
+said of Nicholas: "The old story--always thinking, and never doing." The
+same thought is expressed very clearly in the pregnant sentence written
+about Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities: "Sadly, sadly, the sun rose;
+it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good
+emotions, incapable of their directed exercise." The saddest sight in the
+world is a man or woman using power for evil. It is nearly as sad to see a
+man or woman with power, but without power to use it wisely.
+
+In A Tale of Two Cities he caricatures admirably the class who cling to
+old customs and conventions, and decline even to discuss changes or
+improvements, in his description of Tellson's Bank.
+
+    Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the
+    year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very
+    dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place,
+    moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the house were
+    proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness,
+    proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence
+    in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if
+    it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no
+    passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more
+    convenient places of business. Tellson's (they said) wanted no
+    elbowroom, Tellson's wanted no light, Tellson's wanted no
+    embellishment. Noakes and Co.'s might, or Snooks Brothers' might: but
+    Tellson's, thank heaven!
+
+    Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the
+    question of rebuilding Tellson's. In this respect the house was much
+    on a par with the country; which did very often disinherit its sons
+    for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been
+    highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.
+
+Every child should get into his consciousness by experience, not by
+theory, the idea that he is expected to do his share in the improvement of
+his environment. The worst conception he can get is that "whatever is is
+right"; that things can not be improved. Every child should be encouraged
+to make suggestions for the improvement of his own environment and
+conditions in the schoolroom, in the yard, in the details of class
+management, or in anything else that he thinks he can improve.
+
+The closing sentence of Our School should ring always in the minds of
+teachers, especially the last clause: "And will do far better yet."
+
+Dickens had implicit faith in even weak humanity, and taught the hopeful
+truth, that every man and every child may be improved, if the men and
+women most directly associated with them are wise and loving. Harriet
+Carker said to Mr. Morfin:
+
+    "Oh, sir, after what I have seen, let me conjure you, if you are in
+    any place of power, and are ever wronged, never for any wrong inflict
+    punishment that can not be recalled; while there is a God above us to
+    work changes in the hearts he made."
+
+The Goblin of the Bell said to Toby Veck in The Chimes:
+
+    "Who turns his back upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind;
+    abandons them as vile; and does not trace and track with pitying eyes
+    the unfenced precipice by which they fell from good, grasping in their
+    fall some tufts and shreds of that lost soil, and clinging to them
+    still when bruised and dying in the gulf below, does wrong to Heaven
+    and man, to time and to eternity."
+
+The influence of Nature on the awakening mind of the child was outlined in
+A Child's Dream of a Star.
+
+    These children used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the
+    beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of
+    the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered
+    at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.
+
+Nature is the great centre of interest to the child, and it may be the
+child's first true revealer of God, if adulthood does not impiously come
+between the child and God by trying to give him a word God for his
+intellect too soon to take the place of the true God of his imagination.
+
+Dickens's best characters loved Nature. Esther, when recovering from her
+illness, said:
+
+    I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and
+    leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and everything in
+    Nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it
+    yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost,
+    when the wide world was so full of delight to me!
+
+The deep, spiritual influences of Nature are revealed in the effects of
+life in the growing country on Oliver Twist.
+
+    Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft
+    tranquility, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green
+    hills and rich woods of an inland village! Who can tell how scenes of
+    peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close
+    and noisy places, and carry their own freshness deep into their jaded
+    hearts! Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives
+    of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has
+    indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick
+    and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even
+    they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at
+    last for one short glimpse of Nature's face; and, carried from the
+    scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once
+    into a new state of being. Crawling forth from day to day, to some
+    green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within them
+    by the sight of sky, and hill, and plain, and glistening water, that a
+    foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they
+    have sunk into their tombs as peacefully as the sun, whose setting
+    they watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before,
+    faded from their dim and feeble sight! The memories which peaceful
+    country scenes call up are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and
+    hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands
+    for the graves of those we love--may purify our thoughts, and bear
+    down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this there
+    lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed
+    consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote
+    and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to
+    come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.
+
+    It was a lovely spot to which they repaired. Oliver, whose days had
+    been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and
+    brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence there.
+
+In the story of The Five Sisters of York Alice said to her sisters:
+
+    "Nature's own blessings are the proper goods of life, and we may share
+    them sinlessly together. To die is our heavy portion, but, oh, let us
+    die with life about us; when our cold hearts cease to beat, let warm
+    hearts be beating near; let our last look be upon the bounds which God
+    has set to his own bright skies, and not on stone walls and bars of
+    iron! Dear sisters, let us live and die, if you list, in this green
+    garden's compass."
+
+Dickens had very advanced opinions in regard to the importance of physical
+training, especially of play, as an agent not only in physical culture,
+but in the development of the mind and character. Doctor Blimber's school
+is condemned because the boys were not allowed to play, and Doctor
+Strong's school is highly commended because the boys "had noble games out
+of doors" there.
+
+What splendid runners and jumpers and divers and swimmers those grand boys
+were whom Mr. Marton had the good fortune to teach in his second school in
+The Old Curiosity Shop!
+
+Mrs. Crupp recommended David Copperfield to take up some game as an
+antidote for his despondency during his early love experience.
+
+"If you was to take to something, sir," said Mrs. Crupp, "if you was to
+take to skittles, now, which is healthy, you might find it divert your
+mind and do you good."
+
+Mrs. Chick told Mr. Dombey that Paul was delicate. "Our darling is not
+altogether as stout as we could wish. The fact is that his mind is too
+much for him. His soul is a great deal too large for his frame." Yet his
+father paid no attention to the boy's food, and sent him, when but a
+little sickly child, to Doctor Blimber's to learn everything--not to play.
+"They had nothing so vulgar as play at Doctor Blimber's."
+
+One of the most vicious conventions is that which makes vigorous play
+vulgar and unladylike for girls.
+
+He called attention in American notes to the advantages possessed by the
+students of Upper Canada College, Toronto, inasmuch as "the town is well
+adapted for wholesome exercise at all seasons." In the same book he gives
+his opinion that American girls "must go more wisely clad, and take more
+healthful exercise."
+
+He praised the free life of the gipsy children in Nicholas Nickleby.
+
+In Martin Chuzzlewit, when Tom Pinch and Martin had to walk to Salisbury
+instead of riding in Mr. Pecksniff's gig, Dickens says it was better for
+them that they were compelled to walk. What a breezy enthusiasm he throws
+into his advocacy of walking as an exercise:
+
+    Better! A rare strong, hearty, healthy walk--four statute miles an
+    hour--preferable to that rumbling, tumbling, jolting, shaking,
+    scraping, creaking, villainous old gig? Why, the two things will not
+    admit of comparison. It is an insult to the walk to set them side by
+    side. Where is an instance of a gig having ever circulated a man's
+    blood, unless when, putting him in danger of his neck, it awakened in
+    his veins and in his ears, and all along his spine, a tingling heat
+    much more peculiar than agreeable? When did a gig ever sharpen
+    anybody's wits and energies, unless it was when the horse bolted, and,
+    crashing madly down a steep hill with a stone wall at the bottom, his
+    desperate circumstances suggested to the only gentleman left inside
+    some novel and unheard-of mode of dropping out behind? Better than the
+    gig!
+
+    Better than the gig! When were travellers by wheels and hoofs seen
+    with such red-hot cheeks as those? when were they so good-humouredly
+    and merrily bloused? when did their laughter ring upon the air, as
+    they turned them round, what time the stronger gusts came sweeping up;
+    and, facing round again as they passed by, dashed on, in such a glow
+    of ruddy health as nothing could keep pace with, but the high spirits
+    it engendered? Better than the gig! Why here _is_ a man in a gig
+    coming the same way now. Look at him as he passes his whip into his
+    left hand, chafes his numbed right fingers on his granite leg, and
+    beats those marble toes of his upon the footboard. Ha, ha, ha! Who
+    would exchange this rapid hurry of the blood for yonder stagnant
+    misery, though its pace were twenty miles for one?
+
+    Better than the gig! No man in a gig could have such interest in the
+    milestones. No man in a gig could see, or feel, or think, like merry
+    users of their legs.
+
+Dickens taught comparatively little about the subjects of instruction or
+the methods of teaching them. He dealt cramming its most stunning blow in
+Doctor Blimber's school, and he criticised sharply the methods of teaching
+classics and literature in the same school. He advocated the objective
+method of teaching number in Jemmy Lirriper's training at home by Major
+Jackman.
+
+He took more interest in reading and literature than in any other
+department of school study, so far as can be judged from his writings. He
+deplored the practice of allowing children to try to read before they
+could recognise the words readily, and understand their meaning in the
+training of Pip and Charley Hexam. At the great party at Mr. Merdle's,
+
+    the Bishop consulted the great Physician on the relaxation of the
+    throat with which young curates were too frequently afflicted, and on
+    the means of lessening the great prevalence of that disorder in the
+    church. Physician, as a general rule, was of opinion that the best way
+    to avoid it was to know how to read before you made a profession of
+    reading. Bishop said, dubiously, did he really think so? And Physician
+    said, decidedly, yes, he did.
+
+He criticised, too, the reading in the school visited in an American city,
+because "the girls blundered through three or four dreary passages,
+obviously without comprehending ten words," and said "he would have been
+much better pleased if they had been asked to read some simpler selections
+which they could understand."
+
+Mr. Wegg, when reading for Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, "read on by
+rote, and attached as few ideas as possible to the text."
+
+He discusses the advantages of reading suitable books in David
+Copperfield, giving to David his own real experience in early boyhood.
+After describing the cruel treatment of the Murdstones, he says:
+
+    The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose, for some
+    six months, was to make me sullen, dull, and dogged. I was not made
+    the less so by my sense of being daily more and more shut out and
+    alienated from my mother. I believe I should have been almost
+    stupefied but for one circumstance.
+
+    It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a
+    little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it joined my own) and
+    which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little
+    room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones,
+    The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe,
+    came out, a glorious host to keep me company. They kept alive my
+    fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time--they, and
+    the Arabian Nights, and the tales of the Genii.
+
+His faith in the influence of reading increased as he grew older. In Our
+Mutual Friend he says: "No one who can read ever looks at a book, even
+unopened on a shelf, like one who can not read."
+
+Dickens taught a useful lesson in Martin Chuzzlewit regarding the way
+teachers used to be treated by society. Even yet there is need of a higher
+recognition of the teaching profession in its true dignity by a
+civilization that reverences wealth more than intellectual and spiritual
+character.
+
+Tom Pinch's sister was engaged in the family of a wealthy brass founder.
+She was treated contemptuously by him and his wife, yet they complained to
+Tom that his sister was unable to command the respect of her pupil. Tom
+was naturally indignant, and he spoke his mind very clearly to the brass
+founder.
+
+    "Sir!" cried Tom, after regarding him in silence for some time. "If
+    you do not understand what I mean I will tell you. My meaning is that
+    no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades."
+
+    "When you tell me," resumed Tom, who was not the less indignant for
+    keeping himself quiet, "that my sister has no innate power of
+    commanding the respect of your children, I must tell you it is not so;
+    and that she has. She is as well bred, as well taught, as well
+    qualified by Nature to command respect as any hirer of a governess you
+    know. But when you place her at a disadvantage in reference to every
+    servant in your house, how can you suppose, if you have the gift of
+    common sense, that she is not in a tenfold worse position in reference
+    to your daughters?"
+
+    "Pretty well! Upon my word," exclaimed the gentleman, "that is pretty
+    well!"
+
+    "It is very ill, sir," said Tom. "It is very bad and mean and wrong
+    and cruel. Respect! I believe young people are quick enough to observe
+    and imitate; and why or how should they respect whom no one else
+    respects, and everybody slights? And very partial they must grow--oh,
+    very partial!--to their studies, when they see to what a pass
+    proficiency in those same tasks has brought their governess! Respect!
+    Put anything the most deserving of respect before your daughters in
+    the light in which you place her, and you will bring it down as low,
+    no matter what it is!"
+
+    "You speak with extreme impertinence, young man," observed the
+    gentleman.
+
+    "I speak without passion, but with extreme indignation and contempt
+    for such a course of treatment, and for all who practise it," said
+    Tom. "Why, how can you, as an honest gentleman, profess displeasure or
+    surprise at your daughter telling my sister she is something beggarly
+    and humble when you are forever telling her the same thing yourself in
+    fifty plain, outspeaking ways, though not in words; and when your very
+    porter and footman make the same delicate announcement to all comers?"
+
+Dickens described a great variety of weak, and mean, and selfish, and
+degraded people in order to expose weakness, and meanness, and
+selfishness, and baseness, so that humanity might learn to overcome them,
+but he reserved his supreme contempt for those who oppose the general
+education of "the masses," because it fills their mind with ideas above
+their station, or disqualifies them for the work they were intended to do.
+This being interpreted, means in plain language that certain human beings
+who, because they possess wealth, or belong to what they arrogantly call
+the "upper classes," claim the right to dominate those who have not a
+sufficient amount of money to be independent of them; to fix what they
+selfishly call "the sphere of the lower classes"; and to prescribe the
+limits beyond which the children of the poor must not be educated, lest
+they be lifted beyond tame subserviency to their natural lords and
+masters, and fail to abase themselves dutifully or to be sufficiently
+grateful to those above them for the pittance they grudgingly give them
+for labouring in the menial occupations assigned them.
+
+Dickens despised all Barnacles, and Dedlocks, and Podsnaps, and Dombeys,
+and Merdles; he ridiculed all who violate the sacred bond of human
+brotherhood; but the vials of his bitterest wrath were poured upon those
+who because a child was born in the home of poor parents would therefore
+restrict its education and dwarf its soul.
+
+Mr. Dombey, after the christening of Paul, called Mrs. Toodle before his
+guests, and in a very condescending but rigidly majestic manner told her
+he had graciously decided to send her son to the school of the Charitable
+Grinders. He prefaced his announcement by a brief statement of his views
+regarding education:
+
+    "I am far from being friendly," pursued Mr. Dombey, "to what is called
+    by persons of levelling sentiments, general education. But it is
+    necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be taught to
+    know their position, and to conduct themselves properly. So far I
+    approve of schools."
+
+    In Mr. Dombey's eyes, as in some others that occasionally see the
+    light, they only achieved that mighty piece of knowledge, the
+    understanding of their own position, who showed a fitting reverence
+    for his. It was not so much their merit that they knew themselves, as
+    that they knew him, and bowed low before him.
+
+There are thousands of Dombeys still. Two Canadian judges recently said in
+speaking of education precisely what Mr. Dombey and his class said in the
+time of Dickens. One objected to educating the common people because it
+unfitted them for positions as house servants, and made them so
+outrageously independent that they would not bow (bend their bodies
+properly, bow their heads, and look reverently at the floor) when in the
+presence of their mistresses. The other said that the very derivation of
+the word "education" meant to lead out, and it was therefore clear that
+"education should be used to develop a few, 'lead them out,' beyond the
+masses in order that they might be qualified for leadership." The
+necessary development to be imposed upon all but the favoured few in his
+system of government is willingness to follow leaders, and ignorance is
+the only condition that can make this possible. The glory of education is
+the awakening of the consciousness of freedom in the soul of the race and
+the revelation of the perfect law of liberty--individual right, social
+duty. The shackles, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, have fallen
+from humanity, as education has done its true work of emancipating the
+individual soul and revealing its own value and its responsibility for its
+brother souls.
+
+The most brutal of all the characters described by Dickens is Bill Sikes.
+The most degraded and despicable of his characters is Dennis the hangman
+in Barnaby Rudge. Dickens makes Bill Sikes and Dennis use the very same
+arguments, from their standpoint, that the so-called upper classes have
+used and still do use against the education of the masses.
+
+Bill Sikes, referring to the need of small boys in the trade of burglary,
+said:
+
+    "I want a boy, and he mustn't be a big 'un. Lord!" said Mr. Sikes,
+    reflectively, "if I'd only got that young boy of Ned, the chimbley
+    sweeper's! He kept him small on purpose, and let him out by the job.
+    But the father gets lagged; and then the Juvenile Delinquent Society
+    comes and takes the boy away from a trade where he was arning money,
+    teaches him to read and write, and in time makes a 'prentice of him.
+    And so they go on," said Mr. Sikes, his wrath rising with the
+    recollection of his wrongs, "so they go on; and, if they'd got money
+    enough (which it's a Providence they haven't), we shouldn't have half
+    a dozen boys left in the whole trade in a year or two."
+
+And Fagin agreed with Bill Sikes.
+
+When Hugh was formally admitted as a member of Lord Gordon's mob Dennis
+the hangman was much delighted at the addition of such a strong young man
+to the ranks, and Dickens adds:
+
+    If anything could have exceeded Mr. Dennis's joy on the happy
+    conclusion of this ceremony it would have been the rapture with which
+    he received the announcement that the new member could neither read
+    nor write: those two arts being (as Mr. Dennis swore) the greatest
+    possible curse a civilized community could know, and militating more
+    against the professional emoluments and usefulness of the great
+    constitutional office he had the honour to hold than any adverse
+    circumstances that could present themselves to his imagination.
+
+Bill Sikes objected to education because it spoiled the boys for the trade
+for which he required them; Dennis the hangman objected to education
+because "it reduced the professional emoluments of his great
+constitutional office," or, in other words, reduced the number who had to
+be hanged; and their reasons are just as respectable as the reason given
+by any man in any position who objects to free education because it unfits
+boys for certain trades, or girls for "service," or because "it fills
+their minds with ideas above their station," or because they have to pay
+their just share of its cost, or for any other narrow and selfish reason.
+Selfishness is selfishness, and it is as utterly loathsome in a bishop as
+in Bill Sikes, in a judge as in Dennis the hangman.
+
+Dickens never did any more artistic work than when he painted the
+aristocratic objectors to popular education in their natural hideousness
+with Bill Sikes and Dennis the hangman for a harmonious background.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+THE TRAINING OF POOR, NEGLECTED, AND DEFECTIVE CHILDREN.
+
+
+It is a singular fact that humanity in its highest development so long
+neglected the poor, and the weak, and the defective. They were practically
+left out of consideration by educators and philanthropists. The fact that
+they more than any others needed education and care was not seen clearly
+enough to lead to definite plans for the amelioration of their misfortunes
+until the nineteenth century. Dickens must always have the honour of being
+the great English apostle of the poor--especially of neglected childhood.
+
+He wrote in the Uncommercial Traveller:
+
+    I can find--_must_ find, whether I will or no--in the open streets,
+    shameful instances of neglect of children, intolerable toleration of
+    the engenderment of paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched and
+    destructive cripples both in body and mind; a misery to themselves, a
+    misery to the community, a disgrace to civilization, and an outrage on
+    Christianity. I know it to be a fact as easy of demonstration as any
+    sum in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the State
+    would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would with the
+    strong hand take those children out of the streets while they are yet
+    children, and wisely train them, it would make them a part of
+    England's glory, not its shame--of England's strength, not its
+    weakness--would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good citizens,
+    and many great men out of the seeds of its criminal population; it
+    would clear London streets of the most terrible objects they smite the
+    sight with--myriads of little children who awfully reverse our
+    Saviour's words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the
+    Kingdom of Hell.
+
+He sympathized with childhood on account of every form of coercion and
+abuse practised upon it by tyrannical, selfish, or ignorant adulthood,
+under the most favourable conditions; but his great heart was especially
+tender toward the little ones who, in addition to coercion and abuse, and
+bad training by the selfish, the ignorant, and the careless, were
+compelled to endure the terrible sufferings and deprivations of poverty.
+He was conscious not only of the material and physical evils to which the
+children of the very poor were exposed, but of the mental and spiritual
+barrenness of their lives, and one of his most manifest educational
+purposes was to improve social conditions, to arouse the spirit of truly
+sympathetic brotherhood (not merely considerate altruism, but genuine
+brotherhood) to place the poorest children in conditions that would
+develop by experience the apperceptive centres of intellectual and
+spiritual growth, and to direct special attention to the urgent need of
+education for the blind, the deaf, and the mentally defective.
+
+No other American touched his heart and won his reverence quite so
+thoroughly as Dr. Howe, of Boston, who will undoubtedly be recognised as
+one of the greatest men yet produced by American civilization when men are
+tested by their purposes, and by their unselfish work for humanity in
+hitherto untrodden paths. After describing Dr. Howe's work for the blind,
+he reverently says: "There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who,
+after reading these passages, can ever hear that name with indifference."
+
+Dickens charged on humanity, on society, the crime of making criminals. He
+said with great force and truth in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit:
+
+    Nothing is more common in real life than a want of profitable
+    reflection on the causes of many vices and crimes that awaken general
+    horror. What is substantially true of families in this respect, is
+    true of a whole commonwealth. As we sow, we reap. Let the reader go
+    into the children's side of any prison in England, or, I grieve to
+    add, of many workhouses, and judge whether those are monsters who
+    disgrace our streets, people our hulks and penitentiaries, and
+    overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom we have
+    deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin.
+
+This thought was the motive that led him throughout his whole life to try
+to arouse sympathetic interest of the most active kind in the conditions
+and circumstances of the poor.
+
+One of his most striking appeals to thoughtful people is made in Martin
+Chuzzlewit. These profound words will always be worthy of careful study by
+teachers and reformers:
+
+    Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in
+    every sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in
+    God's highway, so smooth below your carriage wheels, so rough beneath
+    the tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift
+    descent of men who _have_ lived in their own esteem, that there are
+    scores of thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful
+    toil, who in that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a
+    chance of life! Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred bard who
+    had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never
+    seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go,
+    teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the
+    forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of
+    man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul
+    that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!
+    And, oh! ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of Christian
+    knowledge, who soundingly appeal to human nature, see that it be human
+    first. Take heed it has not been transformed, during your slumber and
+    the sleep of generations, into the nature of the beasts.
+
+Dickens saw clearly the depravity of human nature, but he looked beyond
+the depravity to its cause, and he found a natural cause for the
+degradation, but not the cause that had been commonly assigned. He taught
+that the highest and holiest elements in human nature were the causes of
+its swiftest deterioration when misused, perverted, or neglected.
+
+Alice Marwood, in Dombey and Son, was introduced to teach parents and
+society in general the duties they owe to childhood, and to show how lives
+are wrecked by neglect and by a false use of power. When she returned, an
+outcast, to her mother, and her mother upbraided her, the young woman
+said:
+
+    "I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me
+    as well as you. Come back harder? Of course I have come back harder.
+    What else did you expect?"
+
+    "Harder to me! To her own dear mother!" cried the old woman.
+
+    "I don't know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn't,"
+    she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and
+    compressed lips, as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every
+    softer feeling from her breast. "Listen, mother, to a word or two. If
+    we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps.
+    I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful
+    enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been
+    very dutiful to me?"
+
+    "I!" cried the old woman. "To my own gal! A mother dutiful to her own
+    child!"
+
+    "It sounds unnatural, don't it?" returned the daughter, looking coldly
+    on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; "but I have
+    thought of it sometimes, in the course of _my_ lone years, till I have
+    got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but
+    it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and
+    then--to pass away the time--whether no one ever owed any duty to me."
+
+    Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but whether
+    angrily, or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical
+    infirmity, did not appear.
+
+    "There was a child called Alice Marwood," said the daughter with a
+    laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself,
+    "born among poverty and neglect, and nurtured in it. Nobody taught
+    her, nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her."
+
+    "Nobody!" echoed the mother, pointing to herself and striking her
+    breast.
+
+    "The only care she knew," returned the daughter, "was to be beaten,
+    and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better
+    without that. She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a
+    crowd of little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks
+    out of this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have
+    been hunted and worried to death for ugliness."
+
+    "Go on! go on!" exclaimed the mother.
+
+    "She'll soon have ended," said the daughter. "There was a criminal
+    called Alice Marwood--a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And
+    she was tried, and she was sentenced. And Lord, how the gentlemen in
+    the court talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty,
+    and on her having perverted the gifts of Nature--as if he didn't know
+    better than anybody there that they had been made curses to her!--and
+    how he preached about the strong arm of the Law--so very strong to
+    save her, when she was an innocent and helpless little wretch! and how
+    solemn and religious it all was! I have thought of that many times
+    since, to be sure!"
+
+    She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone that
+    made the howl of the old woman musical.
+
+    "So Alice Marwood was transported, mother," she pursued, "and was sent
+    to learn her duty where there was twenty times less duty, and more
+    wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood is
+    come back a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this. In
+    good time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more
+    strong arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her; but the
+    gentlemen needn't be afraid of being thrown out of work. There's
+    crowds of little wretches, boy and girl, growing up in any of the
+    streets they live in, that'll keep them to it till they've made their
+    fortunes."
+
+Bleak House is one of the greatest of the educational works of Dickens.
+One of its chief aims was to arouse a sympathetic interest in the lives of
+poor children. The Neckett children, Charlotte, and Tom, and Emma,
+revealed a new world to many thousands of good people.
+
+    "Charley, Charley!" said my guardian. "How old are you?"
+
+    "Over thirteen, sir," replied the child.
+
+    "Oh! what a great age," said my guardian. "What a great age, Charley!"
+
+    "And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?" said my
+    guardian.
+
+    "Yes, sir," returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect
+    confidence, "since father died."
+
+    "And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley," said my guardian, turning
+    his face away for a moment, "how do you live?"
+
+    "Since my father died, sir, I've gone out to work. I'm out washing
+    to-day."
+
+    "God help you, Charley!" said my guardian. "You're not tall enough to
+    reach the tub!"
+
+    "In pattens I am, sir," she said, quickly. "I've got a high pair as
+    belonged to mother."
+
+    "And when did mother die? Poor mother!"
+
+    "Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at
+    the face upon her bosom. "Then father said I was to be as good a
+    mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home, and
+    did cleaning and nursing and washing, for a long time before I began
+    to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir?"
+
+    "And do you often go out?"
+
+    "As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes, and smiling,
+    "because of earning sixpences and shillings!"
+
+    "And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?"
+
+    "To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see?" said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder
+    comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps
+    I can run in sometimes, and they can play, you know, and Tom ain't
+    afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?"
+
+    "No-o!" said Tom stoutly.
+
+    "When it comes on dark the lamps are lighted down in the court, and
+    they show up here quite bright--almost quite bright. Don't they, Tom?"
+
+    "Yes, Charley," said Tom; "almost quite bright."
+
+The hearts must be hard that are not moved to a deeper and more practical
+interest in the children of the poor by this pathetic story, and others of
+a kindred character which Dickens told over and over again for the
+Christian world to study. And the study led to feeling and thought and
+co-operative action.
+
+The fruits of these wonderful stories are the splendid homes, and
+organizations for children, and the laws to protect them from cruelty by
+parents or teachers, or employers, and the free public schools to educate
+them, and the joy, and happiness, and freedom, that are taking the place
+of the sorrow, and tears, and coercion of the time when Dickens began his
+noble work.
+
+The tragic story of poor Jo illustrated the poverty, the ignorance, the
+destitution, the hopelessness, the barrenness, and the dreadful
+environment of a London street boy. The world has done much better since,
+as Dickens prophesied it would do, and the good work is going on. Hundreds
+of thousands of the poor Joes of London are now in the public schools of
+London alone of whom the Christian philanthropy of the world thought
+little till Dickens told his stories.
+
+In Nobody's Story Dickens returns to his special purpose of changing the
+attitude of civilization toward the education of the poor. The Bigwigs
+represent society, and "the man" means the poor man.
+
+    But the Bigwig family broke out into violent family quarrels
+    concerning what it was lawful to teach to this man's children. Some of
+    the family insisted on such a thing being primary and indispensable
+    above all other things; and others of the family insisted on such
+    another thing being primary and indispensable above all other things;
+    and the Bigwig family, rent into factions, wrote pamphlets, held
+    convocations, delivered charges, orations, and all varieties of
+    discourses; impounded one another in courts Lay and courts
+    Ecclesiastical; threw dirt, exchanged pummellings, and fell together
+    by the ears in unintelligible animosity. Meanwhile, this man, in his
+    short evening snatches at his fireside, saw the demon Ignorance arise
+    there, and take his children to itself. He saw his daughter perverted
+    into a heavy slatternly drudge; he saw his son go moping down the ways
+    of low sensuality, to brutality and crime; he saw the dawning light of
+    intelligence in the eyes of his babies so changing into cunning and
+    suspicion, that he could have rather wished them idiots.
+
+Dickens objected to a certain kind of sentimentality exhibited in his day
+toward criminals, and draws a very suggestive picture full of elements
+for psychological study in David Copperfield, in which he makes the brutal
+schoolmaster Creakle a very considerate Middlesex magistrate, with an
+unfailing system for a quick and effective method of converting the
+wickedest scoundrels into the most submissive, Scripture-quoting saints by
+solitary confinement. Dickens did not approve of the system, and he did
+not approve either of the plan of the spending of so much money by the
+state in erecting splendid buildings for criminals, while the honest poor
+were in hovels, and especially while the state allowed the boys and girls,
+through neglect, to be transformed into criminals by thousands every year.
+Dickens would have made criminals earn their own living, and he urged the
+establishment of industrial schools for the boys and girls of the streets,
+so that they might become respectable, intelligent, self-reliant,
+law-abiding citizens instead of criminals.
+
+David said:
+
+    Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was powerful.
+    It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I
+    could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar
+    would have been made in the country if any deluded man had proposed to
+    spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial
+    school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.
+
+As usual with great reformers, the philanthropists of his own day refused
+to accept the theories of Dickens, but succeeding generations adopted
+them. The reforms for which he pleaded began to be practised so soon
+because he winged his thought with living appeals to the deepest, truest
+feelings of the human heart.
+
+Dickens said truly of Barnaby Rudge:
+
+    "The absence of the soul is far more terrible in a living man than in
+    a dead one; and in this unfortunate being its noblest powers were
+    wanting."
+
+He pleaded again for those who are weak-minded in Mr. Dick's case in David
+Copperfield. Mr. Dick was evidently introduced into the story to show the
+effect of kind treatment on those who are defective in intellect. The
+insane were flogged and put in strait-jackets in the time of Dickens. His
+teaching is now the practice of the civilized world. The insane are kindly
+treated, and weak-minded children are taught in good schools by the best
+teachers that can be obtained for them.
+
+Betsy Trotwood, David's aunt, was an embodiment of a good heart united
+with an eminently practical head. She did not talk about religion, as did
+the Murdstones, but she showed her religious life in good, reasonable,
+self-sacrificing, helpful living. David asked her for an explanation of
+Mr. Dick's case.
+
+    "He has been _called_ mad," said my aunt. "I have a selfish pleasure
+    in saying he has been called mad, or I should not have had the benefit
+    of his society and advice for these last ten years and upward--in
+    fact, ever since your sister, Betsy Trotwood, disappointed me."
+
+    "So long as that?" I said.
+
+    "And nice people they were, who had the audacity to call him mad,"
+    pursued my aunt. "Mr. Dick is a sort of distant connection of mine--it
+    doesn't matter how; I needn't enter into that. If it hadn't been for
+    me, his own brother would have shut him up for life. That's all."
+
+    I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my aunt felt
+    strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt strongly too.
+
+    "A proud fool!" said my aunt. "Because his brother was a little
+    eccentric--though he is not half so eccentric as a good many
+    people--he didn't like to have him visible about the house, and sent
+    him away to some private asylum place; though he had been left to his
+    particular care by their deceased father, who thought him almost a
+    natural. And a wise man _he_ must have been to think so! Mad himself,
+    no doubt."
+
+    Again, as my aunt looked quite convinced, I endeavoured to look quite
+    convinced also.
+
+    "So I stepped in," said my aunt, "and made him an offer. I said, 'Your
+    brother's sane--a great deal more sane than you are, or ever will be,
+    it is to be hoped. Let him have his little income, and come and live
+    with me. _I_ am not afraid of him; _I_ am not proud; _I_ am ready to
+    take care of him, and shall not ill treat him as some people (besides
+    the asylum folks) have done.' After a good deal of squabbling," said
+    my aunt, "I got him; and he has been here ever since. He is the most
+    friendly and amenable creature in existence; and as for advice!--but
+    nobody knows what that man's mind is, except myself."
+
+Dickens was greatly delighted with the asylums of the United States, and
+he strongly advocated the adoption in England of American methods of
+treating the insane. He says, in American Notes:
+
+    At South Boston, as it is called, in a situation excellently adapted
+    for the purpose, several charitable institutions are clustered
+    together. One of these is the State Hospital for the Insane; admirably
+    conducted on those enlightened principles of conciliation and
+    kindness, which twenty years ago would have been worse than heretical,
+    and which have been acted upon with so much success in our own pauper
+    asylum at Hanwell. "Evince a desire to show some confidence, and
+    repose some trust, even in mad people," said the resident physician,
+    as we walked along the galleries, his patients flocking round us
+    unrestrained. Of those who deny or doubt the wisdom of this maxim
+    after witnessing its effects, if there be such people still alive, I
+    can only say that I hope I may never be summoned as a juryman on a
+    commission of lunacy whereof they are the subjects; for I should
+    certainly find them out of their senses, on such evidence alone.
+
+    Each ward in this institution is shaped like a long gallery or hall,
+    with the dormitories of the patients opening from it on either hand.
+    Here they work, read, play at skittles, and other games; and, when the
+    weather does not admit of their taking exercise out of doors, pass the
+    day together. In one of these rooms, seated, calmly, and quite as a
+    matter of course, among a throng of mad women, black and white, were
+    the physician's wife and another lady, with a couple of children.
+    These ladies were graceful and handsome; and it was not difficult to
+    perceive at a glance that even their presence there had a highly
+    beneficial influence on the patients who were grouped about them.
+
+    Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a
+    knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman whose
+    manner of dealing with his charges I have just described. At every
+    meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among them from
+    cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that influence is
+    reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even as a means of
+    restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a hundred times
+    more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, fetters, and
+    handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have manufactured
+    since the creation of the world.
+
+How much those benighted teachers who so tragically ask "What _can_ you do
+with bad boys, if you do _not_ use corporal punishment?" might learn from
+the last sentence!
+
+Blinded by old ideals, these teachers whip away, admitting that they fail
+to reform many of the best boys, and quieting their consciences with the
+horrible thought that the evil course was the natural one for the boys,
+and that they are not responsible for their blighted lives. They comfort
+themselves with the thought that it is God's business, and if he made a
+boy so bad that flogging would not reform him, they at any rate are free
+from blame, because they "have beaten, and beaten, and beaten him, and it
+did him no good." Having beaten him, and beaten him, and beaten him, they
+rest contented with the sure conviction that they have faithfully done
+their duty; and when, perchance, the poor boy becomes a criminal, they
+solemnly say without a blush or a pang: "I knew he would come to a bad
+end, but I am so thankful that I did my duty to him."
+
+Ignominious failure to save the brave boys who are not cowardly enough to
+be deterred from doing wrong by beating has taught nothing to some
+teachers. Even yet they placidly beat on, and get angry if they are
+requested to try freedom as a substitute for coercion in the training of
+beings created in God's image. They even question the sanity and the
+theology of those who dare to doubt the efficiency of the sacred rod. They
+do not deem it possible that by studying the child and their own higher
+powers they could find easier, pleasanter, and infinitely more successful
+methods of guiding a boy to a true, strong life than by beating, and
+beating, and beating him.
+
+The keepers of asylums in the time of Dickens were equally severe on the
+wise friends of the insane. They honestly believed that terrible evils
+would necessarily result from giving greater freedom to the afflicted
+patients in asylums. Dickens took the side of freedom and common sense,
+and the strait-jackets, and handcuffs, and fetters have been taken off,
+and, _even as a means of restraint_, kindness and freedom have done better
+work than all the coercive fetters that "ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty
+have manufactured since the creation of the world."
+
+So all teachers who have grown wise enough have found that kindness and
+freedom are much better even as restraining agents, and infinitely better
+in the development of true, independent, positive, progressive characters
+than all the coercive terrors of rod, rule, strap, rawhide, or any form of
+cruelty ever practised on helpless childhood by ignorance, prejudice, and
+perverted theology since the creation of the world.
+
+In American Notes Dickens gave a long description of Laura Bridgman
+written by Dr. Howe, and showed his intense interest in what was then a
+new movement in favour of the education of the blind.
+
+Speaking of Laura Bridgman, Dickens himself wrote:
+
+    The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room before a
+    girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell, and nearly so of
+    taste; before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and
+    hope, and power of goodness and affection inclosed within her delicate
+    frame, and but one outward sense--the sense of touch. There she was
+    before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any
+    ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping
+    through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that
+    an immortal soul might be awakened.
+
+    Long before I looked upon her the help had come. Her face was radiant
+    with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands,
+    was bound about her head, whose intellectual capacity and development
+    were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open
+    brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and
+    simplicity; the work she had knitted lay beside her; her writing book
+    was on the desk she leaned upon. From the mournful ruin of such
+    bereavement there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless,
+    grateful-hearted being.
+
+The touching story of Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter was intended to
+arouse interest in blind children.
+
+Doctor Marigold should be one of the best beloved of all the beautiful
+characters of Dickens. If any kind of language could awaken an intense
+interest in the education of deaf-mutes, the story of the dear old Cheap
+Jack must surely do it.
+
+The sad picture of the cruel treatment of his own little Sophy by her
+mother; of her dying on his shoulder while he was selling his wares to the
+crowd, whispering fondly to her between his jokes; and the suicide of the
+mother, when she afterward saw another woman beating her child, and heard
+the child cry piteously, "Don't beat me! Oh, mother, mother,
+mother!"--these prepare the heart for full appreciation of the tender,
+considerate, and intelligent treatment of the deaf-mute child adopted by
+Doctor Marigold in Sophy's place.
+
+    I went to that Fair as a mere civilian, leaving the cart outside the
+    town, and I looked about the back of the Vans while the performing was
+    going on, and at last, sitting dozing against a muddy cart wheel, I
+    come upon the poor girl who was deaf and dumb. At the first look I
+    might almost have judged that she had escaped from the Wild Beast
+    Show; but at the second I thought better of her, and thought that if
+    she was more cared for and more kindly used she would be like my
+    child. She was just the same age that my own daughter would have been,
+    if her pretty head had not fell down upon my shoulder that unfortunate
+    night.
+
+    It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel in
+    the cart. I at once gave her the name of Sophy, to put her ever toward
+    me in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to begin to
+    understand one another, through the goodness of the Heavens, when she
+    knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a very little time she
+    was wonderful fond of me. You have no idea what it is to have anybody
+    wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon
+    by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the
+    better of me.
+
+    You'd have laughed--or the rewerse--it's according to your
+    disposition--if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At first
+    I was helped--you'd never guess by what--milestones. I got some large
+    alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of bone, and say
+    we was going to WINDSOR; I gave her those letters in that order, and
+    then at every milestone I showed her those same letters in that same
+    order again, and pointed toward the abode of royalty. Another time I
+    give her CART, and then chalked the same upon the cart. Another time I
+    give her DOCTOR MARIGOLD, and hung a corresponding inscription outside
+    my waistcoat. People that met us might stare a bit and laugh, but what
+    did _I_ care if she caught the idea? She caught it after long patience
+    and trouble, and then we did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe
+    you! At first she was a little given to consider me the cart, and the
+    cart the abode of royalty, but that soon wore off.
+
+    The way she learned to understand any look of mine was truly
+    surprising. When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart, unseen
+    by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes when I
+    looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or articles
+    I wanted. And then she would clap her hands, and laugh for joy. And as
+    for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she was when I
+    first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged, leaning asleep
+    against the muddy cart wheel, it give me such heart that I gained a
+    greater height of reputation than ever.
+
+    This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen years old. By
+    which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole duty
+    by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching than I
+    could give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I commenced
+    explaining my views to her; but what's right is right, and you can't
+    neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character.
+
+    So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf
+    and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to speak
+    to us, I says to him: "Now, I'll tell you what I'll do with you, sir.
+    I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have laid by for a
+    rainy day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter (adopted), and you
+    can't produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her the most that can be
+    taught her in the shortest separation that can be named--state the
+    figure for it--and I am game to put the money down. I won't bate you
+    single farthing, sir, but I'll put down the money here and now, and
+    I'll thankfully throw you in a pound to take it. There!" The gentleman
+    smiled, and then, "Well, well," says he, "I must first know what she
+    has learned already. How do you communicate with her?" Then I showed
+    him, and she wrote in printed writing many names of things and so
+    forth; and we held some sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a
+    little story in a book which the gentleman showed her, and which she
+    was able to read. "This is most extraordinary," says the gentleman;
+    "is it possible that you have been her only teacher?" "I have been her
+    only teacher, sir," I says, "besides herself." "Then," says the
+    gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, "you're a
+    clever fellow, and a good fellow." This he makes known to Sophy, who
+    kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it.
+
+    "Now, Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter to
+    know?"
+
+    "I want her, sir, to be cut off from the world as little as can be,
+    considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read
+    whatever is wrote with perfect ease and pleasure."
+
+No one ever read this story and its delightful closing without being more
+deeply interested in deaf-mutes and their education.
+
+All the children, especially poor and defective children, should be taught
+how much they owe to Dickens, that they might reverently love his memory.
+
+One of the most awful pictures shown to Scrooge by the Phantom was the
+picture of the two "wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable
+children."
+
+    They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish;
+    but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should
+    have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest
+    tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and
+    twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have
+    sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no
+    degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the
+    mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and
+    dread.
+
+    "They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they
+    cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This
+    girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of
+    all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,
+    unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching
+    out its hand toward the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it
+    for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!"
+
+Dickens bravely fought the battle against the enemies of the children, and
+helped to win the grandest victories of Christian civilization.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES.
+
+_12mo, cloth, uniform binding._
+
+
+THE INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES was projected for the purpose of
+bringing together in orderly arrangement the best writings, new and old,
+upon educational subjects, and presenting a complete course of reading and
+training for teachers generally. It is edited by WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL.
+D., United States Commissioner of Education, who has contributed for the
+different volumes in the way of introduction, analysis, and commentary.
+
+1. The Philosophy of Education. By JOHANN K. F. ROSENKRANZ, Doctor of
+Theology and Professor of Philosophy. University of Königsberg. Translated
+by ANNA C. BRACKETT. Second edition, revised, with Commentary and complete
+Analysis. $1.50.
+
+2. A History of Education. By F. V. N. PAINTER, A. M. Professor of Modern
+Languages and Literature, Roanoke College, Va. Revised edition, 1904.
+$1.20 net.
+
+3. The Rise and Early Constitution of Universities. WITH A SURVEY OF
+MEDIĈVAL EDUCATION. By S. S. LAURIE, LL. D., Professor of the Institutes
+and History of Education, University of Edinburgh. $1.50.
+
+4. The Ventilation and Warming of School Buildings. By GILBERT B.
+MORRISON, Teacher of Physics and Chemistry, Kansas City High School.
+$1.00.
+
+5. The Education of Man. By FRIEDRICH FROEBEL. Translated and annotated by
+W. N. HAILMANN, A. M., Superintendent of Public Schools, La Porte, Ind.
+$1.50.
+
+6. Elementary Psychology and Education. By JOSEPH BALDWIN, A. M., LL. D.,
+author of "The Art of School Management." $1.50.
+
+7. The Senses and the Will. (Part I of "THE MIND OF THE CHILD.") By W.
+PREYER, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated by H. W. BROWN,
+Teacher in the State Normal School at Worcester, Mass. $1.50.
+
+8. Memory: What it is and How to Improve it. By DAVID KAY, F. R. G. S.,
+author of "Education and Educators," etc. $1.50.
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+9. The Development of the Intellect. (Part II of "THE MIND OF THE CHILD.")
+By W. PREYER, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated by H. W. BROWN.
+$1.50.
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+10. How to Study Geography. A Practical Exposition of Methods and Devices
+in Teaching Geography which apply the Principles and Plans of Ritter and
+Guyot. By FRANCIS W. PARKER, Principal of the Cook County (Illinois)
+Normal School. $1.50.
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+11. Education in the United States: Its History from the Earliest
+Settlements. By RICHARD G. BOONE, A. M., Professor of Pedagogy, Indiana
+University. $1.50.
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+12. European Schools; OR, WHAT I SAW IN THE SCHOOLS OF GERMANY, FRANCE,
+AUSTRIA, AND SWITZERLAND. By L. R. KLEMM, Ph. D., Principal of the
+Cincinnati Technical School. Fully illustrated. $2.00.
+
+13. Practical Hints for the Teachers of Public Schools. By GEORGE HOWLAND,
+Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools. $1.00.
+
+14. Pestalozzi: His Life and Work. By ROGER DE GUIMPS. Authorized
+Translation from the second French edition, by J. RUSSELL, B. A. With an
+Introduction by Rev. R. H. QUICK, M. A. $1.50.
+
+15. School Supervision. By J. L. PICKARD, LL. D. $1.00.
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+16. Higher Education of Women in Europe. By HELENE LANGE, Berlin.
+Translated and accompanied by comparative statistics by L. R. KLEMM.
+$1.00.
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+17. Essays on Educational Reformers. By ROBERT HERBERT QUICK, M. A.,
+Trinity College, Cambridge. Only authorized edition of the work as
+rewritten in 1890. $1.50.
+
+18. A Text-Book in Psychology. By JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART. Translated by
+MARGARET K. SMITH. $1.00.
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+19. Psychology Applied to the Art of Teaching. By JOSEPH BALDWIN, A. M.,
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+20. Rousseau's Émile; or, TREATISE ON EDUCATION. Translated and annotated
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+23. Education from a National Standpoint. By ALFRED FOUILLÉE. $1.50.
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+24. Mental Development of the Child. By W. PREYER, Professor of Physiology
+in Jena. Translated by H. W. BROWN. $1.00.
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+25. How to Study and Teach History. By B. A. HINSDALE, Ph. D., LL. D.,
+University of Michigan. $1.50.
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+26. Symbolic Education. A COMMENTARY ON FROEBEL'S "MOTHER-PLAY." By SUSAN
+E. BLOW. $1.50.
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+MARTIN, A. M. $1.50.
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+31. The Mottoes and Commentaries of Friedrich Froebel's Mother-Play. By
+SUSAN E. BLOW and HENRIETTA R. ELIOT. $1.50.
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+32. The Songs and Music of Froebel's Mother-Play. By SUSAN E. BLOW. $1.50.
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+33. The Psychology of Number. By JAMES A. MCLELLAN, A. M., and JOHN DEWEY,
+Ph. D. $1.50.
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+34. Teaching the Language-Arts. By B. A. HINSDALE, LL. D. $1.00.
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+35. The Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child. PART I. By
+GABRIEL COMPAYRÉ. Translated by MARY E. WILSON. $1.50.
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+36. Herbart's A B C of Sense-Perception, and Introductory Works. By
+WILLIAM J. ECKOFF, Pd. D., Ph. D. $1.50.
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+D. $1.50.
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dickens As an Educator, by James L. (James
+Laughlin) Hughes</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Dickens As an Educator</p>
+<p>Author: James L. (James Laughlin) Hughes</p>
+<p>Release Date: August 31, 2011  [eBook #37284]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (<a href="http://www.pgdp.net">http://www.pgdp.net</a>)<br />
+    from paage images generously made available by<br />
+    Internet Archive<br />
+    (<a href="http://www.archive.org/">http://www.archive.org</a>)</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table border="0" style="background-color: #ccccff;margin: 0 auto;" cellpadding="10">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">
+      Note:
+    </td>
+    <td>
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/dickensaseducato00hughrich">
+      http://www.archive.org/details/dickensaseducato00hughrich</a>
+   </td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>DICKENS<br />AS AN EDUCATOR</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">BY<br />
+<span class="huge">JAMES L. HUGHES</span><br />
+<small>INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS, TORONTO<br />
+AUTHOR OF FROEBEL&#8217;S EDUCATIONAL LAWS<br />
+MISTAKES IN TEACHING, ETC.</small></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">NEW YORK AND LONDON<br />
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY<br />
+1913</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1900,<br />
+<span class="smcap">By</span> D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Electrotyped and Printed<br />
+at the Appleton Press, U.S.A.</span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<h2>EDITOR&#8217;S PREFACE.</h2>
+
+<p>The following pages are sufficient to establish the claim of Mr. Hughes
+for Dickens as an educational reformer&mdash;the greatest that England has
+produced. It will be admitted that he has done more than any one else to
+secure for the child a considerate treatment of his tender age. &#8220;It is a
+crime against a child to rob it of its childhood.&#8221; This principle was
+announced by Dickens, and it has come to be generally recognised and
+adopted. Gradually it is changing the methods of primary instruction and
+bringing into vogue a milder form of discipline and a more stimulative
+teaching&mdash;arousing the child&#8217;s self-activity instead of repressing it.</p>
+
+<p>The child is born with animal instincts and tendencies, it is true, but he
+has all the possibilities of human nature. The latter can be developed
+best by a treatment which takes for granted the child&#8217;s preference to
+adopt what is good rather than what is bad in social customs and usages.</p>
+
+<p>The child, it is true, is uneven in his proclivities, having some bad ones
+and some good ones. The true pedagogy uses the good inclinations as a
+lever by which to correct bad ones. The teacher recognises what is good in
+the child&#8217;s disposition and endeavours to build on it a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> self-respect
+which may at all times be invoked against temptations to bad conduct.
+Child depravity sometimes exists, but it can generally be traced to
+injudicious methods of education in the family, the school, or the
+community. Dickens has laid so much emphasis on defects of method in these
+three directions that he has made the generation in which he lived and the
+next succeeding one sensitively conscious of them. He has even caricatured
+them with such vehemence of style as to make our ideals so vivid that we
+see at once any wrong tendency in its very beginning.</p>
+
+<p>Walter Scott, in his schoolmasters, has caricatured pedantry; so has
+Shakespeare. But Dickens has discovered a variety of types of pedantry and
+made them all easily recognisable and odious to us. More than this, he has
+attacked the evil of cramming, the evil of isolation from the family in
+the boarding school for too young children, and the evil of uninteresting
+instruction. Whatever is good and reasonable for the child to know should
+be made interesting to the child, and the teacher is to be considered
+incompetent who can not find in the life histories of his class threads of
+daily experience and present interest to which he can attach every point
+that the regular lesson contains.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens has done a great work in directing the attention of society to its
+public institutions&mdash;especially to its orphan asylums and poorhouses. The
+chill which the infant gets when it comes in direct contact with the
+formality of a state institution, or even a religious institution, without
+the mediation of the family, is portrayed so well that every reader of
+Dickens feels it by sympathy. So, too, in those families of public men or
+women or in those of the directors of industry or commerce who crush out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span>
+the true family life by bringing home their unrelaxing business manners
+and trying to regulate the family as they regulate the details of a great
+business house&mdash;the reading world has imbibed a sympathy for the rights of
+the home. Free childhood and the culture of individuality has become a
+watchword.</p>
+
+<p>Above all, Dickens has introduced a reform as to the habit of terrorizing
+children. Corporal punishment has diminished to one fourth of its former
+amount, and Charles Dickens is the prophet to whom the reform owes its
+potency. In fact, the habit of finding in the good tendencies of the child
+the levers with which to move him to the repression of his bad impulses
+has placed in the hands of the professional teacher the means of governing
+the child without appeal to force except in the rarest cases.</p>
+
+<p>The tendency to caricature an evil has its dangers, of course, and
+Dickens, like all the other educational reformers, has often condemned as
+entirely unworthy of toleration what has really in it some good reason for
+its existence. It was the abuse that needed correction. Reform instead of
+revolution should have been recommended, but the reformer often gets so
+heated in his contest with superficial evil that he attacks what is
+fundamentally good. He cuts down the tree when it needed only the removal
+of a twig infested with caterpillars. This defect of the reformer renders
+necessary a new reformer, and thus arises a pendulum swing of educational
+method from one extreme to another.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens shares with all reformers some of their weaknesses, but he does
+not share his most excellent qualities with many of them. He stands apart
+and alone as one of the most potent influences of social reform in the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span>nineteenth century, and therefore deserves to be read and studied by all
+who have to do with schools and by all parents everywhere in our day and
+generation.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">W. T. Harris.</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><span class="smcap">Washington, D. C.</span>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;"><i>October 12, 1900</i>.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+<h2>AUTHOR&#8217;S PREFACE.</h2>
+
+<p>This book has two purposes: to prove that Dickens was the great apostle of
+the &#8220;new education&#8221; to the English-speaking world, and to bring into
+connected form, under appropriate headings, the educational principles of
+one of the world&#8217;s greatest educators, and one of its two most sympathetic
+friends of childhood.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens was the most profound exponent of the kindergarten and the most
+comprehensive student of childhood that England has yet produced. He was
+one of the first great advocates of a national system of schools, and his
+revelations of the ignorance and the intellectual and spiritual
+destitution of the children of the poor led to the deep interest which
+ultimately brought about the establishment of free schools in England.</p>
+
+<p>He was essentially a child trainer rather than a teacher. In the
+twenty-eight schools described in his writings, and in the training of his
+army of little children in institutions and homes, he reveals nearly every
+form of bad training resulting from ignorance, selfishness, indifference,
+unwise zeal, unphilosophic philosophy, and un-Christian theology. No other
+writer has attacked so many phases of wrong training, unjust treatment,
+and ill usage of childhood.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span>He is the most distinctive champion of the rights of childhood. He struck
+the bravest blows against corporal punishment, and against all forms of
+coercive tyranny toward the child in homes, institutions, and schools,
+even condemning the dogmatic will control of such a placid, Christian
+woman as Mrs. Crisparkle. He demanded a free, real, joyous childhood, rich
+in all a child&#8217;s best experiences and interests, so that &#8220;childhood may
+ripen in childhood.&#8221; He pleaded for the development of the individuality
+of each child. He taught the wisdom of giving a child proper food, and he
+showed the vital importance of real sympathy with the child, not mere
+consideration for him. He was the English father of true reverence for the
+child.</p>
+
+<p>But Dickens studied the methods of cultivating the minds of children, as
+well as their character development. He exposed the evils of cramming more
+vigorously than any other writer. He taught the essential character of the
+imagination in intellectual and spiritual development. He showed the need
+of correlation of studies, and of apperceptive centres of feeling and
+thought in order to comprehend, and assimilate, and transform into
+definite power the knowledge and thought that is brought to our minds.</p>
+
+<p>It is said by some, who see but the surface of the work of Dickens, that
+his work is done. Much of the good work for which he lived has been done,
+but much more remains to be done. Men are but beginning the work of child
+study and of rational education. The twentieth century will understand
+Dickens better than the nineteenth has understood him. His profound
+philosophy is only partially comprehended yet, even by the leaders in
+educational work. Teachers and all students of childhood will find in his
+true feeling and rich thought revelation and inspiration.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td align="right"><small>CHAPTER</small></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">The place of Dickens among educators</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Infant gardens</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_15">15</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">The overthrow of coercion</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_29">29</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">The doctrine of child depravity</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Cramming</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Free childhood</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Individuality</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">The culture of the imagination</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Sympathy with childhood</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_162">162</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">X.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Child study and child nature</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_181">181</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">XI.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Bad training</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_188">188</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">XII.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Good training</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_218">218</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">XIII.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Community</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">XIV.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Nutrition as a factor in education</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">XV.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Minor schools</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">XVI.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Miscellaneous educational principles</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_285">285</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">XVII.</a></td>
+    <td>&mdash;<span class="smcap">The training of poor, neglected, and defective children</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">THE PLACE OF DICKENS AMONG EDUCATORS.</span></p>
+
+<p>Dickens was England&#8217;s greatest educational reformer. His views were not
+given to the world in the form of ordinary didactic treatises, but in the
+form of object lessons in the most entertaining of all stories. Millions
+have read his books, whereas but hundreds would have read them if he had
+written his ideals in the form of direct, systematic exposition. He is
+certainly not less an educator because his books have been widely read.</p>
+
+<p>The highest form of teaching is the informal, the indirect, the
+incidental. The fact that his educational principles are revealed chiefly
+by the evolution of the characters in his novels and stories, instead of
+by the direct philosophic statements of scientific pedagogy or psychology,
+gives Dickens higher rank as an educator, not only because it gives him
+much wider influence, but because it makes his teaching more effective by
+arousing deep, strong feeling to give permanency and propulsive force to
+his great thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>Was Dickens consciously and intentionally an educator? The prefaces to his
+novels; the preface to his Household Words; the educational articles he
+wrote; the prominence given in his books to child training in homes,
+institutions, and schools; the statements of the highest educational
+philosophy found in his writings; and especially the clearness of his
+insight and the profoundness of his educational thought, as shown by his
+condemnation of the wrong and his appreciation of the right in teaching
+and training the child, prove beyond question that he was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> not only broad
+and true in his sympathy with childhood, but that he was a careful and
+progressive student of the fundamental principles of education.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens deals with twenty-eight schools in his writings, evidently with
+definite purposes in each case: &#8220;Minerva House,&#8221; in Sketches by Boz;
+&#8220;Dotheboys Hall,&#8221; in Nicholas Nickleby; Mr. Marton&#8217;s two schools, Miss
+Monflather&#8217;s school, and Mrs. Wackles&#8217;s school, in Old Curiosity Shop; Dr.
+Blimber&#8217;s school and &#8220;The Grinders&#8217;&#8221; school, in Dombey and Son; Mr.
+Creakle&#8217;s school, Dr. Strong&#8217;s school, Agnes&#8217;s school, and the school
+Uriah Heep attended, in David Copperfield; the school at which Esther was
+a day boarder and Miss Donney&#8217;s school, in Bleak House; Mr.
+McChoakumchild&#8217;s school, in Hard Times; Mr. Wopsle&#8217;s great aunt&#8217;s school,
+in Great Expectations; the evening school attended by Charley Hexam,
+Bradley Headstone&#8217;s school, and Miss Peecher&#8217;s school, in Our Mutual
+Friend; Ph&oelig;be&#8217;s school, in Barbox Brothers; Mrs. Lemon&#8217;s school, in
+Holiday Romance; Jemmy Lirriper&#8217;s school, in Mrs. Lirriper&#8217;s Lodgings;
+Miss Pupford&#8217;s school, in Tom Tiddler&#8217;s Ground; the school described in
+The Haunted House; Miss Twinkleton&#8217;s seminary, in Edwin Drood; the schools
+of the Stepney Union; The Schoolboy&#8217;s Story; and Our School.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to these twenty-eight schools, he describes a real school in
+American Notes, and makes brief references to The Misses Nettingall&#8217;s
+establishment, Mr. Cripples&#8217;s academy, Drowvey and Grimmer&#8217;s school, the
+Foundation school attended by George Silverman, Scrooge&#8217;s school,
+Pecksniff&#8217;s school for architects, Fagin&#8217;s school for training thieves,
+and three dancing schools, conducted by Mr. Baps, Signor Billsmethi, and
+Mr. Turveydrop. He introduces Mr. Pocket, George Silverman, and Canon
+Crisparkle as tutors, and Mrs. General, Miss Lane, and Ruth Pinch as
+governesses. Mrs. Sapsea had been the proprietor of an academy in
+Cloisterham. One of the first sketches by &#8220;Boz&#8221; was Our Schoolmaster, and
+his books are full of illustrations of wrong training of children in
+homes, in institutions, and by professional child trainers such as Mrs.
+Pipchin.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>Clearly Dickens intended to reveal the best educational ideals, and to
+expose what he regarded as weak or wrong in school methods, and especially
+in child training.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens was the first great English student of the kindergarten. His
+article on Infant Gardens, published in Household Words in 1855, is one of
+the most comprehensive articles ever written on the kindergarten
+philosophy. It shows a perfect appreciation of the physical, intellectual,
+and spiritual aims of Froebel, and a clear recognition of the value of
+right early training and of the influence of free self-activity in the
+development of individual power and character.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens is beyond comparison the chief English apostle of childhood, and
+its leading champion in securing a just, intelligent, and considerate
+recognition of its rights by adulthood, which till his time had been
+deliberately coercive and almost universally tyrannical in dealing with
+children. He entered more fully than any other English author into
+sympathy with childhood from the standpoint of the child. Other educators
+and philanthropists have shown consideration for children, but Dickens had
+the perfect sympathy with childhood that sees and feels <i>with</i> the child,
+not merely <i>for</i> him.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens attacked all forms of coercion in child training. He discussed
+fourteen types of coercion, from the brutal corporal punishment of Squeers
+and Creakle in schools, of Bumble and the Christian philanthropist with
+the white waistcoat in institutions, and of the Murdstones and Mrs.
+Gargery in homes, to the gentle but dwarfing firmness of the dominant will
+of placid Mrs. Crisparkle. He condemned all coercion because it prevents
+the full development of selfhood, and makes men negative instead of
+positive.</p>
+
+<p>Among the many improvements made in child training none is more complete
+than the change in discipline. For this change the world is indebted
+chiefly to Froebel and Dickens. Froebel revealed the true philosophy,
+Dickens gave it wings; Froebel gave the thought, Dickens made the thought
+clear and strong by arousing energetic feeling in harmony with it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>Thought makes slow progress without a basis of feeling. Dickens opened the
+hearts of humanity in sympathy for suffering childhood, and thus gave
+Froebel&#8217;s philosophy definiteness and propulsive power. The darkest clouds
+have been cleared away from child life during the past fifty years.
+Teachers, managers of institutions for the care of children, and parents
+are now severely punished by the laws of civilized countries for offences
+against children that were approved by the most enlightened Christian
+philosophy at the time of Froebel and Dickens as necessary duties
+essential in the proper training of childhood.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens helped to break the bonds of the doctrine of child depravity. This
+doctrine had a most depressing influence on educators. It was not possible
+to reverence a child so long as he was regarded as a totally depraved
+thing. Froebel and Dickens did not teach that a child is totally divine,
+but they did believe that every child possesses certain elements of
+divinity which constitute selfhood or individuality, and that if this
+selfhood is developed in conscious unity with the Divine Fatherhood the
+child will attain to complete manhood. This thought gives the educator a
+new and a higher attitude toward childhood. The child is no longer a thing
+to be repressed, but a being to be developed. Men are not persistently
+dwarfed now by deliberate efforts to define a blighting consciousness of
+weakness; they are stimulated to broader effort and higher purpose by a
+true self-consciousness of individual power. The philosophy that trains
+men to recognise responsibility for the good in their nature is infinitely
+more productive educationally than that which teaches men responsibility
+for the evil in their nature.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens taught that loving sympathy is the highest qualification of a true
+teacher. He showed this to be true by both positive and negative
+illustrations. Mr. Marton, the old schoolmaster in Old Curiosity Shop, was
+a perfect type of a sympathetic teacher. Dr. Strong was &#8220;the ideal of the
+whole school, for he was the kindest of men.&#8221; Ph&oelig;be&#8217;s school was such a
+good place for the little ones, because she loved them. Like Mr. Marton,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+she had not studied the new systems of teaching, but loving sympathy gave
+her power and made her school a place in which the good in human hearts
+grew and blossomed naturally.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are fond of children and learned in the new systems of teaching
+them,&#8221; said Mr. Jackson.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very fond of them,&#8221; replied Ph&oelig;be, &#8220;but I know nothing of teaching
+beyond the pleasure I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they
+learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars sing some of their
+lessons has led you so far astray as to think me a good teacher? Ah, I
+thought so! No, I have only read and been told about that system. It seems
+so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry robins they
+are, that I took up with it in my little way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had heard of the kindergarten and had caught some of its spirit of
+sympathy with the child, but she did not understand its methods. Jemmy
+Lirriper received perfectly sympathetic treatment from Mrs. Lirriper and
+the Major; Agnes loved her little scholars; Esther, who sympathized with
+everybody, loved her pupils, and was beloved by them; and the Bachelor,
+who introduced Mr. Marton to his second school, was a genuine boy in his
+comprehensive sympathy with real, boyish boyhood.</p>
+
+<p>So throughout all his books Dickens pleads for kindly treatment for the
+child, and for complete sympathy with him in his childish feelings and
+interests. He gave the child the place of honour in literature for the
+first time, and he aroused the heart of the Christian world to the fact
+that it was treating the child in a very un-Christlike way. He pleaded for
+a better education for the child, for a free childhood, for greater
+liberty in the home and in the school, for fuller sympathy especially at
+the time when childhood merges into youth and when the mysteries of life
+have begun to make themselves conscious to the young mind and heart. The
+poorer the child the greater the need he revealed.</p>
+
+<p>Canon Crisparkle, Esther Summerson, Mr. Jarndyce, Joe Gargery, Rose
+Maylie, Allan Woodcourt, Betty Higden, Mr. Sangsby, the Old Schoolmaster,
+the Bachelor,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> Mrs. Lirriper, Major Jackmann, Doctor Marigold, Agnes
+Wickfield, Mr. George, and Mr. Brownlow are types of the people with whom
+Dickens would fill the world&mdash;men and women whose hearts were overflowing
+with true sympathy. Esther Summerson is the best type of perfect sympathy
+to be met with in literature. She expressed the central principle of
+Dickens&#8217;s philosophy regarding sympathy when she said: &#8220;When I love a
+person very tenderly indeed my understanding seems to brighten; my
+comprehension is quickened when my affection is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The need of sympathy with childhood was revealed by Dickens most strongly
+by the cruelty, the coercion, and the harshness of such characters as
+Squeers, Creakle, Bumble, the Murdstones, Mrs. Gargery, John Willet, Mrs.
+Pipchin, Mrs. Clennam, and the teachers in The Grinders&#8217; school.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens&#8217;s description of Dr. Blimber&#8217;s school is the most profound
+criticism of the cramming system of teaching that was ever written. He
+treats the same subject also in Hard Times, Christmas Stories, and A
+Holiday Romance.</p>
+
+<p>The vital importance of a free, rich childhood, the value of the
+imagination as the basis of intellectual and spiritual development, the
+folly of the Herbartian psychology relating to the soul, the error of
+regarding fact-storing as the chief aim of education, and the terrible
+evils resulting from the tyranny of adulthood in dealing with childhood
+are all treated very ably in Hard Times, the most advanced and most
+profound of Dickens&#8217;s works from the standpoint of the educator.</p>
+
+<p>The need of a real childhood, so well expressed in Froebel&#8217;s maxim, &#8220;Let
+childhood ripen in childhood,&#8221; is shown also in Nicholas Nickleby, Old
+Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son, Great
+Expectations, and Edwin Drood.</p>
+
+<p>The true reverence for individual selfhood is shown in Dombey and Son,
+David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual
+Friend, and Edwin Drood.</p>
+
+<p>The wisdom of studying the subject of nutrition as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> one of the most
+important subjects connected with the development of children physically,
+intellectually, and morally, and the meanness or carelessness too
+frequently shown in feeding children, were taught in Oliver Twist, Old
+Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield,
+Bleak House, Great Expectations, Edwin Drood, Christmas Stories, and
+American Notes.</p>
+
+<p>Play as an essential factor in education is treated in Martin Chuzzlewit,
+Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and American Notes.</p>
+
+<p>The folly of the old practice of attempting to educate by polishing the
+surface of the character, of training from without instead of from within,
+is revealed in Bleak House and Little Dorrit.</p>
+
+<p>Bleak House discusses the contents of children&#8217;s minds and the need of
+early experiences to form apperceptive centres of feeling and thought in a
+comprehensive and suggestive manner.</p>
+
+<p>The need of practising the fundamental law of co-operation and the sharing
+of responsibilities and duties, as the foundation for the true
+comprehension of the law of community, is shown in Barnaby Rudge, David
+Copperfield, Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit.</p>
+
+<p>The need of child study is suggested in David Copperfield and Bleak House.</p>
+
+<p>The value of joyousness in the development of true, strong character is
+discussed in Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, Old Curiosity Shop, Martin
+Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Little Dorrit,
+Great Expectations, and Edwin Drood.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens was one of the first Englishmen to see the need of normal schools
+to train teachers, and to advocate the abolition of uninspected private
+schools and the establishment of national schools. He taught these ideals
+in the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, issued in 1839, so that he very early
+caught the spirit of Mann and Barnard in America, and saw the wisdom of
+their efforts to establish schools supported, controlled, and directed by
+the state.</p>
+
+<p>He says, in his preface to Nicholas Nickleby:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>Of the monstrous neglect of education in England, and the disregard of
+it by the state as a means of forming good or bad citizens, and
+miserable or happy men, this class of schools long afforded a notable
+example. Although any man who had proved his unfitness for any other
+occupation in life, was free, without examination or qualification, to
+open a school anywhere; although preparation for the functions he
+undertook was required in the surgeon who assisted to bring a boy into
+the world, or might one day assist, perhaps, to send him out of it; in
+the chemist, the attorney, the butcher, the baker, the
+candlestick-maker; the whole round of crafts and trades, the
+schoolmaster excepted; and although schoolmasters, as a race, were the
+blockheads and impostors who might naturally be expected to spring
+from such a state of things, and to flourish in it, these Yorkshire
+schoolmasters were the lowest and most rotten round in the whole
+ladder. Traders in the avarice, indifference, or imbecility of
+parents, and the helplessness of children; ignorant, sordid, brutal
+men, to whom few considerate persons would have intrusted the board
+and lodging of a horse or a dog; they formed the worthy corner-stone
+of a structure which, for absurdity and magnificent high-handed
+<i>laissez-aller</i> neglect, has rarely been exceeded in the world.</p>
+
+<p>We hear sometimes of an action for damages against the unqualified
+medical practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to
+heal it. But what about the hundreds of thousands of minds that have
+been deformed forever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended
+to form them?</p>
+
+<p>I make mention of the race, as of the Yorkshire schoolmasters, in the
+past tense. Though it has not yet finally disappeared, it is dwindling
+daily. A long day&#8217;s work remains to be done about us in the way of
+education, Heaven knows; but great improvements and facilities toward
+the attainment of a good one have been furnished of late years.</p></div>
+
+<p>This leaves no doubt in regard to the conscious purpose of Dickens in
+writing with definite educational plans.</p>
+
+<p>Incidentally he discusses every phase of what is called the &#8220;new
+education.&#8221; He was the first and the greatest English student of Froebel,
+and his writings gave wings to the profound thought of the greatest
+philosopher of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> childhood. Froebel revealed the truth that feeling is the
+basis of thought. In harmony with this great psychological principle, it
+may fairly be claimed that the works of Dickens so fully aroused the heart
+of the civilized world to the wrongs inflicted on childhood, and the
+grievous errors committed in training children, as to prepare the minds of
+all who read his books for the conscious revelation of the imperfections
+of educational systems and methods, and the imperative need of radical
+educational reforms.</p>
+
+<p>The intense feeling caused by the writings of Dickens prepared the way for
+the thought of Froebel. Dickens studied Froebel with great care. He was
+not merely a student of theoretical principles, but he was a very frequent
+visitor to the first kindergarten opened in England. Madame Kraus-Boelte,
+who assisted Madame Rong&eacute; in the first kindergarten opened in London, says
+in a recent letter: &#8220;I remember very distinctly the frequent visits made
+by Mr. Dickens to Madame Rong&eacute;&#8217;s kindergarten. He always appeared to be
+deeply interested, and would sometimes stay during the whole session.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The description of the schools of the Stepney Union in the Uncommercial
+Traveller shows how keenly appreciative Dickens was of all true new ideals
+in educational work. These were charity schools conducted on an excellent
+system. The pupils worked at industrial occupations half of their school
+hours, and studied the other half. They were taught music, and the boys
+had military drill and naval training. They had no corporal punishment in
+these schools.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens approved most heartily of everything he saw in his frequent visits
+to the schools of the Stepney Union except the work of one of the younger
+teachers, who would, in his opinion, have been better &#8220;if she had shown
+more geniality.&#8221; He commended the industrial work, the military training,
+the naval training, the music, the discipline without corporal punishment,
+and the intellectual brightness of the children. He pointed out at some
+length the difference in interest shown by the pupils<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> in these schools
+and by the pupils in the school he himself attended when a boy, and drew
+the conclusion very definitely that shorter hours of study, with a variety
+of interesting operations, were much better for the physical and
+intellectual development of children than long hours spent in monotonous
+work.</p>
+
+<p>The folly and wrong of trying to make children study beyond the fatigue
+point was never more clearly pointed out than by Dickens in the
+description of the school he attended when a boy, given as a contrast to
+the life and brightness and interest shown in the schools of the Stepney
+Union:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When I was at school, one of seventy boys, I wonder by what secret
+understanding our attention began to wander when we had pored over our
+books for some hours. I wonder by what ingenuity we brought on that
+confused state of mind when sense became nonsense, when figures
+wouldn&#8217;t work, when dead languages wouldn&#8217;t construe, when live
+languages wouldn&#8217;t be spoken, when memory wouldn&#8217;t come, when dulness
+and vacancy wouldn&#8217;t go. I can not remember that we ever conspired to
+be sleepy after dinner, or that we ever particularly wanted to be
+stupid, and to have flushed faces and hot, beating heads, or to find
+blank hopelessness and obscurity this afternoon in what would become
+perfectly clear and bright in the freshness of to-morrow morning. We
+suffered for these things, and they made us miserable enough. Neither
+do I remember that we ever bound ourselves, by any secret oath or
+other solemn obligation to find the seats getting too hard to be sat
+upon after a certain time; or to have intolerable twitches in our
+legs, rendering us aggressive and malicious with those members; or to
+be troubled with a similar uneasiness in our elbows, attended with
+fistic consequences to our neighbours; or to carry two pounds of lead
+in the chest, four pounds in the head, and several active bluebottles
+in each ear. Yet, for certain, we suffered under those distresses, and
+were always charged at for labouring under them, as if we had brought
+them on of our own deliberate act and deed.</p></div>
+
+<p>It was therefore out of a full heart and an enriched mind that Dickens
+wrought the wonderful plots into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> which he wove the most advanced
+educational ideals of his time and of our time relating to the blighting
+influence of coercion, the divinity in the child, the recognition of
+freedom as the truest process and highest aim of education, the value of
+real sympathy, the importance of self-activity, the true reverence for the
+child leading to faith in it, the need of child study, the effect of
+joyousness on the child&#8217;s development, the benefits of play, the influence
+of nutrition, the ideal of community, the importance of the imagination as
+a basis for the best intellectual growth, the narrowness of
+utilitarianism, the absolute need of apperceptive centres to which shall
+be related the progressive enlargement and enrichment of feeling and
+thought throughout the life of the individual, the arrest of development
+and the sacrifice of power and life due to cramming, and the weakness of
+all educational systems and methods that regard fact-storing as the
+highest work of the teacher.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said by critics of Dickens that he exaggerated the defects and
+errors in the characters of those whom he described. Two things should be
+kept in mind, however. Dickens usually described the worst, not the best
+types, and he was justified in revealing a wrong principle or practice in
+the strongest possible light, in order to make it more easily recognisable
+and more completely repugnant to the aroused feeling and startled thought
+of humanity. He was writing with the definite purpose of making the world
+so thoroughly hate the wrong in education and child training as to lead to
+definite practical reforms.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens himself did not admit the justness of the charge of exaggeration.
+His coarsest, most ignorant, and most brutal teacher is Squeers, yet he
+says &#8220;Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an
+existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be
+deemed impossible. There are upon record trials at law in which damages
+have been sought as a poor recompense for lasting agonies and
+disfigurements inflicted upon children by the treatment of the master in
+these places, involving such offensive and foul details of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> neglect,
+cruelty, and disease as no writer of fiction would have the boldness to
+imagine. Since the author has been engaged upon these Adventures he has
+received, from private quarters far beyond the reach of suspicion or
+distrust, accounts of atrocities, in the perpetration of which upon
+neglected or repudiated children these schools have been the main
+instruments, very far exceeding any that appear in these pages.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens discusses the charge of exaggeration in the preface to Martin
+Chuzzlewit. He says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain
+truth to another. That which is commonly called a long-sight,
+perceives in a prospect innumerable features and bearings nonexistent
+to a shortsighted person. I sometimes ask myself whether there may
+occasionally be a difference of this kind between some writers and
+some readers; whether it is <i>always</i> the writer who colours highly, or
+whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for colour is a little
+dull?</p>
+
+<p>On this head of exaggeration I have a positive experience more curious
+than the speculation I have just set down. It is this: I have never
+touched a character precisely from the life, but some counterpart of
+that character has incredulously asked me: &#8220;Now really, did I ever
+really see one like it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>All the Pecksniff family upon earth are quite agreed, I believe, that
+Mr. Pecksniff is an exaggeration, and that no such character ever
+existed.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is worth remembering, too, that it is impossible to exaggerate the
+description of the effects of the evils Dickens attacked. Coercion in any
+form blights and dwarfs the true selfhood of the child. The coercion of
+Mrs. Crisparkle&#8217;s placid but unbending will, which she kept rigid from a
+deep conviction of Christian duty, is as clearly at variance with the
+elemental laws of individual freedom and growth by self-activity as the
+more dreadful forms of coercion practised by Squeers, Creakle, Bumble, or
+Murdstone.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Blimber&#8217;s cramming is not exaggerated. It would be quite possible
+to find in England or the United<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> States or Canada not only private but
+public institutions in which similar processes of illogical cramming are
+still practised. Words are still given before the thought, and as a
+substitute for thought. &#8220;Mathematical gooseberries&#8221; are yet produced &#8220;from
+mere sprouts of bushes,&#8221; the &#8220;words and grammar&#8221; of literature are still
+given instead of the life and glory of the author&#8217;s revelations, children
+yet are &#8220;made to bear to pattern somehow or other.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Whether Dickens exaggerated or not in regard to other spheres of work or
+of existence without work, he certainly did not exaggerate in regard to
+school conditions. He studied them faithfully, and described them truly.
+He saw wrongs more clearly than other men, and he made them stand out in
+their natural hideousness.</p>
+
+<p>It is frequently asserted that Dickens portrayed wrong training more than
+right, that he was destructive rather than constructive. In a sense, this
+is correct. His mission was to startle men, so that they would be made
+conscious of the awful crimes that were being committed by teachers and
+parents in the name of duty, as conceived by the highest Christian
+civilization of his time. He knew that a basis of strong feeling must be
+aroused against a wrong before it can be overthrown and right practices
+substituted for it. The only sure foundation for any reform is an
+energetic feeling of dislike for present conditions. The chief work of
+Dickens was to lay bare the injustice, the meanness, and the blighting
+coercion practised on helpless children not only by &#8220;ignorant, sordid,
+brutal men called schoolmasters,&#8221; but in a less degree by the best
+teachers and parents of his time. His was a noble work, and it was well
+done.</p>
+
+<p>The grandest movement of the nineteenth century was the development of a
+profound reverence for the child, so deep and wide that his rights are
+beginning to be clearly recognised by individuals and by national laws,
+and that intelligent adulthood is studying him as the central element of
+power in the representation of God in the accomplishment of the
+progressive evolution of the race. Christ put &#8220;the child in the midst of
+his disciples&#8221;; men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> are learning to follow his example, and study the
+child as the surest way to secure industrial, social, and moral reforms.
+Froebel and Dickens were the men who revealed the child. They were the
+true apostles of childhood. It must not be supposed that Dickens was not
+conscious of the positive good while describing the evils. The expressions
+&#8220;child queller,&#8221; &#8220;gospel of monotony,&#8221; &#8220;bear to pattern,&#8221; &#8220;taught as
+parrots are,&#8221; etc., and the name &#8220;McChoakumchild,&#8221; reveal the possession
+of the highest consciousness of child freedom, of individuality, and of
+child reverence yet given to humanity. So in all his wonderful pictures it
+would have been impossible for him to have so vividly described the wrong
+if he had not clearly understood the right. He had perfect sympathy with
+childhood, he was a great student of the child and of the existing methods
+of training and educating him, and his insights and judgment were so clear
+and true that, as Ruskin says, &#8220;in the last analysis he was always right.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If he had never written anything but his article on the kindergarten,
+published July, 1855, he would have proved himself to be an educational
+philosopher.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">INFANT GARDENS.</span></p>
+
+<p>Dickens wrote the following article for Household Words in 1855. It
+reveals a surprising mastery of the vital principles of &#8220;the new
+education.&#8221; He wrote the article to direct attention to the work of the
+Baroness Von B&uuml;low, who had come to England to introduce the kindergarten
+system. Dickens&#8217;s works show that he had long been a close student of
+Froebel&#8217;s philosophy. The article must always take a front rank as a
+strikingly clear, comprehensive, and sympathetic exposition of the
+principles and processes of the kindergarten. Kindergartens were called
+&#8220;infant gardens&#8221; when first introduced into England.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Seventy or eighty years ago there was a son born to the Pastor
+Froebel, who exercised his calling in the village of Oberweissbach, in
+the principality of Schwartzburg-Rudolstadt. The son, who was called
+Frederick, proved to be a child of unusually quick sensibilities,
+keenly alive to all impressions, hurt by discords of all kinds; by
+quarrelling of men, women, and children, by ill-assorted colours,
+inharmonious sounds. He was, to a morbid extent, capable of receiving
+delight from the beauties of Nature, and, as a very little boy, would
+spend much of his time in studying and enjoying, for their own sake,
+the lines and angles in the Gothic architecture of his father&#8217;s
+church. Who does not know what must be the central point of all the
+happiness of such a child? The voice of its mother is the sweetest of
+sweet sounds, the face of its mother is the fairest of fair sights,
+the loving touch of her lip is the symbol to it of all pleasures of
+the sense and of the soul. Against the thousand shocks and terrors
+that are ready to afflict a child too exquisitely sensitive, the
+mother is the sole <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>protectress, and her help is all-sufficient.
+Frederick Froebel lost his mother in the first years of his childhood,
+and his youth was tortured with incessant craving for a sympathy that
+was not to be found.</p>
+
+<p>The Pastor Froebel was too busy to attend to all the little fancies of
+his son. It was his good practice to be the peaceful arbiter of the
+disputes occurring in the village, and, as he took his boy with him
+when he went out, he made the child familiar with all the quarrels of
+the parish. Thus were suggested, week after week, comparisons between
+the harmony of Nature and the spite and scandal current among men. A
+dreamy, fervent love of God, a fanciful boy&#8217;s wish that he could make
+men quiet and affectionate, took strong possession of young Frederick,
+and grew with his advancing years. He studied a good deal. Following
+out his love of Nature, he sought to become acquainted with the
+sciences by which her ways and aspects are explained; his
+contemplation of the architecture of the village church ripened into a
+thorough taste for mathematics, and he enjoyed agricultural life
+practically, as a worker on his father&#8217;s land. At last he went to
+Pestalozzi&#8217;s school in Switzerland.</p>
+
+<p>Then followed troublous times, and patriotic war in Germany, where
+even poets fought against the enemy with lyre and sword. The quick
+instincts, and high, generous impulses of Frederick Froebel were
+engaged at once, and he went out to battle on behalf of Fatherland in
+the ranks of the boldest, for he was one of L&uuml;tzow&#8217;s regiment&mdash;a troop
+of riders that earned by its daring an immortal name. Their fame has
+even penetrated to our English concert rooms, where many a fair
+English maiden has been made familiar with the dare-devil patriots of
+which it was composed by the refrain of the German song in honour of
+their prowess&mdash;&#8220;Das ist L&uuml;tzow&#8217;s fliegende, wilde Jagd.&#8221; Having
+performed his duty to his country in the ranks of its defenders,
+Froebel fell back upon his love of nature and his study of triangles,
+squares, and cubes. He had made interest that placed him in a position
+which, in many respects, curiously satisfied his tastes&mdash;that of
+Inspector to the Mineralogical Museum in Berlin. The post was
+lucrative, its duties were agreeable to him, but the object of his
+life&#8217;s desire was yet to be attained.</p>
+
+<p>For the unsatisfied cravings of his childhood had borne fruit within
+him. He remembered the quick feelings and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>perceptions, the incessant
+nimbleness of mind proper to his first years, and how he had been
+hemmed in and cramped for want of right encouragement and sympathy. He
+remembered, too, the ill-conditioned people whose disputes had been
+made part of his experience, the dogged children, cruel fathers,
+sullen husbands, angry wives, quarrelsome neighbours; and surely he
+did not err when he connected the two memories together. How many men
+and women go about pale-skinned and weak of limb, because their
+physical health during infancy and childhood was not established by
+judicious management. It is just so, thought Froebel, with our minds.
+There would be fewer sullen, quarrelsome, dull-witted men or women if
+there were fewer children starved or fed improperly in heart and
+brain. To improve society&mdash;to make men and women better&mdash;it is
+requisite to begin quite at the beginning, and to secure for them a
+wholesome education during infancy and childhood. Strongly possessed
+with this idea, and feeling that the usual methods of education, by
+restraint and penalty, aim at the accomplishment of far too little,
+and by checking natural development even do positive mischief, Froebel
+determined upon the devotion of his entire energy, throughout his
+life, to a strong effort for the establishment of schools that should
+do justice and honour to the nature of a child. He resigned his
+appointment at Berlin, and threw himself, with only the resources of a
+fixed will, a full mind, and a right purpose, on the chances of the
+future.</p>
+
+<p>At Keilhau, a village of Thuringia, he took a peasant&#8217;s cottage, in
+which he proposed to establish his first school&mdash;a village boys&#8217;
+school. It was necessary to enlarge the cottage; and, while that was
+being done, Froebel lived on potatoes, bread, and water. So scanty was
+his stock of capital on which his enterprise was started, that, in
+order honestly to pay his workmen, he was forced to carry his
+principle of self-denial to the utmost. He bought each week two large
+rye loaves, and marked on them with chalk each day&#8217;s allowance.
+Perhaps he is the only man in the world who ever, in so literal a way,
+chalked out for himself a scheme of diet.</p>
+
+<p>After labouring for many years among the boys at Keilhau,
+Froebel&mdash;married to a wife who shared his zeal, and made it her labour
+to help to the utmost in carrying out the idea of her husband&#8217;s
+life&mdash;felt that there was more <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>to be accomplished. His boys came to
+him with many a twist in mind or temper, caught by wriggling up
+through the bewilderments of a neglected infancy. The first sproutings
+of the human mind need thoughtful culture; there is no period of life,
+indeed, in which culture is so essential. And yet, in nine out of ten
+cases, it is precisely while the little blades of thought and buds of
+love are frail and tender that no heed is taken to maintain the soil
+about them wholesome, and the air about them free from blight. There
+must be Infant Gardens, Froebel said; and straightway formed his
+plans, and set to work for their accomplishment.</p>
+
+<p>He had become familiar in cottages with the instincts of mothers, and
+the faculties with which young children are endowed by Nature. He
+never lost his own childhood from memory, and being denied the
+blessing of an infant of his own, regarded all the little ones with
+equal love. The direction of his boys&#8217; school&mdash;now flourishing
+vigorously&mdash;he committed to the care of a relation, while he set out
+upon a tour through parts of Germany and Switzerland to lecture upon
+infant training and to found Infant Gardens where he could. He founded
+them at Hamburg, Leipzig, Dresden, and elsewhere. While labouring in
+this way he was always exercising the same spirit of self-denial that
+had marked the outset of his educational career. Whatever he could
+earn was for the children, to promote their cause. He would not spend
+upon himself the money that would help in the accomplishment of his
+desire, that childhood should be made as happy as God in his wisdom
+had designed it should be, and that full play should be given to its
+energies and powers. Many a night&#8217;s lodging he took, while on his
+travels, in the open fields, with an umbrella for his bedroom and a
+knapsack for his pillow.</p>
+
+<p>So beautiful a self-devotion to a noble cause won recognition. One of
+the best friends of his old age was the Duchess Ida of Weimar, sister
+to Queen Adelaide of England, and his death took place on the 21st of
+June, three years ago, at a country seat of the Duke of Meiningen. He
+died at the age of seventy, peaceably, upon a summer day, delighting
+in the beautiful scenery that lay outside his window, and in the
+flowers brought by friends to his bedside. Nature, he said, bore
+witness to the promises of revelation. So Froebel passed away.</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+And Nature&#8217;s pleasant robe of green,<br />
+Humanity&#8217;s appointed shroud, enwraps<br />
+His monument and his memory.</p>
+
+<p>Wise and good people have been endeavouring of late to obtain in this
+country a hearing for the views of this good teacher, and a trial for
+his system. Only fourteen years have elapsed since the first Infant
+Garden was established, and already Infant Gardens have been
+introduced into most of the larger towns of Germany. Let us now
+welcome them with all our hearts to England.</p>
+
+<p>The whole principle of Froebel&#8217;s teaching is based on a perfect love
+for children, and a full and genial recognition of their nature, a
+determination that their hearts shall not be starved for want of
+sympathy; that since they are by Infinite Wisdom so created as to find
+happiness in the active exercise and development of all their
+faculties, we, who have children round about us, shall no longer
+repress their energies, tie up their bodies, shut their mouths, and
+declare that they worry us by the incessant putting of the questions
+which the Father of us all has placed in their mouths, so that the
+teachable one forever cries to those who undertake to be its guide,
+&#8220;What shall I do?&#8221; To be ready at all times with a wise answer to that
+question, ought to be the ambition of every one upon whom a child&#8217;s
+nature depends for the means of healthy growth. The frolic of
+childhood is not pure exuberance and waste. &#8220;There is often a high
+meaning in childish play,&#8221; said Froebel. Let us study it, and act upon
+hints&mdash;or more than hints&mdash;that Nature gives. They fall into a fatal
+error who despise all that a child does as frivolous. Nothing is
+trifling that forms part of a child&#8217;s life.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">That which the mother awakens and fosters,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">When she joyously sings and plays;</span><br />
+That which her love so tenderly shelters.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bears a blessing to future days.</span></p>
+
+<p>We quote Froebel again, in these lines, and we quote others in which
+he bids us</p>
+
+<p class="poem">Break not suddenly the dream<br />
+The blessed dream of infancy;<br />
+In which the soul unites with all<br />
+In earth, or heaven, or sea, or sky.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>But enough has already been said to show what he would have done. How
+would he do it?</p>
+
+<p>Of course it must be borne in mind, throughout the following sketch of
+Froebel&#8217;s scheme of infant training, that certain qualities of mind
+are necessary to the teacher. Let nobody suppose that any scheme of
+education can attain its end, as a mere scheme, apart from the
+qualifications of those persons by whom it is to be carried out. Very
+young children can be trained successfully by no person who wants
+hearty liking for them, and who can take part only with a proud sense
+of restraint in their chatter and their play. It is in truth no
+condescension to become in spirit as a child with children, and nobody
+is fit to teach the young who holds a different opinion. Unvarying
+cheerfulness and kindness, the refinement that belongs naturally to a
+pure, well-constituted woman&#8217;s mind are absolutely necessary to the
+management of one of Froebel&#8217;s Infant Gardens.</p>
+
+<p>Then, again, let it be understood that Froebel never wished his system
+of training to be converted into mere routine to the exclusion of all
+that spontaneous action in which more than half of every child&#8217;s
+education must consist. It was his purpose to show the direction in
+which it was most useful to proceed, how best to assist the growth of
+the mind by following the indications Nature furnishes. Nothing was
+farther from his design, in doing that, than the imposition of a check
+on any wholesome energies. Blindman&#8217;s buff, romps, puzzles, fairy
+tales, everything in fact that exercises soundly any set of the
+child&#8217;s faculties, must be admitted as a part of Froebel&#8217;s system. The
+cardinal point of his doctrine is&mdash;take care that you do not exercise
+a part only of the child&#8217;s mind or body; but take thorough pains to
+see that you encourage the development of its whole nature. If
+pains&mdash;and great pains&mdash;be not taken to see that this is done,
+probably it is not done. The Infant Gardens are designed to help in
+doing it.</p>
+
+<p>The mind of a young child must not be trained at the expense of its
+body. Every muscle ought, if possible, to be brought daily into
+action; and, in the case of a child suffered to obey the laws of
+Nature by free tumbling and romping, that is done in the best manner
+possible. Every mother knows that by carrying an infant always on the
+same arm its growth is liable to be perverted. Every <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>father knows the
+child&#8217;s delight at being vigorously danced up and down, and much of
+this delight arises from the play then given to its muscles. As the
+child grows, the most unaccustomed positions into which it can be
+safely twisted are those from which it will receive the greatest
+pleasure. That is because play is thus given to the muscles in a form
+they do not often get, and Nature&mdash;always watchful on the child&#8217;s
+behalf&mdash;cries, We will have some more of that. It does us good. As it
+is with the body, so it is with the mind, and Froebel&#8217;s scheme of
+infant education is, for both, a system of gymnastics.</p>
+
+<p>He begins with the newborn infant, and demands that, if possible, it
+shall not be taken from its mother. He sets his face strongly against
+the custom of committing the child during the tenderest and most
+impressible period of its whole life to the care and companionship of
+an ignorant nursemaid, or of servants who have not the mother&#8217;s
+instinct, or the knowledge that can tell them how to behave in its
+presence. Only the mother should, if possible, be the child&#8217;s chief
+companion and teacher during at least the first three years of its
+life, and she should have thought it worth while to prepare herself
+for the right fulfilment of her duties. Instead of tambour work, or
+Arabic, or any other useless thing that may be taught at girls&#8217;
+schools, surely it would be a great blessing if young ladies were to
+spend some of their time in an Infant Garden, that might be attached
+to every academy. Let them all learn from Froebel what are the
+requirements of a child, and be prepared for the wise performance of
+what is after all to be the most momentous business of their lives.</p>
+
+<p>The carrying out of this hint is indeed necessary to the complete and
+general adoption of the infant-garden system. Froebel desired his
+infants to be taught only by women, and required that they should be
+women as well educated and refined as possible, preferring amiable
+unmarried girls. Thus he would have our maidens spending some part of
+their time in playing with little ones, learning to understand them,
+teaching them to understand; our wives he would have busy at home,
+making good use of their experience, developing carefully and
+thoughtfully the minds of their children, sole teachers for the first
+three years of their life; afterward, either helped by throwing them
+among other children in an Infant Garden for two <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>or three hours every
+day, or, if there be at home no lack of little company, having Infant
+Gardens of their own.</p>
+
+<p>Believing that it is natural to address infants in song, Froebel
+encouraged nursery songs, and added to their number. Those contributed
+by him to the common stock were of course contributed for the sake of
+some use that he had for each; in the same spirit&mdash;knowing play to be
+essential to a child&mdash;he invented games; and those added by him to the
+common stock are all meant to be used for direct teaching. It does not
+in the least follow, and it was not the case, that he would have us
+make all nursery rhymes and garden sports abstrusely didactic. He
+meant no more than to put his own teaching into songs and games, to
+show clearly that whatever is necessary to be said or done to a young
+child may be said or done merrily or playfully; and although he was
+essentially a schoolmaster, he had no faith in the terrors commonly
+associated with his calling.</p>
+
+<p>Froebel&#8217;s nursery songs are associated almost invariably with bodily
+activity on the part of the child. He is always, as soon as he becomes
+old enough, to do something while the song is going on, and the
+
+movements assigned to him are cunningly contrived so that not even a
+joint of a little finger shall be left unexercised. If he be none the
+better, he is none the worse for this. The child is indeed unlucky
+that depends only on care of this description for the full play of its
+body; but there are some children so unfortunate, and there are some
+parents who will be usefully reminded by those songs, of the necessity
+of procuring means for the free action of every joint and limb. What
+is done for the body is done in the same spirit for the mind, and
+ideas are formed, not by song only. The beginning of a most ingenious
+course of mental training by a series of playthings is made almost
+from the very first.</p>
+
+<p>A box containing six soft balls, differing in colour, is given to the
+child. It is Froebel&#8217;s &#8220;first gift.&#8221; Long before it can speak the
+infant can hold one of these little balls in its fingers, become
+familiar with its spherical shape and its colour. It stands still, it
+springs, it rolls. As the child grows, he can roll it and run after
+it, watch it with sharp eyes, and compare the colour of one ball with
+the colour of another, prick up his ears at the songs connected with
+his various games with it, use it as a bond of playfellowship with
+other children, practise with it first <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>efforts at self-denial, and so
+forth. One ball is suspended by a string, it jumps&mdash;it
+rolls&mdash;here&mdash;there&mdash;over&mdash;up; turns left&mdash;turns
+right&mdash;ding-dong&mdash;tip-tap&mdash;falls&mdash;spins; fifty ideas may be connected
+with it. The six balls, three of the primary colours, three of the
+secondary, may be built up in a pyramid; they may be set rolling, and
+used in combination in a great many ways giving sufficient exercise to
+the young wits that have all knowledge and experience before them.</p>
+
+<p>Froebel&#8217;s &#8220;second gift&#8221; is a small box containing a ball, cube, and
+roller (the last two perforated), with a stick and string. With these
+forms of the cube, sphere, and cylinder, there is a great deal to be
+done and learned. They can be played with at first according to the
+child&#8217;s own humour: will run, jump, represent carts, or anything. The
+ancient Egyptians, in their young days as a nation, piled three cubes
+on one another and called them the three Graces. A child will, in the
+same way, see fishes in stones, and be content to put a cylinder upon
+a cube, and say that is papa on horseback. Of this element of ready
+fancy in all childish sport Froebel took full advantage. The ball,
+cube, and cylinder may be spun, swung, rolled, and balanced in so many
+ways as to display practically all their properties. The cube, spun
+upon the stick piercing it through opposite edges, will look like a
+circle, and so forth. As the child grows older, each of the forms may
+be examined definitely, and he may learn from observation to describe
+it. The ball may be rolled down an inclined plane and the acceleration
+of its speed observed. Most of the elementary laws of mechanics may be
+made practically obvious to the child&#8217;s understanding.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;third gift&#8221; is the cube divided once in every direction. By the
+time a child gets this to play with he is three years old&mdash;of age ripe
+for admission to an Infant Garden. The Infant Garden is intended for
+the help of children between three years old and seven. Instruction in
+it&mdash;always by means of play&mdash;is given for only two or three hours in
+the day; such instruction sets each child, if reasonably helped at
+home, in the right train of education for the remainder of its time.</p>
+
+<p>An Infant Garden must be held in a large room abounding in clear space
+for child&#8217;s play, and connected with a garden into which the children
+may adjourn whenever weather will permit. The garden is meant chiefly
+to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>assure, more perfectly, the association of wholesome bodily
+exercise with mental activity. If climate but permitted, Froebel would
+have all young children taught entirely in the pure, fresh air, while
+frolicking in sunshine among flowers. By his system he aimed at
+securing for them bodily as well as mental health, and he held it to
+be unnatural that they should be cooped up in close rooms, and glued
+to forms, when all their limbs twitch with desire for action, and
+there is a warm sunshine out of doors. The garden, too, should be
+their own; every child the master or mistress of a plot in it, sowing
+seeds and watching day by day the growth of plants, instructed
+playfully and simply in the meaning of what is observed. When weather
+forbids use of the garden, there is the great, airy room which should
+contain cupboards, with a place for every child&#8217;s toys and implements;
+so that a habit of the strictest neatness may be properly maintained.
+Up to the age of seven there is to be no book work and no ink work;
+but only at school a free and brisk, but systematic strengthening of
+the body, of the senses, of the intellect, and of the affections,
+managed in such a way as to leave the child prompt for subsequent
+instruction, already comprehending the elements of a good deal of
+knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>We must endeavour to show in part how that is done. The third
+gift&mdash;the cube divided once in every direction&mdash;enables the child to
+begin the work of construction in accordance with its own ideas, and
+insensibly brings the ideas into the control of a sense of harmony and
+fitness. The cube divided into eight parts will manufacture many
+things; and, while the child is at work helped by quiet suggestion now
+and then, the teacher talks of what he is about, asks many questions,
+answers more, mixes up little songs and stories with the play.
+Pillars, ruined castles, triumphal arches, city gates, bridges,
+crosses, towers, all can be completed to the perfect satisfaction of a
+child, with the eight little cubes. They are all so many texts on
+which useful and pleasant talk can be established. Then they are
+capable also of harmonious arrangement into patterns, and this is a
+great pleasure to the child. He learns the charm of symmetry,
+exercises taste in the preference of this or that among the hundred
+combinations of which his eight cubes are susceptible.</p>
+
+<p>Then follows the &#8220;fourth gift,&#8221; a cube divided into eight planes cut
+lengthways. More things can be done <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>with this than with the other.
+Without strain on the mind, in sheer play, mingled with songs, nothing
+is wanted but a liberal supply of little cubes, to make clear to the
+children the elements of arithmetic. The cubes are the things
+numbered. Addition is done with them; they are subtracted from each
+other; they are multiplied; they are divided. Besides these four
+elementary rules they cause children to be thoroughly at home in the
+principle of fractions, to multiply and divide fractions&mdash;as real
+things; all in good time it will become easy enough to let written
+figures represent them&mdash;to go through the rule of three, square root,
+and cube root. As a child has instilled into him the principles of
+arithmetic, so he acquires insensibly the groundwork of geometry, the
+sister science.</p>
+
+<p>Froebel&#8217;s &#8220;fifth gift&#8221; is an extension of the third, a cube divided
+into twenty-seven equal cubes, and three of these further divided into
+halves, three into quarters. This brings with it the teaching of a
+great deal of geometry, much help to the lessons in number,
+magnificent accessions to the power of the little architect, who is
+provided, now, with pointed roofs and other glories, and the means of
+producing an almost infinite variety of symmetrical patterns, both
+more complex and more beautiful than heretofore.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;sixth gift&#8221; is a cube so divided as to extend still farther the
+child&#8217;s power of combining and discussing it. When its resources are
+exhausted and combined with those of the &#8220;seventh gift&#8221; (a box
+containing every form supplied in the preceding series), the little
+pupil&mdash;seven years old&mdash;has had his inventive and artistic powers
+exercised, and his mind stored with facts that have been absolutely
+comprehended. He has acquired also a sense of pleasure in the
+occupation of his mind.</p>
+
+<p>But he has not been trained in this way only. We leave out of account
+the bodily exercise connected with the entire round of occupation, and
+speak only of the mental discipline. There are some other &#8220;gifts&#8221; that
+are brought into service as the child becomes able to use them. One is
+a box containing pieces of wood, or pasteboard, cut into sundry forms.
+With these the letters of the alphabet can be constructed; and, after
+letters, words, in such a way as to create out of the game a series of
+pleasant spelling lessons. The letters are arranged upon a slate ruled
+into little squares, by which the eye is guided in preserving
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>regularity. Then follows the gift of a bundle of small sticks, which
+represent so many straight lines; and, by laying them upon his slate,
+the child can make letters, patterns, pictures; drawing, in fact, with
+lines that have not to be made with pen or pencil, but are provided
+ready made and laid down with the fingers. This kind of Stick-work
+having been brought to perfection, there is a capital extension of the
+idea with what is called Pea-work. By the help of peas softened in
+water, sticks may be joined together, letters, skeletons of cubes,
+crosses, prisms may be built; houses, towers, churches may be
+constructed, having due breadth as well as length and height, strong
+enough to be carried about or kept as specimens of ingenuity. Then
+follows a gift of flat sticks, to be used in plaiting. After that
+there is a world of ingenuity to be expended on the plaiting, folding,
+cutting, and pricking of plain or coloured paper. Children five years
+old, trained in the Infant Garden, will delight in plaiting slips of
+paper variously coloured into patterns of their own invention, and
+will work with a sense of symmetry so much refined by training as to
+produce patterns of exceeding beauty. By cutting paper, too, patterns
+are produced in the Infant Garden that would often, though the work of
+very little hands, be received in schools of design with acclamation.
+Then there are games by which the first truths of astronomy, and other
+laws of Nature, are made as familiar as they are interesting. For our
+own parts, we have been perfectly amazed at the work we have seen done
+by children of six or seven&mdash;bright, merry creatures, who have all the
+spirit of their childhood active in them, repressed by no parent&#8217;s
+selfish love of ease and silence, cowed by no dull-witted teacher of
+the A B C and the pothooks.</p>
+
+<p>Froebel discourages the cramping of an infant&#8217;s hand upon a pen, but
+his slate ruled into little squares, or paper prepared in the same
+way, is used by him for easy training in the elements of drawing.
+Modelling in wet clay is one of the most important occupations of the
+children who have reached about the sixth year, and is used as much as
+possible, not merely to encourage imitation, but to give some play to
+the creative power. Finally, there is the best possible use made of
+the paint-box, and children engaged upon the colouring of pictures and
+the arrangement of nosegays are further taught to enjoy, not merely
+what is bright, but also what is harmonious and beautiful.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>We have not left ourselves as much space as is requisite to show how
+truly all such labour becomes play to the child. Fourteen years&#8217;
+evidence suffices for a demonstration of the admirable working of a
+system of this kind; but as we think there are some parents who may be
+willing to inquire a little further into the subject here commended
+earnestly to their attention, we will end by a citation of the source
+from which we have ourselves derived what information we possess.</p>
+
+<p>At the educational exhibition in St. Martin&#8217;s Hall last year, there
+was a large display of the material used and results produced in
+Infant Gardens which attracted much attention. The Baroness von
+Marenholtz, enthusiastic in her advocacy of the children&#8217;s cause, came
+then to England, and did very much to procure the establishment in
+this country of some experimental Infant Gardens. By her, several
+months ago&mdash;and at about the same time by M. and Madame Rong&eacute; who had
+already established the first English Infant Garden&mdash;our attention was
+invited to the subject. We were also made acquainted with M. Hoffman,
+one of Froebel&#8217;s pupils, who explained the system theoretically at the
+Polytechnic Institution. When in this country, the Baroness von
+Marenholtz published a book called Woman&#8217;s Educational Mission, being
+an explanation of Frederick Froebel&#8217;s System of Infant Gardens. We
+have made use of the book in the preceding notice, but it appeared
+without the necessary illustrations, and is therefore a less perfect
+guide to the subject than a work published more recently by M. and
+Madame Rong&eacute;: A Practical Guide to the English Kindergarten. This last
+book we exhort everybody to consult who is desirous of a closer
+insight into Froebel&#8217;s system than we have been able here to give. It
+not only explains what the system is, but, by help of an unstinted
+supply of little sketches, enables any one at once to study it at home
+and bring it into active operation. It suggests conversations, games;
+gives many of Froebel&#8217;s songs, and even furnishes the music (which
+usually consists of popular tunes&mdash;Mary Blane, Rousseau&#8217;s Dream, etc.)
+to which they may be sung. Furthermore, it is well to say that any one
+interested in this subject, whom time and space do not forbid, may see
+an Infant Garden in full work by calling, on a Tuesday morning between
+the hours of ten and one, on M. and Madame Rong&eacute;, at number 32
+Tavistock Place, Tavistock <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>Square. That day these earliest and
+heartiest of our established infant gardeners have set apart, for the
+help of a good cause, to interruptions and investigations from the
+world without, trusting, of course, we suppose, that no one will
+disturb them for the satisfaction of mere idle curiosity.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">THE OVERTHROW OF COERCION.</span></p>
+
+<p>Dickens, in the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, states that, as Pickwick
+Papers had given him an audience, he determined to carry out a
+long-cherished plan and write for the purpose of driving out of existence
+a class of bad private schools, of which certain schools in Yorkshire were
+the worst types. He drew a picture of low cunning, avarice, ignorance,
+imposture, and brutality in Squeers that astounded his audience, and led
+to the closing of most of the Yorkshire private schools and to the
+overthrow of tyranny in schools throughout the civilized world. Tyranny
+and corporal punishment still exist, but not in the best schools. Not one
+child weeps now on account of corporal punishment for every hundred who
+wailed bitterly for the same reason when Froebel and Dickens began their
+loving work. Year by year the good work goes on. Men are learning the
+better ways of guiding and governing childhood. We can not yet say when
+men and women in the homes and schools everywhere shall understand the
+child and their own powers so thoroughly that there shall be no more
+corporal punishment inflicted, but we do know that the abatement of the
+terrible brutality began with the revelations of Froebel and Dickens.
+Froebel taught the new philosophy, Dickens sent it quivering through the
+hearts and consciences of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Members of the highest classes in England have been imprisoned near the
+close of the nineteenth century for improper methods of punishing children
+that would have excited no comment when Dickens described Squeers a little
+more than half a century earlier. In the report to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> the British
+Government, at the close of his remarkable half-century of honourable and
+very able educational work, Sir Joshua Fitch said: &#8220;In watching the
+gradual development of the training colleges for women from year to year,
+nothing is more striking than the increased attention which is being paid
+in those institutions to the true principles of infant teaching and
+discipline. The circular which has recently been issued by your lordships,
+and which is designed to enforce and explain these principles, would, if
+put forth a few years ago, have fallen on unprepared soil, and would
+indeed have seemed to many teachers both in and out of training colleges
+to be scarcely intelligible. Now its counsels will be welcomed with
+sympathy and full appreciation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens describes Squeers as a man &#8220;whose appearance was not
+prepossessing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two.
+The eye he had was unquestionably useful, but decidedly not
+ornamental: being of a greenish gray, and in shape resembling the
+fanlight of a street door. The blank side of his face was much
+wrinkled and puckered up, which gave him a very sinister appearance,
+especially when he smiled, at which times his expression bordered
+closely on the villainous. His hair was very flat and shiny, save at
+the ends, where it was brushed stiffly up from a low protruding
+forehead, which assorted well with his harsh voice and coarse manner.</p></div>
+
+<p>He then proceeds to reveal the character of Squeers by a series of
+incidents:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Mr. Squeers was standing in a box by one of the coffee-room
+fireplaces. In a corner of the seat was a very small deal trunk, tied
+round with a scanty piece of cord; and on the trunk was perched&mdash;his
+lace-up half-boots and corduroy trousers dangling in the air&mdash;a
+diminutive boy, with his shoulders drawn up to his ears, and his hands
+planted on his knees, who glanced timidly at the schoolmaster, from
+time to time, with evident dread and apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Half-past three,&#8221; muttered Mr. Squeers, turning from the window, and
+looking sulkily at the coffee-room clock. &#8220;There will be nobody here
+to-day.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>Much vexed by this reflection, Mr. Squeers looked at the little boy to
+see whether he was doing anything he could beat him for. As he
+happened not to be doing anything at all, he merely boxed his ears,
+and told him not to do it again.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;At midsummer,&#8221; muttered Mr. Squeers, resuming his complaint, &#8220;I took
+down ten boys; ten twentys is two hundred pound. I go back at eight
+o&#8217;clock to-morrow morning, and have got only three&mdash;three oughts is an
+ought&mdash;three twos is six&mdash;sixty pound. What&#8217;s come of all the boys?
+what&#8217;s parents got in their heads? what does it all mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Here the little boy on the top of the trunk gave a violent sneeze.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Halloa, sir!&#8221; growled the schoolmaster, turning round. &#8220;What&#8217;s that,
+sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nothing, please, sir,&#8221; said the little boy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nothing, sir?&#8221; exclaimed Mr. Squeers.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Please, sir, I sneezed,&#8221; rejoined the boy, trembling till the little
+trunk shook under him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! sneezed, did you?&#8221; retorted Mr. Squeers. &#8220;Then what did you say
+&#8216;nothing&#8217; for, sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In default of a better answer to this question, the little boy screwed
+a couple of knuckles into each of his eyes and began to cry, wherefore
+Mr. Squeers knocked him off the trunk with a blow on one side of his
+face, and knocked him on again with a blow on the other.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wait till I get you down into Yorkshire, my young gentleman,&#8221; said
+Mr. Squeers, &#8220;and then I&#8217;ll give you the rest. Will you hold that
+noise, sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ye&mdash;ye&mdash;yes,&#8221; sobbed the little boy, rubbing his face very hard with
+the Beggar&#8217;s Petition in printed calico.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then do so at once, sir,&#8221; said Squeers. &#8220;Do you hear?&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The waiter at this juncture announced a gentleman who wished to interview
+Mr. Squeers, and the schoolmaster, in an undertone, said to the poor boy:
+&#8220;Put your handkerchief in your pocket, you little scoundrel, or I&#8217;ll
+murder you when the gentleman goes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Affecting not to see the gentleman when he entered, Mr. Squeers feigned to
+be mending a pen and trying to comfort the boy he had so grossly abused.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>&#8220;My dear child,&#8221; said Squeers, &#8220;all people have their trials. This early
+trial of yours, that is fit to make your little heart burst and your very
+eyes come out of your head with crying, what is it? Nothing&mdash;less than
+nothing. You are leaving your friends, but you will have a father in me,
+my dear, and a mother in Mrs. Squeers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Our indignation is still further aroused when we hear the conversation
+between Mr. Squeers and his visitor, who is named Snawley, and who was &#8220;a
+sleek, flat-nosed man, bearing in his countenance an expression of much
+mortification and sanctity.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had brought with him two little boys, whose stepfather he was. Their
+mother had a little money in her own right and he was afraid she might
+squander it on her boys, so he wished to dispose of them. Our blood runs
+cold as we hear the two scoundrels plotting against the unfortunate boys.
+They are to be kept by Squeers till grown up. No questions are to be asked
+&#8220;so long as the payments are regular.&#8221; &#8220;They are to be supplied with
+razors when grown up, and never allowed home for holidays, and not
+permitted to write home, except a circular at Christmas to say they never
+were so happy and hope they may never be sent for, and no questions are to
+be asked in case anything happens to them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>We learn the unutterable selfishness of Squeers as he sits eating a
+sumptuous breakfast, while the five wretched and hungry little boys, who
+are to accompany him to Yorkshire to Dotheboys Hall, look at him. He had
+ordered bread and butter for three, which he cut into five portions, and
+&#8220;two-penn&#8217;orth of milk&#8221; for the five boys. While waiting for the bread to
+come he said, as he took a large mouthful of beef and toast, &#8220;Conquer your
+passions, boys, and don&#8217;t be eager after vittles. Subdue your appetites,
+my dears, and you&#8217;ve conquered human natur.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Nicholas Nickleby had been engaged to teach under Squeers in Dotheboys
+Hall. He was shocked at many things he heard and saw the night he arrived
+in Yorkshire.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>But the school itself and the appearance of the wretched pupils completed
+his discomfiture.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The pupils&mdash;the young noblemen! How the last faint traces of hope, the
+remotest glimmering of any good to be derived from his efforts in this
+den, faded from the mind of Nicholas as he looked in dismay around!
+Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the
+countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys
+of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear
+their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were
+the bleared eye, the harelip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or
+distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for
+their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of
+infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There
+were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the
+scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light
+of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone
+remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, with leaden eyes, like
+malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins
+of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary
+nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With
+every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every
+young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every
+revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil
+way to their core in silence, what an incipient hell was breeding
+here!</p></div>
+
+<p>It was Mr. Squeers&#8217;s custom on the first afternoon after his return from
+London to call the school together to make announcements, and read letters
+written by himself, which he pretended had been written by the relatives
+of the boys. Accordingly, the first afternoon after the arrival of
+Nicholas, Squeers entered the schoolroom &#8220;with a small bundle of papers in
+his hand, and Mrs. S. followed with a pair of canes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let any boy speak a word without leave,&#8221; said Mr. Squeers, &#8220;and I&#8217;ll take
+the skin off his back.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Two letters will serve as samples of the rest:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Graymarsh. Stand up, Graymarsh.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>Graymarsh stood up, while Squeers read his letter:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Graymarsh&#8217;s maternal aunt is very glad to hear he&#8217;s so well and
+happy, and sends her respectful compliments to Mrs. Squeers, and
+thinks she must be an angel. She likewise thinks Mr. Squeers is too
+good for this world; but hopes he may long be spared to carry on the
+business. Would have sent the two pair of stockings as desired, but is
+short of money, so forwards a tract instead, and hopes Graymarsh will
+put his trust in Providence. Hopes, above all, that he will study in
+every thing to please Mr. and Mrs. Squeers, and look upon them as his
+only friends; and that he will love Master Squeers; and not object to
+sleeping five in a bed, which no Christian should. Ah!&#8221; said Squeers,
+folding it up, &#8220;a delightful letter. Very affecting indeed.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mobbs&#8221; was next called, and his letter was read to him:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Mobbs&#8217;s stepmother,&#8221; said Squeers, &#8220;took to her bed on hearing that
+he wouldn&#8217;t eat fat, and has been very ill ever since. She wishes to
+know, by an early post, where he expects to go to, if he quarrels with
+his vittles; and with what feelings he could turn up his nose at the
+cow&#8217;s-liver broth, after his good master had asked a blessing on it.
+This was told her in the London newspapers&mdash;not by Mr. Squeers, for he
+is too kind and too good to set anybody against anybody&mdash;and it has
+vexed her so much, Mobbs can&#8217;t think. She is sorry to find he is
+discontented, which is sinful and horrid, and hopes Mr. Squeers will
+flog him into a happier state of mind; with this view, she has also
+stopped his halfpenny a week pocket-money, and given a double-bladed
+knife with a corkscrew in it to the missionaries, which she had bought
+on purpose for him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A sulky state of feeling,&#8221; said Squeers, after a terrible pause,
+during which he had moistened the palm of his right hand again, &#8220;won&#8217;t
+do. Cheerfulness and contentment must be kept up. Mobbs, come to me!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mobbs moved slowly toward the desk, rubbing his eyes in anticipation
+of good cause for doing so; and he soon afterward retired by the side
+door, with as good a cause as a boy need have.</p></div>
+
+<p>There are still school tyrants who talk with philosophic air of flogging
+children to make them happier, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> others who say with hard tones and
+clenched hands that &#8220;the one thing they will not allow in their schools is
+a sulky boy or girl,&#8221; and they mean, when they say so, that if a boy is
+sulky they take no steps to find out the cause of his disease or the
+natural remedy for it, but they apply the universal remedy of the
+old-fashioned quack trainer and whip the poor boy, who is already
+suffering from some physical or nervous derangement. Squeers and such
+teachers are brother tyrants. They practise the Squeers&#8217;s doctrine&mdash;&#8220;A
+sulky state of feeling won&#8217;t do. Cheerfulness and contentment must be kept
+up. Mobbs, come to me&#8221;&mdash;to make children cheerful and contented.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most heart-stirring cases in Dotheboys Hall was that of poor
+Smike. He had been sent to Squeers when an infant. He was a young man now,
+but he had been starved so that he wore still around his long neck the
+frill of the collar that loving hands had placed there when he was a
+little child. Ill treatment and lack of proper food had made him almost an
+imbecile, and he was the drudge of the institution. Nicholas was attracted
+by the anxious, longing looks of the boy, as his eyes followed Squeers
+from place to place on their arrival from London.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He was lame; and as he feigned to be busy in arranging the table,
+glanced at the letters with a look so keen, and yet so dispirited and
+hopeless, that Nicholas could hardly bear to watch him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What are you bothering about there, Smike?&#8221; cried Mrs. Squeers; &#8220;let
+the things alone, can&#8217;t you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Eh!&#8221; said Squeers, looking up. &#8220;Oh! it&#8217;s you, is it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir,&#8221; replied the youth, pressing his hands together, as though
+to control, by force, the nervous wandering of his fingers; &#8220;is
+there&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well!&#8221; said Squeers.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have you&mdash;did anybody&mdash;has nothing been heard&mdash;about me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Devil a bit,&#8221; replied Squeers testily.</p>
+
+<p>The lad withdrew his eyes, and, putting his hand to his face, moved
+toward the door.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not a word,&#8221; resumed Squeers, &#8220;and never will be.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>This is one of the pathetic pictures that awoke the heart of humanity.
+Nicholas was the first person who had ever sympathized with Smike, so the
+poor fellow naturally gave to Nicholas the pent-up love of his dwarfed
+nature, and kept near him whenever it was possible to do so.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens made Smike the centre of the terrible interest in Dotheboys Hall.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Smike was so badly treated that he ran away, but, after a long chase,
+he was brought home in triumph by Mrs. Squeers, bound like an animal.
+Squeers, of course, determined to flog him before all the boys as an
+example, and this led to the first great step toward the overthrow of the
+power of Squeers in Dotheboys Hall.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The news that Smike had been caught and brought back in triumph, ran
+like wildfire through the hungry community, and expectation was on
+tiptoe all the morning. On tiptoe it was destined to remain, however,
+until afternoon; when Squeers, having refreshed himself with his
+dinner, and further strengthened himself by an extra libation or so,
+made his appearance (accompanied by his amiable partner) with a
+countenance of portentous import, and a fearful instrument of
+flagellation, strong, supple, wax-ended, and new&mdash;in short, purchased
+that morning, expressly for the occasion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is every boy here?&#8221; asked Squeers, in a tremendous voice.</p>
+
+<p>Every boy was there, but every boy was afraid to speak; so Squeers
+glared along the lines to assure himself; and every eye drooped, and
+every head cowered down, as he did so.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Each boy keep his place,&#8221; said Squeers, administering his favourite
+blow to the desk, and regarding with gloomy satisfaction the universal
+start which it never failed to occasion. &#8220;Nickleby! to your desk,
+sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was remarked by more than one small observer that there was a very
+curious and unusual expression in the usher&#8217;s face; but he took his
+seat, without opening his lips in reply. Squeers, casting a triumphant
+glance at his assistant, and a look of most comprehensive despotism on
+the boys, left the room, and shortly afterward returned, dragging
+Smike by the collar&mdash;or rather by that fragment <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>of his jacket which
+was nearest the place where his collar would have been had he boasted
+such a decoration.</p>
+
+<p>In any other place the appearance of the wretched, jaded, spiritless
+object would have occasioned a murmur of compassion and remonstrance.
+It had some effect, even there; for the lookers-on moved uneasily in
+their seats, and a few of the boldest ventured to steal looks at each
+other, expressive of indignation and pity.</p>
+
+<p>They were lost on Squeers, however, whose gaze was fastened on the
+luckless Smike, as he inquired, according to custom in such cases,
+whether he had anything to say for himself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nothing, I suppose?&#8221; said Squeers, with a diabolical grin.</p>
+
+<p>Smike glanced round, and his eye rested for an instant on Nicholas, as
+if he had expected him to intercede; but his look was riveted on his
+desk.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have you anything to say?&#8221; demanded Squeers again; giving his right
+arm two or three flourishes to try its power and suppleness. &#8220;Stand a
+little out of the way, Mrs. Squeers, my dear; I&#8217;ve hardly got room
+enough.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Spare me, sir!&#8221; cried Smike.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! that&#8217;s all, is it?&#8221; said Squeers. &#8220;Yes, I&#8217;ll flog you within an
+inch of your life, and spare you that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ha, ha, ha,&#8221; laughed Mrs. Squeers, &#8220;that&#8217;s a good &#8217;un!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was driven to do it,&#8221; said Smike faintly, and casting another
+imploring look on him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Driven to do it, were you?&#8221; said Squeers. &#8220;Oh! it wasn&#8217;t your fault;
+it was mine, I suppose&mdash;eh?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A nasty, ungrateful, pig-headed, brutish, obstinate, sneaking dog,&#8221;
+exclaimed Mrs. Squeers, taking Smike&#8217;s head under her arm, and
+administering a cuff at every epithet; &#8220;what does he mean by that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Stand aside, my dear,&#8221; replied Squeers. &#8220;We&#8217;ll try and find out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Squeers, being out of breath with her exertions, complied.
+Squeers caught the boy firmly in his grip; one desperate cut had
+fallen on his body&mdash;he was wincing from the lash, and uttering a
+scream of pain&mdash;it was raised again, and again about to fall&mdash;when
+Nicholas Nickleby suddenly starting up, cried: &#8220;Stop!&#8221; in a voice that
+made the rafters ring.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who cried stop?&#8221; said Squeers, turning savagely round.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>&#8220;I,&#8221; said Nicholas, stepping forward. &#8220;This must not go on.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Must not go on!&#8221; cried Squeers, almost in a shriek.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No!&#8221; thundered Nicholas.</p>
+
+<p>Aghast and stupefied by the boldness of the interference, Squeers
+released his hold of Smike, and, falling back a pace or two, gazed
+upon Nicholas with looks that were positively frightful.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I say must not,&#8221; repeated Nicholas, nothing daunted; &#8220;shall not. I
+will prevent it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Squeers continued to gaze upon him, with his eyes starting out of his
+head; but astonishment had actually, for the moment, bereft him of
+speech.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You have disregarded all my quiet interference in the miserable lad&#8217;s
+behalf,&#8221; said Nicholas; &#8220;you have returned no answer to the letter in
+which I begged forgiveness for him, and offered to be responsible that
+he would remain quietly here. Don&#8217;t blame me for this public
+interference. You have brought it upon yourself, not I.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sit down, beggar!&#8221; screamed Squeers, almost beside himself with rage,
+and seizing Smike as he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wretch!&#8221; rejoined Nicholas fiercely, &#8220;touch him at your peril! I will
+not stand by and see it done. My blood is up, and I have the strength
+of ten such men as you. Look to yourself, for, by Heaven, I will not
+spare you, if you drive me on!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Stand back!&#8221; cried Squeers, brandishing his weapon.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have a long series of insults to avenge,&#8221; said Nicholas, flushed
+with passion; &#8220;and my indignation is aggravated by the dastardly
+cruelties practised on helpless infancy in this foul den. Have a care;
+for, if you do raise the devil within me, the consequences shall fall
+heavily upon your own head!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had scarcely spoken, when Squeers, in a violent outbreak of wrath,
+and with a cry like the howl of a wild beast, spit upon him, and
+struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture,
+which raised up a bar of livid flesh as it was inflicted. Smarting
+with the agony of the blow, and concentrating into that one moment all
+his feelings of rage, scorn, and indignation, Nicholas sprang upon
+him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat,
+beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.</p>
+
+<p>The boys&mdash;with the exception of Master Squeers, who, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>coming to his
+father&#8217;s assistance, harassed the enemy in the rear&mdash;moved not hand or
+foot; but Mrs. Squeers, with many shrieks for aid, hung on to the tail
+of her partner&#8217;s coat, and endeavoured to drag him from his infuriated
+adversary; while Miss Squeers, who had been peeping through the
+keyhole in expectation of a very different scene, darted in at the
+very beginning of the attack, and after launching a shower of
+inkstands at the usher&#8217;s head, beat Nicholas to her heart&#8217;s content:
+animating herself at every blow with the recollection of his having
+refused her proffered love, and thus imparting additional strength to
+an arm which (as she took after her mother in this respect) was, at no
+time, one of the weakest.</p>
+
+<p>Nicholas, in the full torrent of his violence, felt the blows no more
+than if they had been dealt with feathers; but, becoming tired of the
+noise and uproar, and feeling that his arm grew weak besides, he threw
+all his remaining strength into half a dozen finishing cuts and flung
+Squeers from him, with all the force he could muster. The violence of
+his fall precipitated Mrs. Squeers completely over an adjacent form;
+and Squeers, striking his head against it in his descent, lay at his
+full length on the ground, stunned and motionless.</p>
+
+<p>Having brought affairs to this happy termination, and ascertained, to
+his thorough satisfaction, that Squeers was only stunned, and not dead
+(upon which point he had had some unpleasant doubts at first),
+Nicholas left his family to restore him and retired to consider what
+course he had better adopt. He looked anxiously round for Smike, as he
+left the room, but he was nowhere to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>After a brief consideration, he packed up a few clothes in a small
+leathern valise, and, finding that nobody offered to oppose his
+progress, marched boldly out by the front door and started to walk to
+London.</p>
+
+<p>Near the school he met John Browdie, the honest corn factor.</p></div>
+
+<p>John saw that Nicholas had received a severe blow, and asked the reason.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;The fact is,&#8221; said Nicholas, not very well knowing how to make the
+avowal, &#8220;the fact is, that I have been ill-treated.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Noa!&#8221; interposed John Browdie, in a tone of compassion; for he was a
+giant in strength and stature, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>Nicholas, very likely, in his
+eyes, seemed a mere dwarf; &#8220;dean&#8217;t say thot.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, I have,&#8221; replied Nicholas, &#8220;by that man Squeers, and I have
+beaten him soundly, and am leaving this place in consequence.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What!&#8221; cried John Browdie, with such an ecstatic shout, that the
+horse quite shied at it. &#8220;Beatten the schoolmeasther! Ho! ho! ho!
+Beatten the schoolmeasther! who ever heard o&#8217; the loike o&#8217; that noo!
+Giv&#8217; us thee hond agean, yongster. Beatten the schoolmeasther! Dang
+it, I loove thee for&#8217;t.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>And the world agreed, and still agrees, with John Browdie.</p>
+
+<p>Squeers and Smike began the real movement against cruelty and corporal
+punishment not only in schools, but in homes. Dickens described both
+characters so admirably that the world hated Squeers and pitied Smike to
+the limit of its power to hate and pity, and unconsciously the world
+associated cruelty and corporal punishment with Squeers. This was exactly
+what Dickens desired. The hatred of Squeers led to a strong disapproval of
+his practices. Corporal punishment was associated with an unpopular man,
+and it lost its respectable character and never regained it. The dislike
+for Squeers was accentuated by the long-continued sympathy and hopefulness
+felt for Smike as he gradually succumbed to the terrible disease,
+consumption, induced by poor food, neglect, and cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>Squeers and Smike are doing their good work still, and doing it well. They
+could do it much better if men and women when they have become acquainted
+with Squeers would candidly ask themselves the question, &#8220;In what respects
+am I like Squeers?&#8221; instead of yielding to the feeling of
+self-satisfaction that they are so very unlike him.</p>
+
+<p>Just before writing about the coercive tyranny of Squeers in his school,
+Dickens had written Oliver Twist, in which he had made a most vigorous
+attack upon two classes of characters for their tyrannical treatment of
+children, and especially on account of their frequent use<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> of corporal
+punishment. Bumble represented the officials in institutions for children,
+and &#8220;the gentleman in the white waistcoat&#8221; was given as a type of the
+advanced Christian philanthropy of his time. He meant well, gave his time
+freely to attend the meetings of the board, and supposed he was doing
+right; but Dickens wished to let philanthropists see that they were
+terribly cruel to the helpless children, and that their good intentions
+could not condone their harshness, even though it resulted from ignorance
+and lack of reverence for childhood, and not from deliberate evil
+intentions.</p>
+
+<p>Poor, friendless little Oliver! His beautiful face and gentle spirit might
+have touched the hardest heart, but the institutional heart becomes hard
+easily, even two generations after the time of Bumble and &#8220;the gentleman
+in the immaculate white waistcoat.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It must not be supposed that Oliver was denied the benefit of
+exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages of religious
+consolation in the workhouse. As for exercise, it was nice cold
+weather, and he was allowed to perform his ablutions every morning
+under the pump, in a stone yard, in the presence of Mr. Bumble, who
+prevented his catching cold, and caused a tingling sensation to
+pervade his frame, by repeated applications of the cane. As for
+society, he was carried every other day into the hall, where the boys
+dined, and there sociably flogged as a public warning and example. And
+so far from being denied the advantage of religious consolation, he
+was kicked into the same apartment every evening at prayer time, and
+there permitted to listen to, and console his mind with, a general
+supplication of the boys, containing a special clause, therein
+inserted by authority of the board, in which they entreated to be made
+good, virtuous, contented, and obedient, and to be guarded from the
+sins and vices of Oliver Twist.</p></div>
+
+<p>After Oliver had been sent to work for Mr. Sowerberry he was goaded to
+desperation one evening by the disrespectful remarks of Noah Claypole
+about his mother, and bravely gave the mean bully the personal
+chastisement he so richly deserved. Noah was sent to complain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> to the
+parish board, and the gentleman in the white waistcoat said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Bumble, just step up to Sowerberry&#8217;s with your cane, and see what&#8217;s
+best to be done. Don&#8217;t spare him, Bumble.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, I will not, sir,&#8221; replied the beadle, adjusting the wax end which
+was twisted round the bottom of his cane, for purposes of parochial
+flagellation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tell Sowerberry not to spare him either. They&#8217;ll never do anything
+with him without stripes and bruises,&#8221; said the gentleman in the white
+waistcoat.</p></div>
+
+<p>The innocent, manly child was beaten unmercifully and abused cruelly by
+Sowerberry and Bumble, yet he bore all their taunts and floggings without
+a tear until he was alone. Then, &#8220;when there was none to see or hear him,
+he fell upon his knees on the floor, and, hiding his face in his hands,
+wept such tears as, God send for the credit of our nature, few so young
+may ever have cause to pour out before him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There are not many &#8220;gentlemen in white waistcoats&#8221; of the type described
+by Dickens now on charitable boards, and the enlightened sentiment of
+civilized countries turns the legal processes of nations upon officials
+who dare to treat children unkindly. Dickens made humane people everywhere
+sympathize with Mr. Meagles, who said: &#8220;Whenever I see a beadle in full
+fig coming down a street on a Sunday at the head of a charity school, I am
+obliged to turn and run away, or I should hit him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ten years after Squeers began his good work Dickens produced Squeers&#8217;s
+associate, Mr. Creakle, the master of Salem House.</p>
+
+<p>David Copperfield was sent to Salem House by his stepfather, Mr.
+Murdstone, because he bit his hand when he was punishing him unjustly. For
+this offence he was compelled to wear a placard on his back on which was
+written: &#8220;Take care of him. He bites.&#8221; This dastardly practice of
+labelling youthful offenders persisted until very recent times. Children
+in schools are even yet in some places degraded by inconsiderate teachers
+by being <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>compelled to wear some indication of their misconduct. Dickens
+vigorously condemned this outrage in 1849.</p>
+
+<p>David was sent to school during the holidays, and was soon brought before
+Mr. Creakle by Tungay, his servant with the wooden leg.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;So,&#8221; said Mr. Creakle, &#8220;this is the young gentleman whose teeth are
+to be filed! Turn him round.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Creakle&#8217;s face was fiery, and his eyes were small and deep in his
+head; he had thick veins in his forehead, a little nose, and a large
+chin. He was bald on the top of his head; and had some thin,
+wet-looking hair that was just turning gray brushed across each
+temple, so that the two sides interlaced on his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now,&#8221; said Mr. Creakle. &#8220;What&#8217;s the report of this boy?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s nothing against him yet,&#8221; returned the man with the wooden
+leg. &#8220;There has been no opportunity.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I thought Mr. Creakle was disappointed. I thought Mrs. and Miss
+Creakle (at whom I now glanced for the first time, and who were, both,
+thin and quiet) were not disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come here, sir!&#8221; said Mr. Creakle, beckoning to me.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come here!&#8221; said the man with the wooden leg, repeating the gesture.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have the happiness of knowing your stepfather,&#8221; whispered Mr.
+Creakle, taking me by the ear; &#8220;and a worthy man he is, and a man of
+strong character. He knows me, and I know him. Do <i>you</i> know me! Hey?&#8221;
+said Mr. Creakle, pinching my ear with ferocious playfulness.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not yet, sir,&#8221; I said, flinching with the pain.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not yet! Hey?&#8221; repeated Mr. Creakle. &#8220;But you will soon. Hey?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will soon. Hey?&#8221; repeated the man with the wooden leg. I
+afterward found that he generally acted, with his strong voice, as Mr.
+Creakle&#8217;s interpreter to the boys.</p>
+
+<p>I was very much frightened, and said, I hoped so, if he pleased. I
+felt all this while as if my ear were blazing; he pinched it so hard.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll tell you what I am,&#8221; whispered Mr. Creakle, letting it go at
+last, with a screw at parting that brought the water to my eyes, &#8220;I&#8217;m
+a Tartar.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>Mr. Creakle proved to be as good as his word. He was a Tartar.</p>
+
+<p>On the first day of school he revealed himself. His opening address was
+very brief and to the point.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Now, boys, this is a new half. Take care what you&#8217;re about in this
+new half. Come fresh up to the lessons, I advise you, for I come fresh
+up to the punishment. I won&#8217;t flinch. It will be of no use your
+rubbing yourselves; you won&#8217;t rub the marks out that I shall give you.
+Now get to work, every boy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When this dreadful exordium was over, Mr. Creakle came to where I sat,
+and told me that if I were famous for biting, he was famous for
+biting, too. He then showed me the cane, and asked me what I thought
+of <i>that</i>, for a tooth? Was it a sharp tooth, hey? Was it a double
+tooth, hey? Had it a deep prong, hey? Did it bite, hey? Did it bite?
+At every question he gave me a fleshy cut with it that made me writhe.</p>
+
+<p>Not that I mean to say these were special marks of distinction, which
+only I received. On the contrary, a large majority of the boys
+(especially the smaller ones) were visited with similar instances of
+notice, as Mr. Creakle made the round of the schoolroom. Half the
+establishment was writhing and crying before the day&#8217;s work began; and
+how much of it had writhed and cried before the day&#8217;s work was over I
+am really afraid to recollect, lest I should seem to exaggerate.</p>
+
+<p>I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed his
+profession more than Mr. Creakle did. He had a delight in cutting at
+the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite. I am
+confident that he couldn&#8217;t resist a chubby boy especially; that there
+was a fascination in such a subject which made him restless in his
+mind until he had scored and marked him for the day. I was chubby
+myself, and ought to know. I am sure when I think of the fellow now,
+my blood rises against him with the disinterested indignation I should
+feel if I could have known all about him without having ever been in
+his power; but it rises hotly, because I know him to have been an
+incapable brute, who had no more right to be possessed of the great
+trust he held than to be Lord High Admiral or Commander-in-chief: in
+either of which capacities it is probable that he would have done
+infinitely less mischief.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless idol, how abject we
+were to him! what a launch in life I think it now, on looking-back, to
+be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!</p></div>
+
+<p>Twenty years after Dickens described Creakle a new teacher stood before a
+class in a large American city, and, holding a long rattan cane above his
+head, said in a fierce, threatening tone: &#8220;Do you see that cane? Would you
+like to feel it? Hey? Well, break any one of my forty-eight rules and you
+will feel it all right.&#8221; The tyrant in adulthood dies hard. No wonder.
+Tyranny has been wrought into our natures by centuries of blind faith in
+corporal punishment as the supreme agency in saving the race from moral
+wreck and anarchy in childhood and youth. Men sought no agency for the
+development of the good in young lives. As they conceived it, their duty
+was done if they prevented their children from doing wrong, and the
+quickest, easiest, most effective way they knew to secure coercion was by
+corporal punishment. The most successful tyrant, he who could most
+thoroughly terrorize children and keep them down most completely, was
+regarded as the best disciplinarian. Squeers and Creakle were fair
+exponents of the almost universally recognised theory of their day, and
+they had many successors in the real schools of the generation that
+followed them. No man could remain a week in a school now if he began on
+the opening day in the way Creakle did.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens was right in revealing the position of the teacher as one of
+&#8220;great trust,&#8221; and he was right, too, in insisting that Creakle was no
+more fitted to be a teacher &#8220;than to be Lord High Admiral or
+Commander-in-chief, in either of which capacities it is probable he would
+have done infinitely less mischief.&#8221; This was another plea for good normal
+schools and for state supervision.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens makes a good point in his remark about the degradation of abject
+submission to a man of such parts and pretensions as Creakle.
+Subordination always dwarfs the human soul, but when the child is forced
+to a position of abject subordination to a coarse tyrant the degradation
+is more complete and more humiliating. It does<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> not mend matters for the
+child when the tyrant is his father. The tyranny of parenthood is usually
+the hardest to escape from.</p>
+
+<p>In the same book in which Creakle is described&mdash;David Copperfield&mdash;Dickens
+deals with the tyranny of the home. David&#8217;s widowed mother married Mr.
+Murdstone, a hard, severe, austere, religious man, with an equally
+dreadful sister&mdash;Jane Murdstone.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Firmness was the grand quality on which both Mr. and Miss Murdstone
+took their stand. However I might have expressed my comprehension of
+it at that time, if I had been called upon, I nevertheless did clearly
+comprehend in my own way that it was another name for tyranny, and for
+a certain gloomy, arrogant, devil&#8217;s humour, that was in them both. The
+creed, as I should state it now, was this: Mr. Murdstone was firm;
+nobody in his world was to be so firm as Mr. Murdstone; nobody else in
+his world was to be firm at all, for everybody was to be bent to his
+firmness.</p></div>
+
+<p>There was no more depressing tyranny in the time of Dickens than the
+tyranny exercised in the name of a rigid and repressive religion.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The gloomy taint that was in the Murdstone blood darkened the
+Murdstone religion, which was austere and wrathful. I have thought,
+since, that its assuming that character was a necessary consequence of
+Mr. Murdstone&#8217;s firmness, which wouldn&#8217;t allow him to let anybody off
+from the utmost weight of the severest penalties he could find any
+excuse for. Be this as it may, I well remember the tremendous visages
+with which we used to go to church, and the changed air of the place.
+Again, the dreaded Sunday comes round, and I file into the old pew
+first, like a guarded captive brought to a condemned service. Again,
+Miss Murdstone, in a black-velvet gown, that looks as if it had been
+made out of a pall, follows close upon me; then my mother; then her
+husband. Again, I listen to Miss Murdstone mumbling the responses, and
+emphasizing all the dread words with a cruel relish. Again, I see her
+dark eyes roll round the church when she says &#8220;miserable sinners,&#8221; as
+if she were calling all the congregation names. Again, I catch rare
+glimpses of my mother, moving her lips timidly between the two, with
+one of them <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>muttering at each ear like low thunder. Again, I wonder
+with a sudden fear whether it is likely that our good old clergyman
+can be wrong, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone right, and that all the
+angels in heaven can be destroying angels. Again, if I move a finger
+or relax a muscle of my face, Miss Murdstone pokes me with her prayer
+book, and makes my side ache.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Chillip said: &#8220;Mr. Murdstone sets up an image of himself and calls it
+the Divine Nature,&#8221; and &#8220;what such people as the Murdstones call their
+religion is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.&#8221; Mild and cautious
+Mr. Chillip observed, &#8220;I don&#8217;t find authority for Mr. and Miss Murdstone
+in the New Testament,&#8221; and his good wife added, &#8220;The darker tyrant Mr.
+Murdstone becomes, the more ferocious is his religious doctrine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When David first learned that Mr. Murdstone had married his mother he
+relieved the swelling in his little heart by crying in his bedroom. His
+mother naturally felt a sympathy for her boy. Mr. Murdstone reproved her
+for her lack of &#8220;firmness,&#8221; ordered her out of the room, and gave David
+his first lesson in &#8220;obedience.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;David,&#8221; he said, making his lips thin, by pressing them together, &#8220;if
+I have an obstinate horse or dog to deal with, what do you think I do?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I beat him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I had answered in a kind of breathless whisper, but I felt, in my
+silence, that my breath was shorter now.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I make him wince, and smart. I say to myself, &#8216;I&#8217;ll conquer that
+fellow;&#8217; and if it were to cost him all the blood he had, I should do it.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>There are still a few schoolmaster tyrants who boast of their ability &#8220;to
+subdue children.&#8221; They are barbarians, who understand neither the new
+education nor the new theology, who have not learned to recognise and
+reverence the individual selfhood of each child, who themselves fear God&#8217;s
+power more than they feel his love.</p>
+
+<p>When David was at home for the holidays he remained in his own room a
+considerable part of the time reading.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> This aroused the anger of Mr.
+Murdstone, and he charged David with being sullen.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I was sorry, David,&#8221; said Mr. Murdstone, turning his head and his
+eyes stiffly toward me, &#8220;to observe that you are of a sullen
+disposition. This is not a character that I can suffer to develop
+itself beneath my eyes without an effort at improvement. You must
+endeavour, sir, to change it. We must endeavour to change it for you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I beg your pardon, sir,&#8221; I faltered. &#8220;I have never meant to be sullen
+since I came back.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t take refuge in a lie, sir!&#8221; he returned so fiercely, that I saw
+my mother involuntarily put out her trembling hand as if to interpose
+between us. &#8220;You have withdrawn yourself in your sullenness to your
+own room. You have kept your room when you ought to have been here.
+You know now, once for all, that I require you to be here, and not
+there. Further, that I require you to bring obedience here. You know
+me, David. I will have it done.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Murdstone gave a hoarse chuckle.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I will have a respectful, prompt, and ready bearing toward myself,&#8221;
+he continued, &#8220;and toward Jane Murdstone, and toward your mother. I
+will not have this room shunned as if it were infected, at the
+pleasure of a child. Sit down.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He ordered me like a dog, and I obeyed like a dog.</p></div>
+
+<p>David&#8217;s lessons, which had been &#8220;along a path of roses&#8221; when his mother
+was alone with him, became a path of thorns after the Murdstones came.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The lessons were a grievous daily drudgery and misery. They were very
+long, very numerous, very hard&mdash;perfectly unintelligible.</p>
+
+<p>Let me remember how it used to be. I come into the parlour after
+breakfast with my books, an exercise book and a slate. My mother is
+ready for me, but not half so ready as Mr. Murdstone, or as Miss
+Murdstone, sitting near my mother stringing steel beads. The very
+sight of these two has such an influence over me, that I begin to feel
+the words I have been at infinite pains to get into my head all
+sliding away, and going I don&#8217;t know where. I wonder where they <i>do</i>
+go, by the bye?</p>
+
+<p>I hand the first book to my mother. I take a last <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>drowning look at
+the page as I give it into her hand, and start off aloud at a racing
+pace while I have got it fresh. I trip over a word. Mr. Murdstone
+looks up. I trip over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden,
+tumble over half a dozen words, and stop. I think my mother would show
+me the book if she dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Davy, Davy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, Clara,&#8221; says Mr. Murdstone, &#8220;be firm with the boy. Don&#8217;t say
+&#8216;Oh, Davy, Davy!&#8217; That&#8217;s childish. He knows his lesson, or he does not
+know it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He does <i>not</i> know it,&#8221; Miss Murdstone interposed awfully.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am really afraid he does not,&#8221; says my mother.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then you see, Clara,&#8221; returns Miss Murdstone, &#8220;you should just give
+him the book back, and make him know it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, certainly,&#8221; says my mother; &#8220;that&#8217;s what I intended to do, my
+dear Jane. Now, Davy, try once more, and don&#8217;t be stupid.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I obey the first clause of the injunction by trying once more, but am
+not so successful with the second, for I am very stupid. I tumble down
+before I get to the old place, at a point where I was all right
+before, and stop to think. But I can&#8217;t think about the lesson. I think
+of the number of yards of net in Miss Murdstone&#8217;s cap, or of the price
+of Mr. Murdstone&#8217;s dressing-gown, or any such ridiculous problem that
+I have no business with, and don&#8217;t want to have anything at all to do
+with. Mr. Murdstone makes a movement of impatience which I have been
+expecting for a long time. Miss Murdstone does the same. My mother
+glances submissively at them, shuts the book, and lays it by as an
+arrear to be worked out when my other tasks are done.</p>
+
+<p>There is a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a
+rolling snowball. The bigger it gets the more stupid I get. The case
+is so hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such a bog of
+nonsense, that I give up all idea of getting out, and abandon myself
+to my fate. The despairing way in which my mother and I look at each
+other, as I blunder on, is truly melancholy. But the greatest effect
+in these miserable lessons is when my mother (thinking nobody is
+observing her) tries to give me the cue by the motion of her lips. At
+that instant, Miss Murdstone, who <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>has been lying in wait for nothing
+else all along, says in a deep warning voice:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Clara!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>My mother starts, colours, and smiles faintly. Mr. Murdstone comes out
+of his chair, takes the book, throws it at me or boxes my ears with
+it, and turns me out of the room by the shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if my unfortunate studies
+generally took this course. I could have done very well if I had been
+without the Murdstones; but the influence of the Murdstones upon me
+was like the fascination of two snakes on a wretched young bird. Even
+when I did get through the morning with tolerable credit, there was
+not much gained but dinner; for Miss Murdstone never could endure to
+see me untasked, and if I rashly made any show of being unemployed,
+called her brother&#8217;s attention to me by saying, &#8220;Clara, my dear,
+there&#8217;s nothing like work&mdash;give your boy an exercise.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One morning when I went into the parlour with my books, I found my
+mother looking anxious, Miss Murdstone looking firm, and Mr. Murdstone
+binding something round the bottom of a cane&mdash;a lithe and limber cane,
+which he left off binding when I came in, and poised and switched in
+the air.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I tell you, Clara,&#8221; said Mr. Murdstone, &#8220;I have been often flogged
+myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To be sure; of course,&#8221; said Miss Murdstone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Certainly, my dear Jane,&#8221; faltered my mother meekly. &#8220;But&mdash;but do you
+think it did Edward good?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you think it did Edward harm, Clara?&#8221; asked Mr. Murdstone,
+gravely.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the point!&#8221; said his sister.</p>
+
+<p>To this my mother returned &#8220;Certainly, my dear Jane,&#8221; and said no
+more.</p>
+
+<p>I felt apprehensive that I was personally interested in this dialogue,
+and sought Mr. Murdstone&#8217;s eye as it lighted on mine.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, David,&#8221; he said&mdash;and I saw that cast again, as he said it&mdash;&#8220;you
+must be far more careful to-day than usual.&#8221; He gave the cane another
+poise, and another switch; and having finished his preparation of it,
+laid it down beside him, with an expressive look, and took up his
+book.</p>
+
+<p>This was a good freshener to my presence of mind, as a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>beginning. I
+felt the words of my lesson slipping off, not one by one, or line by
+line, but by the entire page. I tried to lay hold of them; but they
+seemed, if I may so express it, to have put skates on, and to skim
+away from me with a smoothness there was no checking.</p>
+
+<p>We began badly, and went on worse. I had come in, with an idea of
+distinguishing myself rather, conceiving that I was very well
+prepared; but it turned out to be quite a mistake. Book after book was
+added to the heap of failures, Miss Murdstone being firmly watchful of
+us all the time. And when we came at last to the five thousand cheeses
+(canes he made it that day, I remember), my mother burst out crying.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Clara!&#8221; said Miss Murdstone, in her warning voice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am not quite well, my dear Jane, I think,&#8221; said my mother.</p>
+
+<p>I saw him wink, solemnly, at his sister, as he rose and said, taking
+up the cane.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, Jane, we can hardly expect Clara to bear, with perfect firmness,
+the worry and torment that David has occasioned her to-day. That would
+be stoical. Clara is greatly strengthened and improved, but we can
+hardly expect so much from her. David, you and I will go upstairs,
+boy.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>They went upstairs. David was beaten unmercifully, notwithstanding his
+piteous cries, and in his desperation he bit the hand of Murdstone. For
+this it seemed as if Murdstone would have beaten him to death but for the
+interference of the women. &#8220;Then he was gone, and the door locked outside;
+and I was lying, fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, and raging in my
+puny way, upon the floor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Oh! Blind, self-satisfied &#8220;child-quellers,&#8221; who so ignorantly boast of
+your ability to conquer children! Dickens described Murdstone for you.
+Think of that awful picture of the beautiful boy, created in the image of
+God, lying on the floor, &#8220;fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, and
+raging,&#8221; with every element of sweetness and strength in his life turned
+to darkness and fury, and next time you propose to &#8220;conquer a child&#8221; who
+has been rendered partially insane, possibly by your treatment, and with
+whom you have unnecessarily forced a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> crisis, remember the Murdstone
+tragedy&mdash;a real tragedy, notwithstanding the fact that the boy&#8217;s life was
+spared.</p>
+
+<p>Remember, too, that your very presence and manner may blight the young
+lives that you are supposed to develop.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Murdstone was sending David away to work he gave him his
+philosophy of coercion as his parting advice:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;David,&#8221; said Mr. Murdstone, &#8220;to the young, this is a world for
+action; not for moping and droning in.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&#8220;As you do,&#8221; added his sister.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jane Murdstone, leave it to me, if you please. I say, David, to the
+young, this is a world for action, and not for moping and droning in.
+It is especially so for a young boy of your disposition, which
+requires a great deal of correcting; and to which no greater service
+can be done than to force it to conform to the ways of the working
+world, and to bend it and break it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;For stubbornness won&#8217;t do here,&#8221; said his sister. &#8220;What it wants is
+to be crushed. And crushed it must be. Shall be, too!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>First he fills the boy as full as possible of self-depreciation, and then
+trains him to expect that his leading experiences in life will consist of
+being forced into submission, conforming to the plans of others, bending
+to authority, the breaking of his will, and the crushing of his interests
+and purposes. What a depressing outlook to give a child!</p>
+
+<p>John Willet, in Barnaby Rudge, is used as a means of convincing parents
+that they should respect the feelings and opinions of children. No two
+maxims relating to child training are more utterly wrong in principle,
+more devoid of the simplest elements of child sympathy and child
+reverence, than the time-honoured nonsense that &#8220;children should be seen
+and not heard,&#8221; and &#8220;children should speak only when they are spoken to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens exposes these maxims to deserved ridicule in John Willet&#8217;s
+treatment of his son Joe. John kept the Maypole Inn. Joe was a fine,
+sturdy young man, but his father still ruled him with an unbending
+stubbornness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> that he believed to be a necessary exercise of authority.
+John was encouraged in his tyranny over his son by some of his old
+cronies, who were in the habit of sitting in the Maypole in the evenings
+and praising John for his firmness in training his son. One evening a
+stranger made a remark about a gentleman, to which Joe replied.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Silence, sir!&#8221; cried his father.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What a chap you are, Joe!&#8221; said Long Parkes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Such a inconsiderate lad!&#8221; murmured Tom Cobb.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Putting himself forward and wringing the very nose off his own
+father&#8217;s face!&#8221; exclaimed the parish clerk metaphorically.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What <i>have</i> I done?&#8221; reasoned poor Joe.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Silence, sir!&#8221; returned his father; &#8220;what do you mean by talking,
+when you see people that are more than two or three times your age
+sitting still and silent and not dreaming of saying a word?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why that&#8217;s the proper time for me to talk, isn&#8217;t it?&#8221; said Joe
+rebelliously.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The proper time, sir!&#8221; retorted his father, &#8220;the proper time&#8217;s no
+time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, to be sure!&#8221; muttered Parkes, nodding gravely to the other two
+who nodded likewise, observing under their breaths that that was the
+point.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The proper time&#8217;s no time, sir,&#8221; repeated John Willet; &#8220;when I was
+your age I never talked, I never wanted to talk. I listened and
+improved myself, that&#8217;s what I did.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s all very fine talking,&#8221; muttered Joe, who had been fidgeting in
+his chair with divers uneasy gestures. &#8220;But if you mean to tell me
+that I&#8217;m never to open my lips&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Silence, sir!&#8221; roared his father. &#8220;No, you never are. When your
+opinion&#8217;s wanted, you give it. When you&#8217;re spoke to you speak. When
+your opinion&#8217;s not wanted and you&#8217;re not spoke to, don&#8217;t give an
+opinion and don&#8217;t you speak. The world&#8217;s undergone a nice alteration
+since my time, certainly. My belief is that there an&#8217;t any boys
+left&mdash;that there isn&#8217;t such a thing as a boy&mdash;that there&#8217;s nothing now
+between a male baby and a man&mdash;and that all the boys went out with his
+blessed majesty King George the Second.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>On another occasion Joe had been hit with a whip by a stranger, and he
+expressed his opinion to Mr. Varden about the character of the man who hit
+him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Hold your tongue, sir,&#8221; said his father.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I won&#8217;t, father. It&#8217;s all along of you that he ventured to do what he
+did. Seeing me treated like a child, and put down like a fool, <i>he</i>
+plucks up a heart and has a fling at a fellow that he thinks&mdash;and may
+well think, too&mdash;hasn&#8217;t a grain of spirit. But he&#8217;s mistaken, as I&#8217;ll
+show him, and as I&#8217;ll show all of you before long.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Does the boy know what he&#8217;s saying of!&#8221; cried the astonished John
+Willet.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Father,&#8221; returned Joe, &#8220;I know what I say and mean, well&mdash;better than
+you do when you hear me. I can bear with you, but I can not bear the
+contempt that your treating me in the way you do brings upon me from
+others every day. Look at other young men of my age. Have they no
+liberty, no will, no right to speak? Are they obliged to sit
+mumchance, and to be ordered about till they are the laughingstock of
+young and old? I am a byword all over Chigwell, and I say&mdash;and it&#8217;s
+fairer my saying so now, than waiting till you are dead, and I have
+got your money&mdash;I say, that before long I shall be driven to break
+such bounds, and that when I do, it won&#8217;t be me that you&#8217;ll have to
+blame, but your own self, and no other.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>John never trusted his son, never entered into his plans, and treated even
+the most sacred things of Joe&#8217;s life with contempt.</p>
+
+<p>Joe was about to start to London on business for his father, and he was to
+ride a mare that was so slow that a young man could not enjoy the prospect
+of riding her.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you ride hard,&#8221; said his father.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I should be puzzled to do that, I think, father,&#8221; Joe replied,
+casting a disconsolate look at the animal.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;None of your impudence, sir, if you please,&#8221; retorted old John. &#8220;What
+would you ride, sir? A wild ass or zebra would be too tame for you,
+wouldn&#8217;t he, eh, sir? You&#8217;d like to ride a roaring lion, wouldn&#8217;t you,
+sir, eh, sir? Hold your tongue, sir.&#8221; When Mr. Willet, in his
+differences with his son, had exhausted all the questions that
+occurred to him, and Joe had said nothing at all in answer, he
+generally wound up by bidding him hold his tongue.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>&#8220;And what does the boy mean,&#8221; added Mr. Willet, after he had stared at
+him for a little time, in a species of stupefaction, &#8220;by cocking his
+hat, to such an extent! Are you going to kill the wintner, sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; said Joe tartly; &#8220;I&#8217;m not. Now your mind&#8217;s at ease, father.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With a military air, too!&#8221; said Mr. Willet, surveying him from top to
+toe; &#8220;with a swaggering, fire-eating, biling-water drinking sort of
+way with him! And what do you mean by pulling up the crocuses and
+snowdrops, eh, sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s only a little nosegay,&#8221; said Joe, reddening. &#8220;There&#8217;s no harm in
+that, I hope?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re a boy of business, you are, sir!&#8221; said Mr. Willet
+disdainfully, &#8220;to go supposing that wintners care for nosegays.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t suppose anything of the kind,&#8221; returned Joe. &#8220;Let them keep
+their red noses for bottles and tankards. These are going to Mr.
+Varden&#8217;s house.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And do you suppose <i>he</i> minds such things as crocuses?&#8221; demanded
+John.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know, and to say the truth, I don&#8217;t care,&#8221; said Joe. &#8220;Come,
+father, give me the money, and in the name of patience let me go.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There it is, sir,&#8221; replied John; &#8220;and take care of it; and mind you
+don&#8217;t make too much haste back, but give the mare a long rest. Do you
+mind?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ay, I mind,&#8221; returned Joe. &#8220;She&#8217;ll need it, Heaven knows.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And don&#8217;t you score up too much at the Black Lion,&#8221; said John. &#8220;Mind
+that too.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then why don&#8217;t you let me have some money of my own?&#8221; retorted Joe
+sorrowfully; &#8220;why don&#8217;t you, father? What do you send me into London
+for, giving me only the right to call for my dinner at the Black Lion,
+which you&#8217;re to pay for next time you go, as if I was not to be
+trusted with a few shillings? Why do you use me like this? It&#8217;s not
+right of you. You can&#8217;t expect me to be quiet under it.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens in this interview condemns several mistakes often made by parents
+in restraining instead of sympathizing with their children in the natural
+unfolding of their young manhood or womanhood. It was wrong for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> John
+Willet to ridicule Joe&#8217;s desire to ride a smart horse. It was wrong to bid
+him &#8220;hold his tongue.&#8221; It was wrong to criticise his method of dressing to
+look his very best. It was wrong to sneer at him because his consciousness
+of unfolding manhood and his hope of Dolly Varden&#8217;s love made him carry
+himself with a &#8220;military air.&#8221; What a difference it would make in the
+characters of young men if they all carried themselves with a military
+air, and walked with a consciousness of power and hope!</p>
+
+<p>It was especially wrong to make fun of the nosegay Joe had pulled for
+Dolly Varden. What a pity it is that so few fathers or mothers can truly
+sympathize with their boys and girls during the period of courtship! Why
+should the most sacred feelings that ever stir the soul be made the
+subject of jest and levity by those whose hearts should most truly beat in
+unison with the young hearts that are aflame? If there is a time in the
+life of young men or women when father or mother may enter the hearts of
+their children as benedictions and form a blessed unity that can never be
+broken or undone it is surely when young hearts are hallowed by love. Yet
+there are few parents to whom their children can speak freely about the
+mysteries and the deep experiences of love that come into their lives.</p>
+
+<p>It was wrong to treat Joe as if he was unworthy to be trusted with money.</p>
+
+<p>Every wrong revealed by Dickens in this interview had its root in John&#8217;s
+
+feeling that it was his duty to keep Joe down, to prevent the outflow of
+his inner life.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Old John having long encroached a good standard inch, full measure, on
+the liberty of Joe, and having snipped off a Flemish ell in the matter
+of the parole, grew so despotic and so great, that his thirst for
+conquest knew no bounds. The more young Joe submitted, the more
+absolute old John became. The ell soon faded into nothing. Yards,
+furlongs, miles arose; and on went old John in the pleasantest manner
+possible, trimming off an exuberance in this place, shearing away some
+liberty of speech or action in that, and conducting himself in this
+small way with as much high mightiness and majesty as the most
+glorious <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>tyrant that ever had his statue reared in the public ways,
+of ancient or of modern times.</p>
+
+<p>As great men are urged on to the abuse of power (when they need
+urging, which is not often) by their flatterers and dependents, so old
+John was impelled to these exercises of authority by the applause and
+admiration of his Maypole cronies, who, in the intervals of their
+nightly pipes and pots, would shake their heads and say that Mr.
+Willet was a father of the good old English sort; that there were no
+newfangled notions or modern ways in him; that he put them in mind of
+what their fathers were when they were boys; that there was no mistake
+about him; that it would be well for the country if there were more
+like him, and more was the pity that there were not; with many other
+original remarks of that nature. Then they would condescendingly give
+Joe to understand that it was all for his good, and he would be
+thankful for it one day; and in particular, Mr. Cobb would acquaint
+him, that when he was his age, his father thought no more of giving
+him a parental kick, or a box on the ears, or a cuff on the head, or
+some little admonition of that sort, than he did of any other ordinary
+duty of life; and he would further remark, with looks of great
+significance, that but for this judicious bringing up, he might have
+never been the man he was at that present speaking; which was probable
+enough, as he was, beyond all question, the dullest dog of the party.
+In short, between old John and old John&#8217;s friends, there never was an
+unfortunate young fellow so bullied, badgered, worried, fretted, and
+browbeaten; so constantly beset, or made so tired of his life, as poor
+Joe Willet.</p></div>
+
+<p>The end came at last. One evening Mr. Cobb was more aggravating than
+usual, and Joe&#8217;s patience could hold out no longer. He knocked the
+offending Cobb into a corner among the spittoons, and ran away from the
+unbearable tyranny of home.</p>
+
+<p>What a moral catastrophe occurs when a young man leaves home with a
+feeling of relief! Dickens develops this thought in the case of Tom
+Gradgrind. With the best of intentions, with a single desire of training
+his son in the best possible way, Mr. Gradgrind had repressed his natural
+tendencies and robbed him of the joys of childhood and youth to such an
+extent that when he was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> about to go to live with Mr. Bounderby, and his
+sister, Louisa, asked him &#8220;if he was pleased with his prospect?&#8221; he
+replied, &#8220;Well, it will be getting away from home.&#8221; The boy is never to
+blame for such a catastrophe.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens attacked another phase of the flogging mania in Barnaby Rudge, in
+a brief but suggestive scene. Barnaby and his mother were travelling, and
+were resting at the gate of a gentleman&#8217;s grounds, when the proprietor
+himself came along and demanded to know who they were.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Vagrants,&#8221; said the gentleman, &#8220;vagrants and vagabonds. Thee wish to
+be made acquainted with the cage, dost thee&mdash;the cage, the stocks, and
+the whipping post? Where dost come from?&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Learning that Barnaby was weak-minded, he asked how long he had been
+idiotic.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;From his birth,&#8221; said the widow.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t believe it,&#8221; cried the gentleman, &#8220;not a bit of it. It&#8217;s an
+excuse not to work. There&#8217;s nothing like flogging to cure that
+disorder. I&#8217;d make a difference in him in ten minutes, I&#8217;ll be bound.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Heaven has made none in more than twice ten years, sir,&#8221; said the
+widow mildly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then why don&#8217;t you shut him up? We pay enough for county
+institutions, damn &#8217;em. But thou&#8217;d rather drag him about to excite
+charity&mdash;of course. Ay, I know thee.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now, this gentleman had various endearing appellations among his
+intimate friends. By some he was called &#8220;a country gentleman of the
+true school,&#8221; by some &#8220;a fine old country gentleman,&#8221; by some &#8220;a
+sporting gentleman,&#8221; by some &#8220;a thoroughbred Englishman,&#8221; by some &#8220;a
+genuine John Bull&#8221;; but they all agreed in one respect, and that was,
+that it was a pity that there were not more like him, and that because
+there were not, the country was going to rack and ruin every day.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens always enjoyed ridiculing the people who long for the good old
+times and approve of the good old customs. There are some who even yet
+deplore the fact that children are not repressed and coerced as they used
+to be, and who prophesy untold evils unless the good old customs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> are
+re-established. They long for the recurrence of the days when &#8220;lickin&#8217; and
+larnin&#8217; went hand in hand,&#8221; when &#8220;Wallop the boy, develop the man&#8221; was the
+popular motto, expressive of the general faith. Dickens pictured them in
+John Willet and this &#8220;country gentleman of the true school.&#8221; He also
+criticised them severely in the Chimes.</p>
+
+<p>The depressing influence of another form of coercion is shown in Our
+Mutual Friend by the effect of Mr. Podsnap&#8217;s character on his daughter
+Georgiana. Mr. Podsnap was one of the absolutely positive people who know
+everything about everything, who never allow other people to express
+opinions without contradicting them, and who take every possible
+opportunity of expressing their own opinions in a loud, emphatic, dogmatic
+manner. Of course, no woman should hold opinions, according to Mr.
+Podsnap&#8217;s way of thinking, although Mrs. Podsnap, in her own way, did
+credit to her more Podsnappery master. It was therefore not to be dreamt
+of for a moment that a &#8220;young person&#8221; like their daughter Georgiana could
+have any views of her own regarding life or any of its conditions, past,
+present, or future. She was a &#8220;young person&#8221; to be protected, and kept in
+the background, and guarded from evil, and sheltered, so that she should
+not even hear of anything improper, and shielded from temptation to do
+wrong, or to do anything, indeed, right or wrong. Her father was rich; why
+should she wish to do anything but listen to him, and go away when he told
+her to do so, if he wished to speak of subjects that he deemed it unwise
+to let a &#8220;young person&#8221; hear discussed?</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There was a Miss Podsnap. And this young rocking-horse was being
+trained in her mother&#8217;s art of prancing in a stately manner without
+ever getting on. But the high parental action was not yet imparted to
+her, and in truth she was but an undersized damsel, with high
+shoulders, low spirits, chilled elbows, and a rasped surface of nose,
+who seemed to take occasional frosty peeps out of childhood into
+womanhood, and to shrink back again, overcome by her mother&#8217;s
+headdress and her father from head to foot&mdash;crushed by the mere dead
+weight of Podsnappery.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>Georgiana explained the reason of her shyness to Mrs. Lammle, for, strange
+as it may seem, considering her heredity, Georgiana was shy. Podsnappery
+as environment is always much stronger than Podsnappery as heredity.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;What I mean is,&#8221; pursued Georgiana, &#8220;that ma being so endowed with
+awfulness, and pa being so endowed with awfulness, and there being so
+much awfulness everywhere&mdash;I mean, at least, everywhere where I
+am&mdash;perhaps it makes me who am so deficient in awfulness, and
+frightened at it&mdash;I say it very badly&mdash;I don&#8217;t know whether you can
+understand what I mean?&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Thoughtful people need no explanation regarding the influence of
+Podsnappery on children.</p>
+
+<p>The time will come when in normal schools character analysis will be the
+supreme qualification of those who are to decide who may and who may not
+teach. When that time comes, as come it must, no Podsnaps will be allowed
+to teach.</p>
+
+<p>It was no wonder that&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Whenever Georgiana could escape from the thraldom of Podsnappery;
+could throw off the bedclothes of the custard-coloured phaeton, and
+get up; could shrink out of the range of her mother&#8217;s rocking, and (so
+to speak) rescue her poor little frosty toes from being rocked over;
+she repaired to her friend, Mrs. Alfred Lammle.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens fired another thunderbolt, in Our Mutual Friend, to set the world
+thinking about its method of teaching children, by his brief description
+of Pleasant Riderhood, the daughter of Rogue Riderhood.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Show her a christening, and she saw a little heathen personage having
+a quite superfluous name bestowed upon it, inasmuch as it would be
+commonly addressed by some abusive epithet; which little personage was
+not in the least wanted by anybody, and would be shoved and banged out
+of everybody&#8217;s way, until it should grow big enough to shove and bang.
+Show her a live father, and she saw but a duplicate of her own father,
+who from her infancy had <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>been taken with fits and starts of
+discharging his duty to her, which duty was always incorporated in the
+form of a fist or a leather strap, and being discharged hurt her.</p></div>
+
+<p>In Little Dorrit Dickens gives one of his most striking verbal
+descriptions of the effects of coercion in Arthur Clennam&#8217;s account of his
+own early training. He said to Mr. Meagles, when the kind old gentleman
+spoke of working with a will:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I have no will. That is to say,&#8221; he coloured a little, &#8220;next to none
+that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent;
+heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which
+was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I
+was of age, and exiled there until my father&#8217;s death there, a year
+ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected
+from me in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were
+extinguished before I could sound the words.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Light &#8217;em up again!&#8221; said Mr. Meagles.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr. Meagles, of a hard father and
+mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and
+priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and
+priced had no existence. Strict people, as the phrase is, professors
+of a stern religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of
+tastes and sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part
+of a bargain for the security of their possessions. Austere faces,
+inexorable discipline, penance in this world and terror in the
+next&mdash;nothing graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed
+heart everywhere&mdash;this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word
+as to apply it to such a beginning of life.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>When he returned to the presence of his mother, after an absence of many
+years in China, &#8220;the old influence of her presence, and her stern, strong
+voice, so gathered about her son that he felt conscious of a renewal of
+the timid chill and reserve of his childhood.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a terrible indictment of all coercive, child-quelling,
+will-breaking training that Arthur made when he said to his stern mother:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>&#8220;I can not say that I have been able to
+conform myself, in heart and spirit, to your rules; I can not say that I believe my forty years
+have been profitable or pleasant to myself, or any one; but I have
+habitually submitted, and I only ask you to remember it.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Speaking of her own training, Mrs. Clennam said: &#8220;Mine were days of
+wholesome repression, punishment, and fear,&#8221; and she frankly avowed her
+deliberate purpose of &#8220;bringing Arthur up in fear and trembling.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Those were the dreadful ideals that Dickens aimed to destroy. Repression,
+punishment, fear, and trembling are no longer the dominant ideals of the
+Christian world regarding child training. They are rapidly giving way to
+the new and true gospel of stimulation, happiness, freedom, and creative
+self-activity.</p>
+
+<p>Great Expectations was a valuable contribution to the literature of child
+training. Mrs. Gargery was a type of repressive, coercive, unsympathetic
+women, who regard children as necessarily nuisances, and who are
+continually thankful for the fact that by the free use of &#8220;the tickler&#8221;
+they may be subdued and kept in a state of bearable subjection.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gargery had no children of her own, but she had a little brother,
+Pip, whom she &#8220;brought up by hand.&#8221; Her husband, Joe Gargery, was an
+honest, affectionate, sympathetic man, who pitied poor Pip and tried to
+comfort him when his wife was not present. The dear old fellow said to Pip
+one evening, as they sat by the fire and he beat time to his kindly
+thoughts with the poker:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Your sister is given to government.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Given to government, Joe?&#8221; I was startled, for I had some shadowy
+idea (and I am afraid I must add hope) that Joe had divorced her in
+favour of the lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Given to government,&#8221; said Joe. &#8220;Which I meantersay the government of
+you and myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And she ain&#8217;t over partial to having scholars on the premises,&#8221; Joe
+continued, &#8220;and in particular would not be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>over partial to my being a
+scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don&#8217;t you see?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as &#8220;Why&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;
+when Joe stopped me.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Stay a bit. I know what you&#8217;re a-going to say, Pip? stay a bit! I
+don&#8217;t deny that your sister comes the mo-gul over us, now and again. I
+don&#8217;t deny that she do throw us back-falls, and that she do drop down
+upon us heavy. At such times as when your sister is on the ram-page,
+Pip,&#8221; Joe sunk his voice to a whisper and glanced at the door,
+&#8220;candour compels fur to admit that she is a buster....</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I wish there warn&#8217;t no
+tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all on myself; but
+this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you&#8217;ll
+overlook shortcomings.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Poor Joe! His father had been a blacksmith, but he took to drink, and, as
+Joe said, &#8220;Hammered at me with a wigour only to be equalled by the wigour
+with which he didn&#8217;t hammer at his anwil.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens gives an illustration of Mrs. Gargery&#8217;s training which reveals not
+only her coercive and unsympathetic tendencies, but points to other errors
+in training children that are yet too common. Pip was warming himself
+before going to bed one night, when a cannon sounded from the Hulks, or
+prison ships, near the Gargery home.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Ah!&#8221; said Joe; &#8220;there&#8217;s another conwict off.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What does that mean?&#8221; said I.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said snappishly:
+&#8220;Escaped. Escaped.&#8221; Administering the definition like medicine.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There was a conwict off last night,&#8221; said Joe, aloud, &#8220;after sunset
+gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it appears they&#8217;re firing
+warning of another.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who&#8217;s firing?&#8221; said I.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Drat that boy,&#8221; interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work;
+&#8220;what a questioner he is! Ask no questions and you&#8217;ll be told no lies.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should
+be told lies by her, even if I did ask <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>questions. But she never was
+polite, unless there was company.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mrs. Joe,&#8221; said I, as a last resort, &#8220;I should like to know&mdash;if you
+wouldn&#8217;t much mind&mdash;where the firing comes from?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lord bless the boy!&#8221; exclaimed my sister, as if she didn&#8217;t quite mean
+that, but rather the contrary. &#8220;From the hulks!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And please, what&#8217;s hulks?&#8221; said I.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the way with this boy!&#8221; exclaimed my sister, pointing me out
+with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. &#8220;Answer him
+one question, and he&#8217;ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison
+ships, right &#8217;cross th&#8217; country.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wonder who&#8217;s put into prison ships, and why they&#8217;re put there?&#8221;
+said I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.</p>
+
+<p>It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. &#8220;I tell you what,
+young fellow,&#8221; said she, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t bring you up by hand to badger
+people&#8217;s lives out. It would be blame to me, and not praise, if I had.
+People are put in the hulks because they murder, and because they rob,
+and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking
+questions. Now, you get along to bed!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went
+upstairs in the dark, with my head tingling&mdash;from Mrs. Joe&#8217;s thimble
+having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words&mdash;I
+felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were
+handy for me. I was clearly on my way there.</p>
+
+<p>Pip said later: &#8220;I suppose myself to be better acquainted than any
+living authority with the ridgy effect of a wedding ring passing
+unsympathetically over the human countenance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>My sister&#8217;s bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in
+which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there
+is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may
+be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the
+child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands
+as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.
+Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict
+with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my
+sister, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I
+had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by the
+hand gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my
+punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential
+performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much
+with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the
+fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gargery&#8217;s training was bad because she refused to answer the boy&#8217;s
+questions, or abused him for asking them; and when she did condescend to
+answer she answered in a snappy, unsympathetic way. The cruelty of first
+scolding a child, then trying to terrify him from asking questions by
+telling him that &#8220;robbers, murderers, and all kinds of criminals began
+their downward career by asking questions,&#8221; then rapping him on the head,
+and finally sending him to bed without a light, is admirably described.
+All these practices are terribly unjust to children. Parents and teachers,
+in the picture of Mrs. Gargery, are warned against scolding, against
+threatening, against falsehood and misrepresentation in order to reduce
+children to submission, against corporal punishment with &#8220;the tickler,&#8221;
+against the more dastardly and more exasperating corporal punishment by
+snapping and rapping the head, and against sending children to bed in the
+dark. He was especially careful to make the retiring hour in his own home
+a period of joyousness and freedom from all fear. He made the crime of
+sending children to bed without light and without sympathy one of the
+practices of that model of bad training&mdash;Mrs. Pipchin; and one of the most
+dreaded of little Oliver Twist&#8217;s experiences was to be sent to sleep among
+the coffins in the dark at Sowerberry&#8217;s.</p>
+
+<p>The hour of retiring is the special time when children most need the
+affectionate spirit of motherhood, and wise mothers try to use this sacred
+hour to form their closest unity with the hearts of the little ones, and
+to sow in their young lives the apperceptive seeds of sweetness, and joy,
+and faith.</p>
+
+<p>The wrong of making children sensitive, and then<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> blaming them for being
+sensitive, is admirably shown in Pip&#8217;s training.</p>
+
+<p>The revelation of the child&#8217;s consciousness of the sense of injustice in
+the treatment of those who train it is worthy of most careful study and
+thought by parents and teachers. There can be no doubt that infants have a
+clear sense of wrongs inflicted on them, even before they can speak.</p>
+
+<p>The comparison of the child&#8217;s rocking-horse with the big-boned Irish
+hunter reveals one of the most essential lessons for adulthood: that what
+may appear trifling to an adult may mean much to a child. Kind but
+thoughtless adulthood is often most grievously unjust to childhood,
+because it fails to consider how things appear to the child. However kind
+and good such adults are, they are utterly unsympathetic with the child.
+Many people are very considerate for childhood who are very unsympathetic
+with children. Consideration can never take the place of sympathy. An
+ounce of true sympathy is worth a ton of consideration to a child.
+Adulthood has measured a child&#8217;s corn in the bushel of adulthood. Mr.
+Gradgrind, for instance, was a good man, and he meant to be kind and
+helpful to his children. He was most considerate for them, and spared no
+money to promote their welfare and happiness. But he did it in accordance
+with the tastes and opinions of adulthood, and totally ignored the fact
+that children have opinions and tastes, and he ruined the children whom he
+most loved. &#8220;The rocking-horse and the big-boned Irish hunter&#8221; suggest
+rich mines of child psychology.</p>
+
+<p>The pernicious habit of so many adults who fill the imaginations of
+children with bogies and terrors of an abnormal kind in order to keep them
+in the path of rectitude by falsehood, is exposed in Mrs. Gargery&#8217;s method
+of stopping Pip&#8217;s questions by telling him that asking questions was the
+first step in a career of crime. This habit leads parents insensibly into
+a most dishonest attitude toward their children. It leads, too, in due
+time, to a lack of reverence for adulthood. Falseness is certain to lead
+to the disrespect it deserves. Parents who make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> untruthfulness a basis
+for terror should not be surprised at the irreverence or the scepticism of
+their children.</p>
+
+<p>In The Schoolboy&#8217;s Story, old Cheeseman was brought to school by a woman
+who was always taking snuff and shaking him.</p>
+
+<p>There is a great deal of pedagogical thought in Dombey and Son. At the
+period of its issue (1846-48) Dickens appears to have devoted more
+attention to the study of wrong methods of teaching than at any other
+time, so in Dr. Blimber, Cornelia Blimber, and Mr. Feeder he gave his best
+illustrations of what in his opinion should be condemned in the popular
+methods of teaching. But while this was evidently his chief educational
+purpose in writing the book, he gave a good deal of attention to wrong
+methods of training, especially to the most awful doctrine of the
+ages&mdash;that children must be coerced, and repressed, and checked, and
+subdued. He evidently accepted as his supreme duty the responsibility for
+securing a free childhood for children. Mrs. Pipchin is an admirable
+delineation of the worst features of what was regarded as respectable
+child training. Her training is treated at length in Chapter XI. It is
+sufficient here to deal with her coerciveness, and recall the epithet
+&#8220;child-queller&#8221; which Dickens applied to her. No more expressive term was
+ever used to describe the wickedness of the coercionists. It means more
+than most volumes. It has new meaning every day as our reverence for the
+divinity in the child grows stronger, and the absolute need of the
+development of his selfhood by his own self-activity becomes clearer. It
+reveals a perfect charnel house full of dwarfed souls and blighted
+selfhood, and weak characters that should have been strong, and false
+characters that should have been true, and wailings that should have been
+music, and tears that should have been laughter, and darkness that should
+have been light, and wickedness that should have been a blessing. The one
+awful word &#8220;child-queller&#8221; means all of evil that can result from daring
+to stand between the child and God in our self-satisfied ignorance to
+check the free, natural output of its selfhood which God meant to be
+wrought out with increasing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> power throughout its life. Our work is to
+change the direction of the outflowing selfhood when it is wrong, to
+direct it to new and better interest centres, but never to stop it or turn
+it back upon itself.</p>
+
+<p>There are thousands of child-quellers teaching still. Would that they
+could see truly the dwarfed souls they have blighted, and the ghosts of
+the selfhood they have sacrificed on the altar of what they call
+discipline!</p>
+
+<p>The term child-queller was the creation of genius.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pipchin disdained the idea of reasoning with children. &#8220;Hoity-toity!&#8221;
+exclaimed Mrs. Pipchin, shaking out her black bombazine skirts, and
+plucking up all the ogress within her. &#8220;If she don&#8217;t like it, Mr. Dombey,
+she must be taught to lump it.&#8221; She would &#8220;shake her head and frown down a
+legion of children,&#8221; and &#8220;the wild ones went home tame enough after
+sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof.&#8221; She tamed them
+by robbing them of their power, as Froebel&#8217;s boy tamed flies by tearing
+off their wings and legs, and then saying, &#8220;See how tame they are.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Teachers used to boast about their ability to tame children, when their
+ability really meant the power to destroy the tendency to put forth
+effort, to substitute negativeness for positiveness.</p>
+
+<p>Susan Nipper, in her usual graphic style, expressed her views regarding
+the coercive practices of Mrs. Pipchin and the Blimbers.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Goodness knows,&#8221; exclaimed Miss Nipper, &#8220;there&#8217;s a-many we could
+spare instead, if numbers is a object; Mrs. Pipchin as a overseer
+would come cheap at her weight in gold, and if a knowledge of black
+slavery should be required, them Blimbers is the very people for the
+sitiwation.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>One of Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s favourite methods of coercing, or taming, or
+child-quelling was to send children to bed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;The best thing you can do is to take off your things and go to bed
+this minute.&#8221; This was the sagacious woman&#8217;s remedy for all
+complaints, particularly lowness of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>spirits and inability to sleep;
+for which offence many young victims in the days of the Brighton
+Castle had been committed to bed at ten o&#8217;clock in the morning.</p></div>
+
+<p>Another assault on coercion was made in Dombey and Son in the brief
+description of the Grinders&#8217; school.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Biler&#8217;s life had been rendered weary by the costume of the Charitable
+Grinders. The youth of the streets could not endure it. No young
+vagabond could be brought to bear its contemplation for a moment
+without throwing himself upon the unoffending wearer and doing him a
+mischief. His social existence had been more like that of an early
+Christian than an innocent child of the nineteenth century. He had
+been stoned in the streets. He had been overthrown into gutters;
+bespattered with mud; violently flattened against posts. Entire
+strangers to his person had lifted his yellow cap off his head and
+cast it to the winds. His legs had not only undergone verbal criticism
+and revilings, but had been handled and pinched. That very morning he
+had received a perfectly unsolicited black eye on his way to the
+Grinders&#8217; establishment, and had been punished for it by the master: a
+superannuated old Grinder of savage disposition, who had been
+appointed schoolmaster because he didn&#8217;t know anything and wasn&#8217;t fit
+for anything, and for whose cruel cane all chubby little boys had a
+perfect fascination.</p></div>
+
+<p>Poor Biler went wrong, and when he was taken to task for it by Mr. Carker
+he gave his theory to account for the fact that he had not done better at
+school.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;You&#8217;re a nice young gentleman!&#8221; said Mr. Carker, shaking his head at
+him. &#8220;There&#8217;s hemp-seed sown for <i>you</i>, my fine fellow!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m sure, sir,&#8221; returned the wretched Biler, blubbering again, and
+again having recourse to his coat cuff: &#8220;I shouldn&#8217;t care, sometimes,
+if it was growed too. My misfortunes all began in wagging, sir, but
+what could I do, exceptin&#8217; wag?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Excepting what?&#8221; said Mr. Carker.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wag, sir. Wagging from school.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you mean pretending to go there, and not going?&#8221; said Mr. Carker.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>&#8220;Yes, sir, that&#8217;s wagging, sir,&#8221; returned the quondam Grinder, much
+affected. &#8220;I was chivied through the streets, sir, when I went there,
+and pounded when I got there. So I wagged and hid myself, and that
+began it.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>When Mr. Dombey, by whose act of superior grace Biler had been sent to the
+Charitable Grinders&#8217; school, upbraided the boy&#8217;s father for his failure to
+turn out well,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>the simple father said that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder,
+huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are,
+by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness
+for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan.</p></div>
+
+<p>Sagacious teachers and parents often blame and punish children for being
+what they made them.</p>
+
+<p>Still another illustration of the cruel coercion practised on children is
+found in Dombey and Son, in the training of Alice Marwood.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;There was a child called Alice Marwood,&#8221; said the daughter, with a
+laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself,
+&#8220;born among poverty and neglect, and nursed in it. Nobody taught her,
+nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nobody!&#8221; echoed the mother, pointing to herself, and striking her
+breast.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The only care she knew,&#8221; returned the daughter, &#8220;was to be beaten,
+and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better
+without that.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The picture of George Silverman&#8217;s early life is one of the most touching
+of all the appeals of Dickens on behalf of childhood. He lived in a
+cellar, and when he was removed at length he knew only the sensations of
+&#8220;cold, hunger, thirst, and the pain of being beaten.&#8221; The poor child used
+to speculate on his mother&#8217;s feet having a good or ill temper as she
+descended the stairs to their cellar home, and he watched her knees, her
+waist, her face, as they came into view, to learn whether he was likely to
+be abused or not. Many mothers realized their own cruelty by reading such
+descriptions of cruelty toward little children.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>The whole system of training of Mr. Gradgrind and his teacher, Mr.
+M&#8217;Choakumchild (the latter name contains volumes of coercion) was a
+scientific system of coerciveness and restraint, planned and carried out
+by a good man misguided by false ideas about child training and character
+building. Coercion was only one of several bad elements in his system, but
+he was terribly coercive. His children were lavishly supplied with almost
+everything they did not care for, and robbed of everything they should
+naturally be interested in.</p>
+
+<p>The results were, as might be expected, disastrous. His son Tom became a
+monster of selfishness, sensuality, and criminality. Dickens uses the name
+&#8220;whelp&#8221; to describe him, and, in a satirical manner, accounts for his
+meanness and weaknesses in the following summary:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been brought up
+under one continuous system of unnatural restraint should be a
+hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom. It was very strange
+that a young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for
+five consecutive minutes should be incapable at last of governing
+himself; but so it was with Tom. It was altogether unaccountable that
+a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle
+should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling
+sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Mr. Gradgrind became convinced that he had been altogether wrong in
+his educational ideals and was endeavouring to explain the matter to Mr.
+Bounderby, that gentleman gave expression to the views of many people of
+his time. Fortunately there are few Bounderbys now, but there are some
+even yet.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Well, well!&#8221; returned Mr. Gradgrind, with a patient, even a
+submissive air. And he sat for a little while pondering. &#8220;Bounderby, I
+see reason to doubt whether we have ever quite understood Louisa.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you mean by we?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let me say, I, then,&#8221; he returned, in answer to the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>coarsely blurted
+question; &#8220;I doubt whether I have understood Louisa. I doubt whether I
+have been quite right in the manner of her education.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There you hit it,&#8221; returned Bounderby. &#8220;There I agree with you. You
+have found it out at last, have you? Education! I&#8217;ll tell you what
+education is&mdash;to be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon
+the shortest allowance of everything except blows. That&#8217;s what <i>I</i>
+call education.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>In his last book&mdash;Edwin Drood&mdash;Dickens pictured Mr. Honeythunder as a type
+of coercive philanthropists, whom he regarded as intolerable as well as
+intolerant nuisances&mdash;people who would use force to compel everybody to
+think and act as they are told to think and act by the Honeythunders.</p>
+
+<p>In speaking of Mr. Honeythunder and his class of philanthropists, Rev.
+Canon Crisparkle said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is a most extraordinary thing that these philanthropists are so
+given to seizing their fellow-creatures by the scruff of the neck, and
+(as one may say) bumping them into the paths of peace.</p></div>
+
+<p>Neville Landless described his training to Canon Crisparkle in telling
+words:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;And to finish with, sir: I have been brought up among abject and
+servile dependents of an inferior race, and I may easily have
+contracted some affinity with them. Sometimes I don&#8217;t know but that it
+may be a drop of what is tigerish in their blood.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>There is a profound philosophy of one phase of the evils of coercion in
+this statement. Coercion does not always destroy power by blighting it.
+Often the power that was intended to bless turns to poison when it is
+repressed, and makes men hypocritical and tigerish. It is true, too, that
+a child who is brought up with the idea of dominating a servile class, or
+even servile individuals, can never have a true conception of his own
+freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens was not satisfied with his numerous and sustained attacks on the
+more violent forms of coercion and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> repression. He began in Edwin Drood to
+draw a picture of Mrs. Crisparkle, the mother of the Canon, to show that
+the placid firmness of her strong will had a baleful influence on
+character. Her character was not completed, but the outlines given are
+most suggestive. What could surpass the absolute indifference she showed
+to the slightest consideration for the individuality or opinions of other
+people when she spoke of her wards, who were grown up, it should be
+remembered, to young manhood and womanhood.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I have spoken with my two wards, Neville and Helena Landless, on the
+subject of their defective education, and they give in to the plan
+proposed; as I should have taken good care they did, whether they
+liked it or not.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>How exquisitely he reveals the character of the eminently dogmatic, though
+quiet, Christian lady by her remarking so definitely to her son, the
+Canon:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I have no objection to discuss it, Sept. I trust, my dear, I am
+always open to discussion.&#8221; There was a vibration in the old lady&#8217;s
+cap, as though she internally added, &#8220;And I should like to see the
+discussion that would change <i>my</i> mind!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens meant to show that whether the coercion partook of the nature of
+that exercised by Squeers or Mrs. Crisparkle, it resulted in forcing those
+compelled to submit to it to &#8220;give in,&#8221; and that all children who are
+regularly made to &#8220;give in&#8221; acquire the habit of &#8220;giving in,&#8221; and
+eventually become &#8220;give-iners&#8221; and hypocrites until circumstances make
+them rebels and anarchists. So he condemned every form of coercion, and
+taught the doctrine of true freedom for the child as a necessary element
+in his best development. When this doctrine is fully understood men will
+soon become truly free. All true education has been a movement toward
+freedom. All true national advancement has been toward more perfect
+freedom. The ideal of national, constitutional liberty has changed in
+harmony with the educational <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>revelations of the broadening conception of
+freedom; and more progressive conceptions of national liberty have
+rendered it necessary for the educators to reveal truer, freer methods of
+training children in harmony with the higher national organization.</p>
+
+<p>When the ideal of national organization was the divine right of kings to
+rule their subjects by absolute authority, the system of national
+organization required passive obedience on the part of the subject. To
+secure this coercive discipline the prompt submission of the child to the
+immediate authority over him was the ideal process. Passive submission was
+required as the full duty of the citizen, and passive obedience was the
+desired product of the school. But the new ideal of government is rule by
+the people through their representatives, and national citizenship means
+the intelligent co-operation of independent individuals; so the true
+educational ideal is a free selfhood, and a free selfhood in maturity
+demands a free selfhood in childhood. To secure this it is essential that
+schools shall become &#8220;free republics of childhood.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But a free selfhood in childhood must lead to anarchy,&#8221; say those who
+cling to the coercive ideal. Anarchy never springs from freedom. Anarchy
+is the foul son of coercion. True freedom does not include liberty to do
+wrong. The &#8220;perfect law of liberty&#8221; is the only basis for perfect
+happiness, because it is not freedom beyond law, but freedom within law,
+freedom because of law. Law should never be coercive to the child. When it
+becomes so the law is wrong and it makes the child wrong, and produces the
+apperceptive centres of anarchy in feeling and thought out of the very
+elements that should have produced joyous co-operation. Law should give
+the child consciousness of power, and not of restraint. Undirected
+selfhood, uncontrolled selfhood, is not true freedom. The exercise of
+power without limitations leads to confusion, indecision, and anarchy in
+everything except its spirit of rebellion. The guidance and control of
+adulthood and the limitations of law are necessary to the accomplishment
+of the best results in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> immediate product of effort put forth by the
+child, in the effect on his character, and in the development of a true
+consciousness of freedom in his life.</p>
+
+<p>The terrible blunder of the past in child training has been to make law
+coercive instead of directive. Law has been prohibitive, not stimulative.
+Law has defined barriers to prevent effort, instead of outlining the
+direction effort should take. The limitations of law have been used to
+define the course the child should not take; they should have defined the
+course he ought to take, and within the range of which course he should
+use his selfhood in the freest possible way. Law has said &#8220;thou shalt not&#8221;
+when it should have said &#8220;thou shalt&#8221;; it has said &#8220;don&#8217;t&#8221; when it should
+have said &#8220;do&#8221;; it has said &#8220;quit&#8221; when it should have said &#8220;go on&#8221;; it
+has said &#8220;be still&#8221; when it should have said &#8220;work&#8221;; it has stood in the
+way to check when it should have moved on to lead to victory and progress
+along the most direct lines; it has given a consciousness of weakness
+instead of a consciousness of power; it has developed moroseness instead
+of joyousness, self-depreciation instead of self-reverence; and children
+for these reasons have been led to dislike law, and the apperceptive
+centres of anarchy have been laid by a coercive instead of a stimulative
+use of law.</p>
+
+<p>By false ideals of coercive law adulthood has been made repressive instead
+of suggestive, depressive instead of helpful, dogmatic instead of
+reasonable, tyrannical instead of free, &#8220;child-quellers&#8221; instead of
+sympathetic friends of childhood, executors of penalties instead of wise
+guides, agents to keep children under instead of helping them up; and so
+children have learned to dislike school, and work, and teachers, and often
+home and parents. And the children have not been to blame for their
+dislike of law and their distrust of adulthood.</p>
+
+<p>And the children themselves by coercion have been made don&#8217;ters instead of
+doers, quitters instead of workers, give-iners instead of persevering
+winners, yielders to opposition instead of achievers of victory, negative
+instead of positive, apathetic instead of energetic, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>passive instead of
+active, imitative instead of original, followers instead of leaders,
+dependent instead of independent, servile instead of free, conscious of
+weakness instead of power, defect shunners instead of triumphant creative
+representatives of the God in whose image man was created.</p>
+
+<p>Every agency that robs a child of his originality and freedom and prevents
+the spontaneous output of his creative self-activity destroys the image of
+God in him. Man is most like God when he is freely working out the plans
+of his own creative selfhood for good purposes. Coercion has been the
+greatest destroyer of the image of God in the child, and anarchy is the
+product of the perversion of the very powers that should have made man
+hopefully constructive. The seeds of anarchy are sown in the child&#8217;s life,
+when his selfhood is blighted and checked. The fountain that finds free
+outlet for its waters forms a pure stream that remains always a blessing,
+but the fountain that is obstructed forms a noisome marsh, wasting the
+good land it should have watered and destroying the plant life it should
+have nourished.</p>
+
+<p>The great salt seas and lakes and marshes of the world have been formed by
+the checking of beautiful fresh-water streams and rivers and the
+prevention of their outflow to the ocean they should have reached. So when
+the outflow of the soul of the child is checked the powers that should
+have ennobled his own life and enriched the lives of others turn to evil
+instead of good, and make a dangerous instead of a helpful character. So
+far as coercion can influence selfhood it destroys its power for good and
+makes it a menace to civilization, instead of a beneficent agency in the
+accomplishment of high purposes. The reason that coercion does not more
+effectively blight and dwarf the child is that childhood is not under the
+direct influence of adulthood all the time. The blessed hours of freedom
+in play and work have saved the race.</p>
+
+<p>The absurd idea that &#8220;anarchy will result from giving true freedom to the
+child&#8221; persists in the minds of so many people, partly through the
+strength of the race<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> conception of the need of coercion, from which we
+have not yet been able fully to free ourselves; partly from a terrible
+misconception regarding the true function of law; partly through gross
+ignorance of the child and lack of reverence for him; and partly from
+failure to understand our own higher powers for guiding the child
+properly, or the vital relationships of adulthood to childhood.</p>
+
+<p>The child should recognise law as a beneficent guide in the accomplishment
+of his own plans. In Froebel&#8217;s wonderful kindergarten system the child is
+always guided by law, but he is always perfectly free to work out his own
+designs, and in doing so he is aided by law, not kept back or down by law.
+Law is, to the truly trained child, a revealer of right outlets for power,
+and the supreme duties of adulthood in training childhood are to change
+the centre of its interest when from lack of wisdom its interest centre is
+wrong, and to reveal to it in logical sequence the laws of nature, of
+beauty, of harmony, and of life. With such training life and law will
+always be in harmony, and the seeds of anarchy will find no soil in human
+hearts or minds in which to take root.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens uses the French Revolution, in A Tale of Two Cities, to show that
+anarchy results from coercion, from the unreasoning subordination of a
+lower to a higher or ruling class. Against the reasoning of wisdom the
+Marquis said: &#8220;Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark
+deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to
+the whip as long as this roof shuts out the sky.&#8221; The roof came off one
+wild night&mdash;burned off by an infuriated mob of the dogs who had been
+repressed and whipped into anarchy. Yet the aristocracy of France claimed,
+as coercionist educators claim, that the anarchy was the result of
+insufficient coercion, instead of the natural harvest of the seed they had
+sown.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was too much the way of monseigneur under his reverses as a
+refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy,
+to talk of this terrible revolution as if it were the one only harvest
+ever known under the skies that had not been sown&mdash;as if nothing had
+ever been done that had led to it&mdash;as if the observers of the wretched
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
+should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
+years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw.</p></div>
+
+<p>When the Revolution was at its fearful height, and the repressed dogs were
+having their wild carnival of revenge, Dickens says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Along the Paris streets the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six
+tumbrels carry the day&#8217;s wine to la guillotine. All the devouring and
+insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are
+fused in the one realization, guillotine. And yet there is not in
+France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a
+root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under
+conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.
+Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it
+will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of
+rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield
+the same fruit according to its kind.</p>
+
+<p>Six tumbrels roll along the streets. Change these back again to what
+they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be
+the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles,
+the toilets of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not My Father&#8217;s
+house but dens of thieves, and huts of millions of starving peasants!</p></div>
+
+<p>This is the most profound and most ably written exposition of the
+philosophy of anarchy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But by coercion I can make the child do right, and in this way I can form
+habits of doing right that will control the child when he grows up.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The habit that is really formed by coercion is the habit of submission, of
+passive yielding to authority, of subordination, and, in the last
+analysis, this means the degradation and enslavement of the soul. Two
+habits are thus wrought into the child&#8217;s nature by coercion: the habit of
+doing things because ordered to do them, which is slavery; and the habit
+of doing things he does not like or wish to do, which is the basis of
+hypocrisy. The meanest products that can be made from beings <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>created in
+God&#8217;s image are slaves and hypocrites. One of the remarkable facts
+regarding coercionists is that they blame God for creating the
+monstrosities they have themselves produced by false methods of training.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We should break the child&#8217;s will, if it is wrong, to set it right, just
+as we should break a crooked leg to make it straight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This is a statement that betrays a lack of modern surgical knowledge, and
+a carelessness of psychological thought. Modern treatment for the cure of
+deformity of body avoids harsh treatment whenever it is possible to do so.
+It has been found that many deformities of body may be cured by proper
+exercise of the undeveloped part or parts, and with wider knowledge of
+Nature&#8217;s laws will come a wiser use of the law of self-transformation, and
+a smaller and smaller use of the severer methods of treatment. But no good
+child psychologist now doubts that a child&#8217;s will possesses the power of
+self-development and self-adjustment under proper guidance, nor should any
+one be ignorant of the fact that all true will development comes from
+within outward.</p>
+
+<p>It is only necessary that man should study the child more thoroughly, and
+learn how to change his interest centres from wrong to right, and how to
+surround him with an environment suitable to his progressive stages of
+development, in order to keep his own will in operation along productive
+lines of self-reformation and self-regulation by creative self-activity.
+Thus the will can be set to work truly with undiminished power. When a
+will is broken, however, it can never regain its full power; the breaking
+process blights it forever. More rational processes retain its tendency to
+act and its energy of action while changing the purpose and direction of
+its action.</p>
+
+<p>One of the interesting anomalies of our language is the marvellous fact
+that the term &#8220;self-willed&#8221; should ever have been considered a term of
+reproach or a description of a defect in character. The child with
+strongest self-will may become the greatest champion for righteousness if
+properly trained. He needs a wise and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>sympathetic trainer, who will be
+reverently grateful for his strong self-will, and whose reverence will
+prevent him from doing anything that would weaken the strength or selfhood
+of the will. The attempt to break his will may make him a destroying force
+instead of a leader for truth and progress. If a strangled will ever
+regains vitality it rarely acts truly. There is perhaps no other relic of
+the theories of barbaric ignorance concerning child training still left
+that is so baneful and so illogical as the theory that justifies will
+breaking.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But God punishes the child. The child who touches the fire gets burned,
+and therefore it is right that coercive punishment should be used by
+adulthood in dealing with the child.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The punishments referred to are the revelation of natural laws. There is
+no personal element of the punishing agency manifest to the child. God
+does not appear to the child as a punisher, and it is an astounding error
+in training to reveal such a consciousness of God to the child.
+Responsibility for the consequences of their acts is a law of which all
+children approve. This appeals to their sense of justice, and there is no
+other sense to which we can appeal with success so universally in children
+as the sense of justice. &#8220;Squareness&#8221; is the highest quality named in the
+lexicon of childhood. A boy would rather be deemed &#8220;square&#8221; than receive
+praise for any other characteristic or accomplishment. So he recognises
+the justice of being held accountable for the directly resulting
+consequences of his acts quite as readily as he accepts the fact, without
+blaming any one else, that he will be burned if he touches fire. There is
+no element of coercion in the law of consequences. It is a just and
+universal law in harmony with his moral responsibility; therefore he will
+respect it. Coercion is directly contrary to the fundamental laws of his
+happiness and his true growth, and therefore he naturally and properly
+dislikes and disapproves of it, and of the individual who outrages justice
+by using it.</p>
+
+<p>The wonderful stories of Dickens set the world thinking by first arousing
+the strongest feelings of sympathy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> for the child and then developing
+sentiment and thought against every form of coercion, more especially
+coercion by corporal punishment. The awakening has been most satisfactory
+in its results. When Dickens began his writing against corporal punishment
+the rod was the almost universal remedy for all defects in animals or
+human beings. Whatever the defect, the superior in the eyes of the law
+used the one agency to overcome it. Mothers used the rod to subdue their
+children. Husbands used the rod to keep their children and wives in order.
+Men whipped their horses with impunity, as they did their children or
+wives. They owned them, and their right to punish them as they chose was
+unquestioned. Men trained animals to perform tricks in menageries by
+beating them, and they trained dancing, or performing, or learning girls
+and boys quite as inhumanly. Ownership or subordination justified
+unspeakable cruelty. The weakness of the child, the helplessness of the
+animal, appealed to the hardness of human nature, and not to its chivalry
+or sympathy. Even the poor feeble-minded and idiotic, who were confined in
+asylums, were terribly flogged by the most advanced philanthropists of the
+highest Christian civilization. They were weak. It was the duty of the
+authorities to control them, and &#8220;stripes and bruises&#8221; were regarded as
+the only true agencies for securing obedience. The rod was the highest
+controlling and directing force in the world.</p>
+
+<p>What a change has been wrought! Horses and children and wives are
+protected from brutal treatment now by law. The insane are not flogged to
+make them sane in any well-conducted institutions. More than half the
+children in the schools of the civilized world are free from the terror
+and degradation of corporal punishment by law, or by the higher
+consciousness of more intelligent teachers. Parenthood everywhere is
+studying the child and trying to become conscious of its own higher powers
+of guiding character so that it may be able to train the children in truer
+and more productive and less dangerous ways than formerly. And Charles
+Dickens was the great apostle of these grand reforms.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>We shudder now as we read of the outrages practised on helpless children
+and on the insane half a century ago not by the heathen, but by earnest,
+conscientious Christians. The men who live half a century hence will
+shudder when they read that in some schools at the close of the nineteenth
+century children who were partially or temporarily insane from hereditary
+taint, or imperfect nutrition, or cruel treatment, or anger, or from some
+other removable or remediable cause were whipped, and that men, some of
+whom occupied respectable positions, advocated the breaking of children&#8217;s
+wills! If these &#8220;will-breaking&#8221; educators were in charge of asylums they
+would resurrect the straitjacket and the whipping post for the insane.</p>
+
+<p>The few who advocate corporal punishment openly claim that they have the
+authority of the Bible for their faith in the rod. They should remember
+that good men have stood with Bibles in their hands misrepresenting God
+and attempting to stop the progress of every great movement toward freedom
+and reform. Galileo was imprisoned by the Church because he taught that
+the earth turns round. Men had no difficulty in showing that the Bible
+approved of slavery, or that it prohibited woman from the exercise of the
+right or the performance of the duties of responsible individuality. So
+men still quote Solomon to show that corporal punishment is approved by
+God, though such a conclusion would be rejected by the highest
+interpreters.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Whipping makes strong characters.&#8221; No, it makes hard characters, and
+hardness is but one element of strength, and not the best element of
+strength. The strength of the English character has not been developed, as
+is claimed by some, by the whipping done in English schools and homes. It
+comes partly by race heredity from the sturdiness of the Saxon and Norman
+founders of the race, partly from the general practice of working hard
+from youth up, and largely from the fact that the English playgrounds are
+so universally used, and are the scenes of the severest struggles for
+supremacy in skill and power that are witnessed in any part of the world.
+The winning half inch or half length,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> the valorous struggle for
+leadership on track or river&mdash;these are the things that have preserved and
+developed English force and bravery, in spite of the fact that England in
+her schools and homes has done fully her share of whipping. A boy or girl
+who spends as much time in free strong play as the English boy, works out
+the effects of a great many evils from his or her life. When men see the
+futility of dependence on flogging for developing energetic strength of
+character they will study the influence of play to the great advantage of
+racial vigour, and courage, and moral energy.</p>
+
+<p>Corporal punishment, like all other forms of coercion, robs the child of
+joyousness, and joyousness is one of the most essential elements in the
+true growth of a child. Corporal punishment affects the nervous systems of
+children injuriously, and when applied to certain parts of the body it
+stimulates prematurely the action of the sexual nature, and leads to one
+of the worst forms of depravity.</p>
+
+<p>Corporal punishment is ineffective as a disciplinary agency. In one
+American city during the generation after Dickens began his great crusade
+against corporal punishment it was the practice to whip with a rawhide all
+children who came late, but the lateness steadily increased in defiance of
+the rawhide. It was reduced to less than one one-hundredth part of its
+former proportion when whipping for lateness was entirely abolished and
+more rational means adopted.</p>
+
+<p>The order and co-operation of pupils is best in those schools in which no
+corporal punishment is used. If in any school only one teacher relies on
+the rod as a stimulator to work and a restrainer of evil, her class is
+sure to be the most disorderly, the least co-operative, and the most
+defective in original power in the school. As the children throughout the
+school come from the same homes, play with the same companions, attend the
+same churches, and are subject to the same general influences, it is
+perfectly clear that the whipping is the distinctive feature of character
+training that deforms the children. They will become normal, reasonable
+children when they reach the next<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> room. This illustration assumes that
+all the teachers are possessed of good natural ability to direct the child
+properly. The one who uses corporal punishment fails because she has been
+dwarfed by her faith in corporal punishment. She has believed in it so
+fully that she has not sought to understand higher and better means. She
+has studied neither the child nor her own powers of child guidance.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens taught the inefficiency of coercion to accomplish what men hoped
+to accomplish by it in his criticism of the revolting use of capital
+punishment in former times. In A Tale of Two Cities he says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
+was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death;
+the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the
+holder of a horse at Tellson&#8217;s door, who made off with it, was put to
+Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
+three fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of crime were put to
+Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention&mdash;it
+might always have been worth remarking that the fact was <i>exactly the
+reverse</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>The great prophets of modern education&mdash;Pestalozzi, Froebel, Barnard, and
+Mann&mdash;strongly condemned corporal punishment. These were men of clear
+insight and correct judgment. The opinion of one such man is worth more
+than the views of ten thousand ordinary men in regard to the subject of
+their special study. They were prophet souls who saw the higher truth
+toward which the race had been slowly growing, and revealed it.</p>
+
+<p>Their revelations have been appreciated and adopted more and more fully as
+they have been understood more and more clearly. In the case of corporal
+punishment and all forms of coercion Dickens has been the John the Baptist
+and the Paul of the revelation of the gospel of sympathy for the child.</p>
+
+<p>Not one blow in a thousand is given to a child now as compared with the
+time of Dickens&#8217;s childhood. Corporal punishment is prohibited in the
+schools of France,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> Italy, Switzerland, Finland, Brazil, New Jersey, and
+in the following cities: New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Albany, Syracuse,
+Toledo, and Savannah. In Washington and Philadelphia teachers voluntarily
+gave up the practice of whipping. This is true of the majority of
+individual teachers in the cities of America, and the number of those who
+do without all forms of coercive discipline is rapidly increasing.</p>
+
+<p>The whipping of girls is prohibited in Saxony, Hessen, Oldenburg, and in
+many cities. Few girls are now whipped in schools anywhere. Corporal
+punishment has been abolished for the higher grades in Norway and in the
+lower grades in Saxony, Hessen, Bremen, and Hamburg. In the last-named
+city the cane is kept under lock and key. In some places the consent of
+parents must be obtained before children may be whipped, in some places
+the number of strokes is limited; in other places a record is kept of
+every case of corporal punishment and reports made monthly to the school
+boards. Everywhere action has been taken to prohibit or restrict the use
+of the once universally respected and universally dominant rod.</p>
+
+<p>All wise trainers of children recognise the value of obedience, but truly
+wise trainers no longer aim to make children merely submissively obedient,
+nor even willingly responsive in their obedience. They try to make them
+independently, co-operatively, and reverently obedient; independent in
+free development of will, co-operative in unity of effort with their
+fellows and their adult guides, and reverent in their attitude to law. The
+substitution of independence for subserviency, of co-operation for formal,
+responsive obedience, and of reverence for law for fear of law are the
+most important development in child training.</p>
+
+<p>In Dickens&#8217;s ideal school, Doctor Strong&#8217;s, there was &#8220;plenty of liberty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Gladstone&#8217;s criticism, when over seventy, of his own teachers was that
+they were afraid of freedom. He said: &#8220;I did not learn to set a due value
+on the imperishable and inestimable principles of human liberty. The
+temper<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> which I think prevailed among them was that liberty was regarded
+with jealousy, and fear could not be wholly dispensed with.&#8221; The true
+teacher is not afraid of freedom, but makes it the dominant element in his
+training and in his educational theory.</p>
+
+<p>May the profounder truth in regard to child training spread to the ends of
+the earth! May the time soon come when there shall be no disciples of
+Susan Nipper&#8217;s doctrine, &#8220;that childhood, like money, must be shaken and
+rattled and jostled about a good deal to keep it bright&#8221;! May Christian
+civilization soon be free from such memories as the remembrance of Mr.
+Obenreizer, in No Thoroughfare, had of his parents: &#8220;I was a famished
+naked little wretch of two or three years when they were men and women
+with hard hands to beat me&#8221;! May Christ&#8217;s teaching soon be so fully
+understood that there will be no child anywhere like the shivering little
+boy in The Haunted Man, who was &#8220;used already to be worried and hunted
+like a beast, who crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back
+again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow, and
+threatened to bite if he was hit&#8221;! May teachers and all trainers of
+children learn the underlying philosophy of the statement made by Dickens,
+in connection with the schools of the Stepney Union, in The Uncommercial
+Traveller: &#8220;In the moral health of these schools&mdash;where corporal
+punishment is unknown&mdash;truthfulness stands high&#8221;!</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">THE DOCTRINE OF CHILD DEPRAVITY.</span></p>
+
+<p>Dickens heartily accepted Froebel&#8217;s view of the doctrine of child
+depravity. They did not teach that the child is totally divine, but
+neither did they believe that a being created in God&#8217;s image is entirely
+depraved.</p>
+
+<p>They recognised very clearly that the doctrine of child depravity was the
+logical (or illogical) basis of the theory of corporal punishment and all
+forms of coercion. What more natural or more logical than the practice of
+checking the outflow of a child&#8217;s inner life if we believe his inner life
+to be depraved? The firm belief in the doctrine of child depravity
+compelled conscientious men to be repressive and coercive in their
+discipline. Dickens understood this fully, and therefore he gave the
+doctrine no place in his philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s training was based squarely on the doctrine of child
+depravity, for &#8220;the secret of her management of children was to give them
+everything that they didn&#8217;t like, and nothing that they did.&#8221; If the
+training of children under the &#8220;good old <i>r&eacute;gime</i>,&#8221; for which some
+reactionary philosophers are still pleading, is carefully analyzed, it
+will be found that Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s plan was the commonly approved plan, and
+it was the perfectly logical outcome of the doctrine that the child, being
+wholly depraved, desired everything it should not have and objected to
+everything it should have.</p>
+
+<p>That was a touching question addressed by a little boy to his father:
+&#8220;Say, papa, did mamma stop you from doing everything you wished to do when
+<i>you</i> were a little boy?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>How Dickens despised the awful theology of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> Murdstones, who would not
+let David play with other children, because they believed &#8220;all children to
+be a swarm of little vipers [though there <i>was</i> a child once set in the
+midst of the Disciples], and held that they contaminated one another&#8221;!</p>
+
+<p>How he laughed at Mrs. Varden and Miggs, her maid!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;If you hadn&#8217;t the sweetness of an angel in you, mim, I don&#8217;t think
+you could abear it, I raly don&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Miggs,&#8221; said Mrs. Varden, &#8220;you&#8217;re profane.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Begging your pardon, mim,&#8221; returned Miggs with shrill rapidity, &#8220;such
+was not my intentions, and such I hope is not my character, though I
+am but a servant.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Answering me, Miggs, and providing yourself,&#8221; retorted her mistress,
+looking round with dignity, &#8220;is one and the same thing. How dare you
+speak of angels in connection with your sinful
+fellow-beings&mdash;mere&#8221;&mdash;said Mrs. Varden, glancing at herself in a
+neighbouring mirror, and arranging the ribbon of her cap in a more
+becoming fashion&mdash;&#8220;mere worms and grovellers as we are!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I do not intend, mim, if you please, to give offence,&#8221; said Miggs,
+confident in the strength of her compliment, and developing strongly
+in the throat as usual, &#8220;and I did not expect it would be took as
+such. I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate and despise
+myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable Christian
+should.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Oliver Twist was described by the philanthropists who cared for him as
+&#8220;under the exclusive patronage and protection of the powers of wickedness,
+and an article direct from the manufactory of the very devil himself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Grimwig had no faith in boys, and he tried hard to shake Mr.
+Brownlow&#8217;s faith in Oliver.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;He is a nice-looking boy, is he not?&#8221; inquired Mr. Brownlow.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; replied Mr. Grimwig pettishly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t know?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No. I don&#8217;t know. I never see any difference in boys. I only know two
+sorts of boys: mealy boys and beef-faced boys.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And which is Oliver?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>&#8220;Mealy. I know a friend who has a beef-faced boy&mdash;a fine boy, they
+call him; with a round head, and red cheeks, and glaring eyes; a
+horrid boy; with a body and limbs that appear to be swelling out of
+the seams of his blue clothes; with the voice of a pilot, and the
+appetite of a wolf. I know him! The wretch!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come,&#8221; said Mr. Brownlow, &#8220;these are not the characteristics of young
+Oliver Twist; so he needn&#8217;t excite your wrath.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They are not,&#8221; replied Mr. Grimwig. &#8220;He may have worse. He is
+deceiving you, my good friend.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll swear he is not,&#8221; replied Mr. Brownlow warmly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If he is not,&#8221; said Mr. Grimwig, &#8220;I&#8217;ll&mdash;&mdash;&#8221; and down went the stick.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll answer for that boy&#8217;s truth with my life!&#8221; said Mr. Brownlow,
+knocking the table.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I for his falsehood with my head!&#8221; rejoined Mr. Grimwig, knocking
+the table also.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We shall see,&#8221; said Mr. Brownlow, checking his rising anger.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We will,&#8221; replied Mr. Grimwig, with a provoking smile; &#8220;we will.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens always pleaded for more faith in children.</p>
+
+<p>In Great Expectations poor Pip was continually reminded of the fact that
+he was &#8220;naterally wicious,&#8221; and at the great Christmas dinner party Mr.
+Pumblechook took him as the illustration of his theological discourse on
+&#8220;swine&#8221; and Mrs. Hubble commiserated Mrs. Gargery about the trouble he had
+caused her by all his waywardness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Trouble?&#8221; echoed my sister, &#8220;trouble?&#8221; And then entered on a fearful
+catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts
+of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had
+tumbled from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the
+injuries I had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my
+grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go there.</p></div>
+
+<p>Again, when Pip was just beginning his life away from home his guardian,
+Mr. Jaggers, said to him at their first interview: &#8220;I shall by this means
+be able to check<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> your bills, and to pull you up if I find you outrunning
+the constable. Of course you&#8217;ll go wrong somehow, but that&#8217;s no fault of
+mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course you&#8217;ll go wrong somehow,&#8221; was an inspiring start in life for a
+young gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>Abel Magwitch, Pip&#8217;s friend, told him near the close of his career how he
+came to lead such a dissipated and criminal life. He evidently had ability
+and possessed a deep sense of gratitude, and might have developed the
+other virtues if he had been treated properly. Dickens used him as an
+illustration of the fact that society fails often to do the best for a boy
+and make the most out of him through sheer lack of faith in childhood, and
+that this lack of faith results from the belief that a boy is so depraved
+that he would rather do wrong than right, and that when he starts to do
+wrong there is no hope of his reform.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Dear boy and Pip&#8217;s comrade. I am not a-going fur to tell you my life,
+like a song or a story-book. But to give it you short and handy, I&#8217;ll
+put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in
+jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you&#8217;ve got it.
+That&#8217;s <i>my</i> life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off,
+arter Pip stood my friend.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve been done everything to, pretty well&mdash;except hanged. I&#8217;ve been
+locked up, as much as a silver teakittle. I&#8217;ve been carted here and
+carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that town, and
+stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I&#8217;ve no more
+notion where I was born, than you have&mdash;if so much. I first become
+aware of myself, down in Essex, a-thieving turnips for my living.
+Summun had run away from me&mdash;a man&mdash;a tinker&mdash;and he&#8217;d took the fire
+with him, and left me wery cold.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I know&#8217;d my name to be Magwitch, chrisen&#8217;d Abel. How did I know it?
+Much as I know&#8217;d the birds&#8217; names in the hedges to be chaffinch,
+sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies altogether, only
+as the birds&#8217; names come out true, I supposed mine did.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So fur as I could find, there warn&#8217;t a soul that see young Abel
+Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at
+him, and either drove him off or took<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> him up. I was took up, took up,
+took up, to that extent that I reg&#8217;larly grow&#8217;d up took up.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as
+much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for
+there warn&#8217;t many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the
+name being hardened. &#8216;This is a terrible hardened one,&#8217; they says to
+prison wisitors, picking out me. &#8216;May be said to live in jails, this
+boy.&#8217; Then they looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured
+my head, some on &#8217;em&mdash;they had better a-measured my stomach&mdash;and
+others on &#8217;em giv&#8217; me tracts what I couldn&#8217;t read, and made me
+speeches what I couldn&#8217;t understand. They always went on agen me about
+the devil.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Poor old Toby Veck, in The Chimes, reflected the theories that Dickens
+wished to overthrow.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;It seems as if we can&#8217;t go right, or do right, or be righted,&#8221; said
+Toby. &#8220;I hadn&#8217;t much schooling, myself, when I was young; and I can&#8217;t
+make out whether we have any business on the face of the earth, or
+not. Sometimes I think we must have&mdash;a little; and sometimes I think
+we must be intruding. I get so puzzled sometimes that I am not even
+able to make up my mind whether there is any good at all in us, or
+whether we are born bad. We seem to be dreadful things; we seem to
+give a deal of trouble; we are always being complained of and guarded
+against.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The most realistic picture of the influence of the child-depravity ideal
+on the training of childhood is given in Mrs. Clennam, in Little Dorrit.
+She was a hard, malignant, dishonest, unsympathetic woman, who had
+deliberately driven Arthur&#8217;s mother to madness and blighted his father&#8217;s
+life in the name of her false religion, and blasphemously claimed that she
+was doing it in God&#8217;s stead, as his devoted servant. Yet she was sure she
+was truly religious, and had a pious vanity in the fact that she was
+&#8220;filled with an abhorrence of evil doers.&#8221; She was filled with gladness,
+too, at the prospect of marrying a man of like training with herself.
+Speaking of the training of herself and her husband she said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;You do not know what it is to be brought up strictly and straitly. I
+was so brought up. Mine was no light <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>youth of sinful gaiety and
+pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment, and
+fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse
+that is upon us, the terrors that surround us&mdash;these were the themes
+of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me with an
+abhorrence of evil doers. When old Mr. Gilbert Clennam proposed his
+orphan nephew to my father for my husband, my father impressed upon me
+that his bringing-up had been, like mine, one of severe restraint. He
+told me, that besides the discipline his spirit had undergone, he had
+lived in a starved house, where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and
+where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last. He told me
+that he had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged
+him as one; and that from his school days to that hour, his uncle&#8217;s
+roof had been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious
+and dissolute.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Speaking of her training of Arthur, she said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I devoted myself to reclaim the otherwise predestined and lost boy;
+to bring him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of practical
+contrition for the sins that were heavy on his head before his
+entrance into this condemned world.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens describes her religious character as such as might naturally be
+expected to develop in a woman whose childhood revealed to her only the
+self-abnegation and terrors of religion and the utter contempt for
+humanity shrouded in the doctrine of child depravity. She had seen God as
+an awful character of sleepless watchfulness to see her evil doing and
+record it, of wrathfulness, and of vengeance, but never of loving sympathy
+and forgiveness. So she fitted her religion to the character that such
+training had formed in her.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion, veiled in
+gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and
+destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts
+as we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her.
+Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I
+would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower
+of stone she built up to scale heaven.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>The old discipline and the old training were based on the belief that
+children like to do wrong better than to do right. There could be no
+greater error, or one more certain to lead to false principles of
+training, and prevent the recognition of the true methods of developing
+character in childhood.</p>
+
+<p>Children do not like to do wrong better than to do right. They like to do.
+They like to do the things they themselves plan to do. They like to do the
+things that are interesting to themselves. Their lack of wisdom leaves
+them at the mercy of their interests, and without guidance their
+constructiveness may turn to destructiveness. When it does so, it is
+because of the neglect of their adult guides to surround them with plenty
+of suitable material for construction or transformation adapted to their
+stage of development. With a sufficient variety of material for
+constructive plays the child will rarely exhibit destructive tendencies,
+and when he does so, the wisdom of his adult guide should find little
+trouble in changing his interest centre from the wrong to the right. The
+skilful trainer changes the interest centre without making the child
+conscious of adult interference.</p>
+
+<p>It costs little to supply the child with sand and blocks, and soft clay,
+and colors, and colored paper, and blunt scissors and gum, and other
+similar materials&mdash;much less than is usually spent for toys; yet such
+materials would save parents from much worry, and help them to get rid of
+the wrong ideals, and they would preserve the natural tendency of children
+to constructiveness, and afford them an opportunity for the comfort and
+the development of real self-activity.</p>
+
+<p>The child&#8217;s most dominant tendency is activity in using the material
+things of his environment to transform them into new forms or
+relationships in harmony with his own plans. This tendency is intended to
+accomplish four great purposes in the child&#8217;s development. It reveals the
+child&#8217;s own powers to himself, it develops his originality, it trains him
+to use his constructive powers, and it gives him the habit of transforming
+his environment to suit his own plans. If he is not supplied with suitable
+material<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> to play with he will appropriate the material he finds most
+available. In this way, through the absolute neglect of his adult guides,
+he has acquired a bad reputation.</p>
+
+<p>The instinct that leads the child to transform his material environment
+should lead to the conscious desire and determination to improve the
+physical, intellectual, and spiritual conditions around him at maturity.
+It is therefore a very essential element in his training, and to check or
+neglect it may weaken and warp his character as much as it was intended to
+strengthen and direct it.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the children have been coerced because men believed them to be
+depraved, and the coercion has developed the apparent depravity.</p>
+
+<p>The darkest clouds have been lifted from the vision of adults and from the
+lives of the little ones by the breaking of the power of the doctrine of
+child depravity. The teacher especially has a more hopeful field opened to
+him. His great work of training is no longer restricted to putting
+blinders on the eyes of children to prevent their seeing evil, and bits in
+their mouths to keep them from going wrong. He believes that every child
+has an element of divinity, however small and enfeebled by heredity or
+encrusted by evil environment, and that his chief duty is to arouse this
+divinity (his selfhood or individuality) to consciousness and start it on
+its conscious growth toward the divine. The revelation of this new and
+grander ideal has led to all intelligent child study for the purpose of
+discovering what adulthood can do, and especially what childhood itself
+can do, in accomplishing its most perfect training for its highest
+destiny.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens expressed his general faith in childhood in Mrs. Lirriper&#8217;s remark
+to the Major about Jemmy:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Ah, Major,&#8221; I says, drying my eyes, &#8220;we needn&#8217;t have been afraid. We
+might have known it. Treachery don&#8217;t come natural to beaming youth;
+but trust and pity, love and constancy&mdash;they do, thank God!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>He taught his philosophy of the origin of many of the evils that are
+attributed to child depravity in Nobody&#8217;s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> Story. &#8220;Nobody&#8221; means the
+workingman. He says to the Master:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;The evil consequences of imperfect instruction, the evil consequences
+of pernicious neglect, the evil consequences of unnatural restraint
+and the denial of humanizing enjoyments, will all come from us, and
+none of them will stop with us. They will spread far and wide. They
+always do; they always have done&mdash;just like the pestilence. I
+understand so much, I think, at last.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>There is profoundness in these doctrines.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">CRAMMING.</span></p>
+
+<p>Although Dickens paid much more attention in his writings to the methods
+of training than to the methods of teaching, he studied the methods of
+teaching sufficiently to recognise some of their gravest defects. Dombey
+and Son is unquestionably the greatest book ever written to expose the
+evils of cramming. Doctor Blimber, Cornelia, and Mr. Feeder, when closely
+studied, represent in the varied phases of their work all the worst forms
+of cramming.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Whenever a young gentleman was taken in hand by Doctor Blimber, he
+might consider himself sure of a pretty tight squeeze. The doctor only
+undertook the charge of ten young gentlemen, but he had always ready a
+supply of learning for a hundred, on the lowest estimate; it was at
+once the business and delight of his life to gorge the unhappy ten
+with it.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, Doctor Blimber&#8217;s establishment was a great hothouse, in which
+there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys blew
+before their time. Mental green peas were produced at Christmas, and
+intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries
+(very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere
+sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber&#8217;s cultivation. Every
+description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the dryest twigs
+of boys, under the frostiest circumstances. Nature was of no
+consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to
+bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern, somehow or other. This
+was all very pleasant and ingenious, but the system of forcing was
+attended with its usual disadvantages. There was not the right taste
+about the premature <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>productions, and they didn&#8217;t keep well. Moreover,
+one young gentleman, with a swollen nose and an excessively large head
+(the oldest of the ten who had &#8220;gone through&#8221; everything) suddenly
+left off blowing one day, and remained in the establishment a mere
+stalk. And people did say that the doctor had rather overdone it with
+young Toots, and that when he began to have whiskers he left off
+having brains.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor was a portly gentleman in a suit of black, with strings at
+his knees, and stockings below them. He had a bald head, highly
+polished; a deep voice, and a chin so very double that it was a wonder
+how he ever managed to shave into the creases. He had likewise a pair
+of little eyes that were always half shut up and a mouth that was
+always half expanded into a grin, as if he had, that moment, posed a
+boy, and were waiting to convict him from his own lips. Insomuch that
+when the doctor put his right hand into the breast of his coat, and,
+with his other hand behind him and a scarcely perceptible wag of his
+head, made the commonest observation to a nervous stranger, it was
+like a sentiment from the sphinx, and settled his business.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Blimber, too, although a slim and graceful maid, did no soft
+violence to the gravity of the house. There was no light nonsense
+about Miss Blimber. She kept her hair short and crisp, and wore
+spectacles. She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of
+deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They
+must be dead&mdash;stone dead&mdash;and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a
+ghoul.</p>
+
+<p>As to Mr. Feeder, B. A., Dr. Blimber&#8217;s assistant, he was a kind of
+human barrel organ, with a little list of tunes at which he was
+continually working, over and over again, without any variation. He
+might have been fitted up with a change of barrels, perhaps, in early
+life, if his destiny had been favourable; but it had not been; and he
+had only one, with which, in a monotonous round, it was his occupation
+to bewilder the young ideas of Dr. Blimber&#8217;s young gentlemen. The
+young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew
+no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage
+noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of
+exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing
+system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>three
+weeks. He had all the care of the world on his head in three months.
+He conceived bitter sentiments against his parents or guardians in
+four; he was an old misanthrope in five; envied Curtius that blessed
+refuge in the earth in six; and at the end of the first twelvemonth
+had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterward departed,
+that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages, were a
+mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>But he went on blow, blow, blowing, in the doctor&#8217;s hothouse all the
+time; and the doctor&#8217;s glory and reputation were great when he took
+his wintry growth home to his relations and friends.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the doctor&#8217;s doorsteps one day, Paul stood with a fluttering
+heart, and with his small right hand in his father&#8217;s. His other hand
+was locked in that of Florence. How tight the tiny pressure of that
+one; and how loose and cool the other!</p>
+
+<p>The doctor was sitting in his portentous study, with a globe at each
+knee, books all round him, Homer over the door, and Minerva on the
+mantelshelf. &#8220;And how do you do, sir?&#8221; he said to Mr. Dombey; &#8220;and how
+is my little friend?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very well I thank you, sir,&#8221; returned Paul, answering the clock quite
+as much as the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ha!&#8221; said Dr. Blimber. &#8220;Shall we make a man of him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you hear, Paul?&#8221; added Mr. Dombey; Paul being silent.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shall we make a man of him?&#8221; repeated the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I had rather be a child,&#8221; replied Paul.</p></div>
+
+<p>Paul&#8217;s reply is one of the most touchingly beautiful of even Dickens&#8217;s
+wonderful expressions&mdash;wonderful in their exquisite simplicity and their
+profound philosophy. When this book was written Dickens was beginning to
+get the conception of the great truth, which he illustrated at length in
+Hard Times and other works, that it is a crime against a child to rob it
+of its childhood.</p>
+
+<p>When Doctor Blimber in his cold, formal manner asked Paul &#8220;why he
+preferred to be a child,&#8221; the little fellow was unable to answer, and as
+they stared at him, he at length put his hand on the neck of Florence and
+burst into tears.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>&#8220;Mrs. Pipchin,&#8221; said his
+father in a querulous manner, &#8220;I am really very sorry to see this.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never mind,&#8221; said the doctor blandly, nodding his head to keep Mrs.
+Pipchin back. &#8220;Nev-er mind; we shall substitute new cares and new
+impressions, Mr. Dombey, very shortly. You would still wish my little
+friend to acquire&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Everything, if you please, doctor,&#8221; returned Mr. Dombey firmly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; said the doctor, who, with his half-shut eyes and his usual
+smile, seemed to survey Paul with the sort of interest that might
+attach to some choice little animal he was going to stuff. &#8220;Yes,
+exactly. Ha! We shall impart a great variety of information to our
+little friend, and bring him quickly forward, I dare say. I dare say.
+Quite a virgin soil, I believe you said, Mr. Dombey?&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>On leaving, Mr. Dombey said to Paul:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;You&#8217;ll try and learn a great deal here, and be a clever man, won&#8217;t
+you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll try,&#8221; returned the child wearily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you&#8217;ll soon be grown up now?&#8221; said Mr. Dombey.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! very soon!&#8221; replied the child. Once more the old, old look passed
+rapidly across his features like a strange light.</p></div>
+
+<p>After his father and Florence had left him the doctor said to Cornelia:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Cornelia, Dombey will be your charge at first. Bring him on,
+Cornelia, bring him on. Take him round the house, Cornelia, and
+familiarize him with his new sphere. Go with that young lady, Dombey.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Cornelia took him first to the schoolroom. Here there were eight young
+gentlemen in various stages of mental prostration, all very hard at
+work, and very grave indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Feeder, B. A., had his Virgil stop on, and was slowly grinding
+that tune to four young gentlemen. Of the remaining four, two, who
+grasped their foreheads convulsively, were engaged in solving
+mathematical problems; one, with his face like a dirty window from
+much crying, was endeavouring to flounder through a hopeless number of
+lines before dinner; and one sat looking at his task in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>stony
+stupefaction and despair&mdash;which, it seemed, had been his condition
+ever since breakfast time.</p></div>
+
+<p>After being shown through the dormitories, Cornelia told him dinner would
+be ready in fifteen minutes, and that in the meantime he had better go
+into the schoolroom among his &#8220;friends.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>His friends were all dispersed about the room except the stony friend,
+who remained immovable. Mr. Feeder was stretching himself in his gray
+gown, as if, regardless of expense, he were resolved to pull the
+sleeves off.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Heigh-ho-hum!&#8221; cried Mr. Feeder, shaking himself like a cart horse
+&#8220;oh dear me, dear me! Ya-a-a-ah!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You sleep in my room, don&#8217;t you?&#8221; asked a solemn young gentleman,
+whose shirt collar curled up the lobes of his ears.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Master Briggs?&#8221; inquired Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tozer,&#8221; said the young gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>Paul answered yes; and Tozer, pointing out the stony pupil, said that
+it was Briggs. Paul had already felt certain that it must be either
+Briggs or Tozer, though he didn&#8217;t know why.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is yours a strong constitution?&#8221; inquired Tozer.</p>
+
+<p>Paul said he thought not. Tozer replied that <i>he</i> thought not also,
+judging from Paul&#8217;s looks, and that it was a pity, for it need be. He
+then asked Paul if he were going to begin with Cornelia; and on Paul
+saying &#8220;Yes,&#8221; all the young gentlemen (Briggs excepted) gave a low
+groan.</p></div>
+
+<p>At dinner no boy was allowed to speak; every one was compelled to listen
+to the tedious discourse of Doctor Blimber on the customs of the Romans.
+The cramming of youth was continued with great dignity even during meals.
+One boy, Johnson, was unfortunate enough to choke himself by too suddenly
+swallowing his water in order to catch Doctor Blimber&#8217;s eye when he began
+an account of the dinners of Vitellius; and to punish him for his breach
+of manners, Doctor Blimber said before the boys were dismissed from the
+table:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Johnson will repeat to-morrow morning before breakfast, without book,
+and from the Greek Testament, the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>first chapter of the Epistle of
+Saint Paul to the Ephesians. We will resume our studies, Mr. Feeder,
+in half an hour.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>It used to be a common practice to cultivate a loving reverence for God by
+using the Bible as a means of punishment. This was in harmony with the old
+educational and the old theological ideal of punishment, as the supreme
+means available for guiding children properly. It was considered a
+perfectly appropriate use of the best book to use it for this best of
+purposes.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The young gentlemen bowed and withdrew; Mr. Feeder did likewise.
+During the half hour the young gentlemen, broken into pairs, loitered
+arm in arm up and down a small piece of ground behind the house. But
+nothing happened so vulgar as play. Punctually at the appointed time
+the gong was sounded, and the studies, under the joint auspices of
+Doctor Blimber and Mr. Feeder, were resumed.</p>
+
+<p>Tea was served in a style no less polite than dinner; and after tea
+the young gentlemen, rising and bowing as before, withdrew to fetch up
+the unfinished tasks of that day or to get up the already looming
+tasks of to-morrow. After prayers and light refreshments at eight
+o&#8217;clock or so, the &#8220;young gentlemen&#8221; were sent to bed by the doctor
+rising and solemnly saying, &#8220;We will resume our studies at seven
+to-morrow&#8221;; the pupils bowed again, and went to bed.</p>
+
+<p>In the confidence of their own room upstairs, Briggs said his head
+ached ready to split, and that he should wish himself dead if it
+wasn&#8217;t for his mother and a blackbird he had at home. Tozer didn&#8217;t say
+much, but he sighed a good deal, and told Paul to look out, for his
+turn would come to-morrow. After uttering those prophetic words, he
+undressed himself moodily and got into bed. Briggs was in his bed too,
+and Paul in his bed too, before the weak-eyed young man appeared to
+take away the candle, when he wished them good-night and pleasant
+dreams. But his benevolent wishes were in vain as far as Briggs and
+Tozer were concerned; for Paul, who lay awake for a long while, and
+often woke afterward, found that Briggs was ridden by his lesson as a
+nightmare; and that Tozer, whose mind was affected in his sleep by
+similar causes, in a minor degree, talked unknown tongues, or scraps
+of Greek and Latin&mdash;it was all one to Paul&mdash;which, in the silence of
+night, had an inexpressibly wicked and guilty effect.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>As Paul was going downstairs in the morning Miss Blimber called him into
+her room, and, pointing to a pile of new books on her table, said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;These are yours, Dombey.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All of &#8217;em, ma&#8217;am?&#8221; said Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; returned Miss Blimber; &#8220;and Mr. Feeder will look you out some
+more very soon, if you are as studious as I expect you will be, Dombey.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thank you, ma&#8217;am,&#8221; said Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am going out for a constitutional,&#8221; resumed Miss Blimber; &#8220;and
+while I am gone&mdash;that is to say, in the interval between this and
+breakfast, Dombey&mdash;I wish you to read over what I have marked in these
+books, and to tell me if you quite understand what you have got to
+learn. Don&#8217;t lose time, Dombey, for you have none to spare, but take
+them downstairs, and begin directly.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, ma&#8217;am,&#8221; answered Paul.</p>
+
+<p>There were so many of them, that although Paul put one hand under the
+bottom book and his other hand and his chin on the top book, and
+hugged them all closely, the middle book slipped out before he reached
+the door, and then they all tumbled down on the floor. Having at last
+amassed the whole library and climbed into his place, he fell to work,
+encouraged by a remark from Tozer to the effect that he &#8220;was in for it
+now&#8221;; which was the only interruption he received till breakfast time.
+At that meal, for which he had no appetite, everything was quite as
+solemn and genteel as at the others; and when it was finished, he
+followed Miss Blimber upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, Dombey,&#8221; said Miss Blimber, &#8220;how have you got on with those
+books?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They comprised a little English, and a deal of Latin&mdash;names of things,
+declensions of articles and substantives, exercises thereon, and
+preliminary rules&mdash;a trifle of orthography, a glance at ancient
+history, a wink or two at modern ditto, a few tables, two or three
+weights and measures, and a little general information. When poor Paul
+had spelled out number two, he found he had no idea of number one;
+fragments whereof afterward obtruded themselves into number three,
+which slided into number four, which, grafted itself on to number two.
+So that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic h&aelig;c hoc was troy
+weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>three
+times four was Taurus a bull, were open questions with him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Dombey, Dombey!&#8221; said Miss Blimber, &#8220;this is very shocking.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>So Paul&#8217;s cramming went on day by day. The delicate little boy, who should
+not have been sent to school at all, was forced to memorize confused
+masses of words that had no meaning to him, but he learned to repeat the
+words, and so got the credit of doing well, and because he learned easily
+was driven harder and harder. The more easily he carried his burden the
+higher it was piled on his back.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was not that Miss Blimber meant to be too hard upon him, or that
+Doctor Blimber meant to bear too heavily on the young gentlemen in
+general. Cornelia merely held the faith in which she had been bred;
+and the doctor, in some partial confusion of his ideas, regarded the
+young gentlemen as if they were all doctors, and were born grown up.
+Comforted by the applause of the young gentlemen&#8217;s nearest relations,
+and urged on by their blind vanity and ill-considered haste, it would
+have been strange if Doctor Blimber had discovered his mistake, or
+trimmed his swelling sails to any other tack.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in the case of Paul. When Doctor Blimber said he made great
+progress, and was naturally clever, Mr. Dombey was more bent than ever
+on his being forced and crammed. In the case of Briggs, when Doctor
+Blimber reported that he did not make great progress yet, and was not
+naturally clever, Briggs senior was inexorable in the same purpose. In
+short, however high and false the temperature at which the doctor kept
+his hothouse, the owners of the plants were always ready to lend a
+helping hand at the bellows and to stir the fire.</p>
+
+<p>When the midsummer vacation approached, no indecent manifestations of
+joy were exhibited by the leaden-eyed young gentlemen assembled at
+Doctor Blimber&#8217;s. Any such violent expression as &#8220;breaking up&#8221; would
+have been quite inapplicable to that polite establishment. The young
+gentlemen oozed away, semi-annually, to their own homes; but they
+never broke up. They would have scorned the action.</p>
+
+<p>Tozer, who was constantly galled and tormented by a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>starched white
+cambric neckerchief, which he wore at the express desire of Mrs.
+Tozer, his parent, who, designing him for the Church, was of opinion
+that he couldn&#8217;t be in that forward state of preparation too
+soon&mdash;Tozer said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he thought
+he would rather stay where he was, than go home. However inconsistent
+this declaration might appear with that passage in Tozer&#8217;s essay on
+the subject, wherein he had observed &#8220;that the thoughts of home and
+all its recollections awakened in his mind the most pleasing emotions
+of anticipation and delight,&#8221; and had also likened himself to a Roman
+general, flushed with a recent victory over the Iceni, or laden with
+Carthaginian spoil, advancing within a few hours&#8217; march of the
+Capitol, presupposed, for the purposes of the simile, to be the
+dwelling place of Mrs. Tozer, still it was very sincerely made. For it
+seemed that Tozer had a dreadful uncle, who not only volunteered
+examinations of him, in the holidays, on abstruse points, but twisted
+innocent events and things, and wrenched them to the same fell
+purpose. So that if this uncle took him to the play, or, on a similar
+pretence of kindness, carried him to see a giant, or a dwarf, or a
+conjurer, or anything, Tozer knew he had read up some classical
+allusion to the subject beforehand, and was thrown into a state of
+mortal apprehension; not foreseeing where he might break out, or what
+authority he might not quote against him.</p>
+
+<p>As to Briggs, <i>his</i> father made no show of artifice about it. He never
+would leave him alone. So numerous and severe were the mental trials
+of that unfortunate youth in vacation time, that the friends of the
+family (then resident near Bayswater, London) seldom approached the
+ornamental piece of water in Kensington Gardens without a vague
+expectation of seeing Master Briggs&#8217;s hat floating on the surface and
+an unfinished exercise lying on the bank. Briggs, therefore, was not
+at all sanguine on the subject of holidays; and these two sharers of
+little Paul&#8217;s bedroom were so fair a sample of the young gentlemen in
+general, that the most elastic among them contemplated the arrival of
+those festive periods with genteel resignation.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens did not wish to lay all the blame for the stupid process of
+cramming on the teachers. He properly revealed to parents that they were
+even more to blame than the teachers, because they got what they
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>demanded. Doctor Blimber summed up the whole philosophy of the adulthood
+of his time in regard to a child&#8217;s education when he said to his daughter,
+&#8220;Bring him on, Cornelia! Bring him on!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The standard of knowledge cramming fixed by parents and school boards is
+changing very slowly. Even yet a teacher&#8217;s success is measured and his
+chances of re-engagement decided in most places by the answer to the
+question, &#8220;How does he bring the children on?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When asked by Doctor Blimber what he wished his little sickly son to
+learn, Mr. Dombey answered, &#8220;Oh, everything.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When Paul learned easily, his father pressed for more studies; and because
+Briggs was dull, his father demanded that he be driven harder at school,
+and made the poor boy&#8217;s life miserable at home by tedious lessons during
+the holidays.</p>
+
+<p>The uncle who made Tozer wretched by asking him unexpected questions on
+all occasions is a type of an ogre who sometimes blights the lives of
+children still.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens had a beautiful sympathy with childhood in its sufferings not
+merely on account of deliberate cruelty and neglect, but because of the
+burdens placed upon it by adults who, with the best intentions, robbed it
+of its natural rights of joyousness and freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever Doctor Blimber was informed that Paul was &#8220;old-fashioned&#8221; or
+&#8220;peculiar,&#8221; he said, as he had said when Paul first came, that study would
+do much; and he also said, as he said on that occasion, &#8220;Bring him on,
+Cornelia! Bring him on!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Just before the close of the term Paul fainted and had to be carried to
+his room, and after an examination the physician advised Doctor Blimber to
+&#8220;release the young gentleman from his books just now, the vacation being
+so near at hand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was so very considerate to release him from study, when he was utterly
+unable to study any longer.</p>
+
+<p>At the close of the school party when he was leaving&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>Cornelia, taking both Paul&#8217;s
+hands in hers, said, &#8220;Dombey, Dombey, you have always been my favourite pupil. God bless you!&#8221; And it showed,
+Paul thought, how easily one might do injustice to a person; for Miss
+Blimber meant it&mdash;though she <i>was</i> a Forcer.</p></div>
+
+<p>Paul never returned to school. His life was sacrificed to his father&#8217;s
+desire to have him &#8220;learn everything.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In a brief look at the results of Doctor Blimber&#8217;s teaching, Dickens
+tersely outlines three common results of cramming:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Mr. Tozer, now a young man of lofty stature, in Wellington boots, was
+so extremely full of antiquity as to be nearly on a par with a genuine
+ancient Roman in his knowledge of English; a triumph that affected his
+good parents with the tenderest emotions, and caused the father and
+mother of Mr. Briggs (whose learning, like an ill-arranged luggage,
+was so tightly packed that he couldn&#8217;t get at anything he wanted) to
+hide their diminished heads. The fruit laboriously gathered from the
+tree of knowledge by this latter young gentleman, in fact, had been
+subjected to so much pressure, that it had become a kind of
+intellectual Norfolk Biffin, and had nothing of its original form or
+flavour remaining. Master Bitherstone now, on whom the forcing system
+had the happier and not uncommon effect of leaving no impression
+whatever, when the forcing apparatus ceased to work was in a much more
+comfortable plight; and being then on shipboard, bound for Bengal,
+found himself forgetting with such admirable rapidity, that it was
+doubtful whether his declensions of noun-substantives would hold out
+to the end of the voyage.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens, in his very able description of Doctor Blimber&#8217;s school, directs
+attention to nearly every phase of the evils of cramming. Toots is an
+illustration of the destruction of mental power by the &#8220;hard mathematics&#8221;
+and other subjects, when they are taught improperly. It is a serious
+result of an educational system, when the brightest young men &#8220;cease to
+have brains when they begin to have whiskers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul&#8217;s experience is used to show the terrible physical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> evils of cramming
+in any life, especially in the life of a delicate child. Paul was killed
+by his father and Doctor Blimber. He should have lived.</p>
+
+<p>Cornelia&#8217;s aversion to live languages and her delight in &#8220;digging up the
+dead languages like a ghoul,&#8221; and the address presented to Doctor Blimber
+&#8220;which contained very little of the mother tongue, but fifteen quotations
+from the Latin and seven from the Greek,&#8221; were intended as a protest
+against paying too much attention to the classics to the neglect of other
+studies. He returned to this subject again in Bleak House. Richard
+Carstone &#8220;could make Latin verses,&#8221; but although his powers were naturally
+excellent he was a complete failure in life. He was not educated properly,
+notwithstanding his ability to make Latin verses.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Feeder is the perfect type of a mechanical crammer, &#8220;a sort of barrel
+organ with a little list of tunes at which he was continually working,
+over and over again, without any variation.&#8221; What suggestiveness there is
+in the sentence &#8220;Mr. Feeder had his Virgil stop on, and was grinding that
+tune to four young gentlemen&#8221;!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bewilder the young ideas of Doctor Blimber&#8217;s young gentlemen,&#8221; used to be
+considered too strong a criticism, but modern psychology fully sustains
+Dickens in his view. &#8220;Arrested development&#8221; is well understood now to
+result from too much grinding at any one subject or department of a
+subject, from the monotonous drill of the crammer, or from directing the
+child&#8217;s attention too much to any one study.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of uninteresting study on the spirits was clear to Dickens.
+There is inspiration and physical advantage of a decided character in the
+successful study of an interesting subject&mdash;interesting to the child, of
+course&mdash;if the process of study includes the true self-activity of the
+child. There is blight, and nervous irritation, and &#8220;carking anxiety,&#8221; if
+the child works under compulsion at the dead matter of study. No wonder
+the young gentlemen at Doctor Blimber&#8217;s took leave of their spirits in
+three weeks, and passed through the subsequent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> stages of deeper gloom
+described by Dickens. They had none of the joy of living interest in their
+study, none of the vital enthusiasm connected with independent thought,
+none of the health that comes from pleasant occupation, none of the
+happiness that is found in self-activity alone.</p>
+
+<p>One of the best criticisms of wrong methods of teaching done by Mr. Feeder
+is the criticism of the method of teaching literature. &#8220;At the end of the
+first twelvemonth the boys had arrived at the conclusion, from which they
+never afterward departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and the
+lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had
+no other meaning in the world.&#8221; There are high schools yet in which more
+attention is paid to the &#8220;words and grammar&#8221; than to the sacred and
+inspiring thought of the author.</p>
+
+<p>A professor in one of the leading educational institutions of America
+travelled in Scotland with his daughters. They were graduates of a high
+school. He observed with deep regret that they visited the mountains, and
+valleys, and rivers, and islands, and battlefields, and cathedrals of the
+land, that to him had been filled with sacred interests by the writings of
+Scott, and saw them all without emotion. One day he said to them: &#8220;Why are
+you not interested here? To me every foot of ground here is full of living
+memories. Scott describes it in The Lady of the Lake.&#8221; One of them
+explained the reason. &#8220;Oh!&#8221; she said, &#8220;we&#8217;re sick of Scott; we had enough
+of him in the high school.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There are Feeders yet who profane the temple of literature; who never
+connect the souls of their pupils with the soul life of the authors they
+study. Very few of the graduates of high schools have learned the high art
+of loving literature for its beauty and ennobling thought, fewer still
+have learned how to dig successfully in the rich mines of wealth that
+literature contains, and even a smaller number have learned to transmute
+the revelations of literature into character and new revelations in life
+or richer literature for the happiness and culture of coming generations.
+We may yet learn from Dickens.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>Tozer became an antique pedant, learned but not educated.</p>
+
+<p>Briggs grew to be dull and heavy-witted, and had his &#8220;knowledge so tightly
+packed that he couldn&#8217;t get at anything he wanted.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Bitherstone was one of the few fortunate fellows who are gifted with
+natural power to pass through the cramming system without being affected
+seriously in any way. They get little, if any, good, and they speedily
+forget the wrongs inflicted upon them and the learning with which their
+teachers attempted to cram them.</p>
+
+<p>Briggs showed the evil effects of cramming in the destruction of
+individuality. &#8220;His fruit had nothing of its original flavour remaining.&#8221;
+This is one of the general charges made against Doctor Blimber&#8217;s forcing
+establishment, or hothouse. &#8220;Nature was of no consequence at all. No
+matter what a young gentleman was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made
+him bear to pattern somehow or other.&#8221; The destruction of selfhood was the
+great evil of the old system of teaching.</p>
+
+<p>Another important criticism made by Dickens of the hothouse system is
+worthy of special attention by educators. He recognised the evil effects
+of giving any study or work to children, that is naturally adapted to a
+later stage of their development. The development of children is always
+arrested when the work of a higher stage is forced into a lower stage of
+their growth. The true evolution of the child consists in a growth through
+a series of progressive and interdependent stages. This was not recognised
+in the educational system Dickens desired to improve. It is not yet
+recognised to a very large extent in practice. &#8220;All the boys blew before
+their time,&#8221; in Doctor Blimber&#8217;s school. &#8220;The doctor, in some partial
+confusion of ideas, regarded the young gentlemen as if they were all
+doctors, and were born grown up.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens was so careful to make his names and terms express volumes of
+meaning that he probably meant the phrase &#8220;mathematical gooseberries&#8221; to
+be especially significant. The fact that they were grown on &#8220;mere sprouts
+of bushes,&#8221; and as a consequence were &#8220;very sour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> ones, too,&#8221; reveals the
+philosophy since made so clear by Doctor Harris, that early &#8220;drilling&#8221; in
+arithmetic has been one of the prolific causes of arrested development in
+children. The appeal against the common practice of growing &#8220;every
+description of Greek and Latin vegetable&#8221; <i>from</i> &#8220;<i>dry twigs of boys</i>&#8221; was
+comprehensive and timely. They were not merely twigs, but dry twigs in
+whom the sap had not begun to circulate freely. No expressions, no
+volumes, could state the evil of untimely cramming more clearly than this
+group of phrases used by Dickens in describing Doctor Blimber&#8217;s school.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The frostiest circumstances&#8221; is another of the thought-laden phrases,
+which was evidently intended to warn teachers against the mistake of
+trying to produce any intellectual fruit at untimely periods of the
+child&#8217;s development. &#8220;Wintry growth&#8221; means unseasonable or untimely
+development.</p>
+
+<p>The condemnation of the feeling shown by Paul in parting from Florence,
+and the Doctor&#8217;s cold-blooded observation, &#8220;Never mind; we shall
+substitute new cares and new impressions, Mr. Dombey, very shortly,&#8221; were
+intended to show how utterly the knowledge cramming ideal had prevented
+the recognition of the fundamental fact that feeling is the basis and the
+battery power of intellectual force and energy. The same principle is
+taught by Cornelia&#8217;s shock at Paul&#8217;s affection for old Glubb, and her
+father&#8217;s summary settlement of the case, when he realized that the little
+child was intensely affectionate and sympathetic. &#8220;Ha!&#8221; said the Doctor,
+shaking his head, &#8220;this&mdash;is&mdash;bad, but study will do much.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens deals in a most thorough manner with the absolute wickedness of
+neglecting, or attempting to smother feeling in the training and education
+of children in Hard Times. He undoubtedly received his clear conceptions
+relating to the intellectual value of feeling from Froebel&#8217;s writings.</p>
+
+<p>The bad effects of cramming on the physical constitution of children are
+pointed out in &#8220;the convulsive grasping of their foreheads&#8221; by the two
+boys engaged in solving mathematical problems. Nervous exhaustion<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> is here
+plainly indicated. They were &#8220;very feverish,&#8221; too, and poor Briggs was in
+even a worse condition, for &#8220;he was in a state of stupefaction and was
+flabby and quite cold.&#8221; Both Briggs and Tozer frightened Paul the first
+night he tried to sleep in their room by talking Latin and Greek in their
+dreams. Paul thought they were swearing. Education should never interfere
+with a child&#8217;s sleep, either with its soundness or its duration. Even the
+boys told Paul on the first day of his school life that he would need a
+good constitution to withstand the strain at Doctor Blimber&#8217;s.</p>
+
+<p>The exhaustive and exasperating practice of piling up arrears of work, so
+naturally connected with cramming&mdash;in fact, so essential a part of the
+unnatural process&mdash;comes in for its share of condemnation, too. One of the
+boys, &#8220;whose face was like a dirty window, from much crying, was
+endeavouring to flounder through a hopeless number of lines.&#8221; The friends
+of Briggs were constantly in terror &#8220;lest they should find his hat
+floating on a pond and an unfinished exercise on the bank.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The same practice of charging up arrears of work is condemned in David
+Copperfield by associating it with the hateful Murdstones.</p>
+
+<p>The crammer&#8217;s absolute indifference and contempt for any semblance of
+correlation in studies is revealed by Cornelia&#8217;s action in giving him a
+collection of books on his first morning before school with instructions
+to study them at the places she had marked for him. No wonder that &#8220;when
+poor Paul had spelled out number two he found he had no idea of number
+one; fragments whereof afterward obtruded themselves into number three,
+which sidled into number four, which grafted itself on to number two&mdash;so
+that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic h&aelig;c hoc was troy
+weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three times
+four was Taurus, a bull, were open questions with him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Whenever words are given before thought, or as a substitute for thought,
+and without definite relationship to the thought already in the mind, they
+lie in the mind as unrelated, and therefore unavailable knowledge.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>A boy in London had received considerable historical teaching, and his
+mind had made a certain kind of unity out of the confused mass. When asked
+at his final examination &#8220;What he knew about Cromwell,&#8221; he answered:
+&#8220;Cromwell interfered with the Irish, and he was put in prison. When he was
+in prison he wrote the Pilgrim&#8217;s Progress, and he afterward married Mrs.
+O&#8217;Shea.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This was equalled by the other boy who wrote at an examination: &#8220;Wolsey
+was a famous general who fought in the Crimean War, and who, after being
+decapitated several times, said to Cromwell: &#8216;If I had served you as you
+have served me I would not have been deserted in my old age.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul&#8217;s studies were always dark and crooked to him till Florence bought
+copies of his books and studied them, and by patient sympathy made all
+that had been dark light, and all that had been crooked straight.</p>
+
+<p>The habit of giving definitions of abstractions to children, and expecting
+the definitions alone to be comprehended by children, is held up to
+deserved ridicule in the explanation of the word &#8220;analysis&#8221; to Paul, when
+Cornelia proposed to read the analysis of his character.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If my recollection serves me, the word analysis, as opposed to synthesis,
+is thus defined by Walker: &#8216;The resolution of an object, whether of the
+senses or of the intellect, into its first elements.&#8217; As opposed to
+synthesis, you observe. <i>Now</i> you know what analysis is, Dombey.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>How perfectly simple and clear and expanding this would be to a child&#8217;s
+mind! Dickens says: &#8220;Dombey didn&#8217;t seem absolutely blinded by the light
+let in upon his intellect, but he made Miss Blimber a little bow.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>What loose habits of thought, and how much hypocrisy and mental vagueness
+are caused by using words instead of realities in the early teaching of
+children, and then asking them if they understand what we have been
+telling them! The &#8220;little bow&#8221; has usually a demoralizing effect.</p>
+
+<p>It is a mere farce to call the committing to memory of definitions
+&#8220;education.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the subjects, it is a dwarfing process,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> whether the definitions
+are memorized at home or at school, silently, by oral repetition, or by
+singing them. All definition learning as the origin of thought is certain
+to destroy interest and arrest development and lead to inaccuracy of
+thought. Miss Le Row&#8217;s collection of blunders made by children could never
+have been made if the children had been taught properly.</p>
+
+<p>Such mistakes as &#8220;The body is mostly composed of water, and about one half
+of avaricious tissue&#8221; or &#8220;Parasite, a kind of umbrella,&#8221; or &#8220;Emphasis,
+putting more distress on one word than on another,&#8221; should suggest to
+teachers the absurdity of committing definitions to memory. It is one of
+the weakest forms of cramming, and is most ridiculous and least useful
+when the memorizing is done by simultaneous oral repetition.</p>
+
+<p>Hard Times exposes the evils of cramming in the teaching practised in the
+normal school in which Mr. M&#8217;Choakumchild was trained, and in the
+definition repetition as given by Bitzer, and so highly praised by Mr.
+Gradgrind:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Bitzer, your definition of a horse:&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Quadruped, graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders,
+four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in
+marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be
+shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>How clear this would make the conception of a horse to a man who had never
+seen one! Sissy Jupe, too, is used to show the failure of cramming to
+educate a girl of quick intellect and strong emotions. She could not be
+crammed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>M&#8217;Choakumchild reported that she had a very dense head for figures;
+that, once possessed with a general idea of the globe, she took the
+smallest conceivable interest in its exact measurements; that she was
+extremely slow in the acquisition of dates, unless some pitiful
+incident happened to be connected therewith; that she would burst into
+tears on being required (by the mental process) immediately to name
+the cost of two hundred and forty-seven <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>muslin caps at fourteenpence
+half-penny; that she was as low down in the school as low as could be;
+that after eight weeks of induction into the elements of political
+economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler three
+feet high, for returning to the question, &#8220;What is the first principle
+of this science?&#8221; the absurd answer, &#8220;To do unto others as I would
+that they should do unto me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gradgrind observed, shaking his head, that all this was very bad;
+that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of
+knowledge as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular
+statements A to Z; and that Jupe &#8220;must be kept to it.&#8221; So Jupe was
+kept to it, and became low-spirited, but no wiser.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens makes the artist in Somebody&#8217;s Luggage say:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Who are you passing every day at your competitive excruciations? The
+fortunate candidates whose heads and livers you have turned upside
+down for life? Not you, you are really passing the crammers and
+coaches.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>And Jemmy Lirriper, in describing his teacher, said: &#8220;Oh, he was a Tartar!
+Keeping the boys up to the mark, holding examinations once a month,
+lecturing upon all sorts of subjects at all sorts of times, and knowing
+everything in the world out of a book.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens saw the evils of competitive examinations more clearly than many
+educators do two generations after him.</p>
+
+<p>When educators in schools, colleges, and universities learn a better way
+to promote pupils, to classify men and women and to rank them at
+graduation, than by holding promotion and graduation examinations cramming
+will be of no use, and there shall be no more cramming.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens was right as usual. The crammers and coaches are those who are
+tested by &#8220;competitive excruciations&#8221;; and how those who force through
+most students boast and strut and lord it over the less successful
+crammers and coaches on commencement days and other public occasions! What
+a misleading mockery examinations are as tests of power and character!</p>
+
+<p>Few even of Dickens&#8217;s phrases contain such a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>condensation of fact and
+philosophy as the phrase &#8220;whose heads and livers you have turned upside
+down for life.&#8221; Few phrases deserve more careful consideration from
+educators.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens makes the effect on the head still more startling by the
+description of Miss Wozenham&#8217;s brother in Mrs. Lirriper&#8217;s Legacy. &#8220;Miss
+Wozenham out of her small income had to support a brother that had had the
+misfortune to soften his brain against the hard mathematics.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the same story he laughs at the practical results of language cramming
+usually done in the schools:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And the way in which Jemmy spoke his French was a real charm. It was
+often wanted of him, for whenever anybody spoke a syllable to me I
+says &#8220;Noncomprenny, you&#8217;re very kind but it&#8217;s no use&mdash;Now Jemmy!&#8221; and
+then Jemmy he fires away at &#8217;em lovely, the only thing wanting in
+Jemmy&#8217;s French being as it appeared to me that he hardly ever
+understood a word of what they said to him, which made it scarcely of
+the use it might have been.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens attempted to picture the feelings of a boy toward his teachers in
+the days when cramming was almost universally practised in the story of
+Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Redforth, aged nine. When the Latin master was
+captured, he was saved by Captain Boldheart from the punishment of death
+to which he was condemned by the crew of The Beauty. Captain Boldheart had
+been one of his pupils, and he said: &#8220;Without taking your life, I must yet
+forever deprive you of the power of spiting other boys. I shall turn you
+adrift in this boat. You will find in her two oars, a compass, a bottle of
+rum, a small cask of water, a piece of pork, a bag of biscuit, and my
+Latin grammar. Go! and spite the natives if you can find any.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When he afterward released him from the savages who were about to eat him,
+he granted him his life for the second time on condition:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;1. That he should never under any circumstances presume to teach any boy
+anything any more.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>&#8220;2. That, if taken back to England, he should pass his life in travelling
+to find out boys who wanted their exercises done, and should do their
+exercises for nothing, and never say a word about it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When it finally became necessary to hang the Latin master, Boldheart
+&#8220;impressively pointed out to him that this is what spiters come to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There are many kinds of cram that yet pass as fairly respectable in
+schools and universities. When the teachers or the professors give notes
+to be copied by the pupils and memorized, they are cramming. When teachers
+are storing the memories of children with facts, tables, dates, etc., to
+be used at some future time, they are cramming. All memorizing by
+repetition of words, even if they are understood, is cram, if the pupil
+can work the thought into his life by repetition of process or of
+operation. Words can never take the place of self-activity, nor even of
+activity.</p>
+
+<p>So long as knowledge storing is placed above character development,
+examinations by &#8220;examiners&#8221; will retain their power for evil, and so long
+as such examinations are held cramming will continue.</p>
+
+<p>All processes that attempt to educate from without inward, instead of from
+within outward, are in the last analysis cram. The selfhood must be active
+in going out for the new knowledge. The child must himself be originative,
+directive, and executive in the learning process if cram is to be avoided
+completely. This is the only sure way to secure perfect apperception, and
+without apperception the new knowledge lies dormant, if not dead, and
+unrelated in the memory until it disappears, as did Bitherstone&#8217;s. His
+declensions, according to Dickens, were not likely to last out his journey
+from England to India.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">FREE CHILDHOOD.</span></p>
+
+<p>Adulthood can never be truly free till childhood is free. Perfect freedom
+can not be developed in a soul filled with the apperceptive experiences of
+tyranny. No man is fully free in the freest country in the world who
+wishes to dominate even his child. The practice of tyranny develops the
+tyrant. Guiding control is entirely different from domination.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens taught the doctrine of a rich, full, free childhood from the time
+he wrote Nicholas Nickleby in 1839.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Even the sunburned faces of gipsy children, half naked though they be,
+suggest a drop of comfort. It is a pleasant thing to see that the sun
+has been there; to know that the air and light are on them every day;
+to feel that they <i>are</i> children, and lead children&#8217;s lives; that if
+their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of heaven, and not with
+tears; that the limbs of their girls are free, and that they are not
+crippled by distortions, imposing an unnatural and horrible penance
+upon their sex; that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least
+among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which
+make young children old before they know what childhood is, and give
+them the exhaustion and infirmity of age, without, like age, the
+privilege to die. God send that old nursery tales were true, and that
+gipsies stole such children by the score!</p></div>
+
+<p>If he had written nothing but this exquisite quotation from Nicholas
+Nickleby he would have deserved recognition as an educator. It shows a
+clear insight into the great principles of physical freedom, intellectual
+freedom, and spiritual freedom.</p>
+
+<p>In The Old Curiosity Shop he made the world sympathize<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> with a child who
+lived with an old man. He gives the keynote to this fundamental thought of
+the book in the opening chapter:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into
+the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks
+their confidence and simplicity&mdash;two of the best qualities that Heaven
+gives them&mdash;and demands that they share our sorrows before they are
+capable of entering into our enjoyments.</p></div>
+
+<p>Little Nell had the sadness of a lonely childhood, though her grandfather
+lived with but the one aim of making her happy.</p>
+
+<p>In Martin Chuzzlewit&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Tom Pinch&#8217;s sister was governess in a family, a lofty family; perhaps
+the wealthiest brass and copper founder&#8217;s family known to mankind.
+They lived at Camberwell; in a house so big and fierce that its mere
+outside, like the outside of a giant&#8217;s castle, struck terror into
+vulgar minds and made bold persons quail.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Mr. Pecksniff and his daughters went to visit Miss Pinch she</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>was at that moment instructing her eldest pupil; to wit, a premature
+little woman of thirteen years old, who had already arrived at such a
+pitch of whalebone and education that she had nothing girlish about
+her, which was a source of great rejoicing to all her relations and
+friends.</p></div>
+
+<p>One of the unsolved mysteries is the fact that such a large proportion of
+parents are so anxious to have their children grow up. The desire may be
+understood when poverty longs for the time when the little hands may help
+to win bread, but that wealthy parents should hasten the premature state
+of adulthood in their children is incomprehensible.</p>
+
+<p>A great deal of attention is paid to the blunder of robbing children of
+real childhood in Dombey and Son, which is so rich in several departments
+of educational philosophy. Doctor Blimber regarded the young gentlemen &#8220;as
+if they were born grown up.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>Paul&#8217;s life and death were intended as warnings to ambitious parents.
+Florence was robbed of a true childhood by her mother&#8217;s death and her
+father&#8217;s lack of sympathy. Briggs and Tozer had no childhood; they were
+persecuted by the ingenious and ignorantly learned adults at home during
+vacations, as well as by Doctor Blimber during school time; so that &#8220;Tozer
+said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he would rather stay at
+school than go home.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Poor Bitherstone had no childhood. He was shipped away from his parents in
+India to the respectable hell conducted by that widely known and highly
+reputed child trainer Mrs. Pipchin.</p>
+
+<p>Poor little Miss Pankey spent a great deal of her time in Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s
+&#8220;correctional dungeon.&#8221; What a mercy it would be if all such unfortunate
+children could be stolen by the gipsies!</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s theory taught &#8220;that it was wrong to encourage a child&#8217;s
+mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by
+force like an oyster.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When Doctor Blimber asked Paul, six-year-old Paul, &#8220;if he would like them
+to make a man of him,&#8221; the child replied:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I had rather be a child.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One of Dickens&#8217;s most successful hits at the common philosophy, that the
+desired adult characteristics must be developed in childhood in their
+adult forms, was made in describing Mrs. Tozer&#8217;s effort to qualify Tozer
+for the position of a clergyman by making him wear a stiff, starched
+necktie while he was a boy.</p>
+
+<p>When Edith upbraided her mother for practically compelling her to marry
+Mr. Dombey, her mother asked angrily:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;What do you mean? Haven&#8217;t you from a child&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A child!&#8221; said Edith, looking at her; &#8220;when was I a child? What
+childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman&mdash;artful, designing,
+mercenary, laying snares for men&mdash;before I knew myself or you, or even
+understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learned.
+You <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride
+to-night.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It seems so to me; stranger to me than to you,&#8221; said Edith. &#8220;But my
+education was completed long ago. I am too old now and have fallen too
+low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to help
+myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman&#8217;s breast, and makes it
+true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else to
+sustain me when I despise myself.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Later, on the night before she was to marry Mr. Dombey, she said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Oh, mother, mother, if you had but left me to my natural heart when I
+too was a girl&mdash;a younger girl than Florence&mdash;how different I might have been!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Bleak House gives Dickens&#8217;s most striking picture of the deterioration
+resulting from giving no real childhood to children for a series of
+generations.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree,
+the house of Smallweed, always early to go to business and late to
+marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has
+discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales,
+fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the
+gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it, and that the
+complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed
+to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their
+minds.</p>
+
+<p>There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several
+generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child,
+until Mr. Smallweed&#8217;s grandmother, now living, became weak in her
+intellect, and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With
+such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory,
+understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall asleep
+over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed&#8217;s grandmother has undoubtedly
+brightened the family.</p></div>
+
+<p>There could be no more awful picture than that of a family in which for a
+series of generations the children had been, through heredity and
+training, made &#8220;little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> old men and women,&#8221; who were never permitted to
+indulge in any childish plays, or to enjoy any stories, or in any way have
+a genuine childhood, so that they not only came to look like monkeys, but
+&#8220;like monkeys with something depressing on their minds&#8221;; and in which the
+only child for several generations had been Mr. Smallweed&#8217;s grandmother,
+when she became weak in intellect and &#8220;fell (for the first time) into a
+childish state.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In The Haunted House the wretched child who came to Mr. Redlaw&#8217;s room is
+described as &#8220;a baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a
+child.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens made his greatest plea for a free childhood in Hard Times. The
+whole of the educational part of the book condemns the training of Mr.
+Gradgrind, although he was an earnest, high-minded gentleman, whose
+supreme purpose was to train his family in the best possible way. Indeed
+Mr. Gradgrind was so sure he was right in his views regarding child
+training that he founded a school to teach the children of Coketown in
+accordance with what he believed to be correct principles.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gradgrind is described as</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>a kind cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow
+children clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He
+seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical
+substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed
+away.</p>
+
+<p>There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They
+had been lectured at from their tenderest years; coursed, like little
+hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone they had been made to
+run to the lecture room. The first object with which they had an
+association or of which they had a remembrance was a large blackboard
+with a dry ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.</p>
+
+<p>Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an ogre. Fact
+forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing
+castle, with heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking
+childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the
+moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever
+learned the silly jingle, &#8220;Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder
+what you are&#8221;; it had never known wonder on the subject, having at
+five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen and
+driven Charles&#8217;s Wain like a locomotive engine driver. No little
+Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow
+with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who
+killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who
+swallowed Tom Thumb; it had never heard of those celebrities, and had
+only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped
+with several stomachs.</p></div>
+
+<p>The effect of preventing all kinds of enjoyment for his children in their
+own home was that they naturally sought for enjoyment surreptitiously in a
+way of which their father disapproved. But when a man disapproves of
+legitimate amusements in his family his condemnation of what is improper
+will have little weight with his children.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Gradgrind was going home from the school examination he had to
+pass near the circus, and he was amazed to find his daughter Louisa and
+his son Thomas stealing a view of the performance.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Phenomenon almost incredible though distinctly seen, what did he then
+behold but his own metallurgical Louisa peeping with all her might
+through a hole in a deal board, and his own mathematical Thomas
+abasing himself on the ground to catch but a hoof of the graceful
+equestrian Tyrolean flower act!</p>
+
+<p>Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where his
+family was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring child, and
+said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Louisa! Thomas!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Both rose, red and disconcerted. But Louisa looked at her father with
+more boldness than Thomas did. Indeed, Thomas did not look at him, but
+gave himself up to be taken home like a machine.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind,
+leading each away by a hand; &#8220;what do you do here?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>&#8220;Wanted to see what it was like,&#8221; returned Louisa shortly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What it was like?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, father.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in
+the girl; yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face,
+there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to
+burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which
+brightened its expression. Not with the brightness natural to cheerful
+youth, but with uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had
+something painful in them, analogous to the changes on a blind face
+groping its way.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You! Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the sciences is open,
+Thomas and you, who may be said to be replete with facts, Thomas and
+you, who have been trained to mathematical exactness, Thomas and you,
+here!&#8221; cried Mr. Gradgrind. &#8220;In this degraded position! I am amazed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was tired, father. I have been tired a long time,&#8221; said Louisa.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tired? Of what?&#8221; asked the astonished father.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know of what&mdash;of everything, I think.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>When they reached home, Mr. Gradgrind in an injured tone said to Mrs.
+Gradgrind, after telling her where he had found the children:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I should as soon have expected to find my children reading poetry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dear me,&#8221; whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind. &#8220;How can you, Louisa and Thomas!
+I wonder at you. As if, with my head in its present throbbing state,
+you couldn&#8217;t go and look at the shells and minerals and things
+provided for you, instead of circuses!&#8221; said Mrs. Gradgrind. &#8220;You know
+as well as I do, no young people have circus masters, or keep circuses
+in cabinets, or attend lectures about circuses. What can you possibly
+want to know of circuses then? I am sure you have enough to do, if
+that&#8217;s what you want. With my head in its present state, I couldn&#8217;t
+remember the mere names of half the facts you have got to attend to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the reason!&#8221; pouted Louisa.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t tell me that&#8217;s the reason, because it can be nothing of the
+sort,&#8221; said Mrs. Gradgrind. &#8220;Go and be something-ological directly.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>After Louisa had married Mr. Bounderby, Tom and Mr. Harthouse were
+discussing her one evening, and Tom said she thought a great deal when she was alone:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Ay, ay? Has resources of her own,&#8221; said Harthouse.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not so much of that as you may suppose,&#8221; returned Tom; &#8220;for our
+governor had her crammed with all sorts of dry bones and sawdust. It&#8217;s
+his system.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Formed his daughter on his own model?&#8221; suggested Harthouse.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His daughter? Ah! and everybody else. Why, he formed me that way,&#8221; said Tom.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Impossible!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He did though,&#8221; said Tom, shaking his head. &#8220;I mean to say, Mr.
+Harthouse, that when I first left home and went to old Bounderby&#8217;s, I
+was as flat as a warming-pan, and knew no more about life than any
+oyster does.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens describes a visit Louisa made to her father&#8217;s house, and shows how
+little of the true home feeling was stirred in her heart, as she
+approached the place, where she should have had a happy childhood.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Neither, as she approached her old home now, did any of the best
+influences of old home descend upon her. Her remembrances of home and
+childhood were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and
+fountain in her young heart as it gushed out. The golden waters were
+not there. They were flowing for the fertilization of the land where
+grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.</p></div>
+
+<p>When her father proposed to Louisa that she should marry Mr. Bounderby,
+she said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;The baby preference that even I have heard of as common among
+children has never had its innocent resting place in my breast. You
+have been so careful of me, that I never had a child&#8217;s heart. You have
+trained me so well, that I never dreamed a child&#8217;s dream. You have
+dealt so wisely with me, father, from my cradle to this hour, that I
+never had a child&#8217;s belief or a child&#8217;s fear.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Gradgrind was delighted at his apparent success. He could not see, he
+was so practical and so self-opinionated, that her heart was breaking
+while she was yielding with external calmness.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>But the reaping time came soon. Mr. Harthouse, young, attractive, and
+unscrupulous, made love to Louisa, and finally persuaded her to run away
+with him. Unable to resist the temptation in her own strength, she fled to
+her father&#8217;s house through an awful storm.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The thunder was rolling into distance, and the rain was pouring down
+like a deluge, when the door of his room opened. He looked round the
+lamp upon his table, and saw with amazement his eldest daughter.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Louisa!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Father, I want to speak to you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is the matter? What is it? I conjure you, Louisa, tell me what
+is the matter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She dropped into a chair before him, and put her cold hand on his arm.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Father, you have trained me from my cradle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, Louisa.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her in doubt and dread, vacantly repeating, &#8220;Curse the
+hour! Curse the hour!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable
+things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the
+graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you
+done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have
+bloomed once, in this great wilderness here?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If it had ever been here, its ashes alone would save me from the void
+in which my whole life sinks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He tightened his hold in time to prevent her sinking on the floor, but
+she cried out in a terrible voice, &#8220;I shall die if you hold me! Let me
+fall upon the ground!&#8221; And he laid her down there, and saw the pride
+of his heart and the triumph of his system lying, an insensible heap,
+at his feet.</p></div>
+
+<p>In the Schoolboy&#8217;s Story, the boy who was to have no holiday at home was
+invited to spend his holidays with &#8220;Old Cheeseman&#8221; and Mrs. Cheeseman.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>So I went to their delightful house, and was as happy as I could
+possibly be. They understand how to conduct themselves toward boys,
+<i>they</i> do. When they take a boy to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>the play, for instance, they <i>do</i>
+take him. They don&#8217;t go in after it&#8217;s begun, or come out before it&#8217;s
+over. They know how to bring a boy up, too. Look at their own! Though
+he is very little as yet, what a capital boy he is! Why, my next
+favourite to Mrs. Cheeseman and Old Cheeseman is young Cheeseman.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Dickens came to his last book his heart was still full of sympathy
+with the child.</p>
+
+<p>Edwin Drood said to Mr. Jasper: &#8220;Life for you is a plum with the natural
+bloom on. It hasn&#8217;t been over-carefully wiped off for <i>you</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the same book Mr. Grewgious is described:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding
+mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried
+snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency
+like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it
+must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of
+anybody&#8217;s voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature
+that his face presented was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves
+that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his
+forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them
+into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away
+the chisel, and said, &#8220;I really can not be worried to finish off this
+man; let him go as he is.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>He tried to explain the reason for his peculiarities to Rosa:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I mean,&#8221; he explained, &#8220;that young ways were never my ways. I was the
+only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I half believe I
+was born advanced in life myself. No personality is intended toward
+the name you will so soon change, when I remark that while the general
+growth of people seem to have come into existence buds, I seem to have
+come into existence a chip. I was a chip&mdash;and a very dry one&mdash;when I
+first became aware of myself.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens takes a front rank among the educators who have tried to save the
+child from &#8220;child-quellers,&#8221; and preserve for them the right to a free,
+rich, real childhood. The saddest sight in the world to him was a child
+such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> as he pictured in A Tale of Two Cities: &#8220;The children of St. Antoine
+had ancient faces and grave voices.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In Barbox Brothers Mr. Jackson said of himself: &#8220;I am, to myself, an
+unintelligible book, with the earlier chapters all torn out and thrown
+away. My childhood had no grace of childhood, my youth had no charm of
+youth, and what can be expected from such a lost beginning?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens tried to save all children from such a beginning.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">INDIVIDUALITY.</span></p>
+
+<p>Dickens began to write definitely about individuality in Martin Chuzzlewit
+in 1844. Martin described a company he met in America &#8220;who were so
+strangely devoid of individual traits of character that any one of them
+might have changed minds with the other and nobody would have found it
+out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In David Copperfield he makes Traddles, who was trained by Mr. Creakle,
+say: &#8220;I have no invention at all, not a particle. I suppose there never
+was a young man with less originality than I have.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>David himself said sagely: &#8220;I have encountered some fine ladies and
+gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>David emphasizes the phase of individuality that teaches the power of each
+individual to do some special good, when he said to Martha when she spoke
+of the river as the end of her useless life:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the name of the great Judge, before whom you and all of us must stand
+at his dread time, dismiss that terrible idea! We can all do some good, if
+we will.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In Bleak House Sir Leicester Dedlock is represented as of opinion that he
+should at least think for every one in connection with his estate.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He
+supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual
+characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born
+to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a
+discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned&mdash;would never
+recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>The same absolute contempt for the individuality of the poor is ridiculed
+in The Chimes. Sir Joseph Bowley is a type of the English squire who used
+to act on the assumption that he had to care for the workmen on his
+estate, and the poor of his neighbourhood, as he did for his horses and
+other animals.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I do my duty as the Poor Man&#8217;s Friend and Father; and I endeavour to
+educate his mind by inculcating on all occasions the one great moral
+lesson which that class requires&mdash;that is, entire Dependence on
+myself. They have no business whatever with&mdash;with themselves. If
+wicked and designing persons tell them otherwise, and they become
+impatient and discontented, and are guilty of insubordinate conduct
+and black-hearted ingratitude&mdash;which is undoubtedly the case&mdash;I am
+their Friend and Father still. It is so ordained. It is in the nature
+of things. They needn&#8217;t trouble themselves to think about anything. I
+will think for them; I know what is good for them; I am their
+perpetual parent. Such is the dispensation of an all-wise Providence.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>It is strange that men so commonly ascribe to Providence the dreadful
+conditions which have resulted from man&#8217;s ignorance and selfishness, and
+which Providence intended man to reform.</p>
+
+<p>Esther, in Bleak House, speaking of the influence of the chancery suit on
+Richard Carstone, said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;The character of much older and steadier people may be even changed
+by the circumstances surrounding them. It would be too much to expect
+that a boy&#8217;s, in its formation, should be the subject of such
+influences, and escape them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I felt this to be true; though, if I may venture to mention what I
+thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard&#8217;s
+education had not counteracted those influences or directed his
+character. He had been eight years at a public school, and had
+learned, I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts, in the
+most admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody&#8217;s
+business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings
+lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to <i>him</i>. <i>He</i> had been adapted
+to the verses, and had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> learned the art of making them to such
+perfection, that if he had remained at school until he was of age I
+suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over again,
+unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it.
+Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very
+improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and
+always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would
+not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his
+studying them quite so much.</p></div>
+
+<p>Richard was one of those unstable men who have good abilities, but who do
+not use them persistently in the accomplishment of any one purpose, and
+who never seem to find the sphere for which they are best fitted. They are
+man-products, not God-products. When Richard, after several attempts to
+work at other things with high enthusiasm for a few weeks, decided to be a
+physician, Esther said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Mistrusting that he only came to this conclusion because, having never
+had much chance of finding out for himself what he was fitted for, and
+having never been guided to the discovery, he was taken with the
+newest idea, and was glad to get rid of the trouble of consideration,
+I wondered whether the Latin verses often ended in this, or whether
+Richard&#8217;s was a solitary case.</p>
+
+<p>Richard very often came to see us while we remained in London (though
+he soon failed in his letter writing), and with his quick abilities,
+his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and freshness, was
+always delightful. But though I liked him more and more the better I
+knew him, I still felt more and more how much it was to be regretted
+that he had been educated in no habits of application and
+concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same
+manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in
+character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks,
+always with fair credit, and often with distinction; but in a fitful,
+dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities
+in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They
+were great qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously
+won; but, like fire and water, though excellent servants, they were
+very bad masters. If <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>they had been under Richard&#8217;s direction, they
+would have been his friends; but Richard being under their direction,
+they became his enemies.</p></div>
+
+<p>Any educational system that &#8220;addresses hundreds of boys exactly in the
+same manner&#8221; must destroy their individuality.</p>
+
+<p>In Hard Times Tom Gradgrind became a low, degraded, sensual, dissipated
+criminal, and Dickens accounts for his failure by the unnatural restraint,
+constant oversight, and the strangling of his imagination in his cradle
+and afterward. In other words, the boy&#8217;s selfhood never had a chance to
+develop, and every power he had naturally to make him strong, true, and
+independent had helped to work his ruin.</p>
+
+<p>In Little Dorrit Mrs. General is herself a model to be avoided, and her
+system of training is ridiculed because she paid no attention whatever to
+the selfhood of her pupils except to conceal it artfully and prevent the
+recognition of any of the evils by which it was surrounded and which it
+should help to overcome.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Mrs. General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent
+it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental
+grooves or rails, on which she started little trains of other people&#8217;s
+opinions, which never overtook one another and never got anywhere.
+Even her propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the
+world; but Mrs. General&#8217;s way of getting rid of it was to put it out
+of sight, and make believe that there was no such thing. This was
+another of her ways of forming a mind&mdash;to cram all articles of
+difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no
+existence. It was the easiest way and, beyond all comparison, the
+properest.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. General was not to be told of anything shocking. Accidents,
+miseries, and offences were never to be mentioned before her. Passion
+was to go to sleep in the presence of Mrs. General, and blood was to
+change to milk and water. The little that was left in the world, when
+all these deductions were made, it was Mrs. General&#8217;s province to
+varnish. In that formation process of hers, she dipped the smallest of
+brushes into the largest of pots, and varnished the surface of every
+object that came under <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>consideration. The more cracked it was, the
+more Mrs. General varnished it.</p>
+
+<p>There was varnish in Mrs. General&#8217;s voice, varnish in Mrs. General&#8217;s
+touch, an atmosphere of varnish round Mrs. General&#8217;s figure.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens wished the training of the real inner selfhood, not the varnishing
+of the surface merely. Not what George Macdonald describes as
+&#8220;sandpapering a boy into a saint,&#8221; but genuine character development by
+the working out of the selfhood in the improvement of its environment,
+physically, intellectually, and spiritually.</p>
+
+<p>Briggs&#8217;s education, in Dombey and Son, had been of such a character that
+&#8220;his intellectual fruit had nothing of its original flavour remaining.&#8221;
+The character of his real selfhood had been destroyed, not developed, by
+his &#8220;education.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In Our Mutual Friend Mr. Podsnap is used as a type of the men who not only
+see no need for any person else forming opinions, but who take pains to
+prevent others forming opinions, so far as possible.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As Mr. Podsnap stood with his back to the drawing-room fire, pulling
+up his shirt collar, like a veritable cock of the walk literally
+pluming himself in the midst of his possessions, nothing would have
+astonished him more than an intimation that Miss Podsnap, or any young
+person properly born and bred, could not be exactly put away like the
+plate, brought out like the plate, polished like the plate, counted,
+weighed, and valued like the plate. That such a young person could
+possibly have a morbid vacancy in the heart for anything younger than
+the plate, or less monotonous than the plate, or that such a young
+person&#8217;s thoughts could try to scale the region bounded on the north,
+south, east, and west by the plate, was a monstrous imagination which
+he would on the spot have flourished into space.</p></div>
+
+<p>Eugene Wrayburn&#8217;s criticism of his father&#8217;s habit of choosing professions
+for his sons almost as soon as they were born, or even before, without the
+slightest possible consideration for their natural aptitudes for the work
+to which they were assigned, is a severe attack on a condition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> which
+exists even yet through the failure of the schools or the homes to
+discover and reveal to boys and girls their highest powers, so that they
+may reach their best growth in school or college and choose the profession
+in which they can do most good and attain their most complete evolution.
+There is no better field for co-ordinate work by the home and the school
+than the joint study of the children to find their sphere of greatest
+power. Every child should be helped to find the sphere in which he can
+most successfully achieve the highest destiny for himself and for
+humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Eugene Wrayburn&#8217;s father extended his paternal care and forethought for
+his children not only by choosing their professions without regard for
+their selfhood, but by considerately selecting partners for his sons
+without regard for their individual tastes.</p>
+
+<p>Eugene, speaking to Mortimer Lightwood, said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;My respected father has found, down in the parental neighbourhood, a
+wife for his not-generally-respected son.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With some money, of course?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With some money, of course, or he would not have found her. My
+respected father&mdash;let me shorten the dutiful tautology by substituting
+in future M. R. F., which sounds military, and rather like the Duke of
+Wellington.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What an absurd fellow you are, Eugene!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not at all. I assure you. M. R. F. having always in the clearest
+manner provided (as he calls it) for his children by prearranging from
+the hour of the birth of each, and sometimes from an earlier period,
+what the devoted little victim&#8217;s calling and course in life should be,
+M. R. F. prearranged for myself that I was to be the barrister I am
+(with the slight addition of an enormous practice, which has not
+accrued), and also the married man I am not.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The first you have often told me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The first I have often told you. Considering myself sufficiently
+incongruous on my legal eminence, I have until now suppressed my
+domestic destiny. You know M. R. F., but not as well as I do. If you
+knew him as well as I do, he would amuse you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Filially spoken, Eugene!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perfectly so, believe me; and with every sentiment of affectionate
+deference toward M. R. F. But if he amuses <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>me, I can&#8217;t help it. When
+my eldest brother was born, of course the rest of us knew (I mean the
+rest of us would have known, if we had been in existence) that he was
+heir to the family embarrassments&mdash;we call it before company the
+family estate. But when my second brother was going to be born by and
+by, &#8216;This,&#8217; says M. R. F., &#8216;is a little pillar of the church.&#8217; <i>Was</i>
+born, and became a pillar of the church&mdash;a very shaky one. My third
+brother appeared considerably in advance of his engagement to my
+mother; but M. R. F., not at all put out by surprise, instantly
+declared him a circumnavigator. Was pitchforked into the navy, but has
+not circumnavigated. I announced myself, and was disposed of with the
+highly satisfactory results embodied before you. When my younger
+brother was half an hour old, it was settled by M. R. F. that he
+should have a mechanical genius, and so on. Therefore I say M. R. F.
+amuses me.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>In the same book Bradley Headstone&#8217;s school is described as one of a
+system of schools in which &#8220;school buildings, school-teachers, and school
+pupils are all according to pattern, and all engendered in the light of
+the latest Gospel according to Monotony.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Bradley Headstone himself was a mechanical product of a mechanical system
+of uniformity that destroyed independence and individuality of character.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent
+white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of
+pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its
+decent hair guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man
+of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there
+was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there
+were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics
+in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store
+of teacher&#8217;s knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically,
+sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments
+mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his
+early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage.
+The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always
+ready to meet the demands of retail dealers&mdash;history here, geography
+there, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>astronomy to the right, political economy to the left&mdash;natural
+history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics,
+and what not, all in their several places&mdash;this care had imparted to
+his countenance a look of care.</p>
+
+<p>Suppression of so much to make room for so much had given him a
+constrained manner over and above.</p></div>
+
+<p>The most remarkable description of a system of training that totally
+ignored individuality and chipped and battered and moulded and squeezed
+all students into the same pattern or mould is the description of the
+normal school in which Mr. Gradgrind&#8217;s teacher, Mr. M&#8217;Choakumchild, was
+trained. &#8220;Mr. M&#8217;Choakumchild and one hundred and forty other schoolmasters
+had been lately <i>turned</i> at the same time, in the same factory, on the
+same principles, like so many piano legs.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Volumes could not make the sacrifice of individuality clearer than this
+sentence does.</p>
+
+<p>At &#8220;the grinders&#8217; school boys were taught as parrots are.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Blimber was condemned because in his system &#8220;Nature was of no
+consequence at all; no matter what a boy was intended to bear, Doctor
+Blimber made him bear to pattern somehow or other.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In Doctor Strong&#8217;s school &#8220;we had plenty of liberty.&#8221; The boys had also
+&#8220;noble games out of doors&#8221; in this model school of Dickens. Liberty and
+noble outdoor sports are the best agencies yet revealed to man for the
+development of full selfhood in harmony with the fundamental law of
+education, self-activity.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">THE CULTURE OF THE IMAGINATION.</span></p>
+
+<p>In the preface to the first number of Household Words Dickens said that
+one of the objects he had in view in publishing the magazine was to aid in
+the development of the imagination of children.</p>
+
+<p>From the time of Barnaby Rudge his unconscious recognition of the right of
+the child to have his imagination made freer and stronger can be felt in
+his writings. His conscious recognition of the absolute necessity of child
+freedom included the ideal of the culture of the imagination.</p>
+
+<p>He reached his educational meridian in Hard Times, and the pedagogy of
+this book was devoted almost entirely to child freedom and the
+imagination; to revealing the fatal error of Mr. Gradgrind&#8217;s philosophy,
+which taught that fact storing was the true way to form a child&#8217;s mind and
+character, entirely ignoring the fact that feeling and imagination are the
+strongest elements of intellectual power and clearness.</p>
+
+<p>In Bleak House, which immediately preceded Hard Times, he gave a very able
+description of the effects of the neglect of the development of the
+imagination for several generations in the characteristics of the
+Smallweed family.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Smallweeds had strengthened themselves in their practical
+character, discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks,
+fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities
+whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to
+it, and that the complete little men and women it has produced have
+been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something
+depressing on their minds.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>Mr. Smallweed&#8217;s grandfather is in a helpless condition as to his
+lower, and nearly so as to his upper limbs; but his mind is
+unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever held, the first four rules of
+arithmetic, and a certain small collection of the hardest facts. In
+respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and other such phrenological
+attributes, it is no worse off than it used to be. Everything that Mr.
+Smallweed&#8217;s grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first,
+and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single
+butterfly.</p></div>
+
+<p>This alone is a treatise of great suggestiveness on the need of the
+development of the imagination and the means by which it should be
+developed.</p>
+
+<p>Hard Times was evidently intended to show the weakness of the Herbartian
+psychology. Dickens believed in the distinctive soul as the real selfhood
+of each child, and as the only true reality in his nature, the dominating
+influence in his life and character. He did not believe that knowledge
+formed the soul, but that the soul transformed knowledge. He did not
+believe that knowledge gave form, colour, and tone to the soul, but that
+the soul gave new form, colour, and tone to knowledge. He ridiculed the
+idea that the educator by using great care in the selection of his
+knowledge could produce a man of such a character as he desired; that ten
+pounds of yellow knowledge and ten pounds of blue knowledge judiciously
+mixed in a boy would certainly produce twenty pounds of green manhood.</p>
+
+<p>He believed that in every child there is an element &#8220;defying all the
+calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic than
+his Creator is.&#8221; He did not agree with the psychology of which Mr.
+Gradgrind was the impersonation. Mr. Gradgrind believed that he could
+reduce human nature in all its complexities to statistics, and that &#8220;with
+his rule, and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table, he could
+weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it
+comes to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gradgrind had established a school for the training of the children of
+Coketown, and had engaged Mr. M&#8217;Choakumchild to teach it. Dickens
+criticised the normal school training of his time in his description of
+Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> M&#8217;Choakumchild&#8217;s preparation for the work of stimulating young life
+to larger, richer growth.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 as 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 through her Majesty&#8217;s Most Honourable Privy Council&#8217;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 watersheds 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.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! Mr. M&#8217;Choakumchild, rather overdone. If he had only learned a
+little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens criticised the lack of professional training, and the fact-storing
+process which subordinated feeling and imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gradgrind&#8217;s school was to be opened. The government officer was
+present to examine it. Mr. Gradgrind made a short opening address:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
+facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root
+out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals
+upon facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is
+the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the
+principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to facts, sir!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the
+speaker&#8217;s square forefinger emphasized his observations by
+underscoring every sentence with a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>line on the schoolmaster&#8217;s sleeve.
+The emphasis was helped by the speaker&#8217;s square wall of a forehead,
+which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious
+cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis
+was helped by the speaker&#8217;s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.
+The emphasis was helped by the speaker&#8217;s voice, which was inflexible,
+dry, and dictatorial.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In this life we want nothing but facts, sir; nothing but facts.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present,
+all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of
+little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have
+imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the
+brim.</p></div>
+
+<p>Most of the schoolrooms of the world are yet &#8220;plain, bare, monotonous
+vaults,&#8221; although nearly fifty years after Dickens pointed out the need of
+artistic form and artistic decoration in schools we are beginning to awake
+to the idea that the architecture, the colouring, and the art on the walls
+and in the cabinets of schools may influence the characters of children
+more even than the teaching.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gradgrind proceeded to ask a few questions of the pupils, who in this
+new school were to be known by numbers&mdash;so much more statistical and
+mathematical&mdash;and not by their names.</p>
+
+<p>As he stood before the pupils, who were seated in rows on a gallery, &#8220;he
+seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to
+blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He
+seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical
+substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed
+away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the last sentence Dickens reveals the true philosophy of sustaining and
+developing natural and therefore productive interest, and explains how,
+after destroying it, teachers try to galvanize it into spasmodic activity.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Girl number twenty,&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his
+square forefinger. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know that girl. Who is that girl?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sissy Jupe, sir,&#8221; explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and
+courtesying.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>&#8220;Sissy is not a name,&#8221; said Mr.
+Gradgrind. &#8220;Don&#8217;t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s father as calls me Sissy, sir,&#8221; returned the young girl in a
+trembling voice, and with another courtesy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then he has no business to do it,&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind. &#8220;Tell him he
+mustn&#8217;t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He belongs to the horse riding, if you please, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gradgrind frowned and waved off the objectionable calling with his
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We don&#8217;t want to know anything about that here. You mustn&#8217;t tell us
+about that here. Your father breaks horses, don&#8217;t he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break
+horses in the ring, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mustn&#8217;t tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then, describe
+your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and
+horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind for
+the general behoof of all the little pitchers. &#8220;Girl number twenty
+possessed of no facts in reference to one of the commonest of animals!
+Some boy&#8217;s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Bitzer: &#8220;Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four
+grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the
+spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring
+to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth&mdash;&mdash;&#8221; Thus (and much
+more) Bitzer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, girl number twenty,&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind, &#8220;you know what a horse
+is.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The keen edge of Dickens&#8217;s sarcasm will be felt when it is remembered that
+Sissy Jupe was born among horses, had lived with them, played with them,
+and ridden them all her life, but was &#8220;ignorant of the commonest facts
+regarding a horse.&#8221; She could not define a horse.</p>
+
+<p>The government examiner then stepped forward:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>&#8220;Very well,&#8221; said
+this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. &#8220;That&#8217;s a horse. Now let me ask you girls and boys, would you
+paper a room with representations of horses?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After a pause, one half the children cried in chorus, &#8220;Yes, sir!&#8221; Upon
+which the other half, seeing in the gentleman&#8217;s face that &#8220;Yes&#8221; was
+wrong, cried out in chorus, &#8220;No, sir!&#8221;&mdash;as the custom is in these
+examinations.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course, no. Why wouldn&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing,
+ventured the answer, because he wouldn&#8217;t paper a room at all, but
+would paint it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You <i>must</i> paper it,&#8221; said the gentleman rather warmly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You must paper it,&#8221; said Thomas Gradgrind, &#8220;whether you like it or
+not. Don&#8217;t tell <i>us</i> you wouldn&#8217;t paper it. What do you mean, boy?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll explain to you, then,&#8221; said the gentleman, after another and a
+dismal pause, &#8220;why you wouldn&#8217;t paper a room with representations of
+horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms
+in reality&mdash;in fact? Do you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir!&#8221; from one half, &#8220;No, sir!&#8221; from the other.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course, no,&#8221; said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the
+wrong half. &#8220;Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don&#8217;t see
+in fact; you are not to have anywhere what you don&#8217;t have in fact.
+What is called taste is only another name for fact.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,&#8221; said the
+gentleman. &#8220;Now, I&#8217;ll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet
+a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon
+it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There being a general conviction by this time that &#8220;No, sir!&#8221; was
+always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of &#8220;No&#8221; was very
+strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said &#8220;Yes,&#8221; among them Sissy
+Jupe.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Girl number twenty,&#8221; said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength
+of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Sissy blushed, and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So you would carpet your room&mdash;or your husband&#8217;s room, if you were a
+grown woman and had a husband&mdash;with representations of flowers, would
+you? Why would you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,&#8221; said the girl.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>&#8220;And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have
+people walking over them with heavy boots?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It wouldn&#8217;t hurt them, sir. They wouldn&#8217;t crush and wither, if you
+please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty, and
+pleasant, and I would fancy&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn&#8217;t fancy,&#8221; cried the gentleman, quite elated
+by coming so happily to this point. &#8220;That&#8217;s it! You are never to
+fancy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fact, fact, fact,&#8221; said the gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fact, fact, fact,&#8221; repeated Mr. Gradgrind.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are to be in all things regulated and governed,&#8221; said the
+gentleman, &#8220;by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact,
+composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a
+people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word
+Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have,
+in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in
+fact. You don&#8217;t walk upon flowers in fact; you can not be allowed to
+walk upon flowers in carpets. You don&#8217;t find that foreign birds and
+butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you can not be
+permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery.
+You must use for all these purposes combinations and modifications (in
+primary colours) of mathematical figures, which are susceptible of
+proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This
+is taste.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Then Mr. M&#8217;Choakumchild was asked to teach his first lesson.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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&#8217;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&mdash;or sometimes only maim him and distort him?</p></div>
+
+<p>The &#8220;maiming and distorting&#8221; of the imagination filled Dickens with alarm.
+He recognised with great clearness the law that all evil springs from
+misused good, and he knew that if the imagination is not cultivated
+properly the child not only loses the many intellectual and spiritual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+advantages that would result from its true culture, but that it is exposed
+to the terrible danger of a distorted imagination. Tom Gradgrind is used
+as a type of the degradation that results from &#8220;the strangling of the
+imagination.&#8221; Its ghost lived on to drag him down &#8220;in the form of
+grovelling sensualities.&#8221; That which, truly used, has most power to
+ennoble, has also, when warped or dwarfed, most power to degrade.</p>
+
+<p>As Mr. Varden told his wife, &#8220;All good things perverted to evil purposes
+are worse than those which are naturally bad.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The five young Gradgrinds had little opportunity to develop their
+imaginations. They were watched too closely to have any imaginative plays;
+they were not allowed to read poetry or fiction; they heard no stories;
+they had no fairies or genii in their lives; they heard nothing of giants
+or such false things; no little Boy Blue ever blew his horn for them; no
+Jack Horner took a plum out of any pie in their experience; no such
+ridiculous person as Santa Claus ever put anything in their stockings; no
+cow ever performed the impossible feat of jumping over the moon, so far as
+they knew; they had never even heard of the cow with the crumpled horn
+that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the
+malt that lay in the house that Jack built. They knew, or they could say,
+that a cow was &#8220;a graminivorous ruminating quadruped,&#8221; and that was
+enough, in the philosophy of Mr. Gradgrind.</p>
+
+<p>Sissy Jupe&#8217;s father got into difficulties in Coketown, and he became
+discouraged and ran away. Mr. Gradgrind was a good man, and meant to do
+right, so he adopted Sissy.</p>
+
+<p>He told her his intentions rather bluntly:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Jupe, I have made up my mind to take you into my house, and, when you
+are not in attendance at the school, to employ you about Mrs.
+Gradgrind, who is rather an invalid. I have explained to Miss
+Louisa&mdash;this is Miss Louisa&mdash;the miserable but natural end of your
+late career; and you are to expressly understand that the whole of
+that subject is past, and is not to be referred to any more. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>From
+this time you begin your history. You are, at present, ignorant, I know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir, very,&#8221; she answered, courtesying.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I shall have the satisfaction of causing you to be strictly educated;
+and you will be a living proof to all who come into communication with
+you, of the advantages of the training you will receive. You will be
+reclaimed and formed. You have been in the habit of reading to your
+father and those people I found you among, I dare say?&#8221; said Mr.
+Gradgrind, beckoning her nearer to him before he said so, and dropping
+his voice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Only to father and Merrylegs, sir. At least, I mean to father, when
+Merrylegs was always there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never mind Merrylegs, Jupe,&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind with a passing frown.
+&#8220;I don&#8217;t ask about him. I understand you to have been in the habit of
+reading to your father?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes, sir, thousands of times. They were the happiest&mdash;oh, of all
+the happy times we had together, sir!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was only now, when her grief broke out, that Louisa looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And what,&#8221; asked Mr. Gradgrind in a still lower voice, &#8220;did you read
+to your father, Jupe?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the
+Genies,&#8221; she sobbed out.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There,&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind, &#8220;that is enough. Never breathe a word of
+such destructive nonsense any more.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>One night, in their study den,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Louisa had been overheard to begin a conversation with her brother by
+saying, &#8220;Tom, I wonder&mdash;&#8221; upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person
+overhearing, stepped forth into the light, and said, &#8220;Louisa, never
+wonder!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating
+the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and
+affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction,
+multiplication, and division settle everything somehow, and never
+wonder. &#8220;Bring to me,&#8221; says Mr. M&#8217;Choakumchild, &#8220;yonder baby just able
+to walk, and I will engage that it will never wonder.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M&#8217;Choakumchild deliberately planned, as a result of
+a false psychology, to destroy all foolish dreamings and imaginings and
+wonderings by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> children. This same wonder power is the mightiest
+stimulus to mental and spiritual effort, the source of all true interest,
+man&#8217;s leader in his work of productive investigation.</p>
+
+<p>Wonder power should increase throughout the life of the child.
+Unfortunately, the Gradgrind philosophy is practised by many educators.
+The child&#8217;s natural wonder power is dwarfed, and an unnatural interest is
+substituted for it. Teachers kill the natural interest, and then try to
+galvanize its dead body into temporary activity. The child who was made a
+wonderer and a problem finder by God is made a problem solver by teachers.
+His dreamings and fancies have been stopped, and he has been stored with
+facts and made &#8220;practical.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gradgrind was much exercised by the fact that the people of Coketown
+did not read the scientific and mathematical books in the library so much
+as poetry and fiction. It was a melancholy fact that after working for
+fifteen hours a day &#8220;they sat down to read mere fables about men and women
+more or less like themselves, and about children more or less like their
+own. They took De Foe to their bosoms instead of Euclid, and seemed to be,
+on the whole, more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker.&#8221; This was very
+discouraging to Mr. Gradgrind.</p>
+
+<p>One night Louisa and Tom were sitting alone conversing about themselves
+and the way they were being trained by their father. In the course of
+their conversation Tom said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I am sick of my life, Loo; I hate it altogether, and I hate everybody
+except you. As to me, I am a donkey, that&#8217;s what I am. I am as
+obstinate as one, I am more stupid than one, I get as much pleasure as
+one, and I should like to kick like one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not me, I hope, Tom.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, Loo, I wouldn&#8217;t hurt <i>you</i>. I made an exception of you at first.
+I don&#8217;t know what this&mdash;jolly old&mdash;jaundiced jail&#8221;&mdash;Tom had paused to
+find a sufficiently complimentary and expressive name for the parental
+roof, and seemed to relieve his mind for a moment by the strong
+alliteration of this one&mdash;&#8220;would be without you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tom,&#8221; said his sister, after silently watching the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>sparks a while,
+&#8220;as I get older, and nearly growing up, I often sit wondering here,
+and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can&#8217;t reconcile you to
+home better than I am able to do. I don&#8217;t know what other girls know.
+I can&#8217;t play to you, or sing to you. I can&#8217;t talk to you so as to
+lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any
+amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk
+about, when you are tired.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, no more do I. I am as bad as you in that respect; and I am a
+mule too, which you&#8217;re not. If father was determined to make me either
+a prig or a mule, and I am not a prig, why, it stands to reason, I
+must be a mule. And so I am.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about,&#8221; said
+Tom, spitefully setting his teeth, &#8220;and all the Figures, and all the
+people who found them out; and I wish I could put a thousand barrels
+of gunpowder under them and blow them all up together.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Louisa sat looking at the fire so long that Tom asked, &#8220;Have you gone
+to sleep, Loo?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, Tom, I am looking at the fire.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you see in it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t see anything in it, Tom, particularly, but since I have been
+looking at it I have been wondering about you and me, grown up.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wondering again?&#8221; said Tom.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have such unmanageable thoughts,&#8221; returned his sister, &#8220;that they
+<i>will</i> wonder.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then I beg of you, Louisa,&#8221; said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the
+door without being heard, &#8220;to do nothing of that description, for
+goodness&#8217; sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last
+of it from your father. And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my
+poor head continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you
+have been, and whose education has cost what yours has, should be
+found encouraging his sister to wonder, when he knows his father has
+expressly said that she was not to do it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Louisa denied Tom&#8217;s participation in the offence; but her mother
+stopped her with the conclusive answer, &#8220;Louisa, don&#8217;t tell me, in my
+state of health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and
+physically impossible that you could have done it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>at the red
+sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me
+think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could
+hope to do in it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nonsense!&#8221; said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic. &#8220;Nonsense!
+Don&#8217;t stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you
+know very well that if it was ever to reach your father&#8217;s ears I
+should never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been
+taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the
+experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the
+whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master
+about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say
+every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to
+hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>When a boy hates home, and a girl in her teens is rejoicing at the
+prospect of a short life, there has been some serious blunder in their
+training.</p>
+
+<p>When her father was proposing to her that she should marry old Bounderby,
+Louisa said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;What do <i>I</i> know, father, of tastes and fancies; of aspirations and
+affections; of all that part of my nature in which such light things
+might have been nourished? What escape have I had from problems that
+could be demonstrated, and realities that could be grasped?&#8221; As she
+said it, she unconsciously closed her hand, as if upon a solid object,
+and slowly opened it as though she were releasing dust or ash.</p></div>
+
+<p>After her marriage to Bounderby Louisa rarely came home, and Dickens gives
+in detail a sequence of thought that passed through her mind on her
+approach to the old home after a long absence. None of the true feelings
+were stirred in her heart.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The dreams of childhood&mdash;its airy fables, its graceful, beautiful,
+humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond, so good to be
+believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown, for then the
+least among them rises to the stature of a great charity in the heart,
+suffering little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep
+with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world,
+wherein it were better for all the children of Adam <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>that they should
+oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and not
+worldly-wise&mdash;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&mdash;what had
+she to do with these?</p></div>
+
+<p>This quotation shows how clearly Dickens saw the relationship between the
+imagination and the reason. Her imagination had been dwarfed and
+perverted; and her power to feel, and to think, and to appreciate beauty,
+and to love, and to see God and understand him, was dwarfed and perverted
+as a consequence.</p>
+
+<p>Her poor mother, who had always felt that there was something wrong with
+her husband&#8217;s training, but dared not oppose him, and fully supported him
+for the sake of peace which never really came, was worn out, and had
+almost become a mental wreck. Her mind was struggling with the one great
+question. She tried and tried vainly to find what the great defect of her
+husband&#8217;s system was, but she was very sure it had a great weakness
+somewhere. She tried to explain the matter to Louisa when she came to see
+her.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;You learned a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother. Ologies of
+all kinds, from morning to night. If there is any ology left, of any
+description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can
+say is, I hope I shall never hear its name.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I can hear you, mother, when you have strength to go on.&#8221; This, to
+keep her from floating away.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But there&#8217;s something&mdash;not an ology at all&mdash;that your father has
+missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don&#8217;t know what it is. I have often
+sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its
+name now. But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write
+to him, to find out, for God&#8217;s sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give
+me a pen.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>When Louisa, unable to resist alone the temptation to go with Mr.
+Harthouse, fled to her father and told him in such earnest words that she
+cursed the hour she had been born to submit to his training, she said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t reproach you, father. What you have never nurtured in me, you
+have never nurtured in yourself; but oh! if you had only done so long
+ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a much better and much
+happier creature I should have been this day!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand
+and groaned aloud.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Father, if you had known, when we were last together here, what even
+I feared while I strove against it&mdash;as it has been my task from
+infancy to strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in
+my heart; if you had known that there lingered in my breast
+sensibilities, affections, weakness capable of being cherished into
+strength, defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more
+known to his arithmetic than his Creator is&mdash;would you have given me
+to the husband whom I am now sure that I hate?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He said, &#8220;No, no, my poor child.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that
+have hardened and spoiled me? Would you have robbed me&mdash;for no one&#8217;s
+enrichment&mdash;only for the greater desolation of this world&mdash;of the
+immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my
+refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my
+school in which I should have learned to be more humble, and more
+trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them
+better?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no, no! No, Louisa.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yet, father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my
+sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and
+surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat in regard to them, I
+should have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more
+contented, more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am
+with the eyes I have. Now, hear what I have come to say. With a hunger
+and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a moment
+appeased; with an ardent impulse toward some region where rules, and
+figures, and definitions were not quite absolute, I have grown up,
+battling every inch of my way.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>&#8220;In this strife I have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel
+into a demon. What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving,
+despising, regretting what I have not learned; and my dismal resource
+has been to think that life would soon go by, and that nothing in it
+could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>When she had finished the story of her acquaintance with Mr. Harthouse and
+his influence over her, she said: &#8220;All that I know is, your philosophy and
+your teaching will not save me. Now, father, you have brought me to this.
+Save me by some other means.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens pictured Mr. Gradgrind as a good, earnest man, who desired to do
+only good for his family.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise rod, and in
+staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he
+had meant to do great things. Within the limits of his short tether he
+had tumbled about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater
+singleness of purpose than many of the blatant personages whose
+company he kept.</p></div>
+
+<p>A careful study of what Louisa said to her father will show that Dickens
+had made a profound study of Froebel&#8217;s philosophy of the feelings and the
+imagination which is now the dominating theory of psychology, and that he
+clearly understood what Wordsworth meant when he wrote:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8220;Whose heart the holy forms of young imagination had kept pure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Sissy Jupe failed utterly to satisfy Mr. M&#8217;Choakumchild at school. She
+could not remember facts and dates. She could not be crammed successfully,
+and she had a very dense head for figures. &#8220;She actually burst into tears
+when required (by the mental process) to name immediately the cost of two
+hundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteen pence halfpenny,&#8221; so Mr.
+Gradgrind told her she would have to leave school.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I can not disguise from you, Jupe,&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind, knitting his
+brow, &#8220;that the result of your probation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> there has disappointed
+me&mdash;has greatly disappointed me. You have not acquired, under Mr. and
+Mrs. M&#8217;Choakumchild, anything like that amount of exact knowledge
+which I look for. You are extremely deficient in your facts. Your
+acquaintance with figures is very limited. You are altogether
+backward, and below the mark.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am sorry, sir,&#8221; she returned; &#8220;but I know it is quite true. Yet I
+have tried hard, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind, &#8220;yes, I believe you have tried hard; I have
+observed you, and I can find no fault in that respect.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thank you, sir. I have thought sometimes&#8221;&mdash;Sissy very timid
+here&mdash;&#8220;that perhaps I tried to learn too much, and that if I had asked
+to be allowed to try a little less, I might have&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, Jupe, no,&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind, shaking his head in his
+profoundest and most eminently practical way. &#8220;No. The course you
+pursued, you pursued according to the system&mdash;the system&mdash;and there is
+no more to be said about it. I can only suppose that the circumstances
+of your early life were too unfavourable to the development of your
+reasoning powers, and that we began too late. Still, as I have said
+already, I am disappointed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wish I could have made a better acknowledgment, sir, of your
+kindness to a poor forlorn girl who had no claim upon you, and of your
+protection of her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t shed tears,&#8221; said Mr. Gradgrind. &#8220;Don&#8217;t shed tears. I don&#8217;t
+complain of you. You are an affectionate, earnest, good young woman,
+and&mdash;and we must make that do.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>How blind a man must become when his faith in a system or a philosophy can
+make him estimate fact storing so much and character forming so little!
+Sissy could not learn facts, therefore Mr. Gradgrind mourned. The fact
+that she was &#8220;affectionate, earnest, good,&#8221; was only a trifling matter&mdash;a
+very poor substitute for brilliant acquirements in dates and facts and
+mental arithmetic.</p>
+
+<p>Sissy became, however, the good angel of the Gradgrind household. She
+helped Louisa back to a partial hope and sweetness; she gave the younger
+children, with Mr. Gradgrind&#8217;s permission, the real childhood of freedom
+and imagination, which the older children had lost <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>forever; she
+brightened the lives even of Mrs. and Mr. Gradgrind, and she helped to
+save Tom from the disgrace of his crime.</p>
+
+<p>The closing picture of the book, one of the most beautiful Dickens ever
+painted, tells the story of Sissy&#8217;s future:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>But happy Sissy&#8217;s happy children loving her; all children loving her;
+she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty
+fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler
+fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality
+with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of
+infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally
+stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show
+will be the Writing on the Wall&mdash;she holding this course as part of no
+fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or
+covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair; but simply as a duty to be
+done. Did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be!</p>
+
+<p>Dear reader! It rests with you and me whether, in our two fields of
+action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with
+lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray
+and cold.</p></div>
+
+<p>And the educational Gradgrinds of the present time sneer at Dickens
+because he puts the early training of a circus above the early training of
+a Christian home like Mr. Gradgrind&#8217;s. &#8220;The logical consequence of such
+reasoning,&#8221; they say, &#8220;would be that all children should be trained in
+circuses.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Oh, no! Dickens did not recommend a circus as a good place to train
+children. But he did believe that even a circus is a thousand times better
+than a so-called Christian home for the true and complete development of a
+child, if in the circus the child is free and happy, and is allowed full
+play for her imagination, and is not arrested in her development by rote
+storing of facts and too early drill in arithmetic, and has the rich
+productive love of even one parent, and has blessed opportunities for
+loving service for her pets and her friends; and if in the so-called
+Christian home she is robbed of these privileges even in the name of
+religion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>Sissy had a blessed, free childhood. She lived in her own imaginary world
+most of the time; she had the deep love of her kind-hearted father and of
+Merrylegs, the dog; she read poetry and fairy tales; she attended to her
+father&#8217;s needs; she had many opportunities to show her love in loving
+service for Merrylegs and her father; and she was not dwarfed by fact
+cramming and formal drill. Her chances of reaching a true womanhood were
+excellent, and when she got the opportunity for the revelation of
+character, she had character to reveal, and her character developed in its
+revelation for the benefit and happiness of others. Hers was the true
+Christian training after all. Homes and schools with such training are
+centres of great power.</p>
+
+<p>One of the strongest pleas ever made for the cultivation of the
+imagination, &#8220;the fancies and affections,&#8221; and for the teaching of
+literature, art, and music in the schools was given in Hard Times, which
+is an industrial as well as an educational story. Indeed, Dickens saw that
+the true solution of industrial questions was the proper training of the
+race. No attack on the meanness of utilitarianism and no exposition of its
+terrible dangers could be more incisive and philosophical than the
+following wonderful sentences:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, commissioners of
+fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little
+dog&#8217;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 moment 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!</p></div>
+
+<p>Altogether Hard Times is one of the most remarkable educational books ever
+written.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens made a plea for mental refreshment and recreation for the working
+classes in Nobody&#8217;s Story, similar to that made in Hard Times:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The workingman appealed to the Bigwig family, and said: &#8220;We are a
+labouring people, and I have a glimmering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> suspicion in me that
+labouring people of whatever condition were made&mdash;by a higher
+intelligence than yours, as I poorly understand it&mdash;to be in need of
+mental refreshment and recreation. See what we fall into, when we rest
+without it. Come! Amuse me harmlessly, show me something, give me an
+escape!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Beautiful Lizzie Hexam, one of the latest and highest creations of
+Dickens, longed to read, but she did not learn to do so because her father
+objected so bitterly, and she wished to avoid everything that would weaken
+the bond of love between them, lest she might lose her influence for good
+over him.</p>
+
+<p>Her brother Charley said to her:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;You said you couldn&#8217;t read a book, Lizzie. Your library of books is
+the hollow down by the flare, I think.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I should be very glad to be able to read real books. I feel my want
+of learning very much, Charley. But I should feel it much more, if I
+didn&#8217;t know it to be a tie between me and father.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens was revealing the strange fact that at first many poor and
+ignorant parents strenuously objected to their children being educated;
+and he was at the same time showing that great character growth could take
+place even without the power to read. Lizzie&#8217;s self-sacrifice for her
+father and Charley was a true revelation of the divinity in her nature.
+Though she had not read books, she had read a great deal by her
+imagination from &#8220;the hollow down by the flare.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As Dickens grew older he saw more clearly the value of the dreaming of
+childhood while awake, of the deep reveries into which young people often
+fall, and ought to fall, so that they become oblivious to their
+environment, and sweep through the universe in strange imaginings, that
+after all are very real. He was fond of drawing pictures of young people
+giving free rein to their imaginations, unchecked by intermeddling
+adulthood, while they watched the glowing fire, or the ashes falling away
+from the dying coals. Lizzie&#8217;s library from which she got her culture was
+in &#8220;the hollow down by the flare.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>Crippled little Jenny Wren, the doll&#8217;s dressmaker, said to Lizzie Hexam
+one day, when Eugene Wrayburn was visiting them:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I wonder how it happens that when I am work, work, working here, all
+alone in the summer time, I smell flowers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As a commonplace individual, I should say,&#8221; Eugene suggested
+languidly&mdash;for he was growing weary of the person of the house&mdash;&#8220;that
+you smell flowers because you <i>do</i> smell flowers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, I don&#8217;t,&#8221; said the little creature, resting one arm upon the
+elbow of her chair, resting her chin upon that hand, and looking
+vacantly before her; &#8220;this is not a flowery neighbourhood. It&#8217;s
+anything but that. And yet, as I sit at work, I smell miles of
+flowers. I smell roses till I think I see the rose leaves lying in
+heaps, bushels, on the floor. I smell fallen leaves till I put down my
+hand&mdash;so&mdash;and expect to make them rustle. I smell the white and the
+pink May in the hedges, and all sorts of flowers that I never was
+among. For I have seen very few flowers indeed in my life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pleasant fancies to have, Jennie dear!&#8221; said her friend, with a
+glance toward Eugene as if she would have asked him whether they were
+given the child in compensation for her losses.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So I think, Lizzie, when they come to me. And the birds I hear! Oh!&#8221;
+cried the little creature, holding out her hand and looking upward,
+&#8220;how they sing!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>How life in any stage might be filled with richness and joy, if
+imaginations were stored with apperceptive elements and allowed to
+reconstruct the universe in our fancies! How truly real our fancies might
+become!</p>
+
+<p>In A Child&#8217;s Dream of a Star Dickens gives an exquisite picture of the
+influence of imagination in spiritual evolution.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought
+of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his
+constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They
+wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and
+blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>bright water;
+they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely
+world.</p>
+
+<p>They used to say to one another, sometimes, Supposing all the children
+upon earth were to die, would the flowers, and the water, and the sky
+be sorry? They believed they would be sorry. For, said they, the buds
+are the children of the flowers, and the little playful streams that
+gambol down the hillsides are the children of the water; and the
+smallest bright specks playing at hide and seek in the sky all night,
+must surely be the children of the stars; and they would all be
+grieved to see their playmates, the children of men, no more.</p>
+
+<p>There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky
+before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was
+larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all the others, and
+every night they watched for it, standing hand in hand at a window.
+Whoever saw it first cried out, &#8220;I see the star!&#8221; And often they cried
+out both together, knowing so well when it would rise, and where. So
+they grew to be such friends with it, that, before lying down in their
+beds, they always looked out once again to bid it good night; and when
+they were turning round to sleep they used to say, &#8220;God bless the
+star!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But while she was still very young, oh very, very young, the sister
+drooped, and came to be so very weak that she could no longer stand in
+the window at night; and then the child looked sadly out by himself,
+and when he saw the star, turned round and said to the patient pale
+face on the bed, &#8220;I see the star!&#8221; and then a smile would come upon
+the face, and a little weak voice used to say, &#8220;God bless my brother
+and the star!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens had shown his recognition of the inestimable value of the
+imagination, and the importance of giving it free play and of doing
+everything possible to stimulate its activity by freedom, and story, and
+play, and literature, music, and art, but his description of Jemmy Jackman
+Lirriper&#8217;s training shows a keener appreciation than any of his other
+writings of the value of the child&#8217;s games in which personation is the
+leading characteristic; in which spools, or spoons, or blocks, or sticks
+are people or animals, with regular names and distinct characteristics and
+responsible duties, and in which chairs and tables and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> boxes are coaches,
+or steamboats, or railway trains. No friends are ever more real than those
+of the child&#8217;s creative imagination, with things to represent them; no
+rides ever give greater delight than those rides in trains that move only
+in the imaginations of the children, who construct them by placing the
+chairs in a row, and who act as engineers, conductors, and brakemen. Such
+games form the best elements out of which the child&#8217;s life power can be
+made, especially if the adulthood of his home sympathizes with him in his
+enterprises. They afford an outlet for his imaginative plans. In them he
+forms new worlds of his own, which are adapted to his stage of
+development, and in which he can be the creator and the centre of
+executive influence.</p>
+
+<p>Jemmy Jackman Lirriper&#8217;s training was ideal in most of his home life,
+though he had no father or mother to love and guide him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The miles and miles that me and the Major have travelled with Jemmy in
+the dusk between the lights are not to be calculated, Jemmy driving on
+the coach box, which is the Major&#8217;s brass-bound writing desk on the
+table, me inside in the easy-chair, and the Major Guard up behind with
+a brown-paper horn doing it really wonderful. I do assure you, my
+dear, that sometimes when I have taken a few winks in my place inside
+the coach and have come half awake by the flashing light of the fire
+and have heard that precious pet driving and the Major blowing up
+behind to have the change of horses ready when we got to the Inn, I
+have believed we were on the old North Road that my poor Lirriper knew
+so well. Then to see that child and the Major both wrapped up getting
+down to warm their feet and going stamping about and having glasses of
+ale out of the paper match boxes on the chimney piece, is to see the
+Major enjoying it fully as much as the child I am very sure, and it&#8217;s
+equal to any play when Coachee opens the coach door to look in at me
+inside and say &#8220;Wery &#8216;past that &#8217;tage.&mdash;&#8217;Prightened old lady?&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Such plays as Dickens here describes make one of the greatest differences
+between a real childhood and a barren childhood. The lack of opportunities
+for such perfect plays and such complete sympathy in their plays gives to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+the faces of orphan children brought up in institutions the distinctive
+look which marks them everywhere, so that they can be easily recognised by
+experienced students of happy childhood.</p>
+
+<p>But Jemmy&#8217;s make believe was not ruthlessly cut short with his early
+childhood. He continued his imaginative operations, or it might make it
+clearer to say his operative imaginations, after he went to school; and
+those beautiful old people, Mrs. Lirriper and Major Jackman, continued
+their interest, their real, perfectly sympathetic interest in his plans.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Neither should I tell you any news, my dear, in telling you that the
+Major is still a fixture in the Parlours quite as much so as the roof
+of the house, and that Jemmy is of boys the best and brightest, and
+has ever had kept from him the cruel story of his poor pretty young
+mother, Mrs. Edson, being deserted in the second floor and dying in my
+arms, fully believing that I am his born Gran and him an orphan;
+though what with engineering since he took a taste for it, and him and
+the Major making Locomotives out of parasols, broken iron pots, and
+cotton reels, and them absolutely a-getting off the line and falling
+over the table and injuring the passengers almost equal to the
+originals, it really is quite wonderful. And when I says to the Major,
+&#8220;Major, can&#8217;t you by <i>any</i> means give us a communication with the
+guard?&#8221; the Major says, quite huffy, &#8220;No, madam, it&#8217;s not to be done&#8221;;
+and when I says, &#8220;Why not?&#8221; the Major says, &#8220;That is between us who
+are in the Railway Interest, madam, and our friend, the Right
+Honourable Vice-President of the Board of Trade&#8221;; and if you&#8217;ll
+believe me, my dear, the Major wrote to Jemmy at School to consult him
+on the answer I should have before I could get even that amount of
+unsatisfactoriness out of the man, the reason being that when we first
+began with the little model and the working signals beautiful and
+perfect (being in general as wrong as the real), and when I says,
+laughing, &#8220;What appointment am I to hold in this undertaking,
+gentlemen?&#8221; Jemmy hugs me round the neck and tells me, dancing, &#8220;You
+shall be the Public, Gran,&#8221; and consequently they put upon me just as
+much as ever they like, and I sit a-growling in my easy-chair.</p>
+
+<p>My dear, whether it is that a grown man as clever as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>the Major can
+not give half his heart and mind to anything&mdash;even a plaything&mdash;but
+must get into right down earnest with it, whether it is so or whether
+it is not so, I do not undertake to say; but Jemmy is far outdone by
+the serious and believing ways of the Major in the management of the
+United Grand Junction Lirriper and Jackman Great Norfolk Parlour Line,
+&#8220;for,&#8221; says my Jemmy with the sparkling eyes when it was christened,
+&#8220;we must have a whole mouthful of name, Gran, or our dear old
+Public&#8221;&mdash;and there the young rogue kissed me&mdash;&#8220;won&#8217;t stump up.&#8221; So the
+Public took the shares&mdash;ten at ninepence, and immediately when that
+was spent twelve Preference at one and sixpence&mdash;and they were all
+signed by Jemmy and countersigned by the Major, and between ourselves
+much better worth the money than some shares I have paid for in my
+time. In the same holidays the line was made and worked and opened and
+ran excursions and collisions and had burst its boilers and all sorts
+of accidents and offences all most regular, correct, and pretty. The
+sense of responsibility entertained by the Major as a military style
+of station master, my dear, starting the down train behind time and
+ringing one of those little bells that you buy with the little coal
+scuttles off the tray round the man&#8217;s neck in the street, did him
+honour; but noticing the Major of a night when he is writing out his
+monthly report to Jemmy at school of the state of the Rolling Stock
+and the Permanent Way, and all the rest of it (the whole kept upon the
+Major&#8217;s sideboard and dusted with his own hands every morning before
+varnishing his boots), I notice him as full of thought and care, as
+full can be, and frowning in a fearful manner; but, indeed, the Major
+does nothing by halves, as witness his great delight in going out
+surveying with Jemmy when he has Jemmy to go with, carrying a chain
+and a measuring tape, and driving I don&#8217;t know what improvements right
+through Westminster Abbey, and fully believed in the streets to be
+knocking everything upside down by Act of Parliament. As please Heaven
+will come to pass when Jemmy takes to that as a profession!</p></div>
+
+<p>The Major&#8217;s participation in the plans of Jemmy is a good illustration of
+the sympathy that Froebel and Dickens felt for childhood, a sympathy
+<i>with</i>, not <i>for</i>, the child. It meant more than approval&mdash;it meant
+co-operation, partnership.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>Some educators would criticise Dickens for allowing the Major to make the
+locomotives with parasols, broken pots, and cotton reels. They teach that
+Jemmy should have made these himself. Dickens was away beyond such a
+narrow view as this. The child at first has much more power to plan than
+to execute. To leave him to himself means the failure of his plans and the
+irritation of his temper. It is a terrible experience for a child to get
+the habit of failure. The wise adult will enter into partnership with the
+child to aid in carrying out the child&#8217;s plans. He will not even make
+suggestions of changes in plans when he sees how they might be improved.
+The plans and the leadership should be absolutely the child&#8217;s own. The
+adult should be an assistant, and that only, when skill is required beyond
+that possessed by the child&mdash;either when the mechanical work is too
+difficult for the child or when more than one person is needed to execute
+his plan.</p>
+
+<p>The adult may sometimes lead the child indirectly to a change of plan, but
+he should not do it by direct suggestion. The joy is lost for the child
+when he becomes conscious of the adult as interfering even sympathetically
+with his own personality. There is a great deal of well-intentioned
+dwarfing of childhood.</p>
+
+<p>The consciousness of partnership, of unity, of sympathetic co-operation,
+is the best result of such blessed work as the Major did with Jemmy in
+carrying out Jemmy&#8217;s plans. He is the child&#8217;s best friend who most wisely
+and most thoroughly develops his imagination as a basis for all
+intellectual strength and clearness, and for the highest spiritual growth.
+He is the wealthiest man who sees diamonds in the dewdrops and unsullied
+gold in the sunset tints.</p>
+
+<p>David Copperfield tells the names of the wonderful books he found in his
+father&#8217;s blessed little room, and describes their influence upon his life.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something beyond that place
+and time&mdash;they and the Arabian Nights and the Tales of the Genii. It
+is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small
+troubles (which were great troubles to me) by impersonating my
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>favourite characters in them, as I did, and by putting Mr. and Miss
+Murdstone into all the bad ones, which I did, too. I have been Tom
+Jones&mdash;a child&#8217;s Tom Jones, a harmless creature&mdash;for a week together.
+I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a
+stretch, I verily believe.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let us end with the Boy&#8217;s story,&#8221; said Mrs. Lirriper, &#8220;for the Boy&#8217;s
+story is the best that is ever told.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>There are no other stories so enchanting, or so stimulating, as the
+stories that fill the imaginations of childhood.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">SYMPATHY WITH CHILDHOOD.</span></p>
+
+<p>The dominant element in Dickens&#8217;s character was sympathy <i>with</i> childhood,
+not merely for it. He had the productive sympathy that feels and thinks
+from the child&#8217;s standpoint.</p>
+
+<p>The illustration just given of Major Jackman&#8217;s co-operative sympathy with
+Jemmy Lirriper in the perfect carrying out of what to most people would
+have been only &#8220;the foolish ideas&#8221; of a child, as sincerely as if he had
+been executing commissions from the prime minister, is an excellent
+exemplification of the true ideal of sympathy in practice. The Major was
+not working for Jemmy&#8217;s amusement merely; he was a very active and
+genuinely interested partner with Jemmy. &#8220;Jemmy was far outdone by the
+serious and believing ways of the Major&#8221; in the imaginative plays which
+were the most real life of Jemmy. Such was the sympathy of Dickens with
+his own children; such sympathy he believed to be the most productive
+power in the teacher or child trainer for beneficent influence on the
+character of the child.</p>
+
+<p>There is no other characteristic of his writings so marked as his broad
+sympathy with childhood. Sympathy was the origin of all he wrote against
+coercion in all its dread forms, of all he wrote about robbing children of
+a real childhood, about the dwarfing of individuality, about the
+strangling of the imagination, about improper nutrition, about all forms
+of neglect, and cruelty, and bad training. The more fully his nature is
+known the more deeply he is loved, because of his great love for the
+child.</p>
+
+<p>From the beginning of his educational work his overflowing, practical
+sympathy is revealed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>He tells us in the preface to Nickleby that his study of the Yorkshire
+schools and his delineation of the character of Squeers resulted from a
+resolution formed in childhood, which he was led to form by seeing a boy
+&#8220;with a suppurated abscess caused by its being ripped open by his
+Yorkshire guide, philosopher, and friend with an inky penknife.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The sympathy of Nicholas, and John Browdie, and the Cheeryble brothers
+with Smike and all suffering childhood are strong features of the book.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens&#8217;s own sympathy has cleared his mind of many fogs that still linger
+in some minds regarding a parent&#8217;s rights in regard to his child, even
+though the parent has never recognised any of the child&#8217;s rights. The
+movement in favour of the recognition of the rights of children even
+against their parents began with Dickens. When Nicholas discovered that
+Smike was the son of his uncle, Ralph Nickleby, he went to consult brother
+Charles Cheeryble in regard to his duty under the circumstances.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He modestly, but firmly, expressed his hope that the good old
+gentleman would, under such circumstances as he described, hold him
+justified in adopting the extreme course of interfering between parent
+and child, and upholding the latter in his disobedience; even though
+his horror and dread of his father might seem, and would doubtless be
+represented, as a thing so repulsive and unnatural as to render those
+who countenanced him in it fit objects of general detestation and
+abhorrence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So deeply rooted does this horror of the man appear to be,&#8221; said
+Nicholas, &#8220;that I can hardly believe he really is his son. Nature does
+not seem to have implanted in his breast one lingering feeling of
+affection for him, and surely she can never err.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My dear sir,&#8221; replied brother Charles, &#8220;you fall into the very common
+mistake of charging upon Nature matters with which she has not had the
+smallest connection, and for which she is in no way responsible. Men
+talk of Nature as an abstract thing, and lose sight of what is natural
+while they do so. Here is a poor lad who has never felt a parent&#8217;s
+care, who has scarcely known anything all his life but suffering and
+sorrow, presented to a man who he is told is his father, and whose
+first act is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>to signify his intention of putting an end to his short
+term of happiness by consigning him to his old fate, and taking him
+from the only friend he has ever had&mdash;which is yourself. If Nature, in
+such a case, put into that lad&#8217;s breast but one secret prompting which
+urged him toward his father and away from you, she would be a liar and
+an idiot.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Nicholas was delighted to find that the old gentleman spoke so warmly,
+and in the hope that he might say something more to the same purpose,
+made no reply.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The same mistake presents itself to me, in one shape or other, at
+every turn,&#8221; said brother Charles. &#8220;Parents who never showed their
+love complain of want of natural affection in their children; children
+who never showed their duty complain of want of natural feeling in
+their parents; lawmakers who find both so miserable that their
+affections have never had enough of life&#8217;s sun to develop them are
+loud in their moralizings over parents and children too, and cry that
+the very ties of Nature are disregarded. Natural affections and
+instincts, my dear sir, are the most beautiful of the Almighty&#8217;s
+works, but, like other beautiful works of his, they must be reared and
+fostered, or it is as natural that they should be wholly obscured, and
+that new feelings should usurp their place, as it is that the sweetest
+productions of the earth, left untended, should be choked with weeds
+and briers. I wish we could be brought to consider this, and,
+remembering natural obligations a little more at the right time, talk
+about them a little less at the wrong one.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>It was chiefly to break the power of ignorant and cruel parenthood over
+suffering childhood that Ralph Nickleby was painted with such dark and
+repellent characteristics, and that poor Smike&#8217;s sufferings were detailed
+with such minuteness. The sympathy of the world was aroused against the
+one and in favour of the other, as a basis for the climax of thought which
+brother Charles expressed so truly and so forcefully.</p>
+
+<p>The same thought was driven home by the complaint of Squeers about one of
+the boys in Dotheboys Hall.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;The juniorest Palmer said he wished he was in heaven. I really don&#8217;t
+know, I do <i>not</i> know what&#8217;s to be done with that young fellow; he&#8217;s
+always a-wishing <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>something horrid. He said once he wished he was a
+donkey, because then he wouldn&#8217;t have a father as didn&#8217;t love him!
+Pretty wicious that for a child of six!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>It required the genius of Dickens to make such a clear picture of an
+unloving father.</p>
+
+<p>Even before Nicholas Nickleby was written Dickens had revealed his
+sympathetic nature. Oliver Twist&#8217;s story was written to stir the hearts of
+his readers in favour of unfortunate children. What a contrast is made
+between the hardening effects of his treatment by Bumble and the
+&#8220;gentleman in the white waistcoat,&#8221; and the humanizing influence of Rose
+Maylie&#8217;s tear dropped on his cheek.</p>
+
+<p>Surely no sensitive little boy ever submitted to more unsympathetic
+treatment than poor Oliver.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When little Oliver was taken before &#8220;the gentlemen&#8221; that evening, and
+informed that he was to go that night as general house lad to a coffin
+maker&#8217;s, and that if he complained of his situation, or ever came back
+to the parish again, he would be sent to sea, there to be drowned or
+knocked on the head, as the case might be, he evinced so little
+emotion that they by common consent pronounced him a hardened young
+rascal, and ordered Mr. Bumble to remove him forthwith.</p>
+
+<p>For some time Mr. Bumble drew Oliver along, without notice or remark;
+for the beadle carried his head very erect, as a beadle always should;
+and, it being a windy day, little Oliver was completely enshrouded by
+the skirts of Mr. Bumble&#8217;s coat as they blew open and disclosed to
+great advantage his flapped waistcoat and drab plush knee breeches. As
+they drew near to their destination, however, Mr. Bumble thought it
+expedient to look down and see that the boy was in good order for
+inspection by his new master: which he accordingly did, with a fit and
+becoming air of gracious patronage.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oliver!&#8221; said Mr. Bumble.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir,&#8221; replied Oliver in a low, tremulous voice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pull that cap off your eyes, and hold up your head, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Although Oliver did as he was desired at once, and passed the back of
+his unoccupied hand briskly across his eyes, he left a tear in them
+when he looked up at his conductor. As Mr. Bumble gazed sternly upon
+him, it rolled <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>down his cheek. It was followed by another, and
+another. The child made a strong effort, but it was an unsuccessful
+one. Withdrawing his other hand from Mr. Bumble&#8217;s, he covered his face
+with both, and wept until the tears sprung out from between his chin
+and bony fingers.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well!&#8221; exclaimed Mr. Bumble, stopping short, and darting at his
+little charge a look of intense malignity. &#8220;Well! Of <i>all</i> the
+ungratefullest and worst-disposed boys as ever I see, Oliver, you are
+the&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no, sir,&#8221; sobbed Oliver, clinging to the hand which held the
+well-known cane; &#8220;no, no, sir; I will be good indeed; indeed, indeed I
+will, sir! I am a very little boy, sir; and it is so&mdash;so&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So what?&#8221; inquired Mr. Bumble in amazement.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So lonely, sir! So very lonely!&#8221; cried the child. &#8220;Everybody hates
+me. Oh, sir, don&#8217;t, don&#8217;t, pray, be cross to me!&#8221; The child beat his
+hand upon his heart, and looked in his companion&#8217;s face with tears of
+real agony.</p></div>
+
+<p>The poor boy was put to bed by Sowerberry the first night. His master
+said, as they climbed the stairs:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Your bed&#8217;s under the counter. You don&#8217;t mind sleeping among the
+coffins, I suppose? But it doesn&#8217;t much matter whether you do or
+don&#8217;t, for you can&#8217;t sleep anywhere else. Come, don&#8217;t keep me here all
+night!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens pitied children for the terrors with which they were threatened,
+as Oliver was threatened by the board, and he pitied them also for the
+terrors that their imaginations brought to them at night. Sowerberry&#8217;s
+lack of sympathy was as great as Bumble&#8217;s. When one of his own children
+showed evidence of dread of retiring alone, Dickens sat upstairs with his
+family in the evenings afterward. He did not tell the child the reason,
+but she was saved from terror.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver ran away from Sowerberry&#8217;s, and when passing the workhouse he
+peeped between the bars of the gate into the garden. A very little boy was
+there who came to the gate to say &#8220;Good-bye&#8221; to him. He had been one of
+Oliver&#8217;s little friends.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Kiss me,&#8221; said the child, climbing up the low gate and flinging his
+little arms round Oliver&#8217;s neck: &#8220;Good-bye, dear! God bless you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>The blessing was from a young child&#8217;s lips, but it was the first that
+Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through the struggles
+and sufferings and troubles and changes of his after-life he never
+once forgot it.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Oliver was taken to commit burglary by Bill Sykes, and was wounded
+and brought into the home he was assisting to rob, the good lady of the
+house sent for a doctor. The doctor dressed the arm, and when the boy fell
+asleep he brought Mrs. Maylie and Rose to see the criminal.</p>
+
+<p>Rose sat down by Oliver&#8217;s bedside and gathered his hair from his face.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As she stooped over him her tears fell upon his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>The boy stirred and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity
+and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and
+affection he had never known. Thus a strain of gentle music, or the
+rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the
+mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim
+remembrances of scenes that never were in this life; which vanish like
+a breath; which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone
+by, would seem to have awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the
+mind can ever recall.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What can this mean?&#8221; exclaimed the elder lady. &#8220;This poor child can
+never have been the pupil of robbers!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Vice,&#8221; sighed the surgeon, replacing the curtain, &#8220;takes up her abode
+in many temples; and who can say that a fair outside shall not
+enshrine her?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But at so early an age!&#8221; urged Rose.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My dear young lady,&#8221; rejoined the surgeon, mournfully shaking his
+head, &#8220;crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered
+alone. The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But can you, oh, can you really believe that this delicate boy has
+been the voluntary associate of the worst outcasts of society?&#8221; said
+Rose.</p>
+
+<p>The surgeon shook his head in a manner which intimated that he feared
+it was very possible, and, observing that they might disturb the
+patient, led the way into an adjoining apartment.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>&#8220;But even if he has been wicked,&#8221; pursued Rose, &#8220;think how young he
+is; think that he may never have known a mother&#8217;s love, or the comfort
+of a home; that ill usage and blows, or the want of bread, may have
+driven him to herd with men who have forced him to guilt. Aunt, dear
+aunt, for mercy&#8217;s sake think of this, before you let them drag this
+sick child to a prison, which in any case must be the grave of all his
+chance of amendment. Oh! as you love me, and know that I have never
+felt the want of parents in your goodness and affection, but that I
+might have done so, and might have been equally helpless and
+unprotected with this poor child, have pity upon him before it is too
+late!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My dear love,&#8221; said the elder lady, as she folded the weeping girl to
+her bosom, &#8220;do you think I would harm a hair of his head?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no,&#8221; replied Rose eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, surely,&#8221; said the old lady; &#8220;my days are drawing to their close,
+and may mercy be shown to me as I show it to others. What can I do to
+save him, sir?&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens used the doctor to rebuke the large class of people who are ever
+ready to believe the worst about a boy, and who are always looking for his
+depravity instead of searching for the divinity in him.</p>
+
+<p>Rose&#8217;s plea for kind treatment for the boy, &#8220;even if he has been wicked,&#8221;
+was a new doctrine propounded by Dickens. The worst boys at home or in
+school need most sympathy. Mrs. Maylie&#8217;s attitude was in harmony with
+Christ&#8217;s teaching, but quite out of harmony with much that was called
+Christian practice at the time Dickens wrote Oliver Twist. He taught the
+doctrine that children were turned into evil ways and confirmed in them
+through lack of sympathy. Poor Nancy said to Rose Maylie:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Lady,&#8221; cried the girl, sinking on her knees, &#8220;dear, sweet, angel
+lady, you <i>are</i> the first that ever blessed me with such words as
+these; and if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me
+from a life of sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>In The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens gave a beautiful picture of a
+sympathetic teacher in Mr. Marton. His school was not well lighted or
+properly ventilated, the furniture<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> was poor, there was no apparatus
+except a dunce&#8217;s cap, a cane, and a ruler, his methods were old-fashioned,
+but he possessed the greatest qualification of a good teacher, deep
+sympathy with childhood. This was shown by the erasure of the blot from
+the sick boy&#8217;s writing; by his asking Nell to pray for the boy; by his
+appreciation of the boy&#8217;s love; by his hoping for his recovery against the
+unfavourable reports; by his favourable interpretation of the worst signs;
+by his absent-mindedness in school; by his giving the boys a half holiday
+because he could not teach; by his asking them to go away quietly so as
+not to disturb the sick scholar; by his saying &#8220;I&#8217;m glad they didn&#8217;t mind
+me&#8221; when the jolly boys went shouting away; by his telling the sick boy
+that the flowers missed him and were less gay on account of his absence;
+by his hanging the boy&#8217;s handkerchief out of the window at his request, as
+a token of his remembrance of the boys playing on the green; by the loving
+way in which he embraced the dying boy, and held his cold hand in his
+after he was dead, chafing it, as if he could bring back the life into it.</p>
+
+<p>Dombey and Son is full of appeals for the tender sympathy of adulthood for
+childhood. The story of Florence Dombey longing for the one look of
+tenderness, the one word of kindly interest, the one sympathetic caress
+from her father, which never came to her during her childhood, is one of
+the most touching stories ever written. It was written to show that
+children in the most wealthy homes need sympathy as much as any other
+children, and that they are often most cruelly neglected by their parents.</p>
+
+<p>Floy pleaded to be allowed to lay her face beside her baby brother&#8217;s
+because &#8220;she thought he loved her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The love that is given back in exchange for loving interest is shown by
+Paul&#8217;s loving gratitude to Floy for her interest in him, which led her to
+spend her pocket money in books, so that she might help him with his
+studies that confused him so.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And high was her reward, when one Saturday evening, as little Paul was
+sitting down as usual to &#8220;resume his studies,&#8221; she sat down by his
+side and showed him all that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>was rough made smooth, and all that was
+so dark made clear and plain, before him. It was nothing but a
+startled look in Paul&#8217;s wan face&mdash;a flush&mdash;a smile&mdash;and then a close
+embrace; but God knows how her heart leaped up at this rich payment
+for her trouble.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Floy,&#8221; cried her brother, &#8220;how I love you! How I love you, Floy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I you, dear!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I am sure, sure of that, Floy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He said no more about it, but all that evening sat close by her, very
+quiet; and in the night he called out from his little room within
+hers, three or four times, that he loved her.</p></div>
+
+<p>There is no higher reward than that of the sympathetic teacher who for the
+first time lets light into a dark mind or heart.</p>
+
+<p>The lady whom Florence overheard talking to her little orphaned niece
+about her father&#8217;s cruel coldness toward her truly said: &#8220;Not an orphan in
+the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a
+living parent&#8217;s care.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As Dickens was one of the first to urge that children had rights, so he
+was one of the first to show that there had been altogether too much
+thought about the duty of children to parents, and too little about the
+duty of parents to children. Alice Marwood, one of the characters in
+Dombey and Son, said to Harriet Carker:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;You brought me here by force of gentleness and kindness, and made me
+human by woman&#8217;s looks and words and angel&#8217;s deeds; I have felt, lying
+here, that I should like you to know this. It might explain, I have
+thought, something that used to help to harden me. I had heard so
+much, in my wrongdoing, of my neglected duty, that I took up with the
+belief that duty had not been done to me, and that as the seed was
+sown the harvest grew.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>One other point in regard to sympathy was made in Dombey and Son, that a
+rough exterior may cover a sympathetic heart.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Long may it remain in this mixed world a point not easy of decision,
+which is the more beautiful evidence of the Almighty&#8217;s goodness: the
+delicate fingers that are <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>formed for sensitiveness and sympathy of
+touch, and made to minister to pain and grief, or the rough, hard
+Captain Cuttle hand, that the heart teaches, guides, and softens in a
+moment!</p></div>
+
+<p>In the model school of Dickens Doctor Strong is said to have been &#8220;the
+idol of the whole school&#8221;; and David adds, &#8220;it must have been a badly
+composed school if he had been anything else, for he was the kindest of
+men.&#8221; Doctor Strong&#8217;s wife, who had been his pupil in early life, said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;When I was very young, quite a little child, my first associations
+with knowledge of any kind were inseparable from a patient friend and
+teacher&mdash;the friend of my dead father&mdash;who was always dear to me. I
+can remember nothing that I know without remembering him. He stored my
+mind with its first treasures, and stamped his character upon them
+all. They never could have been, I think, as good as they have been to
+me, if I had taken them from any other hands.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>David said, when telling the story of his first introduction to Mr.
+Murdstone:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;God help me, I might have been improved for my whole life, I might
+have been made another creature, perhaps, for life, by a kind word at
+that season. A word of encouragement and explanation, of pity for my
+childish ignorance, of welcome home, of reassurance to me that it was
+home, might have made me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth,
+instead of in my hypocritical outside, and might have made me respect
+instead of hate him.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>In Bleak House Dickens gave in Esther the most perfect type of human
+sympathy, and by his pathetic pictures of poor Jo, Phil, the Jellyby
+children, the Pardiggle children, and others, stirred a great wave of
+feeling, which led to a recognition of the duty of adulthood to childhood,
+and taught the value of sympathy in the training of children.</p>
+
+<p>Esther laid down a new law, revealed by Froebel, but given to the English
+world by Dickens in the weighty sentence, &#8220;My comprehension is quickened
+when my affection is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>The lack of sympathy in adulthood is revealed for the condemnation of his
+readers in Mrs. Rachael&#8217;s parting from Esther.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was
+not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to have known
+her better after so many years, and ought to have made myself enough
+of a favourite with her to make her sorry then. When she gave me one
+cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw drop from the stone
+porch&mdash;it was a very frosty day&mdash;I felt so miserable and
+self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I
+knew, that she could say good-bye so easily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, Esther!&#8221; she returned. &#8220;It is your misfortune!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Poor child, she cried afterward because Mrs. Rachael was not sorry to part
+with her.</p>
+
+<p>What a different parting she had when leaving the Miss Donnys&#8217; school,
+where for six years she had been a pupil, and for part of the time a
+teacher!</p>
+
+<p>She received a letter informing her that she was to leave Greenleaf.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Oh, never, never, never shall I forget the emotion this letter caused
+in the house! It was so tender in them to care so much for me; it was
+so gracious in that Father who had not forgotten me, to have made my
+orphan way so smooth and easy, and to have inclined so many youthful
+natures toward me, that I could hardly bear it. Not that I would have
+had them less sorry&mdash;I am afraid not; but the pleasure of it, and the
+pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, and the humble regret of it,
+were so blended, that my heart seemed almost breaking while it was
+full of rapture.</p>
+
+<p>The letter gave me only five days&#8217; notice of my removal. When every
+minute added to the proofs of love and kindness that were given me in
+those five days; and when at last the morning came, and when they took
+me through all the rooms that I might see them for the last time; and
+when some one cried, &#8220;Esther, dear, say good-bye to me here, at my
+bedside, where you first spoke so kindly to me!&#8221; and when others asked
+me only to write their names, &#8220;With Esther&#8217;s love&#8221;; and when they all
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>surrounded me with their parting presents, and clung to me weeping,
+and cried, &#8220;What shall we do when dear, dear Esther&#8217;s gone!&#8221; and when
+I tried to tell them how forbearing and how good they had all been to
+me, and how I blessed and thanked them every one&mdash;what a heart I had!</p>
+
+<p>And when the two Miss Donnys grieved as much to part with me as the
+least among them; and when the maids said, &#8220;Bless you, miss, wherever
+you go!&#8221; and when the ugly lame old gardener, who I thought had hardly
+noticed me in all those years, came panting after the coach to give me
+a little nosegay of geraniums, and told me I had been the light of his
+eyes&mdash;indeed the old man said so!&mdash;what a heart I had then!</p></div>
+
+<p>This was intended to show the results of her sympathy toward the pupils
+and everybody connected with the school.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Jellyby is an immortal picture of the woman who neglects her family
+on account of her interest in Borrioboola Gha, or some other place for
+which her sympathy is aroused. Dickens held that a woman&#8217;s first duty is
+to her children. The wretched Mr. Jellyby, almost distracted by the poor
+meals, the disorder of his home, and the wild condition of his unfortunate
+family, said to his daughter, &#8220;Never have a mission, my dear.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Caddy emphasized the thought Dickens had given in Dombey and Son through
+Alice Marwood when she said to Esther:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Oh, don&#8217;t talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where&#8217;s ma&#8217;s duty
+as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I suppose! Then
+let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it&#8217;s much more their
+affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say! Very well, so am I
+shocked, too; so we are both shocked, and there&#8217;s an end of it!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>On another occasion, overcome by emotion at the thought of her mother&#8217;s
+neglect, she said to Esther:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead. It would be a great deal
+better for us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In a moment afterward she kneeled on the ground at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>my side, hid her
+face in my dress, passionately begged my pardon, and wept. I comforted
+her, and would have raised her, but she cried, No, no; she wanted to
+stay there!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You used to teach girls,&#8221; she said. &#8220;If you could only have taught
+me, I could have learned from you! I am so very miserable, and like
+you so much!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>How the Jellyby children loved and trusted Esther! How all children loved
+and trusted her for her true sympathy!</p>
+
+<p>Poor Jo swept the steps at the graveyard where the friend who spoke kindly
+to him lay buried, and he always said of him, &#8220;He wos wery good to me, he
+wos.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And Jo&#8217;s other friends, Mr. Snagsby, whose sympathy drew half crowns from
+his pocket, and Mr. George, and Doctor Woodcourt, and Mr. Jarndyce, and
+Esther, showed their kindly sympathy for the wretched boy so fully that
+the reading world loved them as real friends, and this loving admiration
+led the Christian world to think more clearly in regard to Christ&#8217;s
+teachings about the little ones.</p>
+
+<p>No heart can resist the plea for sympathy for such as Jo in the
+description of his last illness and death. When the end was very near, as
+Allan Woodcourt was watching the heavy breathing of the sufferer,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>After a short relapse into sleep or stupor he makes of a sudden a
+strong effort to get out of bed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Stay, Jo! What now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s time for me to go to that there berryin&#8217;-ground, sir,&#8221; he
+returns with a wild look.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lie down, and tell me. What burying-ground, Jo?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed,
+he wos. It&#8217;s time fur me to go down to that there berryin&#8217;-ground,
+sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be
+berried. He used fur to say to me, &#8216;I am as poor as you to-day, Jo,&#8217;
+he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now, and have
+come there to be laid along with him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;By and bye, Jo. By and bye.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah! P&#8217;raps they wouldn&#8217;t do it if I was to go myself. But will you
+promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>&#8220;I will, indeed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thank&#8217;ee, sir. Thank&#8217;ee, sir. They&#8217;ll have to get the key of the gate
+afore they can take me in, for it&#8217;s allus locked. And there&#8217;s a step
+there, as I used for to clean with my broom.&mdash;It&#8217;s turned wery dark,
+sir. Is there any light a-comin&#8217;?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is coming fast, Jo.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very
+near its end.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jo, my poor fellow!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I&#8217;m a-gropin&#8217;&mdash;a-gropin&#8217;&mdash;let me
+catch hold of your hand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jo, can you say what I say?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it&#8217;s good.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<span class="smcap">Our Father.</span>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Our Father!&mdash;yes, that&#8217;s wery good, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<span class="smcap">Which art in Heaven.</span>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Art in Heaven&mdash;is the light a-comin&#8217;, sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is close at hand. <span class="smcap">Hallowed be thy Name!</span>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hallowed be&mdash;thy&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!</p>
+
+<p>Dead, your majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right
+reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women,
+born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us
+every day.</p></div>
+
+<p>One of the best of Dickens&#8217;s illustrations of gratitude for sympathy is
+the case of Phil Squod, Mr. George&#8217;s assistant in the shooting gallery. He
+was a mere child in everything but years of hard experiences, but he was
+devoted heart and soul to Mr. George for a kindly word of hearty sympathy.
+So devoted was he that he attached himself to Mr. George and became his
+faithful servant, and found his truest happiness in his service of love.</p>
+
+<p>Phil recalled the story to Mr. George.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;It was after the case-filling blow-up when I first see you,
+commander. You remember?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I remember, Phil. You were walking along in the sun.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Crawling, guv&#8217;ner, again a wall&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>&#8220;True, Phil&mdash;shouldering your way on&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In a nightcap!&#8221; exclaims Phil, excited.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In a nightcap&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And hobbling with a couple of sticks!&#8221; cries Phil, still more
+excited.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With a couple of sticks. When&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When you stops, you know,&#8221; cries Phil, putting down his cup and
+saucer, and hastily removing his plate from his knees, &#8220;and says to
+me, &#8216;What, comrade! You have been in the wars!&#8217; I didn&#8217;t say much to
+you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise that a person so
+strong and healthy and bold as you was should stop to speak to such a
+limping bag of bones as I was. But you says to me, says you,
+delivering it out of your chest as hearty as possible, so that it was
+like a glass of something hot: &#8216;What accident have you met with? You
+have been badly hurt. What&#8217;s amiss, old boy? Cheer up, and tell us
+about it!&#8217; Cheer up! I was cheered already! I says as much to you, you
+says more to me, I says more to you, you says more to me, and here I
+am, commander! Here I am, commander!&#8221; cries Phil, who has started from
+his chair and unaccountably begun to sidle away. &#8220;If a mark&#8217;s wanted,
+or if it will improve the business, let the customers take aim at me.
+They can&#8217;t spoil <i>my</i> beauty. <i>I&#8217;m</i> all right. Come on! If they want a
+man to box at, let &#8217;em box at me. Let &#8217;em knock me well about the
+head. <i>I</i> don&#8217;t mind! if they want a light weight, to be throwed for
+practice, Cornwall, Devonshire, or Lancashire, let &#8217;em throw me. They
+won&#8217;t hurt <i>me</i>. I have been throwed all sorts of styles all my life!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Pip said in Great Expectations:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable,
+honest-hearted, duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is
+very possible to know how it has touched one&#8217;s self in going by, and I
+know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my
+apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restless
+aspiring discontented me.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dear, simple-hearted Joe Gargery! When every one else was abusing Pip at
+the great dinner party, he showed his sympathy for him by putting some
+more gravy on his plate.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>In Our Mutual Friend Lizzie Hexam, sympathizing with her father so much
+that she would not learn to read because he was bitterly prejudiced
+against education, but sympathizing so much with her brother Charley that
+she had him educated secretly so that he might become a teacher, is an
+illustration of nearly perfect sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>The happiness of the little &#8220;minders&#8221; at old Betty Higden&#8217;s is in sharp
+contrast to the misery of the boarders of the respectable (?)
+establishment of Mrs. Pipchin. In the one case was abject poverty and
+loving sympathy, in the other plenty and cruel selfishness. When Mr. and
+Mrs. Boffin were adopting Johnnie from Betty Higden&#8217;s care, the brave old
+woman said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;If I could have kept the dear child without the dread that&#8217;s always
+upon me of his coming to that fate I have spoken of, I could never
+have parted with him, even to you. For I love him, I love him, I love
+him! I love my husband long dead and gone, in him; I love my children
+dead and gone, in him; I love my young and hopeful days dead and gone,
+in him. I couldn&#8217;t sell that love, and look you in your bright kind
+face. It&#8217;s a free gift.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Betty was not a logically reasoning woman, but God is good, and hearts
+may count in heaven as high as heads.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens spoke with great enthusiasm in his American Notes of the practical
+sympathy of Doctor Howe with all afflicted children, especially with blind
+children, closing his sketch of the wonderful work he had done with the
+sentence: &#8220;There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who after
+reading these passages can ever hear that name with indifference.&#8221; He
+noted that Laura Bridgman had a special desire for sympathy.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>She is fond of having other children noticed and caressed by the
+teachers, and those whom she respects; but this must not be carried
+too far, or she becomes jealous. She wants to have her share, which,
+if not the lion&#8217;s, is the greater part; and if she does not get it,
+she says, &#8220;<i>My mother will love me</i>.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens&#8217;s types of sympathy with children grew more perfect as he grew
+older. In his later years his head began<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> to catch up with his heart.
+Major Jackman, Mrs. Lirriper, and Doctor Marigold are among his most
+wonderfully sympathetic characters.</p>
+
+<p>What an ideal sending away to school Jemmy Lirriper had!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>So the Major being gone out and Jemmy being at home, I got the child
+into my little room here and I stood him by my chair and I took his
+mother&#8217;s own curls in my hand and I spoke to him loving and serious.
+And when I had reminded the darling how that he was now in his tenth
+year, and when I had said to him about his getting on in life pretty
+much what I had said to the Major, I broke to him how that we must
+have this same parting, and there I was forced to stop, for there I
+saw of a sudden the well-remembered lip with its tremble, and it so
+brought back that time! But with the spirit that was in him he
+controlled it soon, and he says gravely, nodding through his tears: &#8220;I
+understand, Gran&mdash;I knew it <i>must</i> be, Gran&mdash;go on, Gran, don&#8217;t be
+afraid of <i>me</i>.&#8221; And when I had said all that ever I could think of,
+he turned his bright steady face to mine, and he says just a little
+broken here and there: &#8220;You shall see, Gran, that I can be a man, and
+that I can do anything that is grateful and loving to you; and if I
+don&#8217;t grow up to be what you would like to have me&mdash;I hope it will
+be&mdash;because I shall die.&#8221; And with that he sat down by me, and I went
+on to tell him of the school, of which I had excellent
+recommendations, and where it was and how many scholars, and what
+games they played as I had heard, and what length of holidays, to all
+of which he listened bright and clear. And so it came that at last he
+says: &#8220;And now, dear Gran, let me kneel down here where I have been
+used to say my prayers, and let me fold my face for just a minute in
+your gown and let me cry, for you have been more than father&mdash;more
+than mother&mdash;more than brothers, sisters, friends&mdash;to me!&#8221; And so he
+did cry, and I too, and we were both much the better for it.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dear old Doctor Marigold, the travelling auctioneer, in his tender
+sympathy for his little girl when her mother was so cruel to her,
+whispering comforting words in her ear as he was calling for bids on his
+wares while she was dying, and afterward loving the deaf-mute child whom<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+he adopted in memory of his own child whom he had lost, has made thousands
+more kindly sympathetic with children.</p>
+
+<p>In the novel that he was writing when he died Dickens makes Canon
+Crisparkle say to Helena Landless: &#8220;You have the wisdom of Love, and it
+was the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, remember.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>David Copperfield said, &#8220;I hope that real love and truth are stronger in
+the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The effect of lack of true sympathy on the heart that should have felt and
+shown it is revealed in what Sydney Carton said to Mr. Lorry: &#8220;If you
+could say with truth to your own solitary heart to-night, &#8216;I have secured
+to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude and respect, of no human
+creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done
+nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by,&#8217; your seventy-eight years
+would be seventy-eight curses; would they not?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The contrast between the coldness and heartlessness of his parents or
+guardians and the encouraging sympathy of his teacher is one of the
+strongest features in the story of Barbox Brothers (Mugby Junction).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;You remember me, Young Jackson?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do I remember if not you? You are my first remembrance. It was
+you who told me that was my name. It was you who told me that on every
+20th of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called a
+birthday. I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What am I like, Young Jackson?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are like a blight all through the year to me. You hard-lined,
+thin-lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on! You are
+like the Devil to me&mdash;most of all when you teach me religious things,
+for you make me abhor them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?&#8221; In another voice from another
+quarter:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Most gratefully, sir. You are the ray of hope and prospering ambition
+in my life. When I attended your course I believed that I should come
+to be a great healer, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>and I felt almost happy&mdash;even though I was
+still the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate
+and drank in silence and constraint with the mask before me every day.
+As I had done every, every, every day through my school time and from
+my earliest recollection.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are like a Superior Being to me. You are like Nature beginning to
+reveal herself to me. I hear you again as one of the hushed crowd of
+young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and
+you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in
+them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?&#8221; In a grating voice from quite
+another quarter:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Too well. You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and
+announced that its course was to be suddenly and wholly changed. You
+showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox
+Brothers. You told me what I was to do, and what to be paid; you told
+me afterward, at intervals of years, when I was to sign for the Firm,
+when I became a partner, when I became the Firm. I know no more of it,
+or of myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are like my father, I sometimes think. You are hard enough and
+cold enough so to have brought up an acknowledged son. I see your
+scanty figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brown wig; but
+you, too, wear a wax mask to your death. You never by a chance remove
+it; it never by a chance falls off; and I know no more of you.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">CHILD STUDY AND CHILD NATURE.</span></p>
+
+<p>Dickens was a profound student of children, and he revealed his
+consciousness of the need of a general study of childhood in all he wrote
+about the importance of a free childhood, individuality, the imagination,
+coercion, cramming, and wrong methods of training children.</p>
+
+<p>He criticised the blindness of those who saw boys as a class or in a
+limited number of classes, distinguished by external and comparatively
+unimportant characteristics, in Mr. Grimwig, &#8220;who never saw any difference
+in boys, and only knew two sorts of boys, mealy boys and beef-faced boys.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He exposed the ignorance&mdash;the wilful ignorance&mdash;of vast numbers of parents
+and teachers who indignantly resent the suggestion that they need to study
+children, in Jane Murdstone. When Jane was interfering in the management
+of David, and with her brother totally misunderstanding him and
+misrepresenting him, his timid mother ventured to say:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I beg your pardon, my dear Jane, but are you quite sure&mdash;I am certain
+you&#8217;ll excuse me, my dear Jane&mdash;that you quite understand Davy?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I should be somewhat ashamed of myself, Clara,&#8221; returned Miss
+Murdstone, &#8220;if I could not understand the boy, or any boy. I don&#8217;t
+profess to be profound, but I do lay claim to common sense.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Many Jane Murdstones still claim that it is not necessary to study so
+common a thing as a boy. Yet a child is the most wonderful thing in the
+world, and, whether the Jane Murdstones in the schools and homes like it
+or not,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> the wise people <i>are</i> studying the child with a view to finding
+out what he should be guided to do in the accomplishment of his own
+training.</p>
+
+<p>Richard Carstone had been eight years at school, and he was a miserable
+failure in life, although a man of good ability.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It had never been anybody&#8217;s business to find out what his natural bent
+was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him.&#8221;
+Esther wisely said: &#8220;I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited
+by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying Latin verses so
+much.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens studied every subject about which he wrote with great care and
+discrimination. As an instance of this careful study it may be stated that
+medical authorities say that the description of Smike&#8217;s sickness and death
+is the best description of consumption ever written. Dickens had a
+wonderful imagination, but he never relied on his imagination for his
+facts or his philosophy. It is therefore reasonable to believe that as he
+wrote more about children than any other man or woman, he was the greatest
+and most reverent student of childhood that England has produced.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to the revelations of his conclusions given in the evolution
+of his child characters, and in the many illustrations of good and of bad
+training, he continually makes direct statements in regard to child nature
+and how to deal with it in its varied manifestations.</p>
+
+<p>His central motive was expressed by the old gentleman who found Little
+Nell astray in London: &#8220;I love these little people; and it is not a slight
+thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His ideal of unperverted child nature was entirely different from that
+which had been taught by theology and psychology. He believed the child to
+be pure and good, and that even when heredity was bad, its baneful
+influences need not blight the divinity in his life, if he was wisely
+trained and had a free life of self-activity, a suitable environment, and
+truly sympathetic friends.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>&#8220;It
+would be a curious speculation,&#8221; said I, after some restless turns
+across and across the room, &#8220;to imagine her in her future life,
+holding her solitary way among a crowd of wild, grotesque companions,
+the only pure, fresh, youthful object in the throng.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>To keep children pure and fresh was the chief aim of his life work. He had
+no respect for those who treated children as if they were grown-up,
+reasonable beings; who judged children as they would judge adults, and
+therefore misjudged them. He always remembered that a child was a little
+stranger in a new world, and that his complex nature had to adjust itself
+to its environment. He had a perfect, reverent, considerate sympathy for
+the timid young soul venturing to look out upon its new conditions. One of
+the most pathetic things in the world to him was the fact that children
+are nearly universally misunderstood and misinterpreted. How he longed to
+tear down the barriers of formalism, and conventionality, and
+indifference, and misconception from the lives of parents and teachers, so
+that timid children might be true to their better natures in their
+presence.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When little Florence timidly presented herself, Mr. Dombey stopped in
+his pacing up and down and looked toward her. Had he looked with
+greater interest and with a father&#8217;s eye, he might have read in her
+keen glance the impulses and fears that made her waver; the passionate
+desire to run clinging to him, crying, as she hid her face in his
+embrace, &#8220;Oh, father, try to love me! there&#8217;s no one else!&#8221; the dread
+of a repulse; the fear of being too bold, and of offending him; the
+pitiable need in which she stood of some assurance and encouragement;
+and how her overcharged young heart was wandering to find some natural
+resting place for its sorrow and affection.</p>
+
+<p>But he saw nothing of this. He saw her pause irresolutely at the door
+and look toward him; and he saw no more.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come in,&#8221; he said, &#8220;come in; what is the child afraid of?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She came in, and after glancing round her for a moment with an
+uncertain air, stood pressing her small hands hard together, close
+within the door.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>&#8220;Come here, Florence,&#8221;
+said her father coldly. &#8220;Do you know who I am?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, papa.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have you nothing to say to me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The tears that stood in her eyes as she raised them quickly to his
+face were frozen by the expression it wore. She looked down again and
+put out her trembling hand.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Dombey took it loosely in his own, and stood looking down upon her
+for a moment, as if he knew as little as the child what to say or do.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There! Be a good girl,&#8221; he said, patting her on the head, and
+regarding her, as it were, by stealth with a disturbed and doubtful
+look. &#8220;Go to Richards. Go!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His little daughter hesitated for another instant as though she would
+have clung about him still, or had some lingering hope that he might
+raise her in his arms and kiss her. She looked up in his face once
+more. He thought how like her expression was then to what it had been
+when she looked round at the doctor&mdash;that night&mdash;and instinctively
+dropped her hand and turned away.</p>
+
+<p>It was not difficult to perceive that Florence was at a great
+disadvantage in her father&#8217;s presence. It was not only a constraint
+upon the child&#8217;s mind, but even upon the natural grace and freedom of
+her actions.</p>
+
+<p>The child, in her grief and neglect, was so gentle, so quiet and
+uncomplaining, was possessed of so much affection that no one seemed
+to care to have, and so much sorrowful intelligence that no one seemed
+to mind or think about the wounding of, that Polly&#8217;s heart was sore
+when she was left alone again.</p></div>
+
+<p>The same lesson was given to parents and teachers in Murdstone&#8217;s treatment
+of Davy. The sensitive, shy boy was regarded as sullen, and treated &#8220;like
+a dog&#8221; in consequence. Oh, what bitterness it puts into a child&#8217;s life to
+be misunderstood by its dearest friends! If there were no other reason for
+the co-operative study of children by parents and teachers, it would be a
+sufficient reason that they might be understood and appreciated. Many
+lives are made barren and wicked by the failure of parents and teachers to
+understand them.</p>
+
+<p>It is so easy for children to get the impression that they are not liked
+by adults. When Walter started life in Mr. Dombey&#8217;s great warehouse, his
+uncle, old Solomon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> Gills, with whom he lived, asked him on his return
+from work the first day:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Has Mr. Dombey been there to-day?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes! In and out all day.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He didn&#8217;t take any notice of you, I suppose?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, he did. He walked up to my seat&mdash;I wish he wasn&#8217;t so solemn and
+stiff, uncle&mdash;and said, &#8216;Oh! you are the son of Mr. Gills, the ships&#8217;
+instrument maker.&#8217; &#8216;Nephew, sir,&#8217; I said. &#8216;I said nephew, boy,&#8217; said
+he. But I could take my oath he said son, uncle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re mistaken, I dare say. It&#8217;s no matter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, it&#8217;s no matter, but he needn&#8217;t have been so sharp, I thought.
+There was no harm in it, though he did say son. Then he told me that
+you had spoken to him about me, and that he had found me employment in
+the house accordingly, and that I was expected to be attentive and
+punctual, and then he went away. I thought he didn&#8217;t seem to like me
+much.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mean, I suppose,&#8221; observed the instrument maker, &#8220;that you didn&#8217;t
+seem to like him much.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, uncle,&#8221; returned the boy, laughing, &#8220;perhaps so; I never
+thought of that.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>This short selection reveals the disrespect for childhood which leads
+adulthood to flatly contradict what a child says, whether he is making a
+statement of fact or of opinion. This is most inconsiderate, and naturally
+leads to a corresponding disrespect for adulthood on the part of the
+child. The selection clearly intimates that childhood would be more happy,
+and like adulthood better, if adulthood was not so &#8220;solemn and stiff.&#8221;
+Parents and teachers should learn from Solomon&#8217;s philosophy that a child&#8217;s
+feelings toward an adult partly determine his impressions regarding the
+attitude of adulthood toward him.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing necessary in training a child to be his real, best self is
+to win his affectionate regard and confidence. One has to be very true,
+very unconventional, and very joyous, to do this fully.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens pitied the child because, even when he is understood, his wishes,
+plans, and decisions are not treated with respect. This is a gross
+injustice to the child&#8217;s <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>nature. As Pip so truly said: &#8220;It may be only
+small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small,
+and its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as many hands high,
+according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Adulthood needs to learn no lesson more than that childhood lives a life
+of its own, that that life should not be tested by the scales and tape
+lines of adulthood, and that within its range of action its choice should
+be respected, and its opinions treated with reverent consideration.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Lirriper said that when she used to read the Bible to Mrs. Edson,
+when that lady was dying, &#8220;though she took to all I read to her, I used to
+fancy that next to what was taught upon the Mount she took most of all to
+his gentle compassion for us poor women, and to his young life, and to how
+his mother was proud of him, and treasured his sayings in her heart.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The divinity in any child will grow more rapidly if his mother &#8220;treasures
+his sayings in her heart.&#8221; We need more reverence for the child.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens tried to make parents regard the child as a sacred thing, which
+should always be the richest joy of his parents.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of Mrs. Darnay, in The Tale of Two Cities, he says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among
+the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the
+sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they
+would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those
+coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child&#8217;s laugh,
+and the divine Friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had
+confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as he took the
+child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens had profound faith in children whose true development had not been
+arrested.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Doctor Strong had a simple faith in him that might have touched the
+stone hearts of the very urns upon the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>wall.... He appealed in
+everything to the honour and good faith of the boys, and relied on
+their possession of those qualities unless they proved themselves
+unworthy.</p></div>
+
+<p>Reliance begets reliance. Faith increases the qualities that merit faith.</p>
+
+<p>David said the doctor&#8217;s reliance on the boys &#8220;worked wonders.&#8221; No wonder
+it worked wonders. We can help a boy to grow no higher than our faith in
+him can reach.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">BAD TRAINING.</span></p>
+
+<p>In addition to the bad training found in so many of his best-known
+schools, to show the evils of coercion in all forms, of the child
+depravity ideal, of the loss of a free, real, rich childhood, of the
+dwarfing of individuality, of the deadening of the imagination, and other
+similar evils, Dickens&#8217;s books, from Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood, contain
+many illustrations of utterly wrong methods of training children.</p>
+
+<p>The mean and cruel way in which children used to be treated by the
+managers of institutions is described in Oliver Twist. Dickens said that
+when Oliver was born he cried lustily.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If he could have known that he was an orphan, left to the tender
+mercies of church wardens and overseers, perhaps he would have cried
+the louder.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bow to the board,&#8221; said Bumble, when he was brought before that
+august body. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were
+lingering in his eyes, and seeing no board but the table, fortunately
+bowed to that.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s your name, boy?&#8221; said the gentleman in the high chair.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made
+him tremble; and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made
+him cry. These two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating
+voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool.
+Which was a capital way of raising his spirits and putting him quite
+at his ease.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Boy,&#8221; said the gentleman in the high chair, &#8220;listen to me. You know
+you&#8217;re an orphan, I suppose?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s that, sir?&#8221; inquired poor Oliver.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>&#8220;The boy is a fool&mdash;I thought
+he was,&#8221; said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hush!&#8221; said the gentleman who had spoken first. &#8220;You know you&#8217;ve got
+no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don&#8217;t
+you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir,&#8221; replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What are you crying for?&#8221; inquired the gentleman in the white
+waistcoat. And, to be sure, it was very extraordinary. What <i>could</i>
+the boy be crying for?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I hope you say your prayers every night,&#8221; said another gentleman in a
+gruff voice, &#8220;and pray for the people who feed and take care of
+you&mdash;like a Christian.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir,&#8221; stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was
+unconsciously right. It would have been <i>very</i> like a Christian, and a
+marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people
+who fed and took care of <i>him</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>The dreadful practices of first making children self-conscious and
+apparently dull by abuse and formalism, and then calling them &#8220;fools,&#8221; or
+&#8220;stupid,&#8221; or &#8220;dunces,&#8221; are happily not so common now.</p>
+
+<p>In Barnaby Rudge he makes Edward Chester complain to his father about the
+way he had been educated.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>From my childhood I have been accustomed to luxury and idleness, and
+have been bred as though my fortune were large and my expectations
+almost without a limit. The idea of wealth has been familiarized to me
+from my cradle. I have been taught to look upon those means by which
+men raise themselves to riches and distinction as being beyond my
+breeding and beneath my care. I have been, as the phrase is, liberally
+educated, and am fit for nothing.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens was in terrible earnest to kill all the giants that preyed on the
+lifeblood of the joy, the hope, the freedom, the selfhood, and the
+imagination of childhood. He waged unceasing warfare against the system
+which he described as</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The excellent and thoughtful old system, hallowed by long
+prescription, which has usually picked out from the rest of mankind
+the most dreary and uncomfortable <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>people that could possibly be laid
+hold of, to act as instructors of youth.</p></div>
+
+<p>The selfish and mercenary ideal and its consequences are dealt with in the
+training of Jonas Chuzzlewit:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The education of Mr. Jonas had been conducted from his cradle on the
+strictest principles of the main chance. The very first word he
+learned to spell was &#8220;gain,&#8221; and the second one (when he got into two
+syllables) &#8220;money.&#8221; But for two results, which were not clearly
+foreseen perhaps by his watchful parent in the beginning, his training
+may be said to have been unexceptionable. One of these flaws was, that
+having been long taught by his father to overreach everybody, he had
+imperceptibly acquired a love of overreaching that venerable monitor
+himself. The other, that from his early habits of considering
+everything as a question of property, he had gradually come to look
+with impatience on his parent as a certain amount of personal estate
+which had no right whatever to be going at large, but ought to be
+secured in that particular description of iron safe which is commonly
+called a coffin, and banked in the grave.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Charity Pecksniff reproved Jonas for speaking irreverently of her
+father, he said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Ecod, you may say what you like of <i>my</i> father, then, and so I give
+you leave,&#8221; said Jonas. &#8220;I think it&#8217;s liquid aggravation that
+circulates through his veins, and not regular blood. How old should
+you think my father was, cousin?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Old, no doubt,&#8221; replied Miss Charity; &#8220;but a fine old gentleman.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A fine old gentleman!&#8221; repeated Jonas, giving the crown of his hat an
+angry knock. &#8220;Ah! It&#8217;s time he was thinking of being drawn out a
+little finer, too. Why, he&#8217;s eighty!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is he, indeed?&#8221; said the young lady.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And ecod,&#8221; cried Jonas, &#8220;now he&#8217;s gone so far without giving in, I
+don&#8217;t see much to prevent his being ninety; no, nor even a hundred.
+Why, a man with any feeling ought to be ashamed of being eighty, let
+alone more. Where&#8217;s his religion, I should like to know, when he goes
+flying in the face of the Bible like that? Threescore and ten&#8217;s the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>mark; and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what&#8217;s
+expected of him, has any business to live longer.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>When Jonas was particularly brutal in the treatment of Chuffey, the old
+clerk, his father seemed to enjoy his son&#8217;s sharpness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was strange enough that Anthony Chuzzlewit, himself so old a man,
+should take a pleasure in these gibings of his estimable son at the
+expense of the poor shadow at their table; but he did, unquestionably,
+though not so much&mdash;to do him justice&mdash;with reference to their ancient
+clerk, as in exultation at the sharpness of Jonas. For the same
+reason, that young man&#8217;s coarse allusions, even to himself, filled him
+with a stealthy glee, causing him to rub his hands and chuckle
+covertly, as if he said in his sleeve, &#8220;<i>I</i> taught him. <i>I</i> trained
+him. This is the heir of my bringing up. Sly, cunning, and covetous,
+he&#8217;ll not squander my money. I worked for this; I hoped for this; it
+has been the great end and aim of my life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>What a noble end and aim it was to contemplate in the attainment,
+truly! But there be some who manufacture idols after the fashion of
+themselves, and fail to worship them when they are made; charging
+their deformity on outraged Nature. Anthony was better than these at
+any rate.</p></div>
+
+<p>Exaggerated! Slightly exaggerated, but terribly true to Nature. Centring
+the life of a child on one base materialistic aim is certain to make a
+degraded if not a dangerous character. Every noble energy that should have
+given spiritual strength and beauty is devoured by the material monster as
+he grows in the heart. Respect for age, even for parents, is lost with all
+other virtues, and humanity becomes not a brotherhood to be co-operated
+with for noble purposes, but a horde to be entrapped and cheated. Jonas
+delighted his father with his rule in business: &#8220;Here&#8217;s the rule for
+bargains&mdash;&#8216;Do other men, for they would do you.&#8217; That&#8217;s the true business
+precept. All others are counterfeits.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of the conversation heard by Martin Chuzzlewit at the boarding
+house in New York, he said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater
+part of it may be summed up in one word: Dollars. All their cares,
+hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations seemed to be melted
+down into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into
+the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab
+with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by
+their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked
+down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any
+venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that
+worthless ballast, honour and fair dealing, which any man cast
+overboard from the ship of his good name and good intent, the more
+ample stowage room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and
+mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute
+it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a
+degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars! What is a flag to <i>them</i>!</p></div>
+
+<p>This was a solemn warning against the training of a race with such low
+ideals.</p>
+
+<p>In the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens shows that he deliberately
+planned Jonas Chuzzlewit as a psychological study. He says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I conceive that the sordid coarseness and brutality of Jonas would be
+unnatural, if there had been nothing in his early education, and in
+the precept and example always before him, to engender and develop the
+vices that make him odious. But, so born and so bred&mdash;admired for that
+which made him hateful, and justified from his cradle in cunning,
+treachery, and avarice&mdash;I claim him as the legitimate issue of the
+father upon whom those vices are seen to recoil. And I submit that
+their recoil upon that old man, in his unhonoured age, is not a mere
+piece of poetical justice, but is the extreme exposition of a direct
+truth.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pipchin was described as a child trainer of great respectability. She
+adopted the business of child training because her husband lost his money.
+Dickens did great service to the world by ridiculing the outrageous
+practice of sending children to be trained by women or taught by men whose
+only qualification for the most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> sacred of all duties was the fact that
+they had lost their money, and were therefore likely to be bad tempered
+and severe. He had already introduced Squeers to the world, but he knew
+that many people who shuddered at Squeers would send their own children to
+such as Mrs. Pipchin, because she was respectable and poor. He wished to
+alarm such people; hence Mrs. Pipchin.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Chick, Mr. Dombey&#8217;s sister, and Miss Tox called Mr. Dombey&#8217;s
+attention to Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s establishment.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Mrs. Pipchin, my dear Paul,&#8221; returned his sister, &#8220;is an elderly
+lady&mdash;Miss Tox knows her whole history&mdash;who has for some time devoted
+all the energies of her mind, with the greatest success, to the study
+and treatment of infancy, and who has been extremely well connected.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This celebrated Mrs. Pipchin was a marvellous, ill-favoured,
+ill-conditioned old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face
+like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard gray eye that looked as if it
+might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any injury.
+Forty years at least had elapsed since the Peruvian mines had been the
+death of Mr. Pipchin; but his relict still wore black bombazine, of
+such a lustreless, deep, dead, sombre shade that gas itself couldn&#8217;t
+light her up after dark, and her presence was a quencher to any number
+of candles. She was generally spoken of as &#8220;a great manager&#8221; of
+children; and the secret of her management was, to give them
+everything that they didn&#8217;t like and nothing that they did&mdash;which was
+found to sweeten their dispositions very much.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Paul and Florence were taken to Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s establishment, Mrs.
+Pipchin gave them an opportunity to study her disciplinary system as soon
+as Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox went away. &#8220;Master Bitherstone was divested of
+his collar at once, which he had worn on parade,&#8221; and Miss Pankey, the
+only other little boarder at present, was walked off to the castle dungeon
+(an empty apartment at the back, devoted to correctional purposes), for
+having sniffed thrice in the presence of visitors.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>At one o&#8217;clock there was a dinner, chiefly of the farinaceous and
+vegetable kind, when Miss Pankey (a mild little blue-eyed morsel of a
+child, who was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>shampooed every morning, and seemed in danger of being
+rubbed away altogether) was led in from captivity by the ogress
+herself, and instructed that nobody who sniffed before visitors ever
+went to heaven. When this great truth had been thoroughly impressed
+upon her, she was regaled with rice; and subsequently repeated the
+form of grace established in the castle, in which there was a special
+clause thanking Mrs. Pipchin for a good dinner. Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s niece,
+Berinthia, took cold pork. Mrs. Pipchin, whose constitution required
+warm nourishment, made a special repast of mutton chops, which were
+brought in hot and hot, between two plates, and smelled very nice.</p>
+
+<p>As it rained after dinner and they couldn&#8217;t go out walking on the
+beach, and Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s constitution required rest after chops, they
+went away with Berry (otherwise Berinthia) to the dungeon&mdash;an empty
+room looking out upon a chalk wall and a water butt, and made ghastly
+by a ragged fireplace without any stove in it. Enlivened by company,
+however, this was the best place after all; for Berry played with them
+there, and seemed to enjoy a game at romps as much as they did; until
+Mrs. Pipchin knocking angrily at the wall, like the Cock Lane Ghost
+revived, they left off, and Berry told them stories in a whisper until
+twilight.</p>
+
+<p>For tea there was plenty of milk and water, and bread and butter, with
+a little black teapot for Mrs. Pipchin and Berry, and buttered toast
+unlimited for Mrs. Pipchin, which was brought in, hot and hot, like
+the chops. Though Mrs. Pipchin got very greasy outside over this dish,
+it didn&#8217;t seem to lubricate her internally at all; for she was as
+fierce as ever, and the hard gray eye knew no softening.</p>
+
+<p>After tea, Berry brought out a little workbox, with the Royal Pavilion
+on the lid, and fell to working busily; while Mrs. Pipchin, having put
+on her spectacles and opened a great volume bound in green baize,
+began to nod. And whenever Mrs. Pipchin caught herself falling forward
+into the fire, and woke up, she filliped Master Bitherstone on the
+nose for nodding too.</p>
+
+<p>At last it was the children&#8217;s bedtime, and after prayers they went to
+bed. As little Miss Pankey was afraid of sleeping alone in the dark,
+Mrs. Pipchin always made a point of driving her upstairs herself, like
+a sheep; and it was cheerful to hear Miss Pankey moaning long
+afterward, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>in the least eligible chamber, and Mrs. Pipchin now and
+then going in to shake her. At about half-past nine o&#8217;clock the odour
+of a warm sweetbread (Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s constitution wouldn&#8217;t go to sleep
+without sweetbread) diversified the prevailing fragrance of the house,
+which Mrs. Wickam said was &#8220;a smell of building,&#8221; and slumber fell
+upon the castle shortly after.</p>
+
+<p>The breakfast next morning was like the tea overnight, except that
+Mrs. Pipchin took her roll instead of toast, and seemed a little more
+irate when it was over. Master Bitherstone read aloud to the rest a
+pedigree from Genesis (judiciously selected by Mrs. Pipchin), getting
+over the names with the ease and clearness of a person tumbling up the
+treadmill. That done, Miss Pankey was borne away to be shampooed, and
+Master Bitherstone to have something else done to him with salt water,
+from which he always returned very blue and dejected. Paul and
+Florence went out in the meantime on the beach with Wickam&mdash;who was
+constantly in tears&mdash;and at about noon Mrs. Pipchin presided over some
+Early Readings. It being a part of Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s system not to
+encourage a child&#8217;s mind to develop and expand itself like a young
+flower, but to open it by force like an oyster, the moral of these
+lessons was usually of a violent and stunning character; the hero&mdash;a
+naughty boy&mdash;seldom, in the mildest catastrophe, being finished off by
+anything less than a lion or a bear.</p>
+
+<p>Sunday evening was the most melancholy evening in the week; for Mrs.
+Pipchin always made a point of being particularly cross on Sunday
+nights. Miss Pankey was generally brought back from an aunt&#8217;s at
+Rottingdean, in deep distress; and Master Bitherstone, whose relatives
+were all in India, and who was required to sit, between the services,
+in an erect position with his head against the parlour wall, neither
+moving hand nor foot, suffered so acutely in his young spirits that he
+once asked Florence, on a Sunday night, if she could give him any idea
+of the way back to Bengal.</p>
+
+<p>But it was generally said that Mrs. Pipchin was a woman of system with
+children; and no doubt she was. Certainly the wild ones went home tame
+enough, after sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof.</p>
+
+<p>At this exemplary old lady Paul would sit staring in his little
+armchair by the fire for any length of time. He never seemed to know
+what weariness was when he was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>looking fixedly at Mrs. Pipchin. He
+was not fond of her; he was not afraid of her; but in those old, old
+moods of his, she seemed to have a grotesque attraction for him. There
+he would sit, looking at her, and warming his hands, and looking at
+her, until he sometimes quite confounded Mrs. Pipchin, ogress as she
+was. Once she asked him, when they were alone, what he was thinking
+about.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You,&#8221; said Paul, without the least reserve.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And what are you thinking about me?&#8221; asked Mrs. Pipchin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m thinking how old you must be,&#8221; said Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mustn&#8217;t say such things as that, young gentleman,&#8221; returned the
+dame. &#8220;That&#8217;ll never do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why not?&#8221; asked Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because it&#8217;s not polite,&#8221; said Mrs. Pipchin snappishly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not polite?&#8221; said Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not polite,&#8221; said Paul innocently, &#8220;to eat all the mutton chops
+and toast, Wickam says.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wickam,&#8221; retorted Mrs. Pipchin, colouring, &#8220;is a wicked, impudent,
+bold-faced hussy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s that?&#8221; inquired Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never you mind, sir,&#8221; retorted Mrs. Pipchin. &#8220;Remember the story of
+the little boy that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking
+questions.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If the bull was mad,&#8221; said Paul, &#8220;how did he know that the boy had
+asked questions? Nobody can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I
+don&#8217;t believe that story.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t believe it, sir?&#8221; repeated Mrs. Pipchin, amazed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; said Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not if it should happen to have been a tame bull, you little
+infidel?&#8221; said Mrs. Pipchin.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>&#8220;Berry&#8217;s very fond of you, ain&#8217;t she?&#8221; Paul once asked Mrs. Pipchin
+when they were sitting by the fire with the cat.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; said Mrs. Pipchin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why?&#8221; asked Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why?&#8221; returned the disconcerted old lady. &#8220;How can you ask such
+things, sir? Why are you fond of your sister Florence?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because she&#8217;s very good,&#8221; said Paul. &#8220;There&#8217;s nobody like Florence.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>&#8220;Well!&#8221; retorted Mrs.
+Pipchin shortly, &#8220;and there&#8217;s nobody like me, I suppose.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ain&#8217;t there really, though?&#8221; asked Paul, leaning forward in his
+chair, and looking at her very hard.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; said the old lady.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am glad of that,&#8221; observed Paul, rubbing his hands thoughtfully.
+&#8220;That&#8217;s a very good thing.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>To which every one would say &#8220;Amen,&#8221; if they could believe Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s
+statement to be actually true.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pipchin combined in her &#8220;system&#8221; many of the evils of child training.</p>
+
+<p>She was not good-looking, and those who train children should be decidedly
+good-looking. They need not be handsome; they ought to be winsome. Her
+&#8220;mottled face like bad marble, and hard grey eye&#8221; meant danger to
+childhood.</p>
+
+<p>She was gloomy in appearance, in manner, and in dress, all
+disqualifications for any position connected with child development.</p>
+
+<p>She was &#8220;a bitter old lady,&#8221; and children should be surrounded with an
+atmosphere of sweetness and joyousness.</p>
+
+<p>Her one diabolical rule was &#8220;to give children everything they didn&#8217;t like
+and nothing they did like.&#8221; This rule is the logical limit of the doctrine
+of child depravity.</p>
+
+<p>She was generally spoken of as a &#8220;great manager,&#8221; simply because she
+compelled children to do her bidding by fear of punishment in the
+&#8220;dungeon,&#8221; or of being sent to bed, or robbed of their meals, or by some
+other mean form of contemptible coercion. These processes were praised as
+excellent till Dickens destroyed their respectability. His title
+&#8220;child-queller&#8221; is admirable, and full of philosophy. Many a man has been
+able to form a truer conception regarding child freedom through the
+influence of the word &#8220;child-queller.&#8221; Every teacher should ask himself
+every day, &#8220;Am I a child-queller?&#8221; It will be a blessed thing for the
+children when there shall be no more Pipchinny teachers.</p>
+
+<p>The environment of the ogress was not attractive. The gardens grew only
+marigolds, snails were on the doors, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> bad odours in the house. &#8220;In the
+winter time the air couldn&#8217;t be got out of the castle, and in the summer
+time it couldn&#8217;t be got in.&#8221; Dickens knew that the environment of children
+has a direct influence on their characters, and that ventilation is
+essential to good health. These lessons were needed fifty years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pipchin made children dishonest by putting on collars for parade.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The farinaceous and vegetable&#8221; diet, the &#8220;regaled with rice&#8221; criticisms
+show that Dickens anticipated by half a century the present interest in
+the study of nutrition as one of the most important educational subjects.</p>
+
+<p>The combination of coercion and religion is ridiculed in the theological
+constraint of Mrs. Pipchin, when she told little Miss Pankey &#8220;that nobody
+who sniffed before visitors ever went to heaven.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The outrageous selfishness of adulthood was exposed by the description of
+Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s anger at the play of the children in the back room when it
+was raining and they could not go out.</p>
+
+<p>The injustice of the &#8220;child-queller&#8221; was shown because she filliped Master
+Bitherstone on the nose for nodding in the evening, whenever she woke up
+from her own nodding.</p>
+
+<p>The sacrilege of having prayers between two processes of cruelty is worthy
+of note. Religion should never be associated in the mind of a child with
+injustice, cruelty, or any meanness.</p>
+
+<p>The dreadful practice of driving timid children to sleep in the dark was
+another of Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s accomplishments. The retiring hour of childhood
+should be made the happiest and most nerve soothing of the day. Wise and
+sympathetic adulthood, especially motherhood, can then reach the central
+nature of the child most successfully.</p>
+
+<p>The formal reading of a meaningless selection from the Bible by
+Bitherstone tended to prevent the development of a true interest in that
+most interesting of all books.</p>
+
+<p>The Early Readings, with the bad boy in the story<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> &#8220;being finished off
+generally by a lion or a bear,&#8221; were a fit accompaniment to a system in
+which no child&#8217;s mind was encouraged to expand like a flower naturally,
+but to be opened by force like an oyster.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens began with Mrs. Pipchin his revelation of the great blunder of
+checking the questions of children. &#8220;Remember the story of the little boy
+that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking questions,&#8221; she said to
+Paul. The same evil is pointed out in the training of Pip in Great
+Expectations.</p>
+
+<p>Another common error is revealed by Mrs. Pipchin, when she called Paul &#8220;a
+little infidel,&#8221; because he did not accept her statement about the mad
+bull, although she knew it to be false herself. Even when children doubt
+the truth they should not be called &#8220;infidels,&#8221; unless, indeed, it is
+desired to make them definitely and consciously sceptical.</p>
+
+<p>The Puritan Sabbath was a part of Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s quelling system too.</p>
+
+<p>It was little wonder, therefore, that the wild children went home tame
+enough after a few months in her awful institution.</p>
+
+<p>Few men who have ever lived have studied the child and his training so
+thoroughly as to be able to condense into such brief space so many of the
+evils of bad training.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pipchin and Mr. Squeers have been made to do good work for childhood.</p>
+
+<p>Biler was so badly treated at the grinders&#8217; school that he played hookey,
+but that was not the worst feature of his education. They did not feel any
+responsibility for character development in the school of the Charitable
+Grinders.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>But they never taught honour at the grinders&#8217; school, where the system
+that prevailed was particularly strong in the engendering of
+hypocrisy; insomuch that many of the friends and masters of past
+grinders said, if this were what came of education for the common
+people, let us have none. Some more rational said, Let us have a
+better one; but the governing powers of the grinders&#8217; company were
+always ready for <i>them</i>, by picking out a few boys <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>who had turned out
+well in spite of the system, and roundly asserting that they could
+have only turned out well because of it. Which settled the business of
+those objectors out of hand, and established the glory of the
+grinders&#8217; institution.</p></div>
+
+<p>In David Copperfield, Uriah Heep, utterly detestable in character, is the
+natural product of the system of training under which both he and his
+father were brought up. Uriah said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys;
+and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of
+charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness&mdash;not
+much else that I know of&mdash;from morning to night. We was to be umble to
+this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to
+make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves
+before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the
+monitor medal by being umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by
+being umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being
+such a well-behaved man that they were determined to bring him on. &#8216;Be
+umble, Uriah,&#8217; says father, &#8216;and you&#8217;ll get on. It was what was always
+being dinned into you and me at school; it&#8217;s what goes down best. Be
+umble,&#8217; says father, &#8216;and you&#8217;ll do!&#8217; And really it ain&#8217;t done bad!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that this detestable
+cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I
+had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed. I had never
+doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended
+now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful
+spirit must have been engendered by this early, and this long,
+suppression.</p></div>
+
+<p>David himself tells how he suffered after the death of his mother from the
+cold neglect of Mr. Murdstone and Jane Murdstone. No child can be so
+destitute as the child who is neglected through dislike.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And now I fell into a state of neglect, which I can not look back upon
+without compassion. I fell at once into a solitary condition&mdash;apart
+from all friendly notice, apart <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>from the society of all other boys of
+my own age, apart from all companionship but my own spiritless
+thoughts&mdash;which seems to cast its gloom upon this paper as I write.</p>
+
+<p>What would I have given to have been sent to the hardest school that
+ever was kept! to have been taught something, anyhow, anywhere! No
+such hope dawned upon me. They disliked me, and they sullenly,
+sternly, steadily overlooked me. I think Mr. Murdstone&#8217;s means were
+straitened at about this time; but it is little to the purpose. He
+could not bear me; and in putting me from him he tried, as I believe,
+to put away the notion that I had any claim upon him&mdash;and succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>I was not actively ill used. I was not beaten or starved; but the
+wrong that was done to me had no intervals of relenting, and was done
+in a systematic, passionless manner. Day after day, week after week,
+month after month, I was coldly neglected. I wonder sometimes, when I
+think of it, what they would have done if I had been taken with an
+illness&mdash;whether I should have lain down in my lonely room and
+languished through it in my usual solitary way, or whether anybody
+would have helped me out.</p></div>
+
+<p>But the greatest lesson in wrong training given in David Copperfield is
+the character development of Steerforth. He was ruined by the misdirected
+love of his mother, and his life is a fine psychological study.</p>
+
+<p>He was a boy of unusually good ability and great attractiveness. He
+possessed by nature every element of power and grace required to make him
+a strong, true, and very successful man; but the love of his mother
+degenerated to pride and admiration, indulgence was substituted for
+guidance, and the strong woman became weak at the vital point of training
+her boy. She allowed him to become selfish and vain by yielding to his
+caprices. She thought she was making his character strong by allowing no
+restraint to be put upon it. She failed to distinguish between license and
+liberty. She had conceived the ideal of the need of freedom, but she knew
+naught of the true harmony between control and spontaneity. She allowed
+the spontaneity, and gloried in his resistance to control. She was blind
+to the balancing element in &#8220;the perfect law of liberty.&#8221; She made her boy
+a powerful engine<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> without a governor valve. So his selfhood became
+selfishness, and his character was wrecked. Among other immoral opinions
+that he gained from his mother&#8217;s training was the idea that he belonged to
+a select class superior to common humanity. How Dickens hated this
+thought! Rosa Dartle asked Steerforth about</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;That sort of people&mdash;are they really animals and clods, and beings of
+another order? I want to know so much.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, there&#8217;s a pretty wide separation between them and us,&#8221; said
+Steerforth, with indifference. &#8220;They are not to be expected to be as
+sensitive as we are. Their delicacy is not to be shocked or hurt very
+easily. They are wonderfully virtuous, I dare say&mdash;some people contend
+for that, at least, and I am sure I don&#8217;t want to contradict them; but
+they have not very fine natures, and they may be thankful that, like
+their coarse, rough skins, they are not easily wounded.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>He was trained to despise work, which is a good start toward the utter
+loss of character. A boy who despises his fellow-beings whom he assumes to
+rank below him, and who also despises work, instead of recognising the
+duty of every man to be a producer or a distributor of power, may easily
+fall into moral degeneracy.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Help yourself, Copperfield!&#8221; said Steerforth. &#8220;We&#8217;ll drink the
+daisies of the field, in compliment to you; and the lilies of the
+valley that toil not, neither do they spin, in compliment to me&mdash;the
+more shame for me!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>His character lacked seriousness. He had the fatal levity that led him to
+discuss the most sacred subjects in a flippant manner.</p>
+
+<p>His mother knew that Creakle&#8217;s school was not a proper place for him, but
+she wished to make him conscious of his superiority even over his teacher,
+and she knew that Creakle, tyrannical bully though he was, would yield to
+Steerforth, because his mother was wealthy.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;It was not a fit school generally for my son,&#8221; said she; &#8220;far from
+it; but there were particular circumstances to be considered at the
+time, of more importance even <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>than that selection. My son&#8217;s high
+spirit made it desirable that he should be placed with some man who
+felt its superiority, and would be content to bow himself before it;
+and we found such a man there.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>What a perversion of the ideal of freedom in the development of character,
+to suppose that it could only reach perfection by a consciousness of
+superiority; by having some one who should control him bow down before
+him! No man in the world is truly free who has a desire to dominate some
+one else&mdash;another man, a woman, or a child. Yet Mrs. Steerforth sacrificed
+her son&#8217;s education in order that his manly spirit might be cultivated by
+the subordination of the man who should have governed him. She showed
+better judgment in deciding that a coercive tyrant like Creakle would make
+a subservient sycophant.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;My son&#8217;s great capacity was tempted on there by a feeling of
+voluntary emulation and conscious pride,&#8221; the fond lady went on to
+say. &#8220;He would have risen against all constraint; but he found himself
+the monarch of the place, and he haughtily determined to be worthy of
+his station. It was like himself.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>As Steerforth began consciously to feel his better nature surrendering to
+his sensuality, he experienced the pangs that all strong natures feel at
+the loss of moral power, and one time when he and David were visiting Mr.
+Peggotty at Yarmouth he seemed to be moody and disposed to sadness. He
+said suddenly to David when they were alone one day:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;David, I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last twenty
+years!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!&#8221; he exclaimed. &#8220;I
+wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me.
+He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a
+nephew,&#8221; he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney
+piece, with his face toward the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>fire, &#8220;than to be myself, twenty
+times richer and twenty times wiser and be the torment to myself that
+I have been, in this Devil&#8217;s bark of a boat, within the last half
+hour!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>He had already begun to poison the fountains of little Emily&#8217;s purity.</p>
+
+<p>When Steerforth, after running away with Emily and deserting her, was
+drowned and brought home, Rosa Dartle, who had loved him, charged his
+mother with his ruin. She had a scar on her lip, made by a hammer thrown
+by Steerforth when he was a boy.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Do you remember when he did this?&#8221; she proceeded. &#8220;Do you remember
+when in his inheritance of your nature, and in your pampering of his
+pride and passion, he did this, and disfigured me for life? Look at
+me, marked until I die with his high displeasure, and moan and groan
+for what you made him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Miss Dartle,&#8221; I entreated her, &#8220;for Heaven&#8217;s sake&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I <i>will</i> speak,&#8221; she said, turning on me with her lightning eyes. &#8220;Be
+silent you! Look at me, I say, proud mother of a proud false son! Moan
+for your nurture of him, moan for your corruption of him, moan for
+your loss of him, moan for mine!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She clinched her hand, and trembled through her spare, worn figure, as
+if her passion were killing her by inches.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<span class="smcap">You</span> resent his self-will!&#8221; she exclaimed. &#8220;<span class="smcap">You</span> injured by his haughty
+temper! <span class="smcap">You</span>, who opposed to both, when your hair was gray, the
+qualities which made both when you gave him birth! <span class="smcap">You</span>, who from his
+cradle reared him to be what he was, and stunted what he should have
+been! Are you rewarded, <i>now</i>, for your years of trouble?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Miss Dartle,&#8221; said I, &#8220;if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for
+this afflicted mother&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who feels for me?&#8221; she sharply retorted. &#8220;She has sown this. Let her
+moan for the harvest that she reaps to-day!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>To show that the seed for the harvest had been sown by his mother was
+Dickens&#8217;s aim in the delineation of his character. Yet she loved him as a
+part of her own life. She said to Mr. Peggotty, when he came to plead with
+her for Emily:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>&#8220;My son,
+who has been the object of my life, to whom its every thought
+has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish,
+from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>There was a double sadness in David&#8217;s soliloquy about Steerforth, who had
+been his friend:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought
+more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more toward all that
+was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have
+made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had
+done in the height of my devotion to him.</p></div>
+
+<p>In Bleak House a great deal of attention is paid to child training.</p>
+
+<p>Esther&#8217;s sadness because of her neglected birthday touches a tender chord.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other birthdays;
+none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as I
+knew from what I heard the girls relate to one another; there were
+none on mine. My birthday was the most melancholy day at home in the
+whole year.</p></div>
+
+<p>There is more than mere sentiment in birthday celebrations both at home
+and in school. It develops a pleasant consciousness of individuality and
+community&mdash;two of the greatest educational ideals.</p>
+
+<p>The cruelty of telling children of any supposed blight of heredity or of
+any other shadow that arrogant conventionality dares to throw over them,
+is criticised in the hard, gloomy way in which Esther&#8217;s godmother referred
+to her mother.</p>
+
+<p>Even worse than this in the refinement of its cruelty was her parting
+injunction. It is a shameful thing to make a child believe that she is
+different from other children in any sense of either badness or goodness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a
+life begun with such a shadow on it. You are different from other
+children, Esther, because you were not born, like them, in common
+sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>I went up to my room and crept to bed, and laid my doll&#8217;s cheek
+against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon my
+bosom cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my
+sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy, at any time, to
+anybody&#8217;s heart, and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to
+me.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens evidently meant to reveal more than her godmother&#8217;s cruelty in her
+closing moralizings. She made the mistake of using self-denial and
+diligent work as curses instead of blessings. They were for the time none
+the less curses to the child, however.</p>
+
+<p>The gross negligence of parents in regard to the sacredness of the
+children&#8217;s retiring hour is exposed in the management of the Jellyby
+children. Indeed, Mrs. Jellyby may be regarded as several volumes of
+treatises on how not to train children. Caddy expressed her views of the
+training they received by saying: &#8220;I wish I was dead. I wish we were all
+dead. It would be a great deal better for us.&#8221; She wisely added: &#8220;Oh,
+don&#8217;t talk of duty as a child! where&#8217;s ma&#8217;s duty as a parent?&#8221; Esther said
+wisely:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural
+duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope
+in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against
+becoming absurd; but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to
+myself.</p></div>
+
+<p>Esther describes the process of putting the children to bed one evening
+she was visiting at the Jellyby home:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Mrs. Jellyby stopped for a moment her conversation with Mr. Quale, on
+the Brotherhood of Humanity, long enough to order the children to bed.</p>
+
+<p>As Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs,
+where the young woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst
+of the little family like a dragon, and overturned them into cribs.</p>
+
+<p>Peepy was the unfortunate child who had fallen downstairs, who now
+interrupted the correspondence by presenting himself with a slip of
+plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his wounded knees, in which Ada
+and I did not know which to pity most, the bruises or the dirt. Mrs.
+Jellyby merely added, with the serene composure with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>which she said
+everything, &#8220;Go along, you naughty Peepy!&#8221; and fixed her fine eyes on
+Africa again.</p></div>
+
+<p>Here Mrs. Jellyby was guilty of two wrongs, one of commission, the other
+of omission. She did a positive wrong in unjustly calling the child
+&#8220;naughty&#8221; when he was merely unfortunate. Even if children are so badly
+guided that they do wrong, it is a serious mistake to make them feel
+consciously &#8220;bad&#8221; by calling them unpleasant names. It is always wrong to
+define in the child&#8217;s consciousness a passing wave of evil.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Jellyby&#8217;s sin of omission was her neglect of the opportunity of
+sympathizing with the suffering boy, and of training him to bear suffering
+bravely by the suggestion that he was &#8220;a brave little soldier home from
+the war.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jarndyce, in speaking of Harold Skimpole&#8217;s children, said, when
+Richard Carstone asked if he had any children:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Yes, Rick! Half a dozen. More! Nearer a dozen, I should think. But he
+has never looked after them. How could he? He wanted somebody to look
+after <i>him</i>. He is a child, you know!&#8221; said Mr. Jarndyce.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And have the children looked after themselves at all, sir?&#8221; inquired
+Richard.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, just as you may suppose,&#8221; said Mr. Jarndyce, his countenance
+suddenly falling. &#8220;It is said that the children of the very poor are
+not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole&#8217;s children have
+tumbled up somehow or other&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Again Dickens was impressing the responsibility of parents for the care
+and proper training of their children.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jarndyce accounted for the utterly unpractical nature of Mr. Skimpole
+by saying:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Why, he is all sentiment, and&mdash;and susceptibility, and&mdash;and
+sensibility&mdash;and&mdash;and imagination. And these qualities are not
+regulated in him, somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for
+them in his youth attached too much importance to them, and too little
+to any training that would have balanced and adjusted them; and so he
+became what he is.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>Mrs. Pardiggle was given as a type of the philanthropic woman who does
+<i>not</i> neglect her children, but whose training is worse&mdash;much worse than
+Mrs. Jellyby&#8217;s neglect. The Jellyby children had as much motherly sympathy
+as the Pardiggles, and they had freedom. There is always this advantage in
+neglect. Louisa Gradgrind gave utterance to a philosophical principle when
+she said to her father: &#8220;Oh! if you had only neglected me, what a much
+better and much happier creature I should have been.&#8221; Dickens did not
+teach that neglect is good training, but he did teach that it is a lighter
+curse than the Gradgrind or Pardiggle training.</p>
+
+<p>The Jellyby children had a slight chance to turn out moderately well, but
+the Pardiggle children were certain to be morose, hypocritical, and
+vicious. They were certain to hate all forms of Christian philanthropy.
+Mrs. Pardiggle&#8217;s intentions were undoubtedly good, but she destroyed the
+character of her children, nevertheless.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;These, young ladies,&#8221; said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility,
+after the first salutations, &#8220;are my five boys. You may have seen
+their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in
+the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest
+(twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket money, to the amount of
+five and threepence to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten
+and a half), is the child who contributed two and ninepence to the
+Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one and
+sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the
+Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily
+enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never
+through life to use tobacco in any form.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that
+they were weazened and shrivelled&mdash;though they were certainly that
+too&mdash;but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the
+mention of the Tockahoopo Indians I could really have supposed Egbert
+to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave me such a
+savage frown. The face of each child as the amount of his contribution
+was mentioned darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was
+by far the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the
+Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You have been visiting, I understand,&#8221; said Mrs. Pardiggle, &#8220;at Mrs.
+Jellyby&#8217;s?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>We said yes, we had passed one night there.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society, and deserves a helping hand.
+My boys have contributed to the African project&mdash;Egbert, one and six,
+being the entire allowance of nine weeks; Oswald, one and a penny
+halfpenny, being the same; the rest, according to their little means.
+Nevertheless, I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in all things. I do not go
+with Mrs. Jellyby in her treatment of her young family. It has been
+noticed. It has been observed that her young family are excluded from
+participation in the objects to which she is devoted. She may be
+right, she may be wrong; but, right or wrong, this is not my course
+with <i>my</i> young family. I take them everywhere.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I was afterward convinced (and so was Ada) that from the
+ill-conditioned eldest child these words extorted a sharp yell. He
+turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a yell.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They attend matins with me (very prettily done) at half past six
+o&#8217;clock in the morning all the year round, including, of course, the
+depth of winter,&#8221; said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, &#8220;and they are with me
+during the revolving duties of the day. I am a school lady, I am a
+visiting lady, I am a reading lady, I am a distributing lady; I am on
+the local linen box committee, and many general committees; and my
+canvassing alone is very extensive&mdash;perhaps no one&#8217;s more so. But they
+are my companions everywhere; and by these means they acquire that
+knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing charitable business
+in general&mdash;in short, that taste for the sort of thing&mdash;which will
+render them in after life a service to their neighbours, and a
+satisfaction to themselves. My young family are not frivolous; they
+expend the entire amount of their allowance in subscriptions, under my
+direction; and they have attended as many public meetings, and
+listened to as many lectures, orations, and discussions as generally
+fall to the lot of few grown people. Alfred (five), who, as I
+mentioned, has of his own election joined the Infant Bonds of Joy, was
+one of the very few children who manifested consciousness on one
+occasion, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>after a fervid address of two hours from the chairman of
+the evening.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the
+injury of that night.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You may have observed, Miss Summerson,&#8221; said Mrs. Pardiggle, &#8220;in some
+of the lists to which I have referred, in the possession of our
+esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family are
+concluded with the name of O. A. Pardiggle, F. R. S., one pound. That
+is their father. We usually observe the same routine. I put down my
+mite first; then my young family enrol their contributions, according
+to their ages and their little means; and then Mr. Pardiggle brings up
+the rear. Mr. Pardiggle is happy to throw in his limited donation,
+under my direction; and thus things are made, not only pleasant to
+ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pardiggle invited Esther and Ada to go out with her to visit a
+&#8220;wicked brickmaker&#8221; in the neighbourhood. Ada walked ahead with Mrs.
+Pardiggle and Esther followed with the five children. She had an
+interesting experience.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I am very fond of being confided in by children, and am happy in being
+usually favoured in that respect, but on this occasion it gave me
+great uneasiness. As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert, with the
+manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me, on the ground
+that his pocket money was &#8220;boned&#8221; from him. On my pointing out the
+great impropriety of the word, especially in connection with his
+parent (for he added sulkily &#8220;By her!&#8221;), he pinched me and said, &#8220;Oh,
+then! Now! Who are you? <i>You</i> wouldn&#8217;t like it, I think! What does she
+make a sham for, and pretend to give me money, and take it away again?
+Why do you call it <i>my</i> allowance, and never let me spend it?&#8221; These
+exasperating questions so inflamed his mind, and the minds of Oswald
+and Francis, that they all pinched me at once, and in a dreadfully
+expert way; screwing up such little pieces of my arms that I could
+hardly forbear crying out. Felix at the same time stamped upon my
+toes. And the Bond of Joy, who, on account of always having the whole
+of his little income anticipated, stood, in fact, pledged to abstain
+from cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we
+passed a pastry-cook shop, that he terrified me by becoming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> purple. I
+never underwent so much, both in body and mind, in the course of a
+walk with young people, as from these unnaturally constrained
+children, when they paid me the compliment of being natural.</p></div>
+
+<p>In the brickmaker&#8217;s hovel they heard something of how the very poor
+brought up children, or failed to bring them up, in Dickens&#8217;s time. The
+brickmaker was lying at full length on the floor, smoking his pipe. He
+gave them no welcome.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I wants a end of these liberties took with my place. I wants a end of
+being drawed like a badger. Now you are a-going to poll-pry and
+question according to custom&mdash;I know what you&#8217;re a-going to be up to.
+Well! You haven&#8217;t got no occasion to be up to it. I&#8217;ll save you the
+trouble. Is my daughter a-washin&#8217;? Yes, she is a-washin&#8217;. Look at the
+water. Smell it! That&#8217;s wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do
+you think of gin, instead? An&#8217;t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty&mdash;it&#8217;s
+nat&#8217;rally dirty, and it&#8217;s nat&#8217;rally onwholesome; and we&#8217;ve had five
+dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much
+the better for them, and for us besides.</p></div>
+
+<p>The utter carelessness of some &#8220;society gentlemen&#8221; in regard to the
+education of their children is referred to in the description Caddy
+Jellyby gave of her lover, the son of the great Turveydrop.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Caddy told me that her lover&#8217;s education had been so neglected that it
+was not always easy to read his notes. She said if he were not so
+anxious about his spelling, and took less pains to make it clear, he
+would do better; but he put so many unnecessary letters into short
+words that they sometimes quite lost their English appearance. &#8220;He
+does it with the best intention,&#8221; observed Caddy, &#8220;but it hasn&#8217;t the
+effect he means, poor fellow!&#8221; Caddy then went on to reason how could
+he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole life in
+the dancing school, and had done nothing but teach and fag, fag and
+teach, morning, noon, and night! And what did it matter? She could
+write letters enough for both, as she knew to her cost, and it was far
+better for him to be amiable than learned. &#8220;Besides, it&#8217;s not as if I
+was an accomplished girl, who had any right to give herself airs,&#8221;
+said Caddy. &#8220;I know little enough, I am sure, thanks to ma!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>The products of the fashionable education of Dickens&#8217;s time (there is not
+so much of it now, thanks largely to Dickens) were shown in the cousins of
+Sir Leicester Dedlock.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The rest of the cousins are ladies and gentlemen of various ages and
+capacities; the major part, amiable and sensible, and likely to have
+done well enough in life if they could have overcome their cousinship;
+as it is, they are almost all a little worsted by it, and lounge in
+purposeless and listless paths, and seem to be quite as much at a loss
+how to dispose of themselves as anybody else can be how to dispose of
+them.</p></div>
+
+<p>In Little Dorrit Mrs. General is used as a type of two varieties of false
+training. Her pupils were never to be allowed to know that there was
+anything vulgar or wrong in the world. She believed the good old theory,
+that adulthood had two duties in developing purity of character, one to
+prevent children knowing that there was any evil, the other to chain them
+back or beat them back from evil, if they accidentally found it and wished
+to investigate it. She never thought of training a child to do its part in
+reducing the evil around him. Seclusion and exclusion took the place of
+community in her perverted philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>She believed, too, in educating the surface. She did not work from within
+intellectually or spiritually. She varnished the surface that it might
+receive the proper society polish, therefore neither heart nor head
+required much attention. According to her theory, young ladies should
+never be so unladylike as to have great purposes or great ideas.
+Unfortunately some of her descendants are still living.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Fanny,&#8221; observed Mrs. General, &#8220;at present forms too many opinions.
+Perfect breeding forms none, and is never demonstrative.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have conversed with Amy several times since we have been residing
+here on the general subject of the formation of a demeanour. She has
+expressed herself to me as wondering exceedingly at Venice. I have
+mentioned to her that it is better not to wonder.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>Her father sent for Amy to reprove her for her lack of what Mrs. General
+regarded as true culture, and Amy said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I think, father, I require a little time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Papa is a preferable mode of address,&#8221; observed Mrs. General. &#8220;Father
+is rather vulgar, my dear. The word papa, besides, gives a pretty form
+to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very
+good words for the lips; especially prunes and prism. You will find it
+serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to
+yourself in company&mdash;on entering a room, for instance&mdash;papa, potatoes,
+poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If Miss Amy Dorrit will direct her own attention to, and will accept
+of my poor assistance in, the formation of a surface, Mr. Dorrit will
+have no further cause of anxiety. May I take this opportunity of
+remarking, as an instance in point, that it is scarcely delicate to
+look at vagrants with the attention which I have seen bestowed upon
+them by a very dear young friend of mine? They should not be looked
+at. Nothing disagreeable should ever be looked at. Apart from such a
+habit standing in the way of that graceful equanimity of surface which
+is so expressive of good breeding, it hardly seems compatible with
+refinement of mind. A truly refined mind will seem to be ignorant of
+the existence of anything that is not perfectly proper, placid, and
+pleasant.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Great Expectations has numerous illustrations of bad training. Mrs.
+Gargery had many of the worst characteristics of disrespectful and
+coercive adulthood. She abused Pip for asking questions, scolded him,
+thimbled him, and sent him to bed in the dark. She told him he was on the
+way to commit murder and a great variety of crimes, because criminals
+always &#8220;begin by asking questions.&#8221; She kept him in a state of constant
+terror. She tried in every possible way to lower his opinion of himself,
+which is a crime against childhood. One of the worst features of the old
+education was its teaching of a spurious humility, a depreciation of
+selfhood. One of the greatest weaknesses of humanity is the general lack
+of true faith of men and women in their own powers. He was told that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> he
+was &#8220;naterally wicious,&#8221; and made the butt of all the observations
+relating to boys who possessed any vices whatever.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens revealed all these characteristics to condemn them.</p>
+
+<p>Pip discussed a very grave question for students of children when he was
+accounting for the fact that he deliberately misstated facts so
+systematically in answering the questions of his sister and Mr.
+Pumblechook, in regard to Miss Havisham and the peculiarities of her
+mysterious home.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When I reached home my sister was very curious to know all about Miss
+Havisham&#8217;s, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found myself
+getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the
+small of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved against the
+kitchen wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient
+length.</p>
+
+<p>If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other
+young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden
+in mine&mdash;which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to
+suspect myself of having been a monstrosity&mdash;it is the key to many
+reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham&#8217;s as
+my eyes had seen it I should not be understood.</p>
+
+<p>Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy
+perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my
+obstinacy was adamantine.</p></div>
+
+<p>Two thoughts are worthy of note in this part of Pip&#8217;s training: abuse,
+especially of the thumping, bumping, shaking variety, makes a child
+obstinate; and many of childhood&#8217;s difficulties arise from not being
+understood, or the fear of being misunderstood.</p>
+
+<p>Pip resented, as all children do, more than they can show, the unpleasant
+habit of taking patronizing liberties with them.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he
+considered it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and
+poke it into my eyes. I can not conceive why everybody of his standing
+who visited at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>our house should always have put me through the same
+inflammatory process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to
+mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our
+social family circle, but some large-handed person took some such
+ophthalmic steps to patronize me.</p></div>
+
+<p>And Mr. Pumblechook! What could a boy do but hate him?</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with
+almost insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That ass,
+Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose of
+discussing my prospects with my sister; and I really do believe (to
+this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel) that if these
+hands could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise cart, they would
+have done it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity
+of mind that he could not discuss my prospects without having me
+before him&mdash;as it were, to operate upon&mdash;and he would drag me up from
+my stool (usually by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and,
+putting me before the fire as if I were going to be cooked, would
+begin by saying, &#8220;Now, mum, here is this boy! Here is this boy which
+you brought up by hand. Hold up your head, boy, and be forever
+grateful unto them which so did so. Now, mum, with respections to this
+boy!&#8221; And then he would rumple my hair the wrong way&mdash;which from my
+earliest remembrance, as already hinted, I have in my soul denied the
+right of any fellow-creature to do&mdash;and would hold me before him by
+the sleeve: a spectacle of imbecility only to be equalled by himself.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pocket&#8217;s training was given as an illustration of the folly of giving
+girls no practical education.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Her father had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle
+as one who, in the nature of things, must marry a title, and who was
+to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young
+lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly
+ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless.</p></div>
+
+<p>Her home proved that she had grown up a credit to her training. There
+never was a family more utterly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> without order, management, or system than
+Mrs. Pocket&#8217;s. Servants and children indulged in unending turmoil and
+conflict. Dickens added a grim humour to the picture by saying:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for he was a most delightful lecturer on
+domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and
+servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But
+Mrs. Pocket was at home and was in a little difficulty, on account of
+the baby&#8217;s having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him
+quiet during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot
+Guards) of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be
+regarded as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either
+to apply externally or to take as a tonic.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pocket continued to read her one book about the dignities of the
+titled aristocracy, and prescribed &#8220;Bed&#8221; as a sovereign remedy for baby.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens believed a mother should find her highest joy and most sacred duty
+in training her own children. Mrs. Pocket was a type to be avoided.</p>
+
+<p>The description of the dinner at Mr. Pocket&#8217;s, after which the six
+children were brought in, and Mrs. Pocket attempted to mind the baby, is
+one of the raciest bits of Dickens&#8217;s humour. One observation in connection
+with the dinner is worth studying.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made
+admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs&mdash;a sagacious way of
+improving their minds.</p></div>
+
+<p>How few yet clearly understand this profound criticism of bad training!
+How many children are still made vain and frivolous by having their
+attention directed especially to their physical attributes and their
+dress, rather than to the things that would yield them much greater
+immediate happiness and a much truer basis for future development!</p>
+
+<p>In his last book, Edwin Drood, Dickens showed that he still hated the
+tyranny that dwarfs and distorts the souls of children.</p>
+
+<p>Neville Landless described his own training to his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> tutor, who had won his
+confidence as it had never been won before.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;We lived with a stepfather there. Our mother died there, when we were
+little children. We have had a wretched existence. She made him our
+guardian, and he was a miserly wretch who grudged us food to eat and
+clothes to wear.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This stepfather of ours was a cruel brute as well as a grinding one.
+It was well he died when he did, or I might have killed him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Crisparkle stopped short in the moonlight and looked at his
+hopeful pupil in consternation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I surprise you, sir?&#8221; he said, with a quick change to a submissive
+manner.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You shock me; unspeakably shock me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The pupil hung his head for a little while, as they walked on, and
+then said: &#8220;You never saw him beat your sister. I have seen him beat
+mine, more than once or twice, and I never forgot it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly
+and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful. I have been
+always tyrannically held down by the strong hand. This has driven me,
+in my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean. I have been
+stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of
+life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest possessions
+of youth. This has caused me to be utterly wanting in I do not know
+what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts&mdash;I have not even a
+name for the thing, you see&mdash;that you have had to work upon in other
+young men to whom you have been accustomed.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Hatred instead of love; product, a secret and revengeful character.
+&#8220;Tyrannically held down by a strong hand&#8221;; product, falseness and
+meanness. &#8220;Stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very
+necessaries of life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest
+possessions of youth&#8221;; product, a manhood utterly barren in true emotions,
+or pleasant memories, or good instincts.</p>
+
+<p>No other writer has described so many phases of bad training as Dickens.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">GOOD TRAINING.</span></p>
+
+<p>Dickens wrote much less about good training than about bad training. It
+was the part of a true philosopher and a profound student of human nature
+to do so. Pictures of wrong treatment of children accomplished a double
+purpose. They made men hate the wrong, and made them more clearly
+conscious of the right than pictures of the right alone could have done.
+Descriptions of ideal conditions can not make as deep impressions as
+descriptions of utterly bad conditions in the present stage of human
+evolution.</p>
+
+<p>His revelation of cruel tyranny, of will breaking, of cramming, of
+dwarfing of individuality, of distorting of imagination, of harshness, of
+lack of sympathy, of evil in a hundred hideous forms, made men more
+conscious of their corresponding opposites than attempts to reveal these
+opposites by direct effort could have done; and in addition it stirred in
+human hearts everywhere the determination to remove or remedy the wrong.</p>
+
+<p>Little Nell&#8217;s grandfather gave her a good training. Omitting poverty and
+loneliness, and some strange companionships, she had a training calculated
+to make her the supremely pure and attractive child she was. Her
+grandfather loved her passionately; he had never been unkind to her, he
+had taught her carefully in the virtues that are learned by the unselfish
+performance of duty; she had the opportunity for simple, loving service,
+and she was trained to have profound reverence for and true faith in God.</p>
+
+<p>Her grandfather left her alone every night, yet she was never afraid.
+Dickens describes their usual parting in the evening.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>Then she ran
+to the old man, who folded her in his arms and bade God bless her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sleep soundly, Nell,&#8221; he said in a low voice, &#8220;and angels guard thy
+bed! Do not forget thy prayers, my sweet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, indeed,&#8221; answered the child fervently, &#8220;they make me feel so
+happy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s well; I know they do; they should,&#8221; said the old man. &#8220;Bless
+thee a hundred times! Early in the morning I shall be home.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ll not ring twice,&#8221; returned the child. &#8220;The bell wakes me, even
+in the middle of a dream.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The Toodle family is painted in direct contrast to the Dombey family in
+the relationship of parents to children. Mrs. Toodle came to nurse Paul
+Dombey when his mother died. Mr. Toodle himself came too, and Mr. Dombey
+called him in to speak to him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He was a strong, loose, round-shouldered, shuffling, shaggy fellow, on
+whom his clothes sat negligently; with a good deal of hair and
+whisker, deepened in its natural tint, perhaps, by smoke and
+coal-dust; hard knotty hands; and a square forehead, as coarse in
+grain as the bark of an oak. A thorough contrast in all respects to
+Mr. Dombey, who was one of those close-shaved, close-cut moneyed
+gentlemen who are glossy and crisp like new bank notes, and who seem
+to be artificially braced and tightened as by the stimulating action
+of golden shower baths.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You have a son, I believe?&#8221; said Mr. Dombey.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Four on &#8217;em, sir. Four hims and a her. All alive!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, it&#8217;s as much as you can afford to keep them!&#8221; said Mr. Dombey.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I couldn&#8217;t hardly afford but one thing in the world less, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To lose &#8217;em, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Can you read?&#8221; asked Mr. Dombey.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, not partick&#8217;ler, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Write?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With chalk, sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With anything?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I could make shift to chalk a little bit, I think, if I was put to
+it,&#8221; said Toodle, after some reflection.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>&#8220;And yet,&#8221; said Mr. Dombey, &#8220;you are two or three and thirty, I
+suppose?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thereabout, I suppose, sir,&#8221; answered Toodle, after more reflection.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then why don&#8217;t you learn?&#8221; asked Mr. Dombey.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So I&#8217;m agoing to, sir. One of my little boys is agoing to learn me,
+when he&#8217;s old enough, and been to school himself.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>What a beautiful picture of the true relationship that should exist
+between a mother and her children is given in the reception to Mrs. Toodle
+when she went home to visit her family!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Why, Polly!&#8221; cried her sister. &#8220;You! what a turn you <i>have</i> given me!
+who&#8217;d have thought it! come along in, Polly! How well you do look, to
+be sure! The children will go half wild to see you, Polly, that they
+will.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That they did, if one might judge from the noise they made, and the
+way in which they dashed at Polly and dragged her to a low chair in
+the chimney corner, where her own honest apple face became immediately
+the centre of a bunch of smaller pippins, all laying their rosy cheeks
+close to it, and all evidently the growth of the same tree. As to
+Polly, she was full as noisy and vehement as the children; and it was
+not until she was quite out of breath, and her hair was hanging all
+about her flushed face, and her new christening attire was very much
+dishevelled, that any pause took place in the confusion. Even then,
+the smallest Toodle but one remained in her lap, holding on tight with
+both arms round her neck; while the smallest Toodle but two mounted on
+the back of the chair, and made desperate efforts, with one leg in the
+air, to kiss her round the corner.</p></div>
+
+<p>Unfortunately the eldest Toodle, nicknamed Biler, was sent to the
+grinders&#8217; school by Mr. Dombey, and he was so badly treated that he played
+truant and got into bad company; but his mother clung to him and treated
+him kindly, and hoped for him still. Mr. Carker went home with Biler to
+satisfy himself in regard to his family.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;This fellow,&#8221; said Mr. Carker to Polly, giving him a gentle shake,
+&#8220;is your son, eh, ma&#8217;am?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir,&#8221; sobbed Polly, with a courtesy; &#8220;yes, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A bad son, I am afraid?&#8221; said Mr. Carker.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>&#8220;Never a bad son to me, sir,&#8221; returned Polly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To whom, then?&#8221; demanded Mr. Carker.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He has been a little wild, sir,&#8221; replied Polly, checking the baby,
+who was making convulsive efforts with his arms and legs to launch
+himself on Biler, through the ambient air, &#8220;and has gone with wrong
+companions; but I hope he has seen the misery of that, sir, and will
+do well again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Carker had concluded his visit, as he made his way among the
+crowding children to the door, Rob retreated on his mother, and took
+her and the baby in the same repentant hug.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll try hard, dear mother, now. Upon my soul I will!&#8221; said Rob.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, do, my dear boy! I am sure you will, for our sakes and your own!&#8221;
+cried Polly, kissing him. &#8220;But you&#8217;re coming back to speak to me, when
+you have seen the gentleman away?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know, mother.&#8221; Rob hesitated, and looked down.
+&#8220;Father&mdash;when&#8217;s he coming home?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not till two o&#8217;clock to-morrow morning.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll come back, mother, dear!&#8221; cried Rob. And passing through the
+shrill cry of his brothers and sisters in reception of this promise,
+he followed Mr. Carker out.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What!&#8221; said Mr. Carker, who had heard this. &#8220;You have a bad father,
+have you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, sir!&#8221; returned Rob, amazed. &#8220;There ain&#8217;t a better nor a kinder
+father going than mine is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why don&#8217;t you want to see him, then?&#8221; asked his patron.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s such a difference between a father and a mother, sir,&#8221; said
+Rob, after faltering for a moment. &#8220;He couldn&#8217;t hardly believe yet
+that I was going to do better&mdash;though I know he&#8217;d try to; but a
+mother&mdash;<i>she</i> always believes what&#8217;s good, sir; at least I know my
+mother does, God bless her!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>It was not the fault of his home that Biler went astray.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did Dickens fail to give a picture for the fathers too. Mr. Toodle was
+a workman on a train, and great was the joy in the family when father came
+home.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Polly, my gal,&#8221; said Mr. Toodle, with a young Toodle on each knee and
+two more making tea for him, and plenty more scattered about&mdash;Mr.
+Toodle was never out <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>of children, but always kept a good supply on
+hand&mdash;&#8220;you ain&#8217;t seen our Biler lately, have you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; replied Polly, &#8220;but he&#8217;s almost certain to look in to-night.
+It&#8217;s his right evening, and he&#8217;s very regular.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I suppose,&#8221; said Mr. Toodle, relishing his meal infinitely, &#8220;as our
+Biler is a-doin&#8217; now about as well as a boy <i>can</i> do, eh, Polly?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! he&#8217;s a-doing beautiful!&#8221; responded Polly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He ain&#8217;t got to be at all secretlike&mdash;has he, Polly?&#8221; inquired Mr.
+Toodle.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No!&#8221; said Mrs. Toodle plumply.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m glad he ain&#8217;t got to be at all secretlike, Polly,&#8221; observed Mr.
+Toodle in his slow and measured way, and shovelling in his bread and
+butter with a clasp knife, as if he were stoking himself, &#8220;because
+that don&#8217;t look well; do it, Polly?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, of course, it don&#8217;t, father. How can you ask?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You see, my boys and gals,&#8221; said Mr. Toodle, looking round upon his
+family, &#8220;wotever you&#8217;re up to in a honest way, it&#8217;s my opinion as you
+can&#8217;t do better than be open. If you find yourselves in cuttings or in
+tunnels, don&#8217;t you play no secret games. Keep your whistles going, and
+let&#8217;s know where you are.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The rising Toodles set up a shrill murmur, expressive of their
+resolution to profit by the paternal advice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But what makes you say this along of Rob, father?&#8221; asked his wife
+anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Polly, old &#8217;ooman,&#8221; said Mr. Toodle, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know as I said it
+partickler along o&#8217; Rob, I&#8217;m sure. I starts light with Rob only; I
+comes to a branch; I takes on what I finds there; and a whole train of
+ideas gets coupled on to him afore I knows where I am, or where they
+comes from. What a Junction a man&#8217;s thoughts is,&#8221; said Mr. Toodle, &#8220;to
+be sure!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This profound reflection Mr. Toodle washed down with a pint mug of
+tea, and proceeded to solidify with a great weight of bread and
+butter; charging his young daughters meanwhile to keep plenty of hot
+water in the pot, as he was uncommon dry, and should take the
+indefinite quantity of &#8220;a sight of mugs&#8221; before his thirst was
+appeased.</p></div>
+
+<p>And as the jolly old fellow ate his supper he was surrounded by all his
+smaller children, some on his knees, and others under his arms, and all
+getting bites of bread<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> and butter and sups of tea in turn, although they
+had had their own supper before he came home.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens did not wish to teach that such relationships should exist between
+parents and children in the homes of the labouring classes only. He used
+Toodle and his family as representing one extreme of society, as at
+present constituted, in sharp contrast with Mr. Dombey&#8217;s family at the
+other extreme. How happy the one home with barely enough to secure the
+necessaries of life! how miserable the other with unlimited wealth! And
+the best things in the Toodle home were the children, and the love and
+unconventional freedom between them and their parents. With such a feeling
+of community and love in all homes, and with schools of a proper
+character, the children will be trained for higher, and progressively
+advancing manhood and womanhood.</p>
+
+<p>David Copperfield&#8217;s training was not all coercive and degrading. Before
+the Murdstones came to blight his young life he had joy and sympathy to
+stimulate all that was good in him. His mother and Peggotty were kind and
+true. The three had perfect faith in each other. They formed a blessed
+unity. &#8220;The memory of his lessons in those happy days recalled no feeling
+of disgust or reluctance. On the contrary, he seemed to have walked along
+a path of flowers, and to have been cheered by the gentleness of his
+mother&#8217;s voice and manner all the way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again, after the Murdstone interval of terror and cruelty, David was
+kindly treated and well trained by his aunt. Her relationship toward him
+throughout his whole youth is well presented in her parting words, as she
+left him at Mr. Wickfield&#8217;s house, where he was to live while at Doctor
+Strong&#8217;s school.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>She told me that everything would be arranged for me by Mr. Wickfield,
+and that I should want for nothing, and gave me the kindest words and
+the best advice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Trot,&#8221; said my aunt in conclusion, &#8220;be a credit to yourself, to me,
+and Mr. Dick, and Heaven be with you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I was greatly overcome, and could only thank her again and again, and
+send my love to Mr. Dick.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never,&#8221; said my aunt, &#8220;be mean in anything; never <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>be false; never be
+cruel. Avoid these three vices, Trot, and I can always be hopeful of you.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>In Mr. Wickfield&#8217;s home and in Doctor Strong&#8217;s school he had ideal
+conditions of development. He received respectful consideration, fatherly
+interest, wise counsel, and generous hospitality from Mr. Wickfield. With
+Agnes he had the most delightful relationship of sympathetic and
+stimulating friendship. There is no better influence in the life of a boy
+opening into young manhood than the true friendship of a girl of the
+character of Agnes.</p>
+
+<p>In Doctor Strong&#8217;s school David met with the best conditions of good
+training yet revealed by the &#8220;new education.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The boys were taught politeness, courtesy, and consideration for the
+feelings of others in Doctor Strong&#8217;s school.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when
+we went in, but they rose to give the Doctor good morning, and
+remained standing when they saw Mr. Wickfield and me.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A new boy, young gentlemen,&#8221; said the Doctor; &#8220;Trotwood Copperfield.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One Adams, who was the head boy, then stepped out of his place and
+welcomed me. He looked like a young clergyman, in his white cravat,
+but he was very affable and good-humoured; and he showed me my place,
+and presented me to the masters in a gentlemanly way that would have
+put me at my ease if anything could.</p></div>
+
+<p>Physical education received due attention at Doctor Strong&#8217;s school. &#8220;We
+had noble games out of doors.&#8221; These outdoor sports have done more than
+anything else to develop the strength and energy of the British character.
+Thoughtful educators everywhere recognise the value of play in the
+development of the physical, the intellectual, and the spiritual nature as
+taught by Froebel. The love of play has been one of the distinctive
+elements of the British people.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Strong&#8217;s personal influence was good. &#8220;He was the idol of the whole
+school.&#8221; He was not coercive nor restrictive; he was an inspiration to
+effort and to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> manliness of conduct. &#8220;He was the kindest of men,&#8221; full of
+sympathy with boyhood and with individual boys. &#8220;He had a simple faith in
+him that might have touched the stone hearts of the very urns upon the
+wall.&#8221; Mr. Wickfield told David that he feared some of the boys might take
+advantage of his kindness and faith, but boys do not abuse the confidence
+of such teachers. &#8220;He appealed in everything to the honour and good faith
+of the boys, and avowed his intention to rely on the possession of these
+qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy.&#8221; David says this &#8220;worked
+wonders.&#8221; He had no spies in schoolroom or grounds. He trusted his boys in
+a frank, unconventional way, and they proved themselves worthy of trust.
+In such an atmosphere a boy grows to be reliable. He does not need to be
+hypocritical or false. &#8220;The boys all became warmly attached to the
+school&mdash;I am sure I did for one, and I never knew, in all my time, of any
+other boy being otherwise&mdash;and learned with a good will, desiring to do it
+credit.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They had independent self-activity. &#8220;We had plenty of liberty.&#8221; Without
+this no child can reach his best growth. The boys did not abuse their
+privilege. They respected themselves more because they had liberty. &#8220;As I
+remember, we were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace,
+by our appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor
+Strong&#8217;s boys.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The community ideal was wrought into the lives of the boys by their
+experience in this model school. &#8220;We all felt that we had a part in the
+management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity.&#8221; The
+highest work of schools, colleges, and universities is to fill the lives
+of men and women with the apperceptive centres of the community ideal.
+Christian community can not be made clear by books or teaching or sermons
+unless its foundations are laid by experience, by &#8220;sharing in the
+management&#8221; of the conditions of the life of the boy, or girl, or student.
+Froebel pleaded for a college and university education in which students
+should &#8220;share in the management.&#8221; Dickens applied this high ideal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>There is another most important element in Doctor Strong&#8217;s influence. He
+was not &#8220;a human barrel organ,&#8221; like Mr. Feeder, &#8220;playing a little list of
+Greek and Latin tunes over and over again without any variation.&#8221; He was
+an original investigator. He was preparing a dictionary of Greek roots. He
+was not merely an accumulator of knowledge as it had been prepared by some
+one else. He was not a mere canal through which knowledge slowly flowed
+through artificial channels, nor a marsh in which knowledge had become
+confused and stagnant, nor a dead sea into which knowledge flowed, but
+from which there was no outlet. He was a fresh fountain from which
+knowledge came clear and pure. So the boys gained knowledge readily from
+him, but, far beyond knowledge, they learned incidentally the habit of
+work, and were filled with the desire to add to the store of knowledge as
+a basis for the progressive evolution of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>What a farce it is to say that Dickens was not conscious of the pedagogic
+value of his work. He had great facility in learning, but he was also a
+hard student. No one could have written so much and so wisely about
+education unless he had studied carefully the thought of the most advanced
+educators.</p>
+
+<p>David&#8217;s aunt had the wisdom to try to develop in him the characteristics
+of excellence that were lacking in his parents. This is a thought that is
+slowly making its way in the minds of educators.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;But what I want you to be, Trot,&#8221; resumed my aunt&mdash;&#8220;I don&#8217;t mean
+physically, but morally; you are very well physically&mdash;is a firm
+fellow. A fine firm fellow, with a will of your own. With resolution,&#8221;
+said my aunt, shaking her cap at me, and clinching her hand. &#8220;With
+determination. With character, Trot&mdash;with strength of character that
+is not to be influenced, except on good reason, by anybody, or by
+anything. That&#8217;s what I want you to be. That&#8217;s what your father and
+mother might both have been, Heaven knows, and been the better for
+it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I intimated that I hoped I should be what she described.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That you may begin, in a small way, to have a reliance upon yourself,
+and to act for yourself,&#8221; said my aunt, &#8220;I shall send you upon your
+trip alone.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>In pursuance of my aunt&#8217;s kind scheme, I was shortly afterward fitted
+out with a handsome purse of money and a portmanteau, and tenderly
+dismissed upon my expedition. At parting, my aunt gave me some good
+advice and a good many kisses; and said that as her object was that I
+should look about me, and should think a little, she would recommend
+me to stay a few days in London, if I liked it, either on my way down
+into Suffolk, or in coming back. In a word, I was at liberty to do as
+I would for three weeks or a month; and no other conditions were
+imposed upon my freedom than the before-mentioned thinking and looking
+about me, and a pledge to write three times a week and faithfully
+report myself.</p></div>
+
+<p>Betsy Trotwood may safely be taken as a model in dealing with boys during
+the adolescent period, and with young men just about to start in the real
+work of life.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens puts into the words of David Copperfield a statement of the
+elements of character which he regarded as most essential to success in
+life, and which he would take pains to develop by the training in homes
+and schools.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I will only add to what I have already written of my perseverance at
+this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which
+then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong
+part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on
+looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very
+fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and
+not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have
+done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without
+the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no
+matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I
+then formed. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in
+life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have
+devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great
+aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have
+never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can
+claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain,
+hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such
+thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some
+fortunate <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which
+some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to
+stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thoroughgoing,
+ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything on
+which I could throw my whole self and never to affect depreciation of
+my work, whatever it was, I find, now, to have been my golden rules.</p></div>
+
+<p>Bleak House, which is so rich in illustrations of bad training, contains
+little direct teaching regarding the proper training of children.</p>
+
+<p>The value of a doll in the training of a girl is shown in Esther&#8217;s early
+experience. The doll had a real personal relationship to her. She made it
+her confidant, and in various ways gave it a distinct personal standing.
+She could pour out to it the joys and sorrows of her heart more fully than
+to any real person. The doll was an outlet for the pent-up emotions that
+were checked in their flow by the adults with whom she was associated. A
+doll is more than a mere plaything to a child; or perhaps it would be more
+exact to say play with a doll means much more than most people believe.
+Dickens was able to sympathize with even a little girl.</p>
+
+<p>Esther says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to
+my doll, when we were alone together, &#8220;Now, Dolly, I am not clever,
+you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!&#8221; And
+so she used to sit propped up in a great armchair, with her beautiful
+complexion and rosy lips, staring at me&mdash;or not so much at me, I
+think, as at nothing&mdash;while I busily stitched away, and told her every
+one of my secrets.</p>
+
+<p>My dear old doll! I was such a shy little thing that I seldom dared to
+open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody else. It
+almost makes me cry to think what a relief it used to be to me, when I
+came home from school of a day, to run upstairs to my room, and say
+&#8220;Oh you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!&#8221; and
+then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the elbow of her great
+chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we parted. I had always
+rather a noticing way&mdash;not a quick way, oh, no!&mdash;a silent way of
+noticing <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>what passed before me, and thinking I should like to
+understand it better. I have not by any means a quick understanding.
+When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it seems to brighten.</p></div>
+
+<p>When on her lonely birthday she had been told by her godmother that a
+shadow hung over her life she says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll&#8217;s cheek
+against mine wet with tears; and holding that solitary friend upon my
+bosom cried myself to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>Dear, dear, to think how much time we passed alone together afterward,
+and how often I repeated to the doll the story of my birthday, and
+confided to her that I would try, as hard as ever I could, to repair
+the fault I had been born with (of which I confessedly felt guilty and
+yet innocent), and would strive as I grew up to be industrious,
+contented, and kind-hearted, and to do some good to some one, and win
+some love to myself if I could.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Jarndyce emphasized the opinion of David Copperfield when he gave
+advice to Richard Carstone:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own efforts. Never
+separate the two, like the heathen wagoner. Constancy in love is a
+good thing; but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in
+every kind of effort. If you had the abilities of all the great men,
+past and present, you could do nothing well without sincerely meaning
+it and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition that any
+real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever
+will or can be, wrested from fortune by fits and starts, leave that
+wrong idea here.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. George gave Woolwich Bagnet kindly counsel regarding his duty to his
+mother:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;The time will come, my boy,&#8221; pursues the trooper, &#8220;when this hair of
+your mother&#8217;s will be gray, and this forehead all crossed and
+recrossed with wrinkles&mdash;and a fine old lady she&#8217;ll be then. Take
+care, while you are young, that you can think in those days, &#8216;<i>I</i>
+never whitened a hair of her dear head&mdash;<i>I</i> never marked a sorrowful
+line in her face!&#8217; For of all the many things that you can think of
+when you are a man, you had better have <i>that</i> by you, Woolwich!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>Mr. Meagles in Little Dorrit, good, kind Mr. Meagles, explained why Little
+Dorrit, amid all her trials and all her difficulties, had grown to be so
+true a woman, loved by so many people.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If she had constantly thought of herself, and settled with herself
+that everybody visited this place upon her, turned it against her, and
+cast it at her, she would have led an irritable and probably a useless
+existence. Yet I have heard tell, Tattycoram, that her young life has
+been one of active resignation, goodness, and noble service. Shall I
+tell you what I consider those eyes of hers that were here just now,
+to have always looked at, to get that expression?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, if you please, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Duty, Tattycoram. Begin it early, and do it well; and there is no
+antecedent to it, in any origin or station, that will tell against us
+with the Almighty, or with ourselves.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Although Mr. Pocket was not able to manage his own household and family,
+chiefly owing to the hopeless incompetence of Mrs. Pocket, he was an
+excellent teacher, and knew how to treat his pupils. Pip found him a most
+satisfactory guide.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He advised my attending certain places in London for the acquisition
+of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the
+functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that
+with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage
+me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through
+his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed
+himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner: and I
+may state at once that he was always so zealous and honourable in
+fulfilling his compact with me that he made me zealous and honourable
+in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master,
+I had no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he
+gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice.</p></div>
+
+<p>In Our Mutual Friend Betty Higden and Mrs. Boffin are given as true types
+of the proper spirit of adulthood toward childhood. Betty, poor as she
+was, wept at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> thought of parting from Johnny, and Mrs. Boffin said to
+her:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;If you trust the dear child to me he shall have the best of homes,
+the best of care, the best of education, the best of friends. Please
+God, I will be a true good mother to him!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Jemmy Lirriper had an ideal training in many ways. He had freedom and
+love, and his imagination and individuality were developed as fully as
+Mrs. Lirriper and the Major could secure these desirable results. His
+boyish personality received respectful consideration. The Major&#8217;s method
+of revealing mathematical conceptions and processes, while it did not
+fully reveal Froebel&#8217;s processes in reaching the same results (even the
+great mathematicians have been slow in doing that), was much in advance of
+the pedagogy of his time, and it shows the spirit in which Dickens would
+have the child treated, and this is much more important than mathematics.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Lirriper tells the story:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>My dear, the system upon which the Major commenced, and, as I may say,
+perfected Jemmy&#8217;s learning when he was so small that if the dear was
+on the other side of the table you had to look under it instead of
+over it to see him with his mother&#8217;s own bright hair in beautiful
+curls, is a thing that ought to be known to the Throne and Lords and
+Commons, and then might obtain some promotion for the Major, which he
+well deserves, and would be none the worse for (speaking between
+friends, L. S. D-ically). When the Major first undertook his learning
+he says to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m going, Madam,&#8221; he says, &#8220;to make our child a Calculating Boy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Major,&#8221; I says, &#8220;you terrify me, and may do the pet a permanent
+injury you would never forgive yourself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Madam,&#8221; says the Major, &#8220;I would regret if this fine mind was not
+early cultivated. But mark me, Madam,&#8221; says the Major, holding up his
+forefinger, &#8220;cultivated on a principle that will make it a delight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Major,&#8221; I says, &#8220;I will be candid with you and tell you openly that
+if ever I find the dear child fall off in his appetite I shall know it
+is his calculations, and shall put <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>a stop to them at two minutes&#8217;
+notice. Or if I find them mounting to his head,&#8221; I says, &#8220;or striking
+anyways cold to his stomach or leading to anything approaching
+flabbiness in his legs, the result will be the same, but, Major, you
+are a clever man and have seen much, and you love the child and are
+his own godfather, and if you feel a confidence in trying, try.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Spoken, Madam,&#8221; says the Major, &#8220;like Emma Lirriper. All I have to
+ask, Madam, is that you will leave my godson and myself to make a week
+or two&#8217;s preparations for surprising you, and that you will give leave
+to have up and down any small articles not actually in use that I may
+require from the kitchen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From the kitchen, Major!&#8221; I says, half feeling as if he had a mind to
+cook the child.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From the kitchen,&#8221; says the Major, and smiles and swells, and at the
+same time looks taller.</p>
+
+<p>So I passed my word, and the Major and the dear boy were shut up
+together for half an hour at a time through a certain while, and never
+could I hear anything going on betwixt them but talking and laughing
+and Jemmy clapping his hands and screaming out numbers, so I says to
+myself &#8220;It has not harmed him yet,&#8221; nor could I, on examining the dear
+find any signs of it anywhere about him, which was likewise a great
+relief. At last one day Jemmy brings me a card in joke in the Major&#8217;s
+neat writing &#8220;The Mess<sup>rs</sup>. Jemmy Jackman,&#8221; for we had given him the
+Major&#8217;s other name too, &#8220;request the honour of Mrs. Lirriper&#8217;s company
+at the Jackman Institution in the front parlour this evening at five,
+military time, to witness a few slight feats of elementary
+arithmetic.&#8221; And, if you&#8217;ll believe me, there in the front parlour at
+five punctually to the moment was the Major behind the Pembroke table
+with both leaves up and a lot of things from the kitchen tidily set
+out on old newspapers spread atop of it, and there was the Mite stood
+up on a chair, with his rosy cheeks flushing and his eyes sparkling
+clusters of diamonds.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, Gran,&#8221; says he, &#8220;oo tit down and don&#8217;t oo touch ler poople&#8221;&mdash;for
+he saw with every one of those diamonds of his that I was going to
+give him a squeeze.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very well, sir,&#8221; I says, &#8220;I am obedient in this good company, I am
+sure.&#8221; And I sits down in the easy-chair that was put for me, shaking
+my sides.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>But picture my admiration when the Major, going on almost as quick as
+if he was conjuring, sets out all the articles he names, and says,
+&#8220;Three saucepans, an Italian iron, a hand bell, a toasting fork, a
+nutmeg grater, four potlids, a spice box, two egg cups, and a chopping
+board&mdash;how many?&#8221; and when that Mite instantly cries &#8220;Tifteen, tut
+down tive and carry ler &#8217;topping board,&#8221; and then claps his hands,
+draws up his legs, and dances on his chair!</p>
+
+<p>My dear, with the same astonishing ease and correctness, him and the
+Major added up the tables, chairs, and sofy, the picters, fender and
+fire irons, their own selves, me and the cat, and the eyes in Miss
+Wozenham&#8217;s head, and whenever the sum was done Young Roses and
+Diamonds claps his hands and draws up his legs and dances on his
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>The pride of the Major! (&#8220;<i>Here&#8217;s</i> a mind, Ma&#8217;am!&#8221; he says to me
+behind his hand.)</p>
+
+<p>Then he says aloud, &#8220;We now come to the next elementary rule&mdash;which is
+called&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Umtraction!&#8221; cries Jemmy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Right,&#8221; says the Major. &#8220;We have here a toasting fork, a potato in
+its natural state, two potlids, one egg-cup, a wooden spoon, and two
+skewers, from which it is necessary, for commercial purposes, to
+subtract a sprat gridiron, a small pickle jar, two lemons, one pepper
+castor, a black-beetle trap, and a knob of the dresser drawer&mdash;what
+remains?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Toatin fork!&#8221; cries Jemmy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In numbers, how many?&#8221; says the Major.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One!&#8221; cries Jemmy.</p>
+
+<p>(&#8220;<i>Here&#8217;s</i> a boy, Ma&#8217;am!&#8221; says the Major to me, behind his hand.)</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We now approach the next elementary rule&mdash;which is entitled&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tickleication,&#8221; cries Jemmy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Correct,&#8221; says the Major.</p>
+
+<p>But, my dear, to relate to you in detail the way in which they
+multiplied fourteen sticks of firewood by two bits of ginger and a
+larding needle, or divided pretty well everything else there was on
+the table by the heater of the Italian iron and a chamber candlestick,
+and got a lemon over, would make my head spin round and round and
+round, as it did at the time. So I says, &#8220;If you&#8217;ll <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>excuse my
+addressing the chair, Professor Jackman, I think the period of the
+lecture has now arrived when it becomes necessary that I should take a
+good hug of this young scholar.&#8221; Upon which Jemmy calls out from his
+station on the chair, &#8220;Gran, oo open oor arms and me&#8217;ll make a &#8217;pring
+into &#8217;em.&#8221; So I opened my arms to him, as I had opened my sorrowful
+heart when his poor young mother lay a-dying, and he had his jump and
+we had a good long hug together, and the Major, prouder than any
+peacock, says to me behind his hand, &#8220;You need not let him know it,
+Madam&#8221; (which I certainly need not, for the Major was quite audible),
+&#8220;but he is a boy!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Doctor Marigold&#8217;s training of the little deaf-mute girl and &#8220;Old
+Cheeseman&#8217;s&#8221; treatment of children are revelations of the mature ideals of
+Dickens regarding the proper attitude of adulthood toward childhood.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">COMMUNITY.</span></p>
+
+<p>While the opinions of Dickens on the subject of community may not seem
+very advanced to some of the most progressive men and women of the
+present, they were much ahead of his own time, and they are beyond the
+practice of our time.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I have had my share of sorrows&mdash;more than the common lot, perhaps, but
+I have borne them ill. I have broken where I should have bent; and
+have mused and brooded, when my spirit should have mixed with all
+God&#8217;s great creation. The men who learn endurance are they who call
+the whole world brother. I have turned <i>from</i> the world, and I pay the
+penalty.</p></div>
+
+<p>Thus spoke Mr. Haredale to Edward Chester, in Barnaby Rudge.</p>
+
+<p>No one who has lived since the time of Dickens could write a more striking
+statement of the responsibility of every man for his brother, and of the
+terrific consequences of neglect of the duties of brotherhood both to him
+who is neglected and to him who neglects, than Dickens wrote in Dombey and
+Son. There is no phase of sociology that has stepped beyond the position
+taken by Dickens in the following selection:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Was Mr. Dombey&#8217;s master vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an
+unnatural characteristic? It might be worth while, sometimes to
+inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether,
+in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be
+unnatural. Coop any son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow
+range, and bind the prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile
+worship of it on the part of the few timid or <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>designing people
+standing round, and what is Nature to the willing captive who has
+never risen up upon the wings of a free mind&mdash;drooping and useless
+soon&mdash;to see her in her comprehensive truth!</p>
+
+<p>Alas! are there so few things in the world about us most unnatural,
+and yet most natural in being so! Hear the magistrate or judge
+admonish the unnatural outcast of society; unnatural in brutal habits,
+unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all
+distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice,
+in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But
+follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at
+every breath he draws, goes down into their dens, lying within the
+echoes of our carriage wheels and daily tread upon the pavement
+stones. Look round upon the world of odious sights&mdash;millions of
+immortal creatures have no other world on earth&mdash;at the lightest
+mention of which humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living in the
+next street, stops her ears, and lisps, &#8220;I don&#8217;t believe it!&#8221; Breathe
+the polluted air, foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health
+and life; and have every sense conferred upon our race for its delight
+and happiness, offended, sickened, and disgusted, and made a channel
+by which misery and death alone can enter. Vainly attempt to think of
+any simple plant, or flower, or wholesome weed that, set in this fetid
+bed, could have its natural growth or put its little leaves off to the
+sun as God designed it. And then, calling up some ghastly child, with
+stunted form and wicked face, hold forth on its unnatural sinfulness,
+and lament its being so early far away from heaven&mdash;but think a little
+of its having been conceived, and born and bred, in hell!</p>
+
+<p>Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the
+health of man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from
+vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering
+in a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to
+corrupt the better portions of a town. But if the moral pestilence
+that rises with them, and in the eternal laws of outraged nature, is
+inseparable from them, could be made discernible too, how terrible the
+revelation! Then should we see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft,
+murder, and a long train of nameless sins against the natural
+affections and repulsions of mankind, overhanging the devoted spots,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>and creeping on, to blight the innocent and spread contagion among
+the pure. Then should we see how the same poisoned fountains that flow
+into our hospitals and lazar houses, inundate the jails, and make the
+convict ships swim deep, and roll across the seas, and overrun vast
+continents with crime. Then should we stand appalled to know that
+where we generate disease to strike our children down and entail
+itself on unborn generations, there also we breed, by the same certain
+process, infancy that knows no innocence, youth without modesty or
+shame, maturity that is mature in nothing but in suffering and guilt,
+blasted old age that is a scandal on the form we bear. Unnatural
+humanity! When we shall gather grapes from thorns, and figs from
+thistles; when fields of grain shall spring up from the offal in the
+byways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom in the fat churchyards
+that they cherish; then we may look for natural humanity and find it
+growing from such seed.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, for a good spirit who would take the housetops off, with a more
+potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a
+Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to
+swell the retinue of the destroying angel as he moves forth among
+them! For only one night&#8217;s view of the pale phantoms rising from the
+scenes of our too long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air
+where vice and fever propagate together, raining the tremendous and
+social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming
+thicker! Bright and blessed the morning that should rise on such a
+night; for men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own
+making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and
+eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common
+origin, owing one duty to the father of one family, and tending to one
+common end to make the world a better place!</p>
+
+<p>Not the less bright and blessed would that day be for rousing some who
+never have looked out upon the world of human life around them to a
+knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted
+with a perversion of Nature in their own contracted sympathies and
+estimates; as great and yet as natural in its development when once
+begun as the lowest degradation known.</p></div>
+
+<p>This selection is worth rereading. The most advanced thinkers will
+understand it best.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>Dickens showed that he understood clearly that a man becomes marred and
+degraded by shutting the world out of his heart, even though the reason
+for the exclusion may in itself be good. Love is the highest of all
+sentiments, and Dickens used it in the case of Mr. Wickfield to show that
+even the tender love he had for his dead wife became a source of evil to
+him, when it made him cease to think of the sorrows of his fellows, and
+only of his own affliction. Either in joy or sorrow the benefit to the
+individual results from a deepening of his consciousness of unity with the
+whole of humanity. Mr. Wickfield said to David:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Weak indulgence has ruined me. Indulgence in remembrance and
+indulgence in forgetfulness. My natural grief for my child&#8217;s mother
+turned to disease; my natural love for my child turned to disease. I
+have infected everything I touched. I have brought misery on what I
+dearly love, I know&mdash;<i>You</i> know! I thought it possible that I could
+truly love one creature in the world, and not love the rest; I thought
+it possible that I could truly mourn for one creature gone out of the
+world, and not have some part in the grief of all who mourned. Thus
+the lessons of my life have been perverted! I have preyed on my own
+morbid coward heart, and it has preyed on me. Sordid in my grief,
+sordid in my love, sordid in my miserable escape from the darker side
+of both, oh, see the ruin I am, and hate me, shun me!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>In Tom Tiddler&#8217;s Ground Dickens attacks the ideal that there may be merit
+in seclusion. Mr. Traveller visits the hermit who had become famous, and
+who was so vain on account of his dirt and simplicity of living, and he
+tells him some plain truths regarding himself and the duty of man to his
+fellow-men.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Now,&#8221; said he, &#8220;that a man&mdash;even behind bars, in a blanket and a
+skewer&mdash;should tell me that he can see from day to day any orders or
+conditions of men, women, or children, who can by any possibility
+teach him that it is anything but the miserablist drivelling for a
+human creature to quarrel with his social nature&mdash;not to go so far as
+to say, to renounce his common human decency, for that is an extreme
+case, or who can teach him that he can in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>any wise separate himself
+from his kind and the habits of his kind, without becoming a
+deteriorated spectacle calculated to give the Devil (and perhaps the
+monkeys) pleasure&mdash;is something wonderful!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You think yourself profoundly wise,&#8221; said the Hermit.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bah,&#8221; returned Mr. Traveller, &#8220;there is little wisdom in knowing that
+every man must be up and doing, and that all mankind are made
+dependent on one another.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is a moral impossibility,&#8221; continued Mr. Traveller, &#8220;that any son
+or daughter of Adam can stand on this ground that I put my foot on, or
+on any ground that mortal treads, and gainsay the healthy tenure on
+which we hold our existence.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Which is,&#8221; sneered the Hermit, &#8220;according to you&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Which is,&#8221; returned the Traveller, &#8220;according to Eternal Providence,
+that we must arise and wash our faces and do our gregarious work and
+act and react on each other, leaving only the idiot and the palsied to
+sit blinking in the corner.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens saves Little Emily from her great sorrow, and lifts the load of
+&#8220;shame&#8221; from her heart by giving her the opportunity of helping to care
+for others.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>But theer was some poor folks aboard as had illness among &#8217;em, and she
+took care of <i>them</i>; and theer was the children in our company, and
+she took care of <i>them</i>; and so she got to be busy, and to be doing
+good, and that helped her.</p></div>
+
+<p>And in the same great book he ridicules the misuse of the sacred word
+&#8220;society&#8221; by applying it to the sham and mockery of all that should be
+truly helpful and ennobling in the social intercourse of mankind.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Or perhaps this <i>is</i> the Desert of Sahara! for, though Julia has a
+stately house, and mighty company, and sumptuous dinners every day, I
+see no green growth near her; nothing that can ever come to fruit or
+flower. What Julia calls &#8220;society,&#8221; I see among it Mr. Jack Maldon,
+from his Patent Place, sneering at the hand that gave it to him, and
+speaking to me of the Doctor, as &#8220;so charmingly antique.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>But when society is the name of such hollow gentlemen and ladies,
+Julia, and when its breeding is professed indifference to everything
+that can advance or can retard mankind, I think we must have lost
+ourselves in the same Desert of Sahara, and had better find the way
+out.</p></div>
+
+<p>When he spoke of Little Dorrit as &#8220;inspired&#8221; he proceeded to say:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>She was inspired to be something which was not what the rest were, and
+to be that something, different and laborious, for the sake of the
+rest. Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a
+priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the
+lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens had reached the great conception that the duty of every individual
+is to add something by his life to the general good. That we should not
+leave the world as we found it; that our work is not done well if we spend
+our lives in digging among the richest treasures of the past and revealing
+them unselfishly to our fellow-men, but that each should make some
+existing thing or condition better, or reveal some new thought or
+principle, or plan, or process, so that humanity may climb more easily and
+more certainly from the mists and shadows to the higher glory of the
+clearer light.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Doyce had made an invention, but had met with almost insuperable
+difficulties in getting it before the people.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;It is much to be regretted,&#8221; said Clennam, &#8220;that you ever turned your
+thoughts that way, Mr. Doyce.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;True, sir, true, to a certain extent. But what is a man to do? If he
+has the misfortune to strike out something serviceable to the nation,
+he must follow where it leads him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hadn&#8217;t he better let it go?&#8221; asked Clennam.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He can&#8217;t do it,&#8221; said Doyce, shaking his head, with a thoughtful
+smile. &#8220;It&#8217;s not put into his head to be buried. It&#8217;s put into his
+head to be made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to
+the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery
+on the same terms.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That is to say,&#8221; said Arthur, with a growing admiration<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> of his quiet
+companion, &#8220;you are not fully discouraged even now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have no right to be, if I am,&#8221; returned the other. &#8220;The thing is as
+true as it ever was.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Throughout his writings Dickens vigorously condemns the class distinctions
+that separate mankind into sections, and thus destroy the bond of unity
+and brotherhood that should exist between them.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Monflathers, in Old Curiosity Shop, drew the line very definitely
+between genteel children and the children of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Dombey pompously consented to have the children of the poor educated,
+because &#8220;it is necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be
+taught to know their position.&#8221; Fancy using education to prevent the unity
+of men, when its highest function should be the revelation of community
+and the qualification of individuals for the functions of brotherhood.</p>
+
+<p>In David Copperfield the pathetic side of the evil of class distinctions
+is shown by the appeals of Mr. Peggotty to Mrs. Steerforth that she would
+consent to her son&#8217;s marriage with Little Emily, and her indignant refusal
+to allow her son to do so.</p>
+
+<p>In Bleak House Sir Leicester Dedlock was amazed at the audacity of Mr.
+Rouncewell&#8217;s democratic ideas, and his mind was filled with gloomy
+forebodings of the evil that such principles as those held by Mr.
+Rouncewell would work in the social organization as planned and fixed by
+the Dedlock class. These were his thoughts:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>From the village school of Chesney Wold, intact as it is this minute,
+to the whole framework of society; from the whole framework of
+society, to the aforesaid framework receiving tremendous cracks in
+consequence of people (ironmasters, lead mistresses, and what not) not
+minding their catechism, and getting out of the station unto which
+they are called&mdash;necessarily and forever, according to Sir Leicester&#8217;s
+rapid logic, the first station in which they happen to find
+themselves; and from that, to their educating other people out of
+<i>their</i> stations, and so obliterating the landmarks, and opening the
+flood gates, and all the rest of it; this is the swift progress of the
+Dedlock mind.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>In American Notes, after describing at length the admirable co-operative
+arrangements, and the varied means of culture, amusement, and refinement
+enjoyed by the young women in the factories at Lowell, Mass., he says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The large class of readers, startled by these facts, will exclaim with
+one voice, &#8220;How very preposterous!&#8221; On my deferentially inquiring why,
+they will answer, &#8220;These things are above their station.&#8221; In reply to
+that objection, I would beg to ask what their station is.</p>
+
+<p>It is their station to work. And they <i>do</i> work. They labour in these
+mills, upon an average, twelve hours a day, which is unquestionably
+work. And pretty tight work too. Perhaps it is above their station to
+indulge in such amusements on any terms. Are we quite sure that we in
+England have not formed our ideas of the &#8220;station&#8221; of working people
+from accustoming ourselves to the contemplation of that class as they
+are, and not as they might be? I think that if we examine our own
+feelings, we shall find that the pianos, and the circulating
+libraries, and even the Lowell Offering, startle us with their
+novelty, and not by their bearing upon any abstract question of right
+or wrong.</p>
+
+<p>For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of to-day
+cheerfully done and the occupation of to-morrow cheerfully looked to,
+any one of these pursuits is not most humanizing and laudable. I know
+no station which is rendered more endurable to the person in it, or
+more safe to the person out of it, by having ignorance for its
+associate. I know no station which has a right to monopolize the means
+of mutual instruction, improvement, and rational entertainment; or
+which has ever continued to be a station very long, after seeking to
+do so.</p></div>
+
+<p>Walter Wilding planned an ideal relationship between employer and employed
+in No Thoroughfare. He advertised for a housekeeper so that he &#8220;might sit
+daily at the head of the table at which the people in my employment eat
+together, and may eat of the same roast and boiled, and drink of the same
+beer, and one and all form a kind of family.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He planned, too, to train his employees to sing &#8220;Handel, Mozart, Haydn,
+Kent, Purcell, Doctor Arne, Greene, Mendelssohn, to make music a part of
+the bond<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> between us. We will form a Choir in some quiet church near the
+Corner.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He touched the true chord of community when Joey Ladle used the word
+&#8220;they.&#8221; Joey asked, when Mr. Wilding unfolded his plan:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Is all to live in the house, Young Master Wilding? The two other
+cellarmen, the three porters, the two &#8217;prentices, and the odd men?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes. I hope we shall all be a united family, Joey.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah!&#8221; said Joey. &#8220;I hope they may be.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They? Rather say <i>we</i>, Joey.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Not many employers have reached the ideals of Dickens yet.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">NUTRITION AS A FACTOR IN EDUCATION.</span></p>
+
+<p>The influence of diet in the development not only of physical power, but
+of intellectual and spiritual power also, has now begun to attract general
+attention. There is no longer any doubt that the character of the bones,
+of the muscles, of the nerves, and of the brain itself, is decided to a
+considerable extent by the food that is eaten. There is no longer any
+doubt that many children have been urged to do work which becomes
+destructive beyond the fatigue point of their little brains, when their
+brains have not been properly nourished, either from lack of proper food
+or of properly cooked food, or from eating too much or too little.</p>
+
+<p>The deterioration of the physical system, and especially the deterioration
+of the neurological system, is one of the most startling subjects within
+the range of view of educators and psychologists. One of the most
+attractive departments of child study is that which investigates the means
+of deciding from external manifestations of form, proportion, action,
+voice, and attitude the nature and condition of the brain and neurological
+system of the child. When this discovery has been made, however, it but
+prepares the way for further investigation to discover in what way
+abnormal or weak systems may be helped to become normal and strong.</p>
+
+<p>One of the fundamental things to be done by scientists and educators is to
+discover the kinds of food adapted to different stages of the child&#8217;s
+growth, and to the varied functions of study and work required of him. By
+proper nutrition and by proper exercise much may be done to increase the
+power and efficiency of the body and the brain and the rest of the
+neurological system.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>Dickens saw the need of attention to the problems of nutrition very
+clearly. He began to write about it in Oliver Twist.</p>
+
+<p>He first exposed the horrors of baby farming, with its terrible percentage
+of deaths, resulting almost entirely from the villainous indifference to
+the diet of the children. Children yet die in homes from similar causes,
+or, if they do not die, they go through life weakened and dwarfed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>For the next eight or ten months Oliver was the victim of a systematic
+course of treachery and deception. He was brought up by hand. The
+hungry and destitute situation of the infant orphan was duly reported
+by the workhouse authorities to the parish authorities. The parish
+authorities inquired with dignity of the workhouse authorities whether
+there was no female then domiciled &#8220;in the house&#8221; who was in a
+situation to impart to Oliver Twist the consolation and nourishment of
+which he stood in need. The workhouse authorities replied with
+humility that there was not. Upon this the parish authorities
+magnanimously and humanely resolved that Oliver should be &#8220;farmed,&#8221;
+or, in other words, that he should be despatched to a branch workhouse
+some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders
+against the poor laws rolled about the floor all day, without the
+inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the
+parental superintendence of an elderly female, who received the
+culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence halfpenny per
+small head per week. Sevenpence halfpenny&#8217;s worth per week is a good
+round diet for a child; a great deal may be got for sevenpence
+halfpenny, quite enough to overload its stomach, and make it
+uncomfortable. The elderly female was a woman of wisdom and
+experience; she knew what was good for children; and she had a very
+accurate perception of what was good for herself. So she appropriated
+the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own use, and consigned
+the rising parochial generation to even a shorter allowance than was
+originally provided for them. Thereby finding in the lowest depth a
+deeper still; and proving herself a very great experimental
+philosopher.</p></div>
+
+<p>The system did not work well for the children.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>For at the very moment when a child had contrived to exist upon the
+smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did
+perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it
+sickened from want or cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got
+half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable
+little being was usually summoned into another world, and there
+gathered to the fathers it had never known in this.</p>
+
+<p>It can not be expected that this system of farming would produce any
+very extraordinary or luxuriant crop. Oliver Twist&#8217;s ninth birthday
+found him a pale, thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and
+decidedly small in circumference. It <i>was</i> his ninth birthday; and he
+was keeping it in the coal cellar with a select party of two other
+young gentlemen, who, after participating with him in a sound
+thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be hungry.</p></div>
+
+<p>The famous meal in the workhouse when Oliver asked for more was intended
+to direct attention to the way children were fed and treated in
+institutions. The boys were fed on gruel.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Of this festive composition each boy had one porringer, and no
+more&mdash;except on occasions of great public rejoicing, when he had two
+ounces and a quarter of bread besides. The bowls never wanted washing.
+The boys polished them with their spoons till they shone again; and
+when they had performed this operation (which never took very long,
+the spoons being nearly as large as the bowls), they would sit staring
+at the copper, with such eager eyes, as if they could have devoured
+the very bricks of which it was composed; employing themselves,
+meanwhile, in sucking their fingers most assiduously, with the view of
+catching up any stray splashes of gruel that might have been cast
+thereon. Boys have generally excellent appetites. Oliver Twist and his
+companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months;
+at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger that one boy who
+was tall for his age, and hadn&#8217;t been used to that sort of thing (for
+his father had kept a small cookshop), hinted darkly to his companions
+that unless he had another basin of gruel <i>per diem</i>, he was afraid he
+might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next to him, who
+happened to be a weakly youth of tender age. He had a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>wild, hungry
+eye; and they implicitly believed him. A council was held; lots were
+cast who should walk up to the master after supper that evening, and
+ask for more; and it fell to Oliver Twist.</p>
+
+<p>The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in his
+cook&#8217;s uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants
+ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long
+grace was said over a short commons. The gruel disappeared; the boys
+whispered each other and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbours
+nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless
+with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master,
+basin and spoon in hand, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Please, sir, I want some more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed
+in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and
+then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralyzed
+with wonder; the boys with fear.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What!&#8221; said the master at length, in a faint voice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Please, sir,&#8221; replied Oliver, &#8220;I want some more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The master aimed a blow at Oliver&#8217;s head with the ladle; pinioned his
+arms; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.</p>
+
+<p>The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into
+the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high
+chair, said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for
+more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was a general start. Horror was depicted in every countenance.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;For <i>more</i>!&#8221; said Mr. Limbkins. &#8220;Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer
+me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had
+eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He did, sir,&#8221; replied Bumble.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That boy will be hung,&#8221; said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. &#8220;I
+know that boy will be hung.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Having shown how infants were starved in &#8220;farming,&#8221; and how boys were
+starved in the workhouses, he next directed attention to the way
+apprentices were treated.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>Mr. Sowerberry was an undertaker, who decided to take Oliver from the
+workhouse. He took Oliver &#8220;upon liking,&#8221; which meant that &#8220;if he could get
+enough work out of him without putting too much food into him, he should
+keep him for a term of years to do what he liked with him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When Oliver had been driven to desperation by Noah Claypole, and had
+punished him as he deserved, Mrs. Sowerberry sent for Mr. Bumble. When Mr.
+Bumble asked Oliver if he was not afraid of him, Oliver bravely answered
+&#8220;No!&#8221; The Beadle was petrified with amazement, and he accounted for
+Oliver&#8217;s wickedness by saying:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;It&#8217;s meat.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What?&#8221; exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Meat, ma&#8217;am, meat,&#8221; replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. &#8220;You&#8217;ve
+overfed him, ma&#8217;am. You&#8217;ve raised a artificial soul and spirit in him,
+ma&#8217;am, unbecoming a person of his condition; as the board, Mrs.
+Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you. What have
+paupers to do with soul or spirit? It&#8217;s quite enough that we let &#8217;em
+have live bodies. If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma&#8217;am, this would
+never have happened.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dear, dear!&#8221; ejaculated Mrs. Sowerberry, piously raising her eyes to
+the kitchen ceiling; &#8220;this comes of being liberal!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The liberality of Mrs. Sowerberry to Oliver had consisted in a profuse
+bestowal upon him of all the dirty odds and ends which nobody else
+would eat.</p></div>
+
+<p>By this conversation Dickens meant to teach that a well-fed child is a
+different type from one who is not properly nourished; that food has an
+influence on the spirit, as well as on the body. He did not disapprove of
+Oliver&#8217;s spirit, but he heartily commended him for resenting the way he
+was treated. This lesson was needed too, as children were expected to
+submit uncomplainingly to those who were their legal guardians, whether
+strangers or parents. Now, largely through Dickens, children are not only
+encouraged to defend themselves against cruel and tyrannical guardians or
+parents, and to run away from them, but the state itself will take them
+away, if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> cruelty is proved against those who should be their protectors.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens also revealed by this incident the meanness of adults not only in
+institutions but in homes, in giving to the children the &#8220;odds and ends,&#8221;
+the scraps, the parts of the fowl or the meat that older people do not
+care for. He brought the matter up again in Great Expectations. At the
+Christmas dinner Pip &#8220;was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of
+the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when
+living, had least reason to be vain.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One of the reasons given by Snawley to Squeers to induce him to take his
+stepsons at a lower rate was that &#8220;they were not great eaters.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The selfishness of adulthood toward childhood, and the stupidity of the
+general idea, that children do not require good food because they are
+young and do not have to work hard, were held up to deserved ridicule, in
+Squeers&#8217;s manner of breakfasting in London, and the food he provided for
+the five hungry little boys to strengthen them for their long ride to
+Yorkshire in cold weather.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He found that learned gentleman sitting at breakfast, with the three
+little boys before noticed, and two others who had turned up by some
+lucky chance since the interview of the previous day, ranged in a row
+on the opposite seat. Mr. Squeers had before him a small measure of
+coffee, a plate of hot toast, and a cold round of beef; but he was at
+that moment intent on preparing breakfast for the little boys.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This is two penn&#8217;orth of milk, is it, waiter?&#8221; said Mr. Squeers,
+looking down into a large blue mug, and slanting it gently, so as to
+get an accurate view of the quantity of liquid contained in it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s two penn&#8217;orth, sir,&#8221; replied the waiter.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What a rare article milk is, to be sure, in London!&#8221; said Mr. Squeers
+with a sigh. &#8220;Just fill that mug up with lukewarm water, William, will
+you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To the wery top, sir?&#8221; inquired the waiter. &#8220;Why, the milk will be
+drownded.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never you mind that,&#8221; replied Mr. Squeers. &#8220;Serve <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>it right for being
+so dear. You ordered that thick bread and butter for three, did you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Coming directly, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You needn&#8217;t hurry yourself,&#8221; said Squeers; &#8220;there&#8217;s plenty of time.
+Conquer your passions, boys, and don&#8217;t be eager after vittles.&#8221; As he
+uttered this moral precept, Mr. Squeers took a large bite out of the
+cold beef, and recognised Nicholas.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sit down, Mr. Nickleby,&#8221; said Squeers. &#8220;Here we are, a-breakfasting
+you see!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Nicholas did <i>not</i> see that anybody was breakfasting, except Mr.
+Squeers; but he bowed with all becoming reverence, and looked as
+cheerful as he could.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! that&#8217;s the milk and water, is it, William?&#8221; said Squeers. &#8220;Very
+good; don&#8217;t forget the bread and butter presently.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At this fresh mention of the bread and butter the five little boys
+looked very eager, and followed the waiter out, with their eyes;
+meanwhile Mr. Squeers tasted the milk and water.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah!&#8221; said that gentleman, smacking his lips, &#8220;here&#8217;s richness! Think
+of the many beggars and orphans in the streets that would be glad of
+this, little boys. A shocking thing hunger is, isn&#8217;t it, Mr.
+Nickleby?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very shocking, sir,&#8221; said Nicholas.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When I say number one,&#8221; pursued Mr. Squeers, putting the mug before
+the children, &#8220;the boy on the left hand nearest the window may take a
+drink; and when I say number two, the boy next him will go in, and so
+till we come to number five, which is the last boy. Are you ready?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir,&#8221; cried the little boys with great eagerness.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s right,&#8221; said Squeers, calmly getting on with his breakfast;
+&#8220;keep ready till I tell you to begin. Subdue your appetites, my dears,
+and you&#8217;ve conquered human natur. This is the way we inculcate
+strength of mind, Mr. Nickleby,&#8221; said the schoolmaster, turning to
+Nicholas, and speaking with his mouth very full of beef and toast.</p>
+
+<p>Nicholas murmured something&mdash;he knew not what&mdash;in reply; and the
+little boys, dividing their gaze between the mug, the bread and butter
+(which had by this time arrived), and every morsel which Mr. Squeers
+took into his mouth, remained with strained eyes in torments of expectation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>&#8220;Thank God for a good
+breakfast,&#8221; said Squeers, when he had finished. &#8220;Number one may take a drink.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Number one received the mug ravenously, and had just drunk enough to
+make him wish for more, when Mr. Squeers gave the signal for number
+two, who gave up at the same interesting moment to number three; and
+the process was repeated until the milk and water terminated with
+number five.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And now,&#8221; said the schoolmaster, dividing the bread and butter for
+three into as many portions as there were children, &#8220;you had better
+look sharp with your breakfast, the horn will blow in a minute or two,
+and then every boy leaves off.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Permission being thus given to fall to, the boys began to eat
+voraciously, and in desperate haste, while the schoolmaster (who was
+in high good humour after his meal) picked his teeth with a fork, and
+looked smilingly on. In a very short time the horn was heard.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I thought it wouldn&#8217;t be long,&#8221; said Squeers, jumping up and
+producing a little basket from under the seat; &#8220;put what you haven&#8217;t
+had time to eat in here, boys! You&#8217;ll want it on the road!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Young Wackford Squeers was fed on the fattest meats, so that he might be
+kept plump and energetic, in order that he might be taken to London to
+show intending patrons how well the boys were fed in Dotheboys Hall.</p>
+
+<p>Again, in The Old Curiosity Shop, the starving of child servants is
+condemned by the way Sally Brass fed the Marchioness. Dick Swiveller&#8217;s
+curiosity led him to peep through a crack in the kitchen door one day
+while Sally was giving the little servant her dinner.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Everything was locked up; the coal cellar, the candle box, the salt
+box, the meat safe were all padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle
+could have lunched upon. The pinched and meagre aspect of the place
+would have killed a chameleon; he would have known, at the first
+mouthful, that the air was not eatable, and must have given up the
+ghost in despair.</p>
+
+<p>The small servant stood with humility in presence of Miss Sally, and
+hung her head.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Are you there?&#8221; said Miss Sally.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, ma&#8217;am,&#8221; was the answer, in a weak voice.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>&#8220;Go farther away from the
+leg of mutton, or you&#8217;ll be picking it, I know,&#8221; said Miss Sally.</p>
+
+<p>The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass took a key from her
+pocket, and opening the safe, brought from it a dreary waste of cold
+potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge. This she placed before the
+small servant, ordering her to sit down before it, and then, taking up
+a great carving knife, made a mighty show of sharpening it upon the
+carving fork.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you see this?&#8221; said Miss Brass, slicing off about two square
+inches of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and holding it out
+on the point of the fork.</p>
+
+<p>The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to see
+every shred in it, small as it was, and answered, &#8220;Yes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then don&#8217;t you ever go and say,&#8221; retorted Miss Sally, &#8220;that you
+hadn&#8217;t meat here. There, eat it up.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This was soon done. &#8220;Now, do you want any more?&#8221; said Miss Sally.</p>
+
+<p>The hungry creature answered with a faint &#8220;No.&#8221; They were evidently
+going through an established form.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve been helped once to meat,&#8221; said Miss Brass, summing up the
+facts; &#8220;you have had as much as you can eat, you&#8217;re asked if you want
+any more, and you answer &#8216;No!&#8217; Then don&#8217;t you ever go and say you were
+allowanced, mind that.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens showed the evil effects of eating too rapidly in his description
+of the dinner in Mrs. Pawkins&#8217;s boarding house in New York, where Martin
+Chuzzlewit boarded for a short time after reaching America.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was a numerous company, eighteen or twenty perhaps. Of these, some
+five or six were ladies, who sat wedged together in a little phalanx
+by themselves. All the knives and forks were working away at a rate
+that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody
+seemed to eat his utmost in self-defence, as if a famine were expected
+to set in before breakfast time to-morrow morning, and it had become
+high time to assert the first law of Nature. The poultry, which may
+perhaps be considered to have formed the staple of the
+entertainment&mdash;for there was a turkey at the top, a pair of ducks at
+the bottom, and two fowls in the middle&mdash;disappeared as rapidly as if
+every bird had had the use of its wings, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>and had flown in desperation
+down a human throat. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from
+their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the
+assembly. The sharpest pickles vanished, whole cucumbers at once, like
+sugarplums, and no man winked his eye. Great heaps of indigestible
+matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and an awful
+thing to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted their food in wedges;
+feeding not themselves, but broods of nightmares, who were continually
+standing at livery within them. Spare men, with lank and rigid cheeks,
+came out unsatisfied from the destruction of heavy dishes, and glared
+with watchful eyes upon the pastry. What Mrs. Pawkins felt each day at
+dinner time is hidden from all human knowledge. But she had one
+comfort. It was very soon over.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens repeats this criticism of rapid eating in his American Notes, when
+specifying the causes of disease among American people. He says: &#8220;The
+custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food three times a
+day and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal must be
+changed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Poor Paul Dombey was sacrificed to his father&#8217;s pride. Mrs. Toodle was
+dismissed by Mr. Dombey because she dared to take his infant son with her
+when she went to see her own children. Paul was thus robbed of the natural
+food, which his sensitive nature needed so much. This was largely
+responsible for the fact that Paul was delicate. By first depriving him of
+proper food, and then sending him to Doctor Blimber&#8217;s school &#8220;to learn
+everything,&#8221; Mr. Dombey led directly to Paul&#8217;s death. His pride and vanity
+overreached themselves.</p>
+
+<p>In Mrs. Pipchin&#8217;s meals Dickens tried to show two things: First, the
+selfishness of adulthood in regard to children&#8217;s diet as compared with its
+own; second, the absolute insufficiency of the kind of food commonly
+supplied to children for building up strong, energetic, and well-developed
+men and women.</p>
+
+<p>She regaled the children with a repast of &#8220;farinaceous and vegetable
+foods&mdash;chiefly rice,&#8221; but she herself had a good hot dinner with mutton
+chops.</p>
+
+<p>The children were required to repeat a form of grace<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> thanking Mrs.
+Pipchin for a good dinner. Oliver was told he must be thankful to the kind
+gentlemen who provided food for him in the workhouse. The same mockery of
+religion by mixing it up with the starvation of childhood is made
+ridiculous in the letter which Squeers read to the unfortunate children in
+Dotheboys Hall, pretending that it had been written by the stepmother of
+Mobbs.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mobbs&#8217;s stepmother,&#8221; said Squeers, &#8220;took to her bed on hearing that he
+wouldn&#8217;t eat fat, and has been very ill ever since. She wishes to know, by
+an early post, where he expects to go to if he quarrels with his vittles;
+and with what feelings he could turn up his nose at the cow&#8217;s liver&#8217;s
+broth, after his good master had asked a blessing on it.&#8221; &#8220;Cow&#8217;s liver&#8217;s
+broth&#8221; would not be a very strengthening diet for children even with the
+blessing of so good a man as Squeers upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens makes a characteristic hit at the fashionable idea which was
+popular at one time, that it was rather indelicate, especially in a lady,
+to have a good robust constitution and a vigorous digestion in describing
+Mr. Vholes in Bleak House. &#8220;His digestion was impaired, which is always
+highly respectable.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cruncher, in A Tale of Two Cities, objected to the questionable ways
+in which Mr. Cruncher earned his money sometimes. Her husband charged her
+with flying in the face of Providence by refusing the &#8220;wittles and drink&#8221;
+he provided for her, and especially for neglecting to give it to their
+son. &#8220;With you flying into the face of your own wittles and drink! I don&#8217;t
+know how scarce you mayn&#8217;t make the wittles and drink here by your
+flopping tricks and your unfeeling conduct. Look at your boy: he is yourn,
+ain&#8217;t he? He&#8217;s as thin as a lath. Do you call yourself a mother, and not
+know a mother&#8217;s first duty is to blow her son out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Abel Magwitch, when describing the terrible training he received at the
+hands of a Christian community in the most advanced Christian civilization
+of the world, said that when he was in jail some philanthropists &#8220;measured
+his head to find out the cause of his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>wickedness,&#8221; and added with great
+wisdom, &#8220;they had better a-measured my stomach.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The folly of hoping that healthy infants can be nourished by mothers who
+are compelled to labour continuously through long hours without rest is
+shown in the description of the child whose mother was a waitress, in
+Somebody&#8217;s Luggage. Incidentally, too, Dickens reveals in this case the
+facts that the power of assimilation of little children is usually
+impaired, and that, as a consequence, they become more peevish, and
+therefore get shaken and otherwise abused for the ignorance of the adults
+responsible for their care. Speaking of the treatment of the baby, he
+says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>You were conveyed&mdash;ere yet your dawning powers were otherwise
+developed than to harbour vacancy in your inside&mdash;you were conveyed by
+surreptitious means into a pantry adjoining the Admiral Nelson, Civic
+and General Dining-Rooms, there to receive by stealth that healthful
+sustenance which is the pride and boast of the British female
+constitution. Under the combined influence of the smells of roast and
+boiled, and soup, and gas, and malt liquors, you partook of your
+earliest nourishment; your unwilling grandmother sitting prepared to
+catch you when your mother was called and dropped you; your
+grandmother&#8217;s shawl ever ready to stifle your natural complainings;
+your innocent mind surrounded by uncongenial cruets, dirty plates,
+dish covers, and cold gravy; your mother calling down the pipe for
+veals and porks, instead of soothing you with nursery rhymes. Under
+these untoward circumstances you were early weaned. Your unwilling
+grandmother, ever growing more unwilling as your food assimilated
+less, then contracted habits of shaking you till your system curdled,
+and your food would not assimilate at all.</p></div>
+
+<p>The schoolmaster in Jemmy Lirriper&#8217;s original story was captured and put
+into confinement for his treatment of the boys, and he was to have nothing
+to eat but the boys&#8217; dinners, and was to drink half a cask of their beer
+every day.</p>
+
+<p>The schoolboy in The Schoolboy&#8217;s Story describes the food given to the
+boys as one of the grievances they had against the institution.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>As to the beef,
+it&#8217;s shameful. It&#8217;s <i>not</i> beef. Regular beef isn&#8217;t
+veins. You can chew regular beef. Besides which, there&#8217;s gravy to
+regular beef, and you never see a drop to ours. Another of our fellows
+went home ill, and heard the family doctor tell his father that he
+couldn&#8217;t account for his complaint unless it was the beer. Of course
+it was the beer, and well it might be!</p>
+
+<p>However, beef and Old Cheeseman are two different things. So is beer.
+It was Old Cheeseman I meant to tell about; not the manner in which
+our fellows get their constitutions destroyed for the sake of profit.</p>
+
+<p>Why, look at the pie crust alone. There&#8217;s no flakiness in it. It&#8217;s
+solid&mdash;like damp lead. Then our fellows get nightmares, and are
+bolstered for calling out and waking other fellows. Who can wonder!</p>
+
+<p>Old Cheeseman one night walked in his sleep, put his hat on over his
+nightcap, got hold of a fishing rod and a cricket bat, and went down
+into the parlour, where they naturally thought from his appearance he
+was a Ghost. Why, he never would have done that if his meals had been
+wholesome. When we all begin to walk in our sleeps, I suppose they&#8217;ll
+be sorry for it.</p></div>
+
+<p>At Doctor Blimber&#8217;s school they used &#8220;to crib the boys&#8217; dinners.&#8221; There is
+no more outrageous practice than that of depriving a child of food as a
+means of punishment.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens ended his sketch entitled A Walk in a Workhouse with a plea on
+behalf of the inmates for &#8220;a little more liberty&mdash;and a little more
+bread,&#8221; and even in his last book, Edwin Drood, he was still directing
+attention to the poor food supplied in boarding schools.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Billickin was very plain in her hints about the poor board supplied
+to Rosa at Miss Twinkleton&#8217;s when she received the schoolmistress in her
+own home. Referring to Rosa, who was now residing with Mrs. Billickin, she
+said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I did think it well to mention to my cook, which I &#8217;ope you will
+agree with, Miss Twinkleton, was a right precaution, that the young
+lady being used to what we should consider here but poor diet, had
+better be brought forward by degrees. For a rush from scanty feeding
+to generous feeding, and from what you may call messing to what you
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>may call method, do require a power of constitution, which is not
+often found in youth, particularly when undermined by boarding school!
+I was put in youth to a very genteel boarding school, the mistress
+being no less a lady than yourself, of about your own age, or, it may
+be some years younger, and a poorness of blood flowed from the table
+which has run through my life.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">MINOR SCHOOLS.</span></p>
+
+<p>The schools of Squeers, Doctor Blimber, Mr. Creakle, Doctor Strong, and
+Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M&#8217;Choakumchild are the most celebrated schools of
+Dickens, and they contain the greater part of his pedagogical teaching.
+His other schools are, however, worthy of very careful study.</p>
+
+<p>One of the first of the Sketches by Boz described a man who had passed
+through many vicissitudes, and at length was reduced to such poverty that
+he applied to the parish board for charity. This led to his appointment as
+a schoolmaster. Dickens clearly intended to teach the lesson, afterward
+emphasized in Nicholas Nickleby and other books, that poverty should not
+establish a claim to the position of a school-teacher.</p>
+
+<p>Minerva Hall, also in Sketches by Boz, reveals &#8220;one of those public
+nuisances, a spoiled child,&#8221; spoiled because his papa was too busy with
+public duties and his mamma with society duties to train him properly. It
+also shows the reason Mrs. Cornelius Brook Dingwall had for sending her
+daughter to school. She said: &#8220;One of my principal reasons for parting
+with my daughter is that she has lately acquired some sentimental ideas,
+which it is most desirable to eradicate from her young mind.&#8221; Here the
+public nuisance fell out of a chair, and mamma and papa showed their usual
+mode of training him. Mamma called him &#8220;a naughty boy,&#8221; and threatened &#8220;to
+send for James to take him away&#8221;&mdash;both name and threat being wrong. Papa
+merely excused the cherub on the ground of &#8220;his great flow of spirits.&#8221;
+The school also shows the silly training of so-called &#8220;finishing
+schools,&#8221;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> as chiefly intended to teach young ladies the small
+conventionalities of &#8220;society.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In The Old Curiosity Shop there are four schools: Mr. Marton&#8217;s two
+schools, Mrs. Wackles&#8217;s school, and Miss Monflathers&#8217;s school. Mr.
+Marton&#8217;s first school was introduced to reveal all the good qualities that
+Mr. Squeers lacked, especially sympathy. Mr. Marton was the immediate
+successor of Mr. Squeers, and they possessed directly opposite traits of
+character in their relationship to childhood. Mr. Squeers was coarse,
+unsympathetic, and coercive. Mr. Marton was kind, considerate, and a
+perfect type of true sympathy with the child. It is reasonable to believe
+that Mr. Marton and Mr. Squeers were drawn as companion pictures to
+illustrate and enforce the same truth&mdash;that sympathy with the child is the
+fundamental element in the character of a true teacher.</p>
+
+<p>The old bachelor emphasized this when he said to Mr. Marton, &#8220;You are none
+the worse teacher for having learned humanity.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There is a great deal of food for psychological and pedagogical study in
+the introduction of the boys he was to teach in his second school, given
+by the bachelor to Mr. Marton. The bachelor was as full of genuine boyish
+spirit as it is possible for any adult to be, and was in some respects a
+more perfect type for an ideal teacher than Mr. Marton. Mr. Marton had the
+tender, spiritual sympathy of a true woman, the motherhood spirit that
+constitutes the atmosphere in which all right elements of childhood find
+their richest development; the bachelor had the perfect manly sympathy
+that enabled him to enter heartily into boy life. He had especially the
+power of recognising in the things for which boys are often rebuked the
+best evidences of their strength, and he could remember his own boyhood so
+well as to fully sympathize <i>with</i> the boys. Mr. Marton and the bachelor
+reveal the whole range of sympathetic possibilities.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When nothing more was left to be done he charged the boy to run off
+and bring his schoolmates to be marshalled before their new master and
+solemnly reviewed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As good a set of fellows, Marton, as you&#8217;d wish to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>see,&#8221; he said,
+turning to the schoolmaster when the boy was gone; &#8220;but I don&#8217;t let
+&#8217;em know I think so. That wouldn&#8217;t do at all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The messenger soon returned at the head of a long row of urchins,
+great and small, who, being confronted by the bachelor at the house
+door, fell into various convulsions of politeness; clutching their
+hats and caps, squeezing them into the smallest possible dimensions,
+and making all manner of bows and scrapes, which the little old
+gentleman contemplated with excessive satisfaction, and expressed his
+approval of by a great many nods and smiles. Indeed, his approbation
+of the boys was by no means so scrupulously disguised as he had led
+the schoolmaster to suppose, inasmuch as it broke out in sundry loud
+whispers and confidential remarks which were perfectly audible to them
+every one.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This first boy, schoolmaster,&#8221; said the bachelor, &#8220;is John Owen; a
+lad of good parts, sir, and frank, honest temper; but too thoughtless,
+too playful, too light-headed by far. That boy, my good sir, would
+break his neck with pleasure, and deprive his parents of their chief
+comfort&mdash;and between ourselves, when you come to see him at hare and
+hounds, taking the fence and ditch by the finger post, and sliding
+down the face of the little quarry, you&#8217;ll never forget it. It&#8217;s
+beautiful!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>John Owen having been thus rebuked, and being in perfect possession of
+the speech aside, the bachelor singled out another boy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now look at that lad, sir,&#8221; said the bachelor. &#8220;You see that fellow?
+Richard Evans his name is, sir. An amazing boy to learn, blessed with
+a good memory and a ready understanding, and moreover with a good
+voice and ear for psalm singing, in which he is the best among us.
+Yet, sir, that boy will come to a bad end; he&#8217;ll never die in his bed;
+he&#8217;s always falling asleep in sermon time&mdash;and to tell you the truth,
+Mr. Marton, I always did the same at his age, and feel quite certain
+that it was natural to my constitution, and I couldn&#8217;t help it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This hopeful pupil edified by the above terrible reproval, the
+bachelor turned to another.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But if we talk of examples to be shunned,&#8221; said he, &#8220;if we come to
+boys that should be a warning and a beacon to all their fellows,
+here&#8217;s the one, and I hope you won&#8217;t spare him. This is the lad, sir;
+this one with the blue <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>eyes and light hair. This is a swimmer, sir,
+this fellow&mdash;a diver, Lord save us! This is a boy, sir, who had a
+fancy for plunging into eighteen feet of water, with his clothes on,
+and bringing up a blind man&#8217;s dog, who was being drowned by the weight
+of his chain and collar, while his master stood wringing his hands
+upon the bank, bewailing the loss of his guide and friend. I sent the
+boy two guineas anonymously, sir,&#8221; added the bachelor, in his peculiar
+whisper, &#8220;directly I heard of it; but never mention it on any account,
+for he hasn&#8217;t the least idea that it came from me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Having disposed of this culprit, the bachelor turned to another, and
+from him to another, and so on through the whole array, laying, for
+their wholesome restriction within due bounds, the same cutting
+emphasis on such of their propensities as were dearest to his heart,
+and were unquestionably referable to his own precept and example.
+Thoroughly persuaded, in the end, that he had made them miserable by
+his severity, he dismissed them with a small present, and an
+admonition to walk quietly home, without any leapings, scufflings, or
+turnings out of the way; which injunction, he informed the
+schoolmaster in the same audible confidence, he did not think he could
+have obeyed when he was a boy had his life depended on it.</p></div>
+
+<p>What a model he was for teachers, this glorious bachelor, in his sympathy
+<i>with</i> the boys, and in his unconventionality! When teachers begin to feel
+the grip of formalism on their better natures and begin to lose faith in
+so-called bad boys, they should read this introduction of the pupils by
+the bachelor. Bless his memory! he will always rank among the greatest
+child trainers.</p>
+
+<p>His pretence of not letting the boys know that he thought they were good
+fellows was a pleasant rebuke of the miserable old doctrine that a boy
+should always be told his faults, but never be spoken to about his
+virtues. This false doctrine having been so carefully applied in homes and
+schools for centuries as a religious duty, based on the unscriptural
+doctrine of child depravity, has made a large portion of humanity in
+Christian countries mere defect dodgers, instead of making them conscious
+of power to do independent work for God and their fellow-men. Dickens had
+no faith in this doctrine, and he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> taught that one of the highest things a
+teacher can do for a child is to recognise and show honest appreciation of
+his best powers and qualities. When superintendents search as carefully
+for the good qualities and powers of their teachers as some yet do for
+their weaknesses, and when they are so unconventional as to be able to
+show genuine appreciation frankly to the teachers themselves, the schools
+will reach their proper rate of progressive development.</p>
+
+<p>Through the whole series of criticisms of the boys, Dickens is showing the
+full rich sympathy of his own great heart for the whole race of boys in
+the unreasonable and unjust criticism to which they are subjected by
+forgetful and ignorant adulthood. Those who should be wisest in these
+matters&mdash;and especially many who think themselves wise&mdash;are still very
+forgetful of their own early life, and very ignorant of boyhood.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wackles&#8217;s school was called a &#8220;Ladies&#8217; Seminary,&#8221; but it was in
+reality &#8220;a very small day school for young ladies of proportionate
+dimensions.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The several duties of instruction in this establishment were thus
+discharged: English grammar, composition, geography, and the use of
+the dumb-bells, by Miss Melissa Wackles; writing, arithmetic, dancing,
+music, and general fascination, by Miss Sophy Wackles; the art of
+needlework, marking, and samplery, by Miss Jane Wackles; corporal
+punishment, fasting, and other tortures and terrors, by Mrs. Wackles.
+Miss Melissa Wackles was the eldest daughter, Miss Sophy the next, and
+Miss Jane the youngest. Miss Melissa might have seen five-and-thirty
+summers or thereabout, and verged on the autumnal, Miss Sophy was a
+fresh, good-humoured, buxom girl of twenty; and Miss Jane numbered
+scarcely sixteen years. Mrs. Wackles was an excellent, but rather
+venomous old lady of threescore.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wackles&#8217;s school is described to show the frivolous nature of such
+so-called private educational institutions, and to strike again the
+abominable practice of abusing children by &#8220;corporal punishment, fasting,
+and other tortures and terrors&#8221; by &#8220;a venomous old lady of threescore.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>Miss Monflathers&#8217;s school was a boarding establishment for young ladies,
+in which they were duly impressed with the dignity of their social
+position; with the terrible danger of yielding in any way to their natural
+impulses, all of which were assumed to be very wicked; with the sinfulness
+of sympathizing with or in any way recognising the lower classes; with the
+impropriety of knowing the fact that there was any wrong in the world to
+be righted or any suffering to be relieved; with the inestimable value of
+aristocratic birth; and with the most important truth that men are very
+dangerous animals, to be carefully shunned.</p>
+
+<p>Little Nell was sent to the establishment of Miss Monflathers with notices
+of Mrs. Jarley&#8217;s waxworks, being temporarily in the employ of that lady.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Nell had no difficulty in finding out Miss Monflathers&#8217;s Boarding and
+Day Establishment, which was a large house, with a high wall, and a
+large garden gate with a large brass plate, and a small grating
+through which Miss Monflathers&#8217;s parlour maid inspected all visitors
+before admitting them; for nothing in the shape of a man&mdash;no, not even
+a milkman&mdash;was suffered, without special license, to pass that gate.
+Even the taxgatherer, who was stout, and wore spectacles and a
+broadbrimmed hat, had the taxes handed through the grating. More
+obdurate than gate of adamant or brass, this gate of Miss
+Monflathers&#8217;s frowned on all mankind. The very butcher respected it as
+a gate of mystery, and left off whistling when he rang the bell.</p>
+
+<p>As Nell approached the awful door, it turned slowly upon its hinges
+with a creaking noise, and forth from the solemn grove beyond came a
+long file of young ladies, two and two, all with open books in their
+hands, and some with parasols likewise. And last of the goodly
+procession came Miss Monflathers, bearing herself a parasol of lilac
+silk, and supported by two smiling teachers, each mortally envious of
+the other, and devoted unto Miss Monflathers.</p>
+
+<p>Confused by the looks and whispers of the girls, Nell stood with
+downcast eyes and suffered the procession to pass on, until Miss
+Monflathers, bringing up the rear, approached her, when she courtesied
+and presented her little packet; on receipt whereof Miss Monflathers
+commanded that the line should halt.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>&#8220;You&#8217;re the waxwork child, are you not?&#8221; said Miss Monflathers.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, ma&#8217;am,&#8221; replied Nell, colouring deeply, for the young ladies had
+collected about her, and she was the centre on which all eyes were
+fixed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And don&#8217;t you think you must be a very wicked little child,&#8221; said
+Miss Monflathers, who was of rather uncertain temper, and lost no
+opportunity of impressing moral truths upon the tender minds of young
+ladies, &#8220;to be a waxwork child at all?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Poor Nell had never viewed her position in this light, and not knowing
+what to say, remained silent, blushing more deeply than before.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you know,&#8221; said Miss Monflathers, &#8220;that it&#8217;s very naughty and
+unfeminine, and a perversion of the properties wisely and benignantly
+transmitted to us, with expansive powers to be roused from their
+dormant state through the medium of cultivation?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you feel how naughty it is of you,&#8221; resumed Miss Monflathers,
+&#8220;to be a waxwork child, when you might have the proud consciousness of
+assisting, to the extent of your infant powers, the manufactures of
+your country; of improving your mind by the constant contemplation of
+the steam engine; and of earning a comfortable and independent
+subsistence of from two and ninepence to three shillings per week?
+Don&#8217;t you know that the harder you are at work, the happier you are?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;How doth the little&mdash;&mdash;&#8217;&#8221; murmured one of the teachers in quotation
+from Dr. Watts.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Eh?&#8221; said Miss Monflathers, turning smartly round. &#8220;Who said that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The little busy bee,&#8221; said Miss Monflathers, drawing herself up, &#8220;is
+applicable only to genteel children.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;In books, or work, or healthful play&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>is quite right as far as they are concerned; and the work means
+painting on velvet, fancy needlework, or embroidery. In such cases as
+these,&#8221; pointing to Nell with her parasol, &#8220;and in the case of all
+poor people&#8217;s children, we should read it thus:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;In work, work, work. In work alway<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Let my first years be passed,</span><br />
+That I may give for ev&#8217;ry day<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Some good account at last.&#8217;&#8221;</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>Just then somebody happened to discover that Nell was crying, and all
+eyes were again turned toward her.</p>
+
+<p>There were indeed tears in her eyes, and drawing out her handkerchief
+to brush them away, she happened to let it fall. Before she could
+stoop to pick it up, one young lady of about fifteen or sixteen, who
+had been standing a little apart from the others, as though she had no
+recognised place among them, sprang forward and put it in her hand.
+She was gliding timidly away again, when she was arrested by the
+governess.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It was Miss Edwards who did that, I <i>know</i>,&#8221; said Miss Monflathers
+predictively. &#8220;Now I am sure that was Miss Edwards.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was Miss Edwards, and everybody said it was Miss Edwards, and Miss
+Edwards herself admitted that it was.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is it not,&#8221; said Miss Monflathers, putting down her parasol to take a
+severer view of the offender, &#8220;a most remarkable thing, Miss Edwards,
+that you have an attachment to the lower classes which always draws
+you to their sides; or, rather, is it not a most extraordinary thing
+that all I say and do will not wean you from propensities which your
+original station in life has unhappily rendered habitual to you, you
+extremely vulgar-minded girl?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I really intended no harm, ma&#8217;am,&#8221; said a sweet voice. &#8220;It was a
+momentary impulse, indeed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;An impulse!&#8221; repeated Miss Monflathers scornfully. &#8220;I wonder that you
+presume to speak of impulses to me&#8221;&mdash;both the teachers assented&mdash;&#8220;I am
+astonished&#8221;&mdash;both the teachers were astonished&mdash;&#8220;I suppose it is an
+impulse which induces you to take the part of every grovelling and
+debased person that comes in your way&#8221;&mdash;both the teachers supposed so
+too.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I would have you know, Miss Edwards,&#8221; resumed the governess, in a
+tone of increased severity, &#8220;that you can not be permitted&mdash;if it be
+only for the sake of preserving a proper example and decorum in this
+establishment&mdash;that you can not be permitted, and that you shall not
+be permitted, to fly in the face of your superiors in this extremely
+gross manner. If <i>you</i> have no reason to feel a becoming pride before
+waxwork children, there are young ladies here who have, and you must
+either defer to those young ladies or leave the establishment, Miss
+Edwards.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This young lady, being motherless and poor, was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>apprenticed at the
+school&mdash;taught for nothing&mdash;teaching others what she learned for
+nothing&mdash;boarded for nothing&mdash;lodged for nothing&mdash;and set down and
+rated as something immeasurably less than nothing, by all the dwellers
+in the house. The servant maids felt her inferiority, for they were
+better treated; free to come and go, and regarded in their stations
+with much more respect. The teachers were infinitely superior, for
+they had paid to go to school in their time, and were paid now. The
+pupils cared little for a companion who had no grand stories to tell
+about home; no friends to come with post horses, and be received in
+all humility, with cake and wine, by the governess; no deferential
+servant to attend and bear her home for the holidays; nothing genteel
+to talk about, and nothing to display. But why was Miss Monflathers
+always vexed and irritated with the poor apprentice&mdash;how did that come
+to pass?</p>
+
+<p>Why, the gayest feather in Miss Monflathers&#8217;s cap, and the brightest
+glory of Miss Monflathers&#8217;s school, was a baronet&#8217;s daughter&mdash;the real
+live daughter of a real live baronet&mdash;who, by some extraordinary
+reversal of the laws of Nature, was not only plain in features but
+dull in intellect, while the poor apprentice had both a ready wit and
+a handsome face and figure. It seems incredible. Here was Miss
+Edwards, who only paid a small premium which had been spent long ago,
+every day outshining and excelling the baronet&#8217;s daughter, who learned
+all the extras (or was taught them all), and whose half yearly bill
+came to double that of any other young lady&#8217;s in the school, making no
+account of the honour and reputation of her pupilage. Therefore, and
+because she was a dependent, Miss Monflathers had a great dislike to
+Miss Edwards, and was spiteful to her, and aggravated by her, and,
+when she had compassion on Little Nell, verbally fell upon and
+maltreated her, as we have already seen.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will not take the air to-day, Miss Edwards,&#8221; said Miss
+Monflathers. &#8220;Have the goodness to retire to your own room, and not to
+leave it without permission.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The poor girl was moving hastily away, when she was suddenly, in a
+nautical phrase, &#8220;brought to&#8221; by a subdued shriek from Miss
+Monflathers.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She has passed me without any salute!&#8221; cried the governess, raising
+her eyes to the sky. &#8220;She has actually passed me without the slightest
+acknowledgment of my presence!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>The young lady turned and courtesied. Nell could see that she raised
+her dark eyes to the face of her superior, and that their expression,
+and that of her whole attitude for the instant, was one of mute but
+most touching appeal against this ungenerous usage. Miss Monflathers
+only tossed her head in reply, and the great gate closed upon a
+bursting heart.</p></div>
+
+<p>In addition to the gross evils of such institutions already suggested,
+Dickens exposed the cruelty of Miss Monflathers, as a type of Christian
+rectitude, toward Nell, whom she assumed to be very wicked, and the
+tendency of society to treat teachers with contempt, if they are not rich.
+The standard based on mere wealth is happily changing.</p>
+
+<p>The tone of Miss Monflathers&#8217;s lofty criticism in language and thought,
+quite incomprehensible to the person admonished, is very true to the life
+in cases of conventional people, who take no pains to understand child
+nature or human nature in any phase, except its depravity.</p>
+
+<p>The heartlessness of the distinction between the &#8220;genteel&#8221; children and
+poor children is clearly pointed out. There could scarcely be a more
+unchristlike thought than the one that would prohibit the children of the
+poor from the enjoyment of their natural tendency to play. No civilization
+in which either by deliberate purpose or by criminal negligence the
+children of the poorest are left without the privilege and the means for
+full free play should dare to call itself Christian. Yet Miss
+Monflathers&#8217;s parody aptly represented the practical outworking of
+civilization at the time of Dickens, and long since, too, in regard to
+poor children.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Monflathers told Miss Edwards majestically that she &#8220;must not take
+the air to-day,&#8221; and contemptuously ordered her to remain in her room all
+day. This was written to condemn the common punishment of keeping children
+in at recess or confining them as a means of punishment. Dickens always
+thought it a crime against childhood to punish a child by robbing it of
+any of its natural rights to food, or fresh air, or free exercise.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>The ecstasy of passion reached by Miss Monflathers because Miss Edwards
+passed her without saluting her showed Dickens&#8217;s attitude toward those who
+insisted and still insist on obeisance from those whom they are pleased to
+regard as &#8220;inferiors.&#8221; Public school education has been criticised because
+&#8220;it does not train poor children to courtesy to their superiors.&#8221; Any
+system deserves the support of all right-thinking people if it trains the
+children of the poorest to hold their heads up respectfully, and look the
+world squarely in the face without a debasing consciousness of
+inferiority. The greatest aim of education, so far as the individual is
+concerned, is freedom&mdash;spiritual freedom. Respect for properly constituted
+authority should become a part of every child&#8217;s consciousness, but this
+properly involves contempt for the arrogant assumption of certain people
+that certain other people should bow down in servile humility to them.
+Education must always be the enemy of tyranny, slavery, and all kinds of
+abasement.</p>
+
+<p>The grinders&#8217; school was introduced to ridicule the practice of forcing
+all children in charitable institutions to wear a uniform dress, and to
+attack corporal punishment, neglect of moral training, and the practice of
+placing ignorant men in the high position of a teacher. The teacher in the
+grinders&#8217; school was &#8220;a superannuated old grinder of savage disposition,
+who had been appointed schoolmaster because he didn&#8217;t know anything, and
+wasn&#8217;t fit for anything, and for whose cruel cane all chubby little boys
+had a perfect fascination.&#8221; The practice of dressing all children alike,
+and of dressing them all without taste, is continued in most homes for
+orphan children still. Surely the poor orphans have suffered enough
+without subjecting them to the indignity of tasteless dressing. There
+might at least be a difference of taste in colour, for instance, for the
+blondes and the brunettes.</p>
+
+<p>The school taught by Agnes in David Copperfield is mentioned to show that
+if a teacher works with a true spirit (Agnes was a splendid character for
+women to study with great care), teaching is a pleasant instead of an
+unhappy profession.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>David said: &#8220;It is laborious, is it not?&#8221;
+&#8220;The labour is so pleasant,&#8221; she returned, &#8220;that it is scarcely grateful in me to call it by that name.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The school attended by Uriah Heep and his father before him was described
+as an attack on the practice of instilling into the minds of poor children
+the consciousness of subserviency. David says: &#8220;I fully comprehended now
+for the first time (after hearing Uriah describe his training at school)
+what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit must have been engendered
+by this early, and this long, suppression.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The first school attended by Esther in Bleak House is apparently
+introduced to point out four evils in the social training of little
+children. The other children were all older than Esther; her godmother
+refused to allow her to accept invitations to go to the homes of the other
+girls; she was never allowed out to play; and while holidays were given on
+the birthdays of other girls, none were ever given on hers. The cruelty of
+two of these evils was made still more bitter by the revelation of the
+fact that she was not treated like other girls because of some wrong her
+mother was supposed to have done.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Donny&#8217;s school at Greenleaf was a charming place, conducted in a
+&#8220;precise, exact, and orderly way.&#8221; Esther was taught well, and trained
+well. She was to be a governess, and so she taught as she learned. Her
+barren childhood made her sympathize with the girls whom she taught,
+especially the new girls, and she naturally won their love, and was
+therefore happy. Esther possessed every essential characteristic of a good
+teacher and a true woman. Miss Donny&#8217;s school is one of the schools in
+which Dickens was approving, not condemning.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cripple&#8217;s academy is merely mentioned in Little Dorrit to complain
+about the habit of scribbling over buildings and on desks and walls in
+which boys used to indulge, and of which many evidences may yet be found
+on the fences and walls of the present day.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The pupils of Mr. Cripple&#8217;s appeared to have been making a copy book of
+the street door, it was so extensively scribbled over in pencil.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>Pip&#8217;s early education, in Great
+Expectations, was received in Mr. Wopsle&#8217;s great-aunt&#8217;s school.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Mr. Wopsle&#8217;s great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is
+to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited
+infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in
+the society of youth, who paid twopence per week each, for the
+improving opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage,
+and Mr. Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we students used to
+overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner,
+and occasionally bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction that Mr.
+Wopsle &#8220;examined&#8221; the scholars once a quarter. What he did on those
+occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us
+Mark Antony&#8217;s oration over the body of C&aelig;sar.</p>
+
+<p>Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr.
+Wopsle&#8217;s great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had
+been a bramble bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by
+every letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures,
+who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves
+and baffle recognition. But at last I began, in a purblind groping
+way, to read, write, and cipher on the very smallest scale.</p>
+
+<p>Biddy was Mr. Wopsle&#8217;s great-aunt&#8217;s granddaughter; I confessed myself
+quite unequal to the working out of the problem, what relation she was
+to Mr. Wopsle.</p>
+
+<p>The educational scheme or course established by Mr. Wopsle&#8217;s
+great-aunt may be resolved into the following synopsis: The pupils ate
+apples and put straws down one another&#8217;s backs, until Mr. Wopsle&#8217;s
+great-aunt collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter
+at them with a birch rod. After receiving the charge with every mark
+of derision, the pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged
+book from hand to hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures
+and tables, and a little spelling&mdash;that is to say, it had had once. As
+soon as this volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle&#8217;s great-aunt fell
+into a state of coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic
+paroxysm. The pupils then entered among themselves upon a competitive
+examination on the subject of boots, with the view of ascertaining who
+could tread the hardest upon whose toes. This mental exercise lasted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+until Biddy made a rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles
+(shaped as if they had been unskilfully cut off the chumped end of
+something), more illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of
+literature I have since met with, speckled all over with iron mould,
+and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between their
+leaves. This part of the course was usually lightened by several
+single combats between Biddy and refractory students. When the fights
+were over, Biddy gave out the number of a page, and then we all read
+aloud what we could&mdash;or what we couldn&#8217;t&mdash;in a frightful chorus; Biddy
+leading with a high shrill monotonous voice, and none of us having the
+least notion of, or reverence for, what we were reading about. When
+this horrible din had lasted a certain time, it mechanically awoke Mr.
+Wopsle&#8217;s great-aunt, who staggered at a boy fortuitously, and pulled
+his ears. This was understood to terminate the course for the evening,
+and we emerged into the air with shrieks of intellectual victory.</p></div>
+
+<p>The reasons for describing this school were to renew the attack on bad
+private schools, conducted without any state control and no supervision or
+inspection by competent officers, to show the need of better appliances
+and text-books, and to teach the utter folly of allowing pupils to try to
+read any book, especially the Bible, without understanding what they were
+reading. Incidentally Dickens taught that to use the Bible as it was used
+in Mr. Wopsle&#8217;s great-aunt&#8217;s school develops a lack of reverence for it.
+The evil of corporal punishment of the indiscriminate and irregular kind
+comes in for a share of condemnation in this wretched school.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens returned to the attack on bad private schools in Our Mutual
+Friend. He had made a thorough study of the evening schools conducted in
+London&mdash;conducted many of them by organizations with good intentions.</p>
+
+<p>There are a good many Sunday schools yet which in some respects are open
+to the criticisms made of Charley Hexam&#8217;s first school.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The school at which young Charley Hexam had first learned from a
+book&mdash;the streets being, for pupils of his degree, the great
+preparatory establishment, in which <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>very much that is never unlearned
+is learned without and before book&mdash;was a miserable loft in an
+unsavoury yard. Its atmosphere was oppressive and disagreeable; it was
+crowded, noisy, and confusing; half the pupils dropped asleep, or fell
+into a state of stupefaction; the other half kept them in either
+condition by maintaining a monotonous droning noise, as if they were
+performing, out of time and tune, on a ruder sort of bagpipe. The
+teachers, animated solely by good intentions, had no idea of
+execution, and a lamentable jumble was the upshot of their kind
+endeavours.</p>
+
+<p>It was a school for all ages and for both sexes. The latter were kept
+apart, and the former were partitioned off into square assortments.
+But all the place was pervaded by a grimly ludicrous pretence that
+every pupil was childish and innocent. This pretence, much favoured by
+the lady visitors, led to the ghastliest absurdities. Young women, old
+in the vices of the commonest and worst life, were expected to profess
+themselves enthralled by the good child&#8217;s book, the Adventures of
+Little Margery, who resided in the village cottage by the mill;
+severely reproved and morally squashed the miller, when she was five
+and he was fifty; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied
+herself a new nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not
+wear nankeen bonnets, neither did the sheep, who ate them; who plaited
+straw and delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts
+of unseasonable times. So unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks
+were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having
+resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his
+particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came
+into supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a
+shining light ever afterward. (Note, that the benefactor came to no
+good.) Several swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in
+the same strain; it always appearing from the lessons of those very
+boastful persons that you were to do good, not because it <i>was</i> good,
+but because you were to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the
+adult pupils were taught to read (if they could learn) out of the New
+Testament; and by dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping
+their bewildered eyes on the particular syllables coming round to
+their turn, were as absolutely ignorant of the sublime <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>history as if
+they had never seen or heard of it. An exceedingly and confoundingly
+perplexing jumble of a school, in fact, where black spirits and gray,
+red spirits and white, jumbled, jumbled, jumbled, jumbled, jumbled
+every night. And particularly every Sunday night. For then an inclined
+plane of unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and
+worst of all the teachers with good intentions, whom nobody older
+would endure. Who, taking his stand on the floor before them, as chief
+executioner, would be attended by a conventional volunteer boy as
+executioner&#8217;s assistant. When and where it first became the
+conventional system that a weary or inattentive infant in a class must
+have its face smoothed downward with a hot hand, or when or where the
+conventional volunteer boy first beheld such system in operation, and
+became inflamed with a sacred zeal to administer it, matters not. It
+was the function of the chief executioner to hold forth, and it was
+the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping infants, yawning
+infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth their
+wretched faces, sometimes with one hand, as if he were anointing them
+for a whisker; sometimes with both hands, applied after the fashion of
+blinkers. And so the jumble would be in action in this department for
+a mortal hour; the exponent drawling on to my dearerr childerrenerr,
+let us say for example, about the beautiful coming to the sepulchre;
+and repeating the word sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five
+hundred times and never once hinting what it meant; the conventional
+boy smoothing away right and left, as an infallible commentary; the
+whole hotbed of flushed and exhausted infants exchanging measles,
+rashes, whooping-cough, fever, and stomach disorders, as if they were
+assembled in High Market for the purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Even in this temple of good intentions, an exceptionally sharp boy
+exceptionally determined to learn, could learn something, and, having
+learned it, could impart it so much better than the teachers; as being
+more knowing than they, and not at the disadvantage in which they
+stood toward the shrewder pupils. In this way it had come about that
+Charley Hexam had risen in the jumble, taught in the jumble, and been
+received from the jumble into a better school.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens slaughtered evils by wholesale in this brief description. The
+influence of the great preparatory <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>establishment, the street, was brought
+to the notice of thinking people.</p>
+
+<p>The need of ventilation was pointed out, and the evil of crowding a large
+number of pupils into poorly ventilated rooms was made very clear. &#8220;Half
+the pupils dropped asleep, or fell into a state of waking stupefaction.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The teachers were untrained. &#8220;They were animated solely by good
+intentions, and had no idea of execution.&#8221; The consequence was a
+lamentable jumble.</p>
+
+<p>The separation of the sexes was not approved.</p>
+
+<p>The stupid blunder of treating all pupils alike, without regard to
+heredity, environment, or past experience, is aptly caricatured in giving
+the Adventures of Little Margery and the Experiences of Thomas Twopence to
+young women old in vice and to young male criminals in order to reform
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Incidentally he disapproves of such literature for any children, and also
+of the autobiographies of &#8220;swaggering sinners.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The error pointed out in Pip&#8217;s education of using the New Testament as a
+book from which pupils should be taught how to read is emphasized. &#8220;By
+dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on
+the particular syllables coming round to their turn, they were as
+absolutely ignorant of the sublime history as if they had never seen or
+heard of it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He criticised severely the old custom of giving least attention to the
+choice of a teacher for the little ones. The old theory was: they can not
+learn much any way; anybody will do to teach them. &#8220;The inclined plane of
+unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all
+the teachers of good intentions, whom nobody older would endure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The dreadful practice, still kept up in some heathen-producing Sunday
+schools, of having an &#8220;executioner&#8217;s assistant to keep order,&#8221; is severely
+condemned. &#8220;It was the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping
+infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth, their wretched
+faces.&#8221; The irritating influence of this operation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> on the suffering
+infants and the degrading effect on the executioner&#8217;s assistant himself
+are clearly indicated.</p>
+
+<p>But the greatest cruelty was in having the infants talked at in a droning
+voice for an hour by the chief executioner in a voice that would sometimes
+deaden, sometimes irritate their nervous systems, and in language they
+could not comprehend, about subjects entirely foreign to their
+experiences.</p>
+
+<p>The danger of spreading contagious diseases in such badly ventilated
+schools was shown. Dickens was a leader in the department of sanitation
+both in homes and in schools.</p>
+
+<p>The schools taught by Bradley Headstone and Miss Peecher were</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>newly built, and there were so many like them all over the country,
+that one might have thought the whole were but one restless edifice
+with the locomotive gift of Aladdin&#8217;s palace.</p>
+
+<p>All things in these schools&mdash;buildings, teachers, and pupils&mdash;were
+according to pattern, and engendered in the light of the latest Gospel
+according to Monotony.</p></div>
+
+<p>These brief descriptions contained volumes of protest against the dead
+uniformity of school architecture, and against the sacrifice of
+individuality in schools. There are no other buildings in which there
+should be more care taken to have truly artistic architecture than in
+schools, because the children are influenced so much by their environment.
+Correct taste may be formed more easily and more definitely by making the
+places in which children spend so much of their lives truly artistic than
+by studying the best authorities. The child&#8217;s spirits should be toned by
+the colouring of the walls of the schoolroom, and by the pictures,
+statues, and other artistic articles around them.</p>
+
+<p>The phrase &#8220;Gospel according to Monotony&#8221; is one of the most effective
+phrases ever used to describe the destruction of individuality.</p>
+
+<p>The Peecher-Headstone schools were described as one of several protests
+against separating little girls from little boys in schools.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>Ph&oelig;be, the happy young woman, who had never been able to sit up since
+she had been dropped by her mother when she was in a fit, is one of the
+sweetest of the characters of Dickens. She lay on a couch as high as the
+window and enjoyed the view as she made lace. She taught a little school
+part of the day, and when Barbox Brothers was at Mugby Junction he heard
+the children singing in the school, and watched them trooping home happily
+till he became so interested in what was going on in the little cottage
+that he went in to investigate. He found a small but very clean room, with
+no one there but Ph&oelig;be lying on her couch. He asked her if she was
+learned in the new system of teaching, meaning the kindergarten system,
+because he had heard her children singing as he passed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;No,&#8221; she said, &#8220;I am very fond of children, but I know nothing of
+teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure it gives
+me, when they learn. I have only read and been told about the new
+system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like
+the merry robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way. My
+school is a pleasure to me. I began it, when I was but a child,
+because it brought me and other children into company, don&#8217;t you see?
+I carry it on still, because it keeps children about me. I do it as
+love, not as work.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>What a beautiful school! What an ideal spirit for every true teacher! What
+a wise man Dickens was to reveal so much sweetness and trueness in the
+life of such a woman as Ph&oelig;be! When Ph&oelig;be had overcome her
+restrictions so triumphantly, surely every one who dares to teach should
+try to rise above personal infirmities, and treat children like the &#8220;merry
+robins that they are.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Holiday Romance, in which three young children write romances for the
+edification of their adult friends and relatives, to show how adult
+treatment impresses young children, is usually regarded as merely an
+exquisite piece of humour. In writing to Mr. Fields about the story
+Dickens said: &#8220;It made me laugh to that extent, that my people here
+thought I was out of my wits, until I gave it to them to read, when they
+did likewise.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>There is more philosophy than fun in these stories, however, and when
+carefully studied they should aid in the &#8220;education of the grown-up
+people&#8221;&mdash;not merely the &#8220;grown-ups&#8221; for whom they were intended, but all
+&#8220;grown-ups.&#8221; This is especially true of the last story, written by Miss
+Nettie Ashford, aged &#8220;half-past-six.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The story is about Mrs. Lemon&#8217;s school and Mrs. Orange&#8217;s family.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The grown-up people&#8221; were the children in Nettie&#8217;s story, and the
+children were the managers of all things at home and at school.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Orange went to Mrs. Lemon&#8217;s and told her that &#8220;her children were
+getting positively too much for her.&#8221; She had two parents, two intimate
+friends of theirs, one godfather, two godmothers, and an aunt. She wished
+to send them to school, because they were &#8220;getting too much for her.&#8221; Many
+real mothers give the same reason.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Have you as many as eight vacancies?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have just eight, ma&#8217;am,&#8221; said Mrs. Lemon.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Corporal punishment dispensed with?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, we do occasionally shake,&#8221; said Mrs. Lemon, &#8220;and we have
+slapped. But only in extreme cases.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Orange was shown through the school, and had the bad &#8220;grown-ups&#8221;
+pointed out to her and their evil propensities explained to her in their
+hearing, as naturally as in a real school. She decided to send her family,
+and went home with her baby&mdash;which was a doll&mdash;saying, &#8220;These troublesome
+troubles are got rid of, please the pigs.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A small party for the grown-up children was given by Mrs. Alicumpaine, and
+the arrangements made for the adults, and the ways in which they were
+treated by their child masters, and the criticisms on the way the seniors
+behaved are all instructive to thoughtful parents. The real things that
+adult people say and do appear delightfully stupid or exquisitely silly
+when made to appear as said and done by children.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>When Mr. and Mrs. Orange
+were going home they passed the establishment of Mrs. Lemon, and necessarily thought of their eight adult pupils who were there.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wonder, James, dear,&#8221; said Mrs. Orange, looking up at the window,
+&#8220;whether the precious children are asleep!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t care much whether they are or not, myself,&#8221; said Mr. Orange.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;James, dear!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You dote upon them, you know,&#8221; said Mr. Orange. &#8220;That&#8217;s another
+thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I do,&#8221; said Mrs. Orange rapturously. &#8220;Oh, I do!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t,&#8221; said Mr. Orange.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, I was thinking, James, love,&#8221; said Mrs. Orange, pressing his
+arm, &#8220;whether our dear, good, kind Mrs. Lemon would like them to stay
+the holidays with her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If she was paid for it, I dare say she would,&#8221; said Mr. Orange.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I adore them, James,&#8221; said Mrs. Orange, &#8220;but <i>suppose</i> we pay her,
+then.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This was what brought the country to such perfection, and made it such
+a delightful place to live in. The grown-up people (that would be in
+other countries) soon left off being allowed any holidays after Mr.
+and Mrs. Orange tried the experiment; and the children (that would be
+in other countries) kept them at school as long as ever they lived,
+and made them do whatever they were told.</p></div>
+
+<p>This story was written about two years before the death of Dickens, so it
+represents his maturest thought. Its great fundamental motive was
+Froebel&#8217;s motto, &#8220;Come, let us live with our children.&#8221; It was a
+trenchant, though humorous criticism of the methods of treating children
+practised by adults, at home and at school. Mrs. Orange&#8217;s adoration for
+children, while at the same time she was proposing to keep them at school
+during the holidays, is very suggestive to those mothers who in society
+talk so much about their &#8220;precious darlings,&#8221; but who keep them in the
+nursery so that they have no share in the family life. The practice of
+calling children bad and describing their supposed evil propensities in
+the presence of others is also condemned in this story.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>One of the very best of the stories of Dickens to show his perfect
+sympathy with boyhood is the story told by Jemmy Jackman Lirriper about
+&#8220;the boy who went to school in Rutlandshire.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It reveals the feelings of boys to the &#8220;Tartars&#8221; who teach school, as the
+boys, when they got control, put the Tartar into confinement and &#8220;forced
+him to eat the boys&#8217; dinners and drink half a cask of their beer every
+day.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It reveals, too, the psychological condition of a healthy boy just
+entering the adolescent period, if he has been fortunate enough to have
+had a life of love and freedom at home; with his heart filled with love
+for the schoolmaster&#8217;s daughter Seraphina, and his mind filled with
+hopeful dreams of success, and triumph, and fortune, and happiness ever
+afterward, not excluding those who had nurtured him, but sharing all with
+them, and finding his greatest joy in their affectionate pride at his
+success. Blessed is the boy who has such glorious experiences and such
+hopeful dreams in his later boyhood and onward, and thrice blessed is he
+who finds in parenthood hearts so reverently sympathetic that it is
+natural for the young heart to overflow into them.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But such dreams can never come true.&#8221; They are true. Nothing is ever more
+true for the stage of evolution in which they naturally fill the life of
+the child. To stop them is a crime; to shut them up in the heart of the
+boy or girl makes them a source of great danger instead of an essential
+element in the ennoblement of character.</p>
+
+<p>Let the boy dream on, and help him to dream by sympathetically sharing his
+visions with him. His own visions and the most wonderful visions of
+heroism and adventure dreamed by the best authors should fill his life
+during the most important stage of his growth, adolescence, when the
+elements of his manhood are rushing into his life and require an outlet in
+the ideal life as a preparation for the real life of later days.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens recognises, too, in this story the great truth so little used by
+educators, that the child&#8217;s imagination is not restricted by any
+conditions of impossibility or by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> any laws of Nature or of man. The ideal
+transcends the real, the desired is accomplished. Development is rapid
+under such conditions.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;And was there no quarrelling,&#8221; asked Mrs. Lirriper, &#8220;after the boy
+and his boy friend had gained high renown, and unlimited stores of
+gold, and had married Seraphina and her sister, and had come to live
+with Gran and Godfather forever, and the story was ended?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No! Nobody ever quarrelled.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And did the money never melt away?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No! Nobody could ever spend it all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And did none of them ever grow older?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No! Nobody ever grew older after that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And did none of them ever die?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;O, no, no, no, Gran!&#8221; exclaimed our dear boy, laying his cheek upon
+her breast, and drawing her closer to him. &#8220;Nobody ever died.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, Major, Major!&#8221; says Mrs. Lirriper, smiling benignly upon me,
+&#8220;this beats our stories. Let us end with the Boy&#8217;s Story, Major, for
+the Boy&#8217;s Story is the best that is ever told.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Miss Pupford&#8217;s school in Tom Tiddler&#8217;s Ground reveals the foolish
+conventional formalism of some teachers before their pupils; exposes the
+pretences of some teachers in private schools&mdash;&#8220;Miss Pupford&#8217;s assistant
+with the Parisian accent, who never conversed with a Parisian and never
+was out of England&#8221;; and condemns the practice of sending mere children
+long distances from home to be trained and educated: &#8220;Kitty Kimmeens had
+to remain behind in Miss Pupford&#8217;s school during the holidays, because her
+friends and relations were all in India, far away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In Edwin Drood Dickens had begun a description of the school: &#8220;On the trim
+gate inclosing the courtyard of which is a resplendent brass plate
+flashing forth the legend: &#8216;Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The chief thing revealed by the brief description given of it is the
+formal conventionality of most teachers in such institutions, the
+unreality of manner and tone and character shown by most teachers in the
+schoolroom.</p>
+
+<p>How much greater Miss Twinkleton&#8217;s power would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> have been to help in
+developing human hearts and heads, if she could have been more truly human
+during the day! She did not deceive the young ladies either by her
+formalism. They merely said, &#8220;What a pretending old thing Miss Twinkleton
+is!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When the rumour of the quarrel between Neville Landless and Edwin Drood
+reached the seminary, and began to cause dangerous excitement among the
+young ladies, Miss Twinkleton deemed it her duty to quiet their minds.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was reserved for Miss Twinkleton to tone down the public mind of
+the Nuns&#8217; House. That lady, therefore, entering in a stately manner
+what plebeians might have called the schoolroom, but what, in the
+patrician language of the head of the Nuns&#8217; House, was euphuistically,
+not to say roundaboutedly, denominated &#8220;the apartment allotted to
+study,&#8221; and saying with a forensic air, &#8220;Ladies!&#8221; all rose. Mrs.
+Tisher at the same time grouped herself behind her chief, as
+representing Queen Elizabeth&#8217;s first historical female friend at
+Tilbury Fort. Miss Twinkleton then proceeded to remark that Rumour,
+ladies, had been represented by the Bard of Avon&mdash;needless were it to
+mention the immortal Shakespeare, also called the Swan of his native
+river, not improbably with some reference to the ancient superstition
+that that bird of graceful plumage (Miss Jennings will please stand
+upright) sung sweetly on the approach of death, for which we have no
+ornithological authority&mdash;Rumour, ladies, had been represented by that
+bard&mdash;hem!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">&#8220;Who drew</span><br />
+The celebrated Jew,&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>as painted full of tongues. Rumour in Cloisterham (Miss Ferdinand will
+honour me with her attention) was no exception to the great limner&#8217;s
+portrait of Rumour elsewhere. A slight <i>fracas</i> between two young
+gentlemen occurring last night within a hundred miles of these
+peaceful walls (Miss Ferdinand, being apparently incorrigible, will
+have the kindness to write out this evening, in the original language,
+the first four fables of our vivacious neighbour, Monsieur La
+Fontaine) had been very grossly exaggerated by Rumour&#8217;s voice. In the
+first alarm and anxiety arising from our sympathy with a sweet young
+friend, not wholly to be dissociated from one of the gladiators<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> in
+the bloodless arena in question (the impropriety of Miss Reynolds&#8217;s
+appearing to stab herself in the hand with a pin is far too obvious,
+and too glaringly unladylike to be pointed out), we descended from our
+maiden elevation to discuss this uncongenial and this unfit theme.
+Responsible inquiries having assured us that it was but one of those
+&#8220;airy nothings&#8221; pointed at by the poet (whose name and date of birth
+Miss Giggles will supply within half an hour), we would now discard
+the subject, and concentrate our minds upon the grateful labours of
+the day.</p></div>
+
+<p>The unnatural formalism of her manner and her language are properly held
+up to ridicule by Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>He incidentally shows the great blunder of interrupting a lesson to
+censure a pupil, the weakness of having to demand attention, and the error
+of punishing by impositions to be memorized or written. What a terrible
+misuse it is of the literature that should always be attractive and
+inspiring to have it associated with punishment! He exposes the greater
+crime of making children commit to memory selections from the Bible as a
+punishment in Dombey and Son, and the association of the Bible with tasks
+in Our Mutual Friend.</p>
+
+<p>The Schoolboy&#8217;s Story deals with the problems of nutrition, coercion,
+robbing a boy of his holidays, the declaration of perpetual warfare
+between pupils and teachers in the olden days, and the surprise of the
+boys when they found that one of their teachers had a true and tender
+heart (what a commentary on teachers that boys should be surprised at
+their being true and good!), and how to treat children as Old Cheeseman
+did, when he inherited his fortune and married Jane, and took the
+disconsolate boys home to his own house, when they were condemned to spend
+their holidays at school.</p>
+
+<p>In Our School the chief pedagogical lessons are: the man&#8217;s remembrance of
+the pug dog in the entry at the first school he attended, and his utter
+forgetfulness of the mistress of the establishment; the folly of external
+polishing or memory polishing on which &#8220;the rust has long since
+accumulated&#8221;; the gross wrong of allowing an ignorant and brutal man to be
+a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>teacher&mdash;&#8220;The only branches of education with which the master showed
+the least acquaintance were ruling and corporally punishing&#8221;; the
+deadening injustice of showing partiality, whether on account of a boy&#8217;s
+parentage or for any other reason; sympathy for &#8220;holiday stoppers&#8221;; the
+interest all children should take in keeping and training pet animals; the
+advantages to boys of having to construct &#8220;houses and instruments of
+performance&#8221; for these pets&mdash;&#8220;some of those who made houses and invented
+appliances for their performing mice in school have since made railroads,
+engines, and telegraphs, the chairman has erected mills and bridges in
+Australia&#8221;; the fact that &#8220;we all liked Maxby the tutor, for he had a good
+knowledge of boys&#8221;; and that teachers should be very particular about
+their personal neatness, because children note so accurately every detail
+of dress and manner. This is shown by the reminiscences about Maxby, the
+Latin master, and the dancing master. The ungenerous rivalry often
+existing between schools, and schools of thought, too, was pointed out:
+&#8220;There was another school not far off, and of course our school could have
+nothing to say to that school. It is mostly the way with schools, whether
+of boys or men.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The world had little reason to be proud of Our School, and has done much
+better since in that way, and will do far better yet.&#8221; This closing
+sentence of the sketch is very suggestive.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens described one school that he visited in America in his American
+Notes, evidently in order to show the need of more care than was then
+taken in the choice of matter for the pupils to read.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I was only present in one of these establishments during the hours of
+instruction. In the boys&#8217; department, which was full of little urchins
+(varying in their ages, I should say, from six years old to ten or
+twelve), the master offered to institute an extemporary examination of
+the pupils in algebra, a proposal which, as I was by no means
+confident of my ability to detect mistakes in that science, I declined
+with some alarm. In the girls&#8217; school reading was proposed, and as I
+felt tolerably equal to that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> art I expressed my willingness to hear a
+class. Books were distributed accordingly, and some half dozen girls
+relieved each other in reading paragraphs from English history. But it
+seemed to be a dry compilation, infinitely above their powers; and
+when they had blundered through three or four dreary passages
+concerning the treaty of Amiens, and other thrilling topics of the
+same nature (obviously without comprehending ten words), I expressed
+myself quite satisfied. It is very possible that they only mounted to
+this exalted stave in the ladder of learning for the astonishment of a
+visitor, and that at other times they keep upon its lower rounds; but
+I should have been much better pleased and satisfied if I had heard
+them exercised in simpler lessons, which they understood.</p></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;The world has done better since, and will do far better yet&#8221; in the
+choice of reading matter for children.</p>
+
+<p>The school recalled by memory in connection with the other ghosts of his
+childhood in The Haunted House was described briefly, but the description
+is full of suggestiveness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Then I was sent to a great cold, bare school of big boys; where
+everything to eat and wear was thick and clumpy, without being enough;
+where everybody, large and small, was cruel; where the boys knew all
+about the sale before I got there [his father&#8217;s furniture had been
+sold for debt], and asked me what I had fetched, and who had bought
+me, and hooted at me, &#8220;Going, going, gone.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The inartistic bareness of the school, the tasteless clothing, the
+unattractive, unsatisfying food, the pervading atmosphere of cruelty, and
+the heartlessness of the boys in tearing open the wounds of the sensitive
+new boy&mdash;are all condemned.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">MISCELLANEOUS EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES.</span></p>
+
+<p>The need of apperception and correlation are shown in the result of Paul
+Dombey&#8217;s first lessons under Miss Cornelia Blimber, and in the same book
+in the description of the learning Briggs carried away with him. It was
+like an ill-arranged luggage, so tightly packed that he couldn&#8217;t get at
+anything he wanted. The absolute necessity for fixing apperceptive centres
+of emotion and thought in the lives of children by experience is shown in
+the case of Neville Landless in Edwin Drood. His early life had been so
+barren that, as he told his tutor, &#8220;It has caused me to be utterly wanting
+in I don&#8217;t know what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts&mdash;I have
+not even a name for the thing, you see&mdash;that you have had to work upon in
+other young men to whom you have been accustomed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens emphasized the fact that the lack of apperceptive centres of an
+improper kind is a great advantage.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>That heart where self has found no place and raised no throne is slow
+to recognise its ugly presence when it looks upon it. As one possessed
+of an evil spirit was held in old time to be alone conscious of the
+lurking demon in the breasts of other men, so kindred vices know each
+other in their hiding places every day, when virtue is incredulous and
+blind.</p></div>
+
+<p>There is no more suggestive work on the contents of children&#8217;s minds than
+Bleak House. When Poor Jo was summoned to give evidence at the inquest he
+was questioned in regard to himself and his theology. The results were
+startling.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>Name, Jo. Nothing else that
+he knows on. Don&#8217;t know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don&#8217;t know that Jo is short
+for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for <i>him</i>. <i>He</i> don&#8217;t find no
+fault with it. Spell it? No. <i>He</i> can&#8217;t spell it. No father, no
+mother, no friends. Never been to school. What&#8217;s home? Knows a broom&#8217;s
+a broom, and knows it&#8217;s wicked to tell a lie. Don&#8217;t recollect who told
+him about the broom, or about the lie, but knows both. Can&#8217;t exactly
+say what&#8217;ll be done to him after he&#8217;s dead if he tells a lie to the
+gentlemen here, but believes it&#8217;ll be something wery bad to punish
+him, and serve him right&mdash;and so he&#8217;ll tell the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any
+link there be. He sums up his mental condition, when asked a question,
+by replying that he &#8220;don&#8217;t know nothink.&#8221; He knows that it&#8217;s hard to
+keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to
+live by doing it. Nobody taught him, even that much; he found it out.</p>
+
+<p>Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone&#8217;s, meeting the tardy morning, which is
+always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of bread
+as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and the houses
+not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the doorstep of the
+Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and gives
+it a brush when he has finished, as an acknowledgment of the
+accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice, and wonders what
+it&#8217;s all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual
+destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific, or what it costs to look
+up the precious souls among the cocoanuts and breadfruits.</p>
+
+<p>He goes to his crossing, and begins to lay it out for the day. The
+town awakes; the great teetotum is set up for its daily spin and
+whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been
+suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo and the other lower animals
+get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is market day. The
+blinded oxen, overgoaded, overdriven, never guided, run into wrong
+places and are beaten out; and plunge, red-eyed and foaming, at stone
+walls; and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt
+themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!</p>
+
+<p>A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> does a dog&mdash;a
+drover&#8217;s dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher&#8217;s shop, and
+evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for some
+hours, and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three or
+four; can&#8217;t remember where he left them; looks up and down the street,
+as half expecting to see them astray; suddenly pricks up his ears and
+remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low
+company and public houses; a terrific dog to sheep; ready at a whistle
+to scamper over their backs, and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but
+an educated, improved, developed dog, who has been taught his duties
+and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music,
+probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise,
+as to awakened association, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or
+joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a
+par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute!</p>
+
+<p>Turn that dog&#8217;s descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years
+they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark&mdash;but not
+their bite.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Lady Dedlock met Jo, she asked him:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Are you the boy I&#8217;ve read of in the papers?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, &#8220;nothink about
+no papers. I don&#8217;t know nothink about nothink at all.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>When Guster, Mr. Snagsby&#8217;s servant, got him some food, she said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Are you hungry?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jist!&#8221; says Jo.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s gone of your father and your mother, eh?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jo stops in the middle of a bite, and looks petrified. For this orphan
+charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting, has patted
+him on the shoulder; and it is the first time in his life that any
+decent hand had been so laid upon him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I never know&#8217;d nothink about &#8217;em,&#8221; says Jo.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No more didn&#8217;t I of mine,&#8221; cries Guster.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Allan Woodcourt took him to Mr. George&#8217;s and had his wants attended
+to, he told Jo to be sure and tell him the truth always.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>&#8220;Wishermaydie, if I don&#8217;t,&#8221; said Jo.
+&#8220;I never was in no other trouble at all, sir&mdash;&#8217;cept knowin&#8217; nothink and starvation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When Allan saw that Jo was nearing the end, he said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Jo! Did you ever know a prayer?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never know&#8217;d nothink, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not so much as one short prayer?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr. Chadband he was a-prayin&#8217; wunst at Mr.
+Snagsby&#8217;s and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-speakin&#8217; to
+hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but <i>I</i> couldn&#8217;t make out
+nothink on it. Different times, there was other genlmen come down
+Tom-all-Alone&#8217;s a-prayin&#8217;, but they all mostly sed as the t&#8217;other wuns
+prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talkin&#8217; to theirselves,
+or a-passin&#8217; blame on the t&#8217;others, and not a-talkin&#8217; to us. <i>We</i>
+never know&#8217;d nothink. <i>I</i> never know&#8217;d what it wos all about.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>No? Mr. Chadband, your long sermon about &#8220;the Terewth&#8221; found no place in
+Jo in which to rest; nothing to which it could attach itself. No wonder he
+went asleep. He had no apperceptive centres in his experience or his
+training to which your kind of religious teaching was related.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Jo! He was the first great illustration, and he is still the best, of
+the great pedagogical truth, that we see, and hear, and understand in all
+that is around us only what corresponds to what we are within; that our
+power to see, and hear, and understand increases as our inner life is
+cultured and developed; and that a life as barren as that of the great
+class of whom Jo was made the type makes it impossible to comprehend any
+teaching of an abstract kind. This revelation is of course most valuable
+to primary teachers in cities.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens showed his wonderful insight into the most profound problems of
+psychology in his great character sketch of poor Jo. He agreed with
+Herbart regarding the philosophy of apperception so far as it related to
+intellectual culture, but he painted Jo entirely out of harmony with
+Herbart&#8217;s psychology in relation to soul development. After describing Mr.
+Chadband&#8217;s sermon on &#8220;Terewth&#8221; Dickens says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, ever
+picking his cap, and putting bits of fur in his mouth. He spits them
+out with a remorseful air, for he feels that it is in his nature to be
+an unimprovable reprobate, and it&#8217;s no good <i>his</i> trying to keep
+awake, for <i>he</i> won&#8217;t never know nothink. Though it may be, Jo, that
+there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near
+the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common
+men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light,
+would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it
+unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their
+modest aid&mdash;it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it
+yet!</p>
+
+<p>Jo never heard of any such book. Its compilers, and the Reverend
+Chadband, are all one to him&mdash;except that he knows the Reverend
+Chadband, and would rather run away from him for an hour than hear him
+talk for five minutes.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Jo was eating at Mr. Snagsby&#8217;s he stopped in the middle of his bite
+and looked petrified, because Guster patted him on the shoulder. &#8220;It was
+the first time in his life that any decent hand had been so laid upon
+him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In The Haunted Man the six-year-old child was described as &#8220;a baby savage,
+a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might
+live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and
+perish a mere beast.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Hugh, the splendid young animal who was John Willet&#8217;s stable boy in
+Barnaby Rudge, was as deficient of most intellectual and spiritual
+apperceptive centres as poor Jo. When Mr. Chester asked him his name he
+replied:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I&#8217;d tell it if I could. I can&#8217;t. I have always been called Hugh;
+nothing more. I never knew nor saw, nor thought about a father; and I
+was a boy of six&mdash;that&#8217;s not very old&mdash;when they hung my mother up at
+Tyburn for a couple of thousand of men to stare at. They might have
+let her live. She was poor enough.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Little George Silverman&#8217;s mind was almost a blank when his mother and
+father died. He had been brought up in a cellar at Preston. He hardly knew
+what sunlight was. His mother&#8217;s laugh in her fever scared him, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>because it
+was the first laugh he had ever heard. When discovered alone with the
+bodies of his father and mother in the cellar, one of the horrified
+bystanders said to him:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you know your father and mother are both dead of fever?&#8221; and he
+replied:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know what it is to be dead. I am hungry and thirsty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After he had been supplied with food and drink he told Mr. Hawkyard that
+&#8220;he didn&#8217;t feel cold, or hungry, or thirsty,&#8221; and in relating the story in
+manhood he said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>That was the whole round of human feelings, as far as I knew, except
+the pain of being beaten. To that time I had never had the faintest
+impression of duty. I had no knowledge whatever that there was
+anything lovely in this life. When I had occasionally slunk up the
+cellar steps into the street, and glared in at shop windows, I had
+done so with no higher feelings than we may suppose to animate a mangy
+young dog or wolf cub. It is equally the fact that I had never been
+alone, in the sense of holding unselfish converse with myself. I had
+been solitary often enough, but nothing better.</p></div>
+
+<p>Redlaw, in The Haunted Man, said to the poor boy who came to his room:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;What is your name?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Got none.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where do you live?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Live! What&#8217;s that?&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Such pictures were not drawn to entertain, or to add artistic effect to
+his stories. They were written to teach the world of wealth and culture
+that all around it were thousands of human souls with as little
+opportunity for development as young animals have; with defined
+apperceptive centres of cold, hunger, thirst, and pain only.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens makes a strong contrast between the condition of the mental and
+spiritual apperceptive centres in the city boy as compared with the
+country boy, in a conversation between Phil Squod and Mr. George.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;And so, Phil,&#8221; says George of the Shooting Gallery, after several
+turns in silence, &#8220;you were dreaming of the country last night?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>Phil, by the bye, said as much, in a tone of surprise, as he scrambled
+out of bed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, guv&#8217;ner.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What was it like?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I hardly know what it was like, guv&#8217;ner,&#8221; said Phil, considering.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How did you know it was the country?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;On account of the grass, I think. And the swans upon it,&#8221; says Phil,
+after further consideration.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What were the swans doing on the grass?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They was a-eating of it, I expect,&#8221; says Phil.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The country,&#8221; says Mr. George, plying his knife and fork; &#8220;why, I
+suppose you never clapped your eyes on the country, Phil?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I see the marshes once,&#8221; said Phil, contentedly eating his breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What marshes?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>The</i> marshes, commander,&#8221; returns Phil.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where are they?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know where they are,&#8221; says Phil; &#8220;but I see &#8217;em, guv&#8217;ner.
+They was flat. And miste.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Governor and commander are interchangeable terms with Phil, expressive
+of the same respect and deference, and applicable to nobody but Mr.
+George.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was born in the country, Phil.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Was you, indeed, commander?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes. And bred there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Phil elevates his one eyebrow, and after respectfully staring at his
+master to express interest, swallows a great gulp of coffee, still
+staring at him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s not a bird&#8217;s note that I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; says Mr. George. &#8220;Not
+many an English leaf or berry that I couldn&#8217;t name. Not many a tree
+that I couldn&#8217;t climb yet, if I was put to it. I was a real country
+boy once. My good mother lived in the country. Do you want to see the
+country, Phil?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;N-no, I don&#8217;t know as I do, particular.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The town&#8217;s enough for you, eh?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, you see, commander,&#8221; says Phil, &#8220;I ain&#8217;t acquainted with
+anythink else, and I doubt if I ain&#8217;t a-getting too old to take to
+novelties.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How old are you, Phil?&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Phil&#8217;s answer is intended to indicate the lack of even mathematical power
+in those who, like Phil, never had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> any training of the imagination, nor
+any other training to define their apperceptive centres of number beyond
+ten.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I&#8217;m something with a eight in it. It can&#8217;t be eighty. Nor yet
+eighteen. It&#8217;s betwixt &#8217;em somewheres. I was just eight, agreeable to
+the parish calculation, when I went with the tinker. That was April
+Fool Day. I was able to count up to ten; and when April Fool Day came
+round again I says to myself, &#8216;Now, old chap, you&#8217;re one and a eight
+in it.&#8217; April Fool Day after that I says, &#8216;Now, old chap, you&#8217;re two
+and a eight in it.&#8217; In course of time I come to ten and a eight in it;
+two tens and a eight in it. When it got so high it got the upper hand
+of me; but this is how I always know there&#8217;s a eight in it.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The folly of trying to make a man moral by precept alone; the fact that
+character is developed by what we do, by true living, by what goes out in
+action, not by what comes in in maxims or theories, is shown in Martin
+Chuzzlewit.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It has been remarked that Mr. Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was.
+Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff,
+especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of
+him by a homely admirer that he had a Fortunatus&#8217;s purse of gold
+sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in
+the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which
+fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste and shone
+prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept
+than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction post, which
+is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there.</p>
+
+<p>The best of architects and land surveyors kept a horse, in whom the
+enemies already mentioned more than once in these pages pretended to
+detect a fanciful resemblance to his master. Not in his outward
+person, for he was a raw-boned, haggard horse, always on a much
+shorter allowance of corn than Mr. Pecksniff; but in his moral
+character, wherein, said they, he was full of promise, but of no
+performance. He was always, in a manner, going to go, and never going.</p></div>
+
+<p>One of the worst results that can follow a system of training is to make a
+man a hypocrite. It is nearly as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> bad to store a mind with good thoughts
+or fill a heart with good feelings without giving the character the
+tendency by practical experience to carry into effect so far as possible
+its good feelings and high purposes. Mr. Pecksniff was a moral
+monstrosity. We should create no more Pecksniffs. A different ideal is
+taught in the remark made by Martin Chuzzlewit to Mary, &#8220;Endeavouring to
+be anything that&#8217;s good, and being it, is, with you, all one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Executive training is emphasized in Nicholas Nickleby. Old Ralph Nickleby
+said of Nicholas: &#8220;The old story&mdash;always thinking, and never doing.&#8221; The
+same thought is expressed very clearly in the pregnant sentence written
+about Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities: &#8220;Sadly, sadly, the sun rose;
+it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good
+emotions, incapable of their directed exercise.&#8221; The saddest sight in the
+world is a man or woman using power for evil. It is nearly as sad to see a
+man or woman with power, but without power to use it wisely.</p>
+
+<p>In A Tale of Two Cities he caricatures admirably the class who cling to
+old customs and conventions, and decline even to discuss changes or
+improvements, in his description of Tellson&#8217;s Bank.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Tellson&#8217;s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the
+year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very
+dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place,
+moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the house were
+proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness,
+proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence
+in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if
+it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no
+passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more
+convenient places of business. Tellson&#8217;s (they said) wanted no
+elbowroom, Tellson&#8217;s wanted no light, Tellson&#8217;s wanted no
+embellishment. Noakes and Co.&#8217;s might, or Snooks Brothers&#8217; might: but
+Tellson&#8217;s, thank heaven!</p>
+
+<p>Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the
+question of rebuilding Tellson&#8217;s. In this respect <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>the house was much
+on a par with the country; which did very often disinherit its sons
+for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been
+highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.</p></div>
+
+<p>Every child should get into his consciousness by experience, not by
+theory, the idea that he is expected to do his share in the improvement of
+his environment. The worst conception he can get is that &#8220;whatever is is
+right&#8221;; that things can not be improved. Every child should be encouraged
+to make suggestions for the improvement of his own environment and
+conditions in the schoolroom, in the yard, in the details of class
+management, or in anything else that he thinks he can improve.</p>
+
+<p>The closing sentence of Our School should ring always in the minds of
+teachers, especially the last clause: &#8220;And will do far better yet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens had implicit faith in even weak humanity, and taught the hopeful
+truth, that every man and every child may be improved, if the men and
+women most directly associated with them are wise and loving. Harriet
+Carker said to Mr. Morfin:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Oh, sir, after what I have seen, let me conjure you, if you are in
+any place of power, and are ever wronged, never for any wrong inflict
+punishment that can not be recalled; while there is a God above us to
+work changes in the hearts he made.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The Goblin of the Bell said to Toby Veck in The Chimes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Who turns his back upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind;
+abandons them as vile; and does not trace and track with pitying eyes
+the unfenced precipice by which they fell from good, grasping in their
+fall some tufts and shreds of that lost soil, and clinging to them
+still when bruised and dying in the gulf below, does wrong to Heaven
+and man, to time and to eternity.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The influence of Nature on the awakening mind of the child was outlined in
+A Child&#8217;s Dream of a Star.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>These children used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the
+beauty of the flowers; they wondered at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>the height and blueness of
+the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered
+at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.</p></div>
+
+<p>Nature is the great centre of interest to the child, and it may be the
+child&#8217;s first true revealer of God, if adulthood does not impiously come
+between the child and God by trying to give him a word God for his
+intellect too soon to take the place of the true God of his imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens&#8217;s best characters loved Nature. Esther, when recovering from her
+illness, said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and
+leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and everything in
+Nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it
+yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost,
+when the wide world was so full of delight to me!</p></div>
+
+<p>The deep, spiritual influences of Nature are revealed in the effects of
+life in the growing country on Oliver Twist.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft
+tranquility, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green
+hills and rich woods of an inland village! Who can tell how scenes of
+peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close
+and noisy places, and carry their own freshness deep into their jaded
+hearts! Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives
+of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has
+indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick
+and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even
+they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at
+last for one short glimpse of Nature&#8217;s face; and, carried from the
+scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once
+into a new state of being. Crawling forth from day to day, to some
+green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within them
+by the sight of sky, and hill, and plain, and glistening water, that a
+foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they
+have sunk into their tombs as peacefully as the sun, whose setting
+they watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>
+faded from their dim and feeble sight! The memories which peaceful
+country scenes call up are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and
+hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands
+for the graves of those we love&mdash;may purify our thoughts, and bear
+down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this there
+lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed
+consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote
+and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to
+come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.</p>
+
+<p>It was a lovely spot to which they repaired. Oliver, whose days had
+been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and
+brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence there.</p></div>
+
+<p>In the story of The Five Sisters of York Alice said to her sisters:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Nature&#8217;s own blessings are the proper goods of life, and we may share
+them sinlessly together. To die is our heavy portion, but, oh, let us
+die with life about us; when our cold hearts cease to beat, let warm
+hearts be beating near; let our last look be upon the bounds which God
+has set to his own bright skies, and not on stone walls and bars of
+iron! Dear sisters, let us live and die, if you list, in this green
+garden&#8217;s compass.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens had very advanced opinions in regard to the importance of physical
+training, especially of play, as an agent not only in physical culture,
+but in the development of the mind and character. Doctor Blimber&#8217;s school
+is condemned because the boys were not allowed to play, and Doctor
+Strong&#8217;s school is highly commended because the boys &#8220;had noble games out
+of doors&#8221; there.</p>
+
+<p>What splendid runners and jumpers and divers and swimmers those grand boys
+were whom Mr. Marton had the good fortune to teach in his second school in
+The Old Curiosity Shop!</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Crupp recommended David Copperfield to take up some game as an
+antidote for his despondency during his early love experience.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you was to take to something, sir,&#8221; said Mrs. Crupp, &#8220;if you was to
+take to skittles, now, which is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> healthy, you might find it divert your
+mind and do you good.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Chick told Mr. Dombey that Paul was delicate. &#8220;Our darling is not
+altogether as stout as we could wish. The fact is that his mind is too
+much for him. His soul is a great deal too large for his frame.&#8221; Yet his
+father paid no attention to the boy&#8217;s food, and sent him, when but a
+little sickly child, to Doctor Blimber&#8217;s to learn everything&mdash;not to play.
+&#8220;They had nothing so vulgar as play at Doctor Blimber&#8217;s.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One of the most vicious conventions is that which makes vigorous play
+vulgar and unladylike for girls.</p>
+
+<p>He called attention in American notes to the advantages possessed by the
+students of Upper Canada College, Toronto, inasmuch as &#8220;the town is well
+adapted for wholesome exercise at all seasons.&#8221; In the same book he gives
+his opinion that American girls &#8220;must go more wisely clad, and take more
+healthful exercise.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He praised the free life of the gipsy children in Nicholas Nickleby.</p>
+
+<p>In Martin Chuzzlewit, when Tom Pinch and Martin had to walk to Salisbury
+instead of riding in Mr. Pecksniff&#8217;s gig, Dickens says it was better for
+them that they were compelled to walk. What a breezy enthusiasm he throws
+into his advocacy of walking as an exercise:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Better! A rare strong, hearty, healthy walk&mdash;four statute miles an
+hour&mdash;preferable to that rumbling, tumbling, jolting, shaking,
+scraping, creaking, villainous old gig? Why, the two things will not
+admit of comparison. It is an insult to the walk to set them side by
+side. Where is an instance of a gig having ever circulated a man&#8217;s
+blood, unless when, putting him in danger of his neck, it awakened in
+his veins and in his ears, and all along his spine, a tingling heat
+much more peculiar than agreeable? When did a gig ever sharpen
+anybody&#8217;s wits and energies, unless it was when the horse bolted, and,
+crashing madly down a steep hill with a stone wall at the bottom, his
+desperate circumstances suggested to the only gentleman left inside
+some novel and unheard-of mode of dropping out behind? Better than the
+gig!</p>
+
+<p>Better than the gig! When were travellers by wheels<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> and hoofs seen
+with such red-hot cheeks as those? when were they so good-humouredly
+and merrily bloused? when did their laughter ring upon the air, as
+they turned them round, what time the stronger gusts came sweeping up;
+and, facing round again as they passed by, dashed on, in such a glow
+of ruddy health as nothing could keep pace with, but the high spirits
+it engendered? Better than the gig! Why here <i>is</i> a man in a gig
+coming the same way now. Look at him as he passes his whip into his
+left hand, chafes his numbed right fingers on his granite leg, and
+beats those marble toes of his upon the footboard. Ha, ha, ha! Who
+would exchange this rapid hurry of the blood for yonder stagnant
+misery, though its pace were twenty miles for one?</p>
+
+<p>Better than the gig! No man in a gig could have such interest in the
+milestones. No man in a gig could see, or feel, or think, like merry
+users of their legs.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens taught comparatively little about the subjects of instruction or
+the methods of teaching them. He dealt cramming its most stunning blow in
+Doctor Blimber&#8217;s school, and he criticised sharply the methods of teaching
+classics and literature in the same school. He advocated the objective
+method of teaching number in Jemmy Lirriper&#8217;s training at home by Major
+Jackman.</p>
+
+<p>He took more interest in reading and literature than in any other
+department of school study, so far as can be judged from his writings. He
+deplored the practice of allowing children to try to read before they
+could recognise the words readily, and understand their meaning in the
+training of Pip and Charley Hexam. At the great party at Mr. Merdle&#8217;s,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>the Bishop consulted the great Physician on the relaxation of the
+throat with which young curates were too frequently afflicted, and on
+the means of lessening the great prevalence of that disorder in the
+church. Physician, as a general rule, was of opinion that the best way
+to avoid it was to know how to read before you made a profession of
+reading. Bishop said, dubiously, did he really think so? And Physician
+said, decidedly, yes, he did.</p></div>
+
+<p>He criticised, too, the reading in the school visited in an American city,
+because &#8220;the girls blundered through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> three or four dreary passages,
+obviously without comprehending ten words,&#8221; and said &#8220;he would have been
+much better pleased if they had been asked to read some simpler selections
+which they could understand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wegg, when reading for Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, &#8220;read on by
+rote, and attached as few ideas as possible to the text.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He discusses the advantages of reading suitable books in David
+Copperfield, giving to David his own real experience in early boyhood.
+After describing the cruel treatment of the Murdstones, he says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose, for some
+six months, was to make me sullen, dull, and dogged. I was not made
+the less so by my sense of being daily more and more shut out and
+alienated from my mother. I believe I should have been almost
+stupefied but for one circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a
+little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it joined my own) and
+which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little
+room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones,
+The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe,
+came out, a glorious host to keep me company. They kept alive my
+fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time&mdash;they, and
+the Arabian Nights, and the tales of the Genii.</p></div>
+
+<p>His faith in the influence of reading increased as he grew older. In Our
+Mutual Friend he says: &#8220;No one who can read ever looks at a book, even
+unopened on a shelf, like one who can not read.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens taught a useful lesson in Martin Chuzzlewit regarding the way
+teachers used to be treated by society. Even yet there is need of a higher
+recognition of the teaching profession in its true dignity by a
+civilization that reverences wealth more than intellectual and spiritual
+character.</p>
+
+<p>Tom Pinch&#8217;s sister was engaged in the family of a wealthy brass founder.
+She was treated contemptuously by him and his wife, yet they complained to
+Tom that his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> sister was unable to command the respect of her pupil. Tom
+was naturally indignant, and he spoke his mind very clearly to the brass
+founder.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Sir!&#8221; cried Tom, after regarding him in silence for some time. &#8220;If
+you do not understand what I mean I will tell you. My meaning is that
+no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When you tell me,&#8221; resumed Tom, who was not the less indignant for
+keeping himself quiet, &#8220;that my sister has no innate power of
+commanding the respect of your children, I must tell you it is not so;
+and that she has. She is as well bred, as well taught, as well
+qualified by Nature to command respect as any hirer of a governess you
+know. But when you place her at a disadvantage in reference to every
+servant in your house, how can you suppose, if you have the gift of
+common sense, that she is not in a tenfold worse position in reference
+to your daughters?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pretty well! Upon my word,&#8221; exclaimed the gentleman, &#8220;that is pretty
+well!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is very ill, sir,&#8221; said Tom. &#8220;It is very bad and mean and wrong
+and cruel. Respect! I believe young people are quick enough to observe
+and imitate; and why or how should they respect whom no one else
+respects, and everybody slights? And very partial they must grow&mdash;oh,
+very partial!&mdash;to their studies, when they see to what a pass
+proficiency in those same tasks has brought their governess! Respect!
+Put anything the most deserving of respect before your daughters in
+the light in which you place her, and you will bring it down as low,
+no matter what it is!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You speak with extreme impertinence, young man,&#8221; observed the
+gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I speak without passion, but with extreme indignation and contempt
+for such a course of treatment, and for all who practise it,&#8221; said
+Tom. &#8220;Why, how can you, as an honest gentleman, profess displeasure or
+surprise at your daughter telling my sister she is something beggarly
+and humble when you are forever telling her the same thing yourself in
+fifty plain, outspeaking ways, though not in words; and when your very
+porter and footman make the same delicate announcement to all comers?&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>Dickens described a great variety of weak, and mean, and selfish, and
+degraded people in order to expose weakness, and meanness, and
+selfishness, and baseness, so that humanity might learn to overcome them,
+but he reserved his supreme contempt for those who oppose the general
+education of &#8220;the masses,&#8221; because it fills their mind with ideas above
+their station, or disqualifies them for the work they were intended to do.
+This being interpreted, means in plain language that certain human beings
+who, because they possess wealth, or belong to what they arrogantly call
+the &#8220;upper classes,&#8221; claim the right to dominate those who have not a
+sufficient amount of money to be independent of them; to fix what they
+selfishly call &#8220;the sphere of the lower classes&#8221;; and to prescribe the
+limits beyond which the children of the poor must not be educated, lest
+they be lifted beyond tame subserviency to their natural lords and
+masters, and fail to abase themselves dutifully or to be sufficiently
+grateful to those above them for the pittance they grudgingly give them
+for labouring in the menial occupations assigned them.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens despised all Barnacles, and Dedlocks, and Podsnaps, and Dombeys,
+and Merdles; he ridiculed all who violate the sacred bond of human
+brotherhood; but the vials of his bitterest wrath were poured upon those
+who because a child was born in the home of poor parents would therefore
+restrict its education and dwarf its soul.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Dombey, after the christening of Paul, called Mrs. Toodle before his
+guests, and in a very condescending but rigidly majestic manner told her
+he had graciously decided to send her son to the school of the Charitable
+Grinders. He prefaced his announcement by a brief statement of his views
+regarding education:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I am far from being friendly,&#8221; pursued Mr. Dombey, &#8220;to what is called
+by persons of levelling sentiments, general education. But it is
+necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be taught to
+know their position, and to conduct themselves properly. So far I
+approve of schools.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In Mr. Dombey&#8217;s eyes, as in some others that occasionally see the
+light, they only achieved that mighty piece of knowledge, the
+understanding of their own position, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> showed a fitting reverence
+for his. It was not so much their merit that they knew themselves, as
+that they knew him, and bowed low before him.</p></div>
+
+<p>There are thousands of Dombeys still. Two Canadian judges recently said in
+speaking of education precisely what Mr. Dombey and his class said in the
+time of Dickens. One objected to educating the common people because it
+unfitted them for positions as house servants, and made them so
+outrageously independent that they would not bow (bend their bodies
+properly, bow their heads, and look reverently at the floor) when in the
+presence of their mistresses. The other said that the very derivation of
+the word &#8220;education&#8221; meant to lead out, and it was therefore clear that
+&#8220;education should be used to develop a few, &#8216;lead them out,&#8217; beyond the
+masses in order that they might be qualified for leadership.&#8221; The
+necessary development to be imposed upon all but the favoured few in his
+system of government is willingness to follow leaders, and ignorance is
+the only condition that can make this possible. The glory of education is
+the awakening of the consciousness of freedom in the soul of the race and
+the revelation of the perfect law of liberty&mdash;individual right, social
+duty. The shackles, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, have fallen
+from humanity, as education has done its true work of emancipating the
+individual soul and revealing its own value and its responsibility for its
+brother souls.</p>
+
+<p>The most brutal of all the characters described by Dickens is Bill Sikes.
+The most degraded and despicable of his characters is Dennis the hangman
+in Barnaby Rudge. Dickens makes Bill Sikes and Dennis use the very same
+arguments, from their standpoint, that the so-called upper classes have
+used and still do use against the education of the masses.</p>
+
+<p>Bill Sikes, referring to the need of small boys in the trade of burglary,
+said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I want a boy, and he mustn&#8217;t be a big &#8217;un. Lord!&#8221; said Mr. Sikes,
+reflectively, &#8220;if I&#8217;d only got that young boy of Ned, the chimbley
+sweeper&#8217;s! He kept him small on purpose, and let him out by the job.
+But the father gets<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> lagged; and then the Juvenile Delinquent Society
+comes and takes the boy away from a trade where he was arning money,
+teaches him to read and write, and in time makes a &#8217;prentice of him.
+And so they go on,&#8221; said Mr. Sikes, his wrath rising with the
+recollection of his wrongs, &#8220;so they go on; and, if they&#8217;d got money
+enough (which it&#8217;s a Providence they haven&#8217;t), we shouldn&#8217;t have half
+a dozen boys left in the whole trade in a year or two.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>And Fagin agreed with Bill Sikes.</p>
+
+<p>When Hugh was formally admitted as a member of Lord Gordon&#8217;s mob Dennis
+the hangman was much delighted at the addition of such a strong young man
+to the ranks, and Dickens adds:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If anything could have exceeded Mr. Dennis&#8217;s joy on the happy
+conclusion of this ceremony it would have been the rapture with which
+he received the announcement that the new member could neither read
+nor write: those two arts being (as Mr. Dennis swore) the greatest
+possible curse a civilized community could know, and militating more
+against the professional emoluments and usefulness of the great
+constitutional office he had the honour to hold than any adverse
+circumstances that could present themselves to his imagination.</p></div>
+
+<p>Bill Sikes objected to education because it spoiled the boys for the trade
+for which he required them; Dennis the hangman objected to education
+because &#8220;it reduced the professional emoluments of his great
+constitutional office,&#8221; or, in other words, reduced the number who had to
+be hanged; and their reasons are just as respectable as the reason given
+by any man in any position who objects to free education because it unfits
+boys for certain trades, or girls for &#8220;service,&#8221; or because &#8220;it fills
+their minds with ideas above their station,&#8221; or because they have to pay
+their just share of its cost, or for any other narrow and selfish reason.
+Selfishness is selfishness, and it is as utterly loathsome in a bishop as
+in Bill Sikes, in a judge as in Dennis the hangman.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens never did any more artistic work than when he painted the
+aristocratic objectors to popular education in their natural hideousness
+with Bill Sikes and Dennis the hangman for a harmonious background.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">THE TRAINING OF POOR, NEGLECTED, AND DEFECTIVE CHILDREN.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is a singular fact that humanity in its highest development so long
+neglected the poor, and the weak, and the defective. They were practically
+left out of consideration by educators and philanthropists. The fact that
+they more than any others needed education and care was not seen clearly
+enough to lead to definite plans for the amelioration of their misfortunes
+until the nineteenth century. Dickens must always have the honour of being
+the great English apostle of the poor&mdash;especially of neglected childhood.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote in the Uncommercial Traveller:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I can find&mdash;<i>must</i> find, whether I will or no&mdash;in the open streets,
+shameful instances of neglect of children, intolerable toleration of
+the engenderment of paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched and
+destructive cripples both in body and mind; a misery to themselves, a
+misery to the community, a disgrace to civilization, and an outrage on
+Christianity. I know it to be a fact as easy of demonstration as any
+sum in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the State
+would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would with the
+strong hand take those children out of the streets while they are yet
+children, and wisely train them, it would make them a part of
+England&#8217;s glory, not its shame&mdash;of England&#8217;s strength, not its
+weakness&mdash;would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good citizens,
+and many great men out of the seeds of its criminal population; it
+would clear London streets of the most terrible objects they smite the
+sight with&mdash;myriads of little children who awfully reverse our
+Saviour&#8217;s words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the
+Kingdom of Hell.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>He sympathized with childhood on account of every form of coercion and
+abuse practised upon it by tyrannical, selfish, or ignorant adulthood,
+under the most favourable conditions; but his great heart was especially
+tender toward the little ones who, in addition to coercion and abuse, and
+bad training by the selfish, the ignorant, and the careless, were
+compelled to endure the terrible sufferings and deprivations of poverty.
+He was conscious not only of the material and physical evils to which the
+children of the very poor were exposed, but of the mental and spiritual
+barrenness of their lives, and one of his most manifest educational
+purposes was to improve social conditions, to arouse the spirit of truly
+sympathetic brotherhood (not merely considerate altruism, but genuine
+brotherhood) to place the poorest children in conditions that would
+develop by experience the apperceptive centres of intellectual and
+spiritual growth, and to direct special attention to the urgent need of
+education for the blind, the deaf, and the mentally defective.</p>
+
+<p>No other American touched his heart and won his reverence quite so
+thoroughly as Dr. Howe, of Boston, who will undoubtedly be recognised as
+one of the greatest men yet produced by American civilization when men are
+tested by their purposes, and by their unselfish work for humanity in
+hitherto untrodden paths. After describing Dr. Howe&#8217;s work for the blind,
+he reverently says: &#8220;There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who,
+after reading these passages, can ever hear that name with indifference.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dickens charged on humanity, on society, the crime of making criminals. He
+said with great force and truth in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Nothing is more common in real life than a want of profitable
+reflection on the causes of many vices and crimes that awaken general
+horror. What is substantially true of families in this respect, is
+true of a whole commonwealth. As we sow, we reap. Let the reader go
+into the children&#8217;s side of any prison in England, or, I grieve to
+add, of many workhouses, and judge whether those are monsters who
+disgrace our streets, people our hulks and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> penitentiaries, and
+overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom we have
+deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin.</p></div>
+
+<p>This thought was the motive that led him throughout his whole life to try
+to arouse sympathetic interest of the most active kind in the conditions
+and circumstances of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>One of his most striking appeals to thoughtful people is made in Martin
+Chuzzlewit. These profound words will always be worthy of careful study by
+teachers and reformers:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in
+every sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in
+God&#8217;s highway, so smooth below your carriage wheels, so rough beneath
+the tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift
+descent of men who <i>have</i> lived in their own esteem, that there are
+scores of thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful
+toil, who in that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a
+chance of life! Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred bard who
+had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never
+seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go,
+teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the
+forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of
+man&#8217;s neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul
+that it extinguishes the soul&#8217;s bright torch as fast as it is kindled!
+And, oh! ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of Christian
+knowledge, who soundingly appeal to human nature, see that it be human
+first. Take heed it has not been transformed, during your slumber and
+the sleep of generations, into the nature of the beasts.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens saw clearly the depravity of human nature, but he looked beyond
+the depravity to its cause, and he found a natural cause for the
+degradation, but not the cause that had been commonly assigned. He taught
+that the highest and holiest elements in human nature were the causes of
+its swiftest deterioration when misused, perverted, or neglected.</p>
+
+<p>Alice Marwood, in Dombey and Son, was introduced to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> teach parents and
+society in general the duties they owe to childhood, and to show how lives
+are wrecked by neglect and by a false use of power. When she returned, an
+outcast, to her mother, and her mother upbraided her, the young woman
+said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me
+as well as you. Come back harder? Of course I have come back harder.
+What else did you expect?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Harder to me! To her own dear mother!&#8221; cried the old woman.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn&#8217;t,&#8221;
+she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and
+compressed lips, as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every
+softer feeling from her breast. &#8220;Listen, mother, to a word or two. If
+we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps.
+I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful
+enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been
+very dutiful to me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I!&#8221; cried the old woman. &#8220;To my own gal! A mother dutiful to her own
+child!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It sounds unnatural, don&#8217;t it?&#8221; returned the daughter, looking coldly
+on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; &#8220;but I have
+thought of it sometimes, in the course of <i>my</i> lone years, till I have
+got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but
+it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and
+then&mdash;to pass away the time&mdash;whether no one ever owed any duty to me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but whether
+angrily, or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical
+infirmity, did not appear.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There was a child called Alice Marwood,&#8221; said the daughter with a
+laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself,
+&#8220;born among poverty and neglect, and nurtured in it. Nobody taught
+her, nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nobody!&#8221; echoed the mother, pointing to herself and striking her
+breast.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The only care she knew,&#8221; returned the daughter, &#8220;was to be beaten,
+and stinted, and abused sometimes; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> she might have done better
+without that. She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a
+crowd of little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks
+out of this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have
+been hunted and worried to death for ugliness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Go on! go on!&#8221; exclaimed the mother.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;ll soon have ended,&#8221; said the daughter. &#8220;There was a criminal
+called Alice Marwood&mdash;a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And
+she was tried, and she was sentenced. And Lord, how the gentlemen in
+the court talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty,
+and on her having perverted the gifts of Nature&mdash;as if he didn&#8217;t know
+better than anybody there that they had been made curses to her!&mdash;and
+how he preached about the strong arm of the Law&mdash;so very strong to
+save her, when she was an innocent and helpless little wretch! and how
+solemn and religious it all was! I have thought of that many times
+since, to be sure!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone that
+made the howl of the old woman musical.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So Alice Marwood was transported, mother,&#8221; she pursued, &#8220;and was sent
+to learn her duty where there was twenty times less duty, and more
+wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood is
+come back a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this. In
+good time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more
+strong arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her; but the
+gentlemen needn&#8217;t be afraid of being thrown out of work. There&#8217;s
+crowds of little wretches, boy and girl, growing up in any of the
+streets they live in, that&#8217;ll keep them to it till they&#8217;ve made their
+fortunes.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Bleak House is one of the greatest of the educational works of Dickens.
+One of its chief aims was to arouse a sympathetic interest in the lives of
+poor children. The Neckett children, Charlotte, and Tom, and Emma,
+revealed a new world to many thousands of good people.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Charley, Charley!&#8221; said my guardian. &#8220;How old are you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Over thirteen, sir,&#8221; replied the child.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! what a great age,&#8221; said my guardian. &#8220;What a great age, Charley!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>&#8220;And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?&#8221; said my
+guardian.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir,&#8221; returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect
+confidence, &#8220;since father died.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley,&#8221; said my guardian, turning
+his face away for a moment, &#8220;how do you live?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Since my father died, sir, I&#8217;ve gone out to work. I&#8217;m out washing
+to-day.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;God help you, Charley!&#8221; said my guardian. &#8220;You&#8217;re not tall enough to
+reach the tub!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In pattens I am, sir,&#8221; she said, quickly. &#8220;I&#8217;ve got a high pair as
+belonged to mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And when did mother die? Poor mother!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mother died just after Emma was born,&#8221; said the child, glancing at
+the face upon her bosom. &#8220;Then father said I was to be as good a
+mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home, and
+did cleaning and nursing and washing, for a long time before I began
+to go out. And that&#8217;s how I know how; don&#8217;t you see, sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And do you often go out?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As often as I can,&#8221; said Charley, opening her eyes, and smiling,
+&#8220;because of earning sixpences and shillings!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To keep &#8217;em safe, sir, don&#8217;t you see?&#8221; said Charley. &#8220;Mrs. Blinder
+comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps
+I can run in sometimes, and they can play, you know, and Tom ain&#8217;t
+afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No-o!&#8221; said Tom stoutly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When it comes on dark the lamps are lighted down in the court, and
+they show up here quite bright&mdash;almost quite bright. Don&#8217;t they, Tom?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, Charley,&#8221; said Tom; &#8220;almost quite bright.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The hearts must be hard that are not moved to a deeper and more practical
+interest in the children of the poor by this pathetic story, and others of
+a kindred character which Dickens told over and over again for the
+Christian world to study. And the study led to feeling and thought and
+co-operative action.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>The fruits of these wonderful stories are the splendid homes, and
+organizations for children, and the laws to protect them from cruelty by
+parents or teachers, or employers, and the free public schools to educate
+them, and the joy, and happiness, and freedom, that are taking the place
+of the sorrow, and tears, and coercion of the time when Dickens began his
+noble work.</p>
+
+<p>The tragic story of poor Jo illustrated the poverty, the ignorance, the
+destitution, the hopelessness, the barrenness, and the dreadful
+environment of a London street boy. The world has done much better since,
+as Dickens prophesied it would do, and the good work is going on. Hundreds
+of thousands of the poor Joes of London are now in the public schools of
+London alone of whom the Christian philanthropy of the world thought
+little till Dickens told his stories.</p>
+
+<p>In Nobody&#8217;s Story Dickens returns to his special purpose of changing the
+attitude of civilization toward the education of the poor. The Bigwigs
+represent society, and &#8220;the man&#8221; means the poor man.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>But the Bigwig family broke out into violent family quarrels
+concerning what it was lawful to teach to this man&#8217;s children. Some of
+the family insisted on such a thing being primary and indispensable
+above all other things; and others of the family insisted on such
+another thing being primary and indispensable above all other things;
+and the Bigwig family, rent into factions, wrote pamphlets, held
+convocations, delivered charges, orations, and all varieties of
+discourses; impounded one another in courts Lay and courts
+Ecclesiastical; threw dirt, exchanged pummellings, and fell together
+by the ears in unintelligible animosity. Meanwhile, this man, in his
+short evening snatches at his fireside, saw the demon Ignorance arise
+there, and take his children to itself. He saw his daughter perverted
+into a heavy slatternly drudge; he saw his son go moping down the ways
+of low sensuality, to brutality and crime; he saw the dawning light of
+intelligence in the eyes of his babies so changing into cunning and
+suspicion, that he could have rather wished them idiots.</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens objected to a certain kind of sentimentality exhibited in his day
+toward criminals, and draws a very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> suggestive picture full of elements
+for psychological study in David Copperfield, in which he makes the brutal
+schoolmaster Creakle a very considerate Middlesex magistrate, with an
+unfailing system for a quick and effective method of converting the
+wickedest scoundrels into the most submissive, Scripture-quoting saints by
+solitary confinement. Dickens did not approve of the system, and he did
+not approve either of the plan of the spending of so much money by the
+state in erecting splendid buildings for criminals, while the honest poor
+were in hovels, and especially while the state allowed the boys and girls,
+through neglect, to be transformed into criminals by thousands every year.
+Dickens would have made criminals earn their own living, and he urged the
+establishment of industrial schools for the boys and girls of the streets,
+so that they might become respectable, intelligent, self-reliant,
+law-abiding citizens instead of criminals.</p>
+
+<p>David said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was powerful.
+It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I
+could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar
+would have been made in the country if any deluded man had proposed to
+spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial
+school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.</p></div>
+
+<p>As usual with great reformers, the philanthropists of his own day refused
+to accept the theories of Dickens, but succeeding generations adopted
+them. The reforms for which he pleaded began to be practised so soon
+because he winged his thought with living appeals to the deepest, truest
+feelings of the human heart.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens said truly of Barnaby Rudge:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;The absence of the soul is far more terrible in a living man than in
+a dead one; and in this unfortunate being its noblest powers were wanting.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>He pleaded again for those who are weak-minded in Mr. Dick&#8217;s case in David
+Copperfield. Mr. Dick was evidently introduced into the story to show the
+effect of kind treatment on those who are defective in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>intellect. The
+insane were flogged and put in strait-jackets in the time of Dickens. His
+teaching is now the practice of the civilized world. The insane are kindly
+treated, and weak-minded children are taught in good schools by the best
+teachers that can be obtained for them.</p>
+
+<p>Betsy Trotwood, David&#8217;s aunt, was an embodiment of a good heart united
+with an eminently practical head. She did not talk about religion, as did
+the Murdstones, but she showed her religious life in good, reasonable,
+self-sacrificing, helpful living. David asked her for an explanation of
+Mr. Dick&#8217;s case.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;He has been <i>called</i> mad,&#8221; said my aunt. &#8220;I have a selfish pleasure
+in saying he has been called mad, or I should not have had the benefit
+of his society and advice for these last ten years and upward&mdash;in
+fact, ever since your sister, Betsy Trotwood, disappointed me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So long as that?&#8221; I said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And nice people they were, who had the audacity to call him mad,&#8221;
+pursued my aunt. &#8220;Mr. Dick is a sort of distant connection of mine&mdash;it
+doesn&#8217;t matter how; I needn&#8217;t enter into that. If it hadn&#8217;t been for
+me, his own brother would have shut him up for life. That&#8217;s all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my aunt felt
+strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt strongly too.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A proud fool!&#8221; said my aunt. &#8220;Because his brother was a little
+eccentric&mdash;though he is not half so eccentric as a good many
+people&mdash;he didn&#8217;t like to have him visible about the house, and sent
+him away to some private asylum place; though he had been left to his
+particular care by their deceased father, who thought him almost a
+natural. And a wise man <i>he</i> must have been to think so! Mad himself,
+no doubt.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again, as my aunt looked quite convinced, I endeavoured to look quite
+convinced also.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So I stepped in,&#8221; said my aunt, &#8220;and made him an offer. I said, &#8216;Your
+brother&#8217;s sane&mdash;a great deal more sane than you are, or ever will be,
+it is to be hoped. Let him have his little income, and come and live
+with me. <i>I</i> am not afraid of him; <i>I</i> am not proud; <i>I</i> am ready to
+take care of him, and shall not ill treat him as some people (besides
+the asylum folks) have done.&#8217; After a good deal of squabbling,&#8221; said
+my aunt, &#8220;I got him; and he has been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> here ever since. He is the most
+friendly and amenable creature in existence; and as for advice!&mdash;but
+nobody knows what that man&#8217;s mind is, except myself.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens was greatly delighted with the asylums of the United States, and
+he strongly advocated the adoption in England of American methods of
+treating the insane. He says, in American Notes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>At South Boston, as it is called, in a situation excellently adapted
+for the purpose, several charitable institutions are clustered
+together. One of these is the State Hospital for the Insane; admirably
+conducted on those enlightened principles of conciliation and
+kindness, which twenty years ago would have been worse than heretical,
+and which have been acted upon with so much success in our own pauper
+asylum at Hanwell. &#8220;Evince a desire to show some confidence, and
+repose some trust, even in mad people,&#8221; said the resident physician,
+as we walked along the galleries, his patients flocking round us
+unrestrained. Of those who deny or doubt the wisdom of this maxim
+after witnessing its effects, if there be such people still alive, I
+can only say that I hope I may never be summoned as a juryman on a
+commission of lunacy whereof they are the subjects; for I should
+certainly find them out of their senses, on such evidence alone.</p>
+
+<p>Each ward in this institution is shaped like a long gallery or hall,
+with the dormitories of the patients opening from it on either hand.
+Here they work, read, play at skittles, and other games; and, when the
+weather does not admit of their taking exercise out of doors, pass the
+day together. In one of these rooms, seated, calmly, and quite as a
+matter of course, among a throng of mad women, black and white, were
+the physician&#8217;s wife and another lady, with a couple of children.
+These ladies were graceful and handsome; and it was not difficult to
+perceive at a glance that even their presence there had a highly
+beneficial influence on the patients who were grouped about them.</p>
+
+<p>Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a
+knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman whose
+manner of dealing with his charges I have just described. At every
+meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among them from
+cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that influence is
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even as a means of
+restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a hundred times
+more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, fetters, and
+handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have manufactured
+since the creation of the world.</p></div>
+
+<p>How much those benighted teachers who so tragically ask &#8220;What <i>can</i> you do
+with bad boys, if you do <i>not</i> use corporal punishment?&#8221; might learn from
+the last sentence!</p>
+
+<p>Blinded by old ideals, these teachers whip away, admitting that they fail
+to reform many of the best boys, and quieting their consciences with the
+horrible thought that the evil course was the natural one for the boys,
+and that they are not responsible for their blighted lives. They comfort
+themselves with the thought that it is God&#8217;s business, and if he made a
+boy so bad that flogging would not reform him, they at any rate are free
+from blame, because they &#8220;have beaten, and beaten, and beaten him, and it
+did him no good.&#8221; Having beaten him, and beaten him, and beaten him, they
+rest contented with the sure conviction that they have faithfully done
+their duty; and when, perchance, the poor boy becomes a criminal, they
+solemnly say without a blush or a pang: &#8220;I knew he would come to a bad
+end, but I am so thankful that I did my duty to him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ignominious failure to save the brave boys who are not cowardly enough to
+be deterred from doing wrong by beating has taught nothing to some
+teachers. Even yet they placidly beat on, and get angry if they are
+requested to try freedom as a substitute for coercion in the training of
+beings created in God&#8217;s image. They even question the sanity and the
+theology of those who dare to doubt the efficiency of the sacred rod. They
+do not deem it possible that by studying the child and their own higher
+powers they could find easier, pleasanter, and infinitely more successful
+methods of guiding a boy to a true, strong life than by beating, and
+beating, and beating him.</p>
+
+<p>The keepers of asylums in the time of Dickens were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> equally severe on the
+wise friends of the insane. They honestly believed that terrible evils
+would necessarily result from giving greater freedom to the afflicted
+patients in asylums. Dickens took the side of freedom and common sense,
+and the strait-jackets, and handcuffs, and fetters have been taken off,
+and, <i>even as a means of restraint</i>, kindness and freedom have done better
+work than all the coercive fetters that &#8220;ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty
+have manufactured since the creation of the world.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So all teachers who have grown wise enough have found that kindness and
+freedom are much better even as restraining agents, and infinitely better
+in the development of true, independent, positive, progressive characters
+than all the coercive terrors of rod, rule, strap, rawhide, or any form of
+cruelty ever practised on helpless childhood by ignorance, prejudice, and
+perverted theology since the creation of the world.</p>
+
+<p>In American Notes Dickens gave a long description of Laura Bridgman
+written by Dr. Howe, and showed his intense interest in what was then a
+new movement in favour of the education of the blind.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of Laura Bridgman, Dickens himself wrote:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room before a
+girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell, and nearly so of
+taste; before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and
+hope, and power of goodness and affection inclosed within her delicate
+frame, and but one outward sense&mdash;the sense of touch. There she was
+before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any
+ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping
+through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that
+an immortal soul might be awakened.</p>
+
+<p>Long before I looked upon her the help had come. Her face was radiant
+with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands,
+was bound about her head, whose intellectual capacity and development
+were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open
+brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and
+simplicity; the work she had knitted lay <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>beside her; her writing book
+was on the desk she leaned upon. From the mournful ruin of such
+bereavement there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless,
+grateful-hearted being.</p></div>
+
+<p>The touching story of Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter was intended to
+arouse interest in blind children.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Marigold should be one of the best beloved of all the beautiful
+characters of Dickens. If any kind of language could awaken an intense
+interest in the education of deaf-mutes, the story of the dear old Cheap
+Jack must surely do it.</p>
+
+<p>The sad picture of the cruel treatment of his own little Sophy by her
+mother; of her dying on his shoulder while he was selling his wares to the
+crowd, whispering fondly to her between his jokes; and the suicide of the
+mother, when she afterward saw another woman beating her child, and heard
+the child cry piteously, &#8220;Don&#8217;t beat me! Oh, mother, mother,
+mother!&#8221;&mdash;these prepare the heart for full appreciation of the tender,
+considerate, and intelligent treatment of the deaf-mute child adopted by
+Doctor Marigold in Sophy&#8217;s place.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I went to that Fair as a mere civilian, leaving the cart outside the
+town, and I looked about the back of the Vans while the performing was
+going on, and at last, sitting dozing against a muddy cart wheel, I
+come upon the poor girl who was deaf and dumb. At the first look I
+might almost have judged that she had escaped from the Wild Beast
+Show; but at the second I thought better of her, and thought that if
+she was more cared for and more kindly used she would be like my
+child. She was just the same age that my own daughter would have been,
+if her pretty head had not fell down upon my shoulder that unfortunate
+night.</p>
+
+<p>It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel in
+the cart. I at once gave her the name of Sophy, to put her ever toward
+me in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to begin to
+understand one another, through the goodness of the Heavens, when she
+knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a very little time she
+was wonderful fond of me. You have no idea what it is to have anybody
+wonderful fond of you,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> unless you have been got down and rolled upon
+by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the
+better of me.</p>
+
+<p>You&#8217;d have laughed&mdash;or the rewerse&mdash;it&#8217;s according to your
+disposition&mdash;if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At first
+I was helped&mdash;you&#8217;d never guess by what&mdash;milestones. I got some large
+alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of bone, and say
+we was going to WINDSOR; I gave her those letters in that order, and
+then at every milestone I showed her those same letters in that same
+order again, and pointed toward the abode of royalty. Another time I
+give her CART, and then chalked the same upon the cart. Another time I
+give her DOCTOR MARIGOLD, and hung a corresponding inscription outside
+my waistcoat. People that met us might stare a bit and laugh, but what
+did <i>I</i> care if she caught the idea? She caught it after long patience
+and trouble, and then we did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe
+you! At first she was a little given to consider me the cart, and the
+cart the abode of royalty, but that soon wore off.</p>
+
+<p>The way she learned to understand any look of mine was truly
+surprising. When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart, unseen
+by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes when I
+looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or articles
+I wanted. And then she would clap her hands, and laugh for joy. And as
+for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she was when I
+first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged, leaning asleep
+against the muddy cart wheel, it give me such heart that I gained a
+greater height of reputation than ever.</p>
+
+<p>This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen years old. By
+which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole duty
+by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching than I
+could give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I commenced
+explaining my views to her; but what&#8217;s right is right, and you can&#8217;t
+neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character.</p>
+
+<p>So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf
+and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to speak
+to us, I says to him: &#8220;Now, I&#8217;ll tell you what I&#8217;ll do with you, sir.
+I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have laid by for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> a
+rainy day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter (adopted), and you
+can&#8217;t produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her the most that can be
+taught her in the shortest separation that can be named&mdash;state the
+figure for it&mdash;and I am game to put the money down. I won&#8217;t bate you
+single farthing, sir, but I&#8217;ll put down the money here and now, and
+I&#8217;ll thankfully throw you in a pound to take it. There!&#8221; The gentleman
+smiled, and then, &#8220;Well, well,&#8221; says he, &#8220;I must first know what she
+has learned already. How do you communicate with her?&#8221; Then I showed
+him, and she wrote in printed writing many names of things and so
+forth; and we held some sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a
+little story in a book which the gentleman showed her, and which she
+was able to read. &#8220;This is most extraordinary,&#8221; says the gentleman;
+&#8220;is it possible that you have been her only teacher?&#8221; &#8220;I have been her
+only teacher, sir,&#8221; I says, &#8220;besides herself.&#8221; &#8220;Then,&#8221; says the
+gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, &#8220;you&#8217;re a
+clever fellow, and a good fellow.&#8221; This he makes known to Sophy, who
+kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter to
+know?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I want her, sir, to be cut off from the world as little as can be,
+considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read
+whatever is wrote with perfect ease and pleasure.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>No one ever read this story and its delightful closing without being more
+deeply interested in deaf-mutes and their education.</p>
+
+<p>All the children, especially poor and defective children, should be taught
+how much they owe to Dickens, that they might reverently love his memory.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most awful pictures shown to Scrooge by the Phantom was the
+picture of the two &#8220;wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable
+children.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish;
+but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should
+have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest
+tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and
+twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> might have
+sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no
+degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the
+mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and
+dread.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They are Man&#8217;s,&#8221; said the Spirit, looking down upon them. &#8220;And they
+cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This
+girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of
+all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,
+unless the writing be erased. Deny it!&#8221; cried the Spirit, stretching
+out its hand toward the city. &#8220;Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it
+for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens bravely fought the battle against the enemies of the children, and
+helped to win the grandest victories of Christian civilization.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">THE END.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<div class="verts">
+<p class="center"><span class="large">INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES.</span></p>
+<p class="center"><i>12mo, cloth, uniform binding.</i></p>
+
+
+<p>THE INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES was projected for the purpose of
+bringing together in orderly arrangement the best writings, new and old,
+upon educational subjects, and presenting a complete course of reading and
+training for teachers generally. It is edited by <span class="smcap">William T. Harris</span>, LL.
+D., United States Commissioner of Education, who has contributed for the
+different volumes in the way of introduction, analysis, and commentary.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>1.</b> <b>The Philosophy of Education.</b> By <span class="smcap">Johann K. F. Rosenkranz</span>, Doctor of
+Theology and Professor of Philosophy. University of K&ouml;nigsberg. Translated
+by <span class="smcap">Anna C. Brackett</span>. Second edition, revised, with Commentary and complete
+Analysis. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>2.</b> <b>A History of Education.</b> By <span class="smcap">F. V. N. Painter</span>, A. M. Professor of Modern
+Languages and Literature, Roanoke College, Va. Revised edition, 1904.
+$1.20 net.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>3.</b> <b>The Rise and Early Constitution of Universities.</b> <span class="smcap">With a Survey of
+Medi&aelig;val Education.</span> By <span class="smcap">S. S. Laurie</span>, LL. D., Professor of the Institutes
+and History of Education, University of Edinburgh. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>4.</b> <b>The Ventilation and Warming of School Buildings.</b> By <span class="smcap">Gilbert B.
+Morrison</span>, Teacher of Physics and Chemistry, Kansas City High School.
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>5.</b> <b>The Education of Man.</b> By <span class="smcap">Friedrich Froebel</span>. Translated and annotated by
+<span class="smcap">W. N. Hailmann</span>, A. M., Superintendent of Public Schools, La Porte, Ind.
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>6.</b> <b>Elementary Psychology and Education.</b> By <span class="smcap">Joseph Baldwin</span>, A. M., LL. D.,
+author of &#8220;The Art of School Management.&#8221; $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>7.</b> <b>The Senses and the Will.</b> (Part I of &#8220;<span class="smcap">The Mind of the Child</span>.&#8221;) By <span class="smcap">W.
+Preyer</span>, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated by <span class="smcap">H. W. Brown</span>,
+Teacher in the State Normal School at Worcester, Mass. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>8.</b> <b>Memory: What it is and How to Improve it.</b> By <span class="smcap">David Kay</span>, F. R. G. S.,
+author of &#8220;Education and Educators,&#8221; etc. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>9.</b> <b>The Development of the Intellect.</b> (Part II of &#8220;<span class="smcap">The Mind of the Child</span>.&#8221;)
+By <span class="smcap">W. Preyer</span>, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated by <span class="smcap">H. W. Brown</span>.
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>10.</b> <b>How to Study Geography.</b> A Practical Exposition of Methods and Devices
+in Teaching Geography which apply the Principles and Plans of Ritter and
+Guyot. By <span class="smcap">Francis W. Parker</span>, Principal of the Cook County (Illinois)
+Normal School. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>11.</b> <b>Education in the United States: Its History from the Earliest
+Settlements.</b> By <span class="smcap">Richard G. Boone</span>, A. M., Professor of Pedagogy, Indiana
+University. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>12.</b> <b>European Schools</b>; <span class="smcap">or, What I Saw in the Schools of Germany, France,
+Austria, and Switzerland</span>. By <span class="smcap">L. R. Klemm</span>, Ph. D., Principal of the
+Cincinnati Technical School. Fully illustrated. $2.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>13.</b> <b>Practical Hints for the Teachers of Public Schools.</b> By <span class="smcap">George Howland</span>,
+Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>14.</b> <b>Pestalozzi: His Life and Work.</b> By <span class="smcap">Roger de Guimps</span>. Authorized
+Translation from the second French edition, by <span class="smcap">J. Russell</span>, B. A. With an
+Introduction by Rev. <span class="smcap">R. H. Quick</span>, M. A. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>15.</b> <b>School Supervision.</b> By <span class="smcap">J. L. Pickard</span>, LL. D. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>16.</b> <b>Higher Education of Women in Europe.</b> By <span class="smcap">Helene Lange</span>, Berlin.
+Translated and accompanied by comparative statistics by <span class="smcap">L. R. Klemm</span>.
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>17.</b> <b>Essays on Educational Reformers.</b> By <span class="smcap">Robert Herbert Quick</span>, M. A.,
+Trinity College, Cambridge. Only authorized edition of the work as
+rewritten in 1890. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>18.</b> <b>A Text-Book in Psychology.</b> By <span class="smcap">Johann Friedrich Herbart</span>. Translated by
+<span class="smcap">Margaret K. Smith</span>. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>19.</b> <b>Psychology Applied to the Art of Teaching.</b> By <span class="smcap">Joseph Baldwin</span>, A. M.,
+LL. D. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>20.</b> <b>Rousseau&#8217;s &Eacute;mile;</b> or, <span class="smcap">Treatise on Education</span>. Translated and annotated
+by <span class="smcap">W. H. Payne</span>, Ph. D., LL. D. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>21.</b> <b>The Moral Instruction of Children.</b> By <span class="smcap">Felix Adler</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>22.</b> <b>English Education in the Elementary and Secondary Schools.</b> By <span class="smcap">Isaac
+Sharpless</span>, LL. D., President of Haverford College. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>23.</b> <b>Education from a National Standpoint.</b> By <span class="smcap">Alfred Fouill&eacute;e</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>24.</b> <b>Mental Development of the Child.</b> By <span class="smcap">W. Preyer</span>, Professor of Physiology
+in Jena. Translated by <span class="smcap">H. W. Brown</span>. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>25.</b> <b>How to Study and Teach History.</b> By <span class="smcap">B. A. Hinsdale</span>, Ph. D., LL. D.,
+University of Michigan. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>26.</b> <b>Symbolic Education.</b> <span class="smcap">A Commentary on Froebel&#8217;s &#8220;Mother-Play.&#8221;</span> By <span class="smcap">Susan
+E. Blow</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>27.</b> <b>Systematic Science Teaching.</b> By <span class="smcap">Edward Gardnier Howe</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>28.</b> <b>The Education of the Greek People.</b> By <span class="smcap">Thomas Davidson</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>29.</b> <b>The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public-School System.</b> By <span class="smcap">G. H.
+Martin</span>, A. M. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>30.</b> <b>Pedagogics of the Kindergarten.</b> By <span class="smcap">Friedrich Froebel</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>31.</b> <b>The Mottoes and Commentaries of Friedrich Froebel&#8217;s Mother-Play.</b> By
+<span class="smcap">Susan E. Blow</span> and <span class="smcap">Henrietta R. Eliot</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>32.</b> <b>The Songs and Music of Froebel&#8217;s Mother-Play.</b> By <span class="smcap">Susan E. Blow</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>33.</b> <b>The Psychology of Number.</b> By <span class="smcap">James A. McLellan</span>, A. M., and <span class="smcap">John Dewey</span>,
+Ph. D. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>34.</b> <b>Teaching the Language-Arts.</b> By <span class="smcap">B. A. Hinsdale</span>, LL. D. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>35.</b> <b>The Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child.</b> <span class="smcap">Part</span> I. By
+<span class="smcap">Gabriel Compayr&eacute;</span>. Translated by <span class="smcap">Mary E. Wilson</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>36.</b> <b>Herbart&#8217;s A B C of Sense-Perception, and Introductory Works.</b> By
+<span class="smcap">William J. Eckoff</span>, Pd. D., Ph. D. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>37.</b> <b>Psychologic Foundations of Education.</b> By <span class="smcap">William T. Harris</span>, A. M., LL.
+D. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>38.</b> <b>The School System of Ontario.</b> By the Hon. <span class="smcap">George W. Ross</span>, LL. D.,
+Minister of Education for the Province of Ontario. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>39.</b> <b>Principles and Practice of Teaching.</b> By <span class="smcap">James Johonnot</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>40.</b> <b>School Management and Methods.</b> By <span class="smcap">Joseph Baldwin</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>41.</b> <b>Froebel&#8217;s Educational Laws for all Teachers.</b> By <span class="smcap">James L. Hughes</span>,
+Inspector of Schools, Toronto. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>42.</b> <b>Bibliography of Education.</b> By <span class="smcap">Will S. Monroe</span>, A. B. $2.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>43.</b> <b>The Study of the Child.</b> By <span class="smcap">A. R. Taylor</span>, Ph. D. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>44.</b> <b>Education by Development.</b> By <span class="smcap">Friedrich Froebel</span>. Translated by
+<span class="smcap">Josephine Jarvis</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>45.</b> <b>Letters to a Mother.</b> By <span class="smcap">Susan E. Blow</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>46.</b> <b>Montaigne&#8217;s The Education of Children.</b> Translated by <span class="smcap">L. E. Rector</span>, Ph.
+D. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>47.</b> <b>The Secondary School System of Germany.</b> By <span class="smcap">Frederick E. Bolton</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>48.</b> <b>Advanced Elementary Science.</b> By <span class="smcap">Edward G. Howe</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>49.</b> <b>Dickens as an Educator.</b> By <span class="smcap">James L. Hughes</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>50.</b> <b>Principles of Education Practically Applied.</b> By <span class="smcap">James M. Greenwood</span>.
+Revised. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>51.</b> <b>Student Life and Customs.</b> By <span class="smcap">Henry D. Sheldon</span>, Ph. D. $1.20 net.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>52.</b> <b>An Ideal School.</b> By <span class="smcap">Preston W. Search</span>. $1.20 net.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>53.</b> <b>Later Infancy of the Child.</b> By <span class="smcap">Gabriel Compayr&eacute;</span>. Translated by <span class="smcap">Mary E.
+Wilson</span>. Part II of Vol. 35. $1.20 net.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>54.</b> <b>The Educational Foundations of Trade and Industry.</b> By <span class="smcap">Fabian Ware</span>.
+$1.20 net.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>55.</b> <b>Genetic Psychology for Teachers.</b> By <span class="smcap">Charles H. Judd</span>, Ph. D. $1.20 net.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>56.</b> <b>The Evolution of the Elementary Schools of Great Britain.</b> By <span class="smcap">James C.
+Greenough</span>, A. M., LL. D. $1.20 net.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>57.</b> <b>Thomas Platter and the Educational Renaissance of the Sixteenth
+Century.</b> By <span class="smcap">Paul Monroe</span>. $1.20 net.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><b>58.</b> <b>Educational Issues in the Kindergarten.</b> By <span class="smcap">Susan E. Blow</span>. $1.50 net.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><br />OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION.</p>
+<p class="center">D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">A VALUABLE BOOK FOR TEACHERS</span></p>
+<p class="center"><br /><span class="huge">Principles of Educational Practice</span></p>
+
+<p>By <span class="smcap">Paul Klapper</span>, Ph.D., Department of Education, College of the City of
+New York. 8vo, Cloth, $1.75.</p>
+
+<p>This book studies the basic principles underlying sound and progressive
+pedagogy. In its scope and organization it aims to give (1) a
+comprehensive and systematic analysis of the principles of education, (2)
+the modern trend and interpretation of educational thought, (3) a
+transition from pure psychology to methods of teaching and discipline, and
+(4) practical applications of educational theory to the problems that
+confront the teacher in the course of daily routine. Every practical
+pedagogical solution that is offered has actually stood the test of
+classroom demonstration.</p>
+
+<p>The book opens with a study of the function of education and a contrast of
+the modern social conception with those aims which have been guiding
+ideals in previous educational systems. Part II deals with the
+physiological aspects of education. Part III is taken up with the problem
+of socializing the child through the curriculum and the school discipline.
+The last part of the book, Part IV, The Mental Aspect of Education, is
+developed under the following sections: <i>Section A.</i> The Instinctive
+Aspect of Mind. Mind and its development through self-expression.
+Self-activity. Instincts. <i>Section B.</i> Intellectual Aspect of Mind. The
+functions of Intellect, Perception, Apperception, Memory, Imagination,
+Thought Activities. The Doctrine of Formal Discipline and its influence
+upon educational endeavor. <i>Section C.</i> Emotional Aspect of Mind. <i>Section
+D.</i> Volitional Aspect of Mind. Study of will, kinds of volitional action,
+habit vs. deliberative consciousness. The Education of the Will. Education
+and Social Responsibility, the problems of ethical instruction, and the
+social functions of the School.</p>
+
+<p>In order to increase the usefulness of the book to teachers of education
+there is added a classified bibliography for systematic, intensive
+reference reading and a list of suggested problems suitable for advanced
+work.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">D. APPLETON AND COMPANY<br />
+NEW YORK<span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>CHICAGO</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dickens As an Educator, by James L. (James
+Laughlin) Hughes
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Dickens As an Educator
+
+
+Author: James L. (James Laughlin) Hughes
+
+
+
+Release Date: August 31, 2011  [eBook #37284]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR***
+
+
+E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(http://www.pgdp.net) from paage images generously made available by
+Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/dickensaseducato00hughrich
+
+
+
+
+
+DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR
+
+by
+
+JAMES L. HUGHES
+
+Inspector of Schools, Toronto
+Author of Froebel's Educational Laws
+Mistakes in Teaching, etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York and London
+D. Appleton and Company
+1913
+
+Copyright, 1900,
+by D. Appleton and Company.
+
+Electrotyped and Printed
+at the Appleton Press, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+
+EDITOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+The following pages are sufficient to establish the claim of Mr. Hughes
+for Dickens as an educational reformer--the greatest that England has
+produced. It will be admitted that he has done more than any one else to
+secure for the child a considerate treatment of his tender age. "It is a
+crime against a child to rob it of its childhood." This principle was
+announced by Dickens, and it has come to be generally recognised and
+adopted. Gradually it is changing the methods of primary instruction and
+bringing into vogue a milder form of discipline and a more stimulative
+teaching--arousing the child's self-activity instead of repressing it.
+
+The child is born with animal instincts and tendencies, it is true, but he
+has all the possibilities of human nature. The latter can be developed
+best by a treatment which takes for granted the child's preference to
+adopt what is good rather than what is bad in social customs and usages.
+
+The child, it is true, is uneven in his proclivities, having some bad ones
+and some good ones. The true pedagogy uses the good inclinations as a
+lever by which to correct bad ones. The teacher recognises what is good in
+the child's disposition and endeavours to build on it a self-respect
+which may at all times be invoked against temptations to bad conduct.
+Child depravity sometimes exists, but it can generally be traced to
+injudicious methods of education in the family, the school, or the
+community. Dickens has laid so much emphasis on defects of method in these
+three directions that he has made the generation in which he lived and the
+next succeeding one sensitively conscious of them. He has even caricatured
+them with such vehemence of style as to make our ideals so vivid that we
+see at once any wrong tendency in its very beginning.
+
+Walter Scott, in his schoolmasters, has caricatured pedantry; so has
+Shakespeare. But Dickens has discovered a variety of types of pedantry and
+made them all easily recognisable and odious to us. More than this, he has
+attacked the evil of cramming, the evil of isolation from the family in
+the boarding school for too young children, and the evil of uninteresting
+instruction. Whatever is good and reasonable for the child to know should
+be made interesting to the child, and the teacher is to be considered
+incompetent who can not find in the life histories of his class threads of
+daily experience and present interest to which he can attach every point
+that the regular lesson contains.
+
+Dickens has done a great work in directing the attention of society to its
+public institutions--especially to its orphan asylums and poorhouses. The
+chill which the infant gets when it comes in direct contact with the
+formality of a state institution, or even a religious institution, without
+the mediation of the family, is portrayed so well that every reader of
+Dickens feels it by sympathy. So, too, in those families of public men or
+women or in those of the directors of industry or commerce who crush out
+the true family life by bringing home their unrelaxing business manners
+and trying to regulate the family as they regulate the details of a great
+business house--the reading world has imbibed a sympathy for the rights of
+the home. Free childhood and the culture of individuality has become a
+watchword.
+
+Above all, Dickens has introduced a reform as to the habit of terrorizing
+children. Corporal punishment has diminished to one fourth of its former
+amount, and Charles Dickens is the prophet to whom the reform owes its
+potency. In fact, the habit of finding in the good tendencies of the child
+the levers with which to move him to the repression of his bad impulses
+has placed in the hands of the professional teacher the means of governing
+the child without appeal to force except in the rarest cases.
+
+The tendency to caricature an evil has its dangers, of course, and
+Dickens, like all the other educational reformers, has often condemned as
+entirely unworthy of toleration what has really in it some good reason for
+its existence. It was the abuse that needed correction. Reform instead of
+revolution should have been recommended, but the reformer often gets so
+heated in his contest with superficial evil that he attacks what is
+fundamentally good. He cuts down the tree when it needed only the removal
+of a twig infested with caterpillars. This defect of the reformer renders
+necessary a new reformer, and thus arises a pendulum swing of educational
+method from one extreme to another.
+
+Dickens shares with all reformers some of their weaknesses, but he does
+not share his most excellent qualities with many of them. He stands apart
+and alone as one of the most potent influences of social reform in the
+nineteenth century, and therefore deserves to be read and studied by all
+who have to do with schools and by all parents everywhere in our day and
+generation.
+
+W. T. HARRIS.
+
+WASHINGTON, D. C., _October 12, 1900_.
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+This book has two purposes: to prove that Dickens was the great apostle of
+the "new education" to the English-speaking world, and to bring into
+connected form, under appropriate headings, the educational principles of
+one of the world's greatest educators, and one of its two most sympathetic
+friends of childhood.
+
+Dickens was the most profound exponent of the kindergarten and the most
+comprehensive student of childhood that England has yet produced. He was
+one of the first great advocates of a national system of schools, and his
+revelations of the ignorance and the intellectual and spiritual
+destitution of the children of the poor led to the deep interest which
+ultimately brought about the establishment of free schools in England.
+
+He was essentially a child trainer rather than a teacher. In the
+twenty-eight schools described in his writings, and in the training of his
+army of little children in institutions and homes, he reveals nearly every
+form of bad training resulting from ignorance, selfishness, indifference,
+unwise zeal, unphilosophic philosophy, and un-Christian theology. No other
+writer has attacked so many phases of wrong training, unjust treatment,
+and ill usage of childhood.
+
+He is the most distinctive champion of the rights of childhood. He struck
+the bravest blows against corporal punishment, and against all forms of
+coercive tyranny toward the child in homes, institutions, and schools,
+even condemning the dogmatic will control of such a placid, Christian
+woman as Mrs. Crisparkle. He demanded a free, real, joyous childhood, rich
+in all a child's best experiences and interests, so that "childhood may
+ripen in childhood." He pleaded for the development of the individuality
+of each child. He taught the wisdom of giving a child proper food, and he
+showed the vital importance of real sympathy with the child, not mere
+consideration for him. He was the English father of true reverence for the
+child.
+
+But Dickens studied the methods of cultivating the minds of children, as
+well as their character development. He exposed the evils of cramming more
+vigorously than any other writer. He taught the essential character of the
+imagination in intellectual and spiritual development. He showed the need
+of correlation of studies, and of apperceptive centres of feeling and
+thought in order to comprehend, and assimilate, and transform into
+definite power the knowledge and thought that is brought to our minds.
+
+It is said by some, who see but the surface of the work of Dickens, that
+his work is done. Much of the good work for which he lived has been done,
+but much more remains to be done. Men are but beginning the work of child
+study and of rational education. The twentieth century will understand
+Dickens better than the nineteenth has understood him. His profound
+philosophy is only partially comprehended yet, even by the leaders in
+educational work. Teachers and all students of childhood will find in his
+true feeling and rich thought revelation and inspiration.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE
+
+     I.--THE PLACE OF DICKENS AMONG EDUCATORS                          1
+
+    II.--INFANT GARDENS                                               15
+
+   III.--THE OVERTHROW OF COERCION                                    29
+
+    IV.--THE DOCTRINE OF CHILD DEPRAVITY                              87
+
+     V.--CRAMMING                                                     96
+
+    VI.--FREE CHILDHOOD                                              117
+
+   VII.--INDIVIDUALITY                                               128
+
+  VIII.--THE CULTURE OF THE IMAGINATION                              136
+
+    IX.--SYMPATHY WITH CHILDHOOD                                     162
+
+     X.--CHILD STUDY AND CHILD NATURE                                181
+
+    XI.--BAD TRAINING                                                188
+
+   XII.--GOOD TRAINING                                               218
+
+  XIII.--COMMUNITY                                                   235
+
+   XIV.--NUTRITION AS A FACTOR IN EDUCATION                          244
+
+    XV.--MINOR SCHOOLS                                               258
+
+   XVI.--MISCELLANEOUS EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES                        285
+
+  XVII.--THE TRAINING OF POOR, NEGLECTED, AND DEFECTIVE CHILDREN     304
+
+
+
+
+DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE PLACE OF DICKENS AMONG EDUCATORS.
+
+
+Dickens was England's greatest educational reformer. His views were not
+given to the world in the form of ordinary didactic treatises, but in the
+form of object lessons in the most entertaining of all stories. Millions
+have read his books, whereas but hundreds would have read them if he had
+written his ideals in the form of direct, systematic exposition. He is
+certainly not less an educator because his books have been widely read.
+
+The highest form of teaching is the informal, the indirect, the
+incidental. The fact that his educational principles are revealed chiefly
+by the evolution of the characters in his novels and stories, instead of
+by the direct philosophic statements of scientific pedagogy or psychology,
+gives Dickens higher rank as an educator, not only because it gives him
+much wider influence, but because it makes his teaching more effective by
+arousing deep, strong feeling to give permanency and propulsive force to
+his great thoughts.
+
+Was Dickens consciously and intentionally an educator? The prefaces to his
+novels; the preface to his Household Words; the educational articles he
+wrote; the prominence given in his books to child training in homes,
+institutions, and schools; the statements of the highest educational
+philosophy found in his writings; and especially the clearness of his
+insight and the profoundness of his educational thought, as shown by his
+condemnation of the wrong and his appreciation of the right in teaching
+and training the child, prove beyond question that he was not only broad
+and true in his sympathy with childhood, but that he was a careful and
+progressive student of the fundamental principles of education.
+
+Dickens deals with twenty-eight schools in his writings, evidently with
+definite purposes in each case: "Minerva House," in Sketches by Boz;
+"Dotheboys Hall," in Nicholas Nickleby; Mr. Marton's two schools, Miss
+Monflather's school, and Mrs. Wackles's school, in Old Curiosity Shop; Dr.
+Blimber's school and "The Grinders'" school, in Dombey and Son; Mr.
+Creakle's school, Dr. Strong's school, Agnes's school, and the school
+Uriah Heep attended, in David Copperfield; the school at which Esther was
+a day boarder and Miss Donney's school, in Bleak House; Mr.
+McChoakumchild's school, in Hard Times; Mr. Wopsle's great aunt's school,
+in Great Expectations; the evening school attended by Charley Hexam,
+Bradley Headstone's school, and Miss Peecher's school, in Our Mutual
+Friend; Phoebe's school, in Barbox Brothers; Mrs. Lemon's school, in
+Holiday Romance; Jemmy Lirriper's school, in Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings;
+Miss Pupford's school, in Tom Tiddler's Ground; the school described in
+The Haunted House; Miss Twinkleton's seminary, in Edwin Drood; the schools
+of the Stepney Union; The Schoolboy's Story; and Our School.
+
+In addition to these twenty-eight schools, he describes a real school in
+American Notes, and makes brief references to The Misses Nettingall's
+establishment, Mr. Cripples's academy, Drowvey and Grimmer's school, the
+Foundation school attended by George Silverman, Scrooge's school,
+Pecksniff's school for architects, Fagin's school for training thieves,
+and three dancing schools, conducted by Mr. Baps, Signor Billsmethi, and
+Mr. Turveydrop. He introduces Mr. Pocket, George Silverman, and Canon
+Crisparkle as tutors, and Mrs. General, Miss Lane, and Ruth Pinch as
+governesses. Mrs. Sapsea had been the proprietor of an academy in
+Cloisterham. One of the first sketches by "Boz" was Our Schoolmaster, and
+his books are full of illustrations of wrong training of children in
+homes, in institutions, and by professional child trainers such as Mrs.
+Pipchin.
+
+Clearly Dickens intended to reveal the best educational ideals, and to
+expose what he regarded as weak or wrong in school methods, and especially
+in child training.
+
+Dickens was the first great English student of the kindergarten. His
+article on Infant Gardens, published in Household Words in 1855, is one of
+the most comprehensive articles ever written on the kindergarten
+philosophy. It shows a perfect appreciation of the physical, intellectual,
+and spiritual aims of Froebel, and a clear recognition of the value of
+right early training and of the influence of free self-activity in the
+development of individual power and character.
+
+Dickens is beyond comparison the chief English apostle of childhood, and
+its leading champion in securing a just, intelligent, and considerate
+recognition of its rights by adulthood, which till his time had been
+deliberately coercive and almost universally tyrannical in dealing with
+children. He entered more fully than any other English author into
+sympathy with childhood from the standpoint of the child. Other educators
+and philanthropists have shown consideration for children, but Dickens had
+the perfect sympathy with childhood that sees and feels _with_ the child,
+not merely _for_ him.
+
+Dickens attacked all forms of coercion in child training. He discussed
+fourteen types of coercion, from the brutal corporal punishment of Squeers
+and Creakle in schools, of Bumble and the Christian philanthropist with
+the white waistcoat in institutions, and of the Murdstones and Mrs.
+Gargery in homes, to the gentle but dwarfing firmness of the dominant will
+of placid Mrs. Crisparkle. He condemned all coercion because it prevents
+the full development of selfhood, and makes men negative instead of
+positive.
+
+Among the many improvements made in child training none is more complete
+than the change in discipline. For this change the world is indebted
+chiefly to Froebel and Dickens. Froebel revealed the true philosophy,
+Dickens gave it wings; Froebel gave the thought, Dickens made the thought
+clear and strong by arousing energetic feeling in harmony with it.
+
+Thought makes slow progress without a basis of feeling. Dickens opened the
+hearts of humanity in sympathy for suffering childhood, and thus gave
+Froebel's philosophy definiteness and propulsive power. The darkest clouds
+have been cleared away from child life during the past fifty years.
+Teachers, managers of institutions for the care of children, and parents
+are now severely punished by the laws of civilized countries for offences
+against children that were approved by the most enlightened Christian
+philosophy at the time of Froebel and Dickens as necessary duties
+essential in the proper training of childhood.
+
+Dickens helped to break the bonds of the doctrine of child depravity. This
+doctrine had a most depressing influence on educators. It was not possible
+to reverence a child so long as he was regarded as a totally depraved
+thing. Froebel and Dickens did not teach that a child is totally divine,
+but they did believe that every child possesses certain elements of
+divinity which constitute selfhood or individuality, and that if this
+selfhood is developed in conscious unity with the Divine Fatherhood the
+child will attain to complete manhood. This thought gives the educator a
+new and a higher attitude toward childhood. The child is no longer a thing
+to be repressed, but a being to be developed. Men are not persistently
+dwarfed now by deliberate efforts to define a blighting consciousness of
+weakness; they are stimulated to broader effort and higher purpose by a
+true self-consciousness of individual power. The philosophy that trains
+men to recognise responsibility for the good in their nature is infinitely
+more productive educationally than that which teaches men responsibility
+for the evil in their nature.
+
+Dickens taught that loving sympathy is the highest qualification of a true
+teacher. He showed this to be true by both positive and negative
+illustrations. Mr. Marton, the old schoolmaster in Old Curiosity Shop, was
+a perfect type of a sympathetic teacher. Dr. Strong was "the ideal of the
+whole school, for he was the kindest of men." Phoebe's school was such a
+good place for the little ones, because she loved them. Like Mr. Marton,
+she had not studied the new systems of teaching, but loving sympathy gave
+her power and made her school a place in which the good in human hearts
+grew and blossomed naturally.
+
+"You are fond of children and learned in the new systems of teaching
+them," said Mr. Jackson.
+
+"Very fond of them," replied Phoebe, "but I know nothing of teaching
+beyond the pleasure I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they
+learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars sing some of their
+lessons has led you so far astray as to think me a good teacher? Ah, I
+thought so! No, I have only read and been told about that system. It seems
+so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry robins they
+are, that I took up with it in my little way."
+
+She had heard of the kindergarten and had caught some of its spirit of
+sympathy with the child, but she did not understand its methods. Jemmy
+Lirriper received perfectly sympathetic treatment from Mrs. Lirriper and
+the Major; Agnes loved her little scholars; Esther, who sympathized with
+everybody, loved her pupils, and was beloved by them; and the Bachelor,
+who introduced Mr. Marton to his second school, was a genuine boy in his
+comprehensive sympathy with real, boyish boyhood.
+
+So throughout all his books Dickens pleads for kindly treatment for the
+child, and for complete sympathy with him in his childish feelings and
+interests. He gave the child the place of honour in literature for the
+first time, and he aroused the heart of the Christian world to the fact
+that it was treating the child in a very un-Christlike way. He pleaded for
+a better education for the child, for a free childhood, for greater
+liberty in the home and in the school, for fuller sympathy especially at
+the time when childhood merges into youth and when the mysteries of life
+have begun to make themselves conscious to the young mind and heart. The
+poorer the child the greater the need he revealed.
+
+Canon Crisparkle, Esther Summerson, Mr. Jarndyce, Joe Gargery, Rose
+Maylie, Allan Woodcourt, Betty Higden, Mr. Sangsby, the Old Schoolmaster,
+the Bachelor, Mrs. Lirriper, Major Jackmann, Doctor Marigold, Agnes
+Wickfield, Mr. George, and Mr. Brownlow are types of the people with whom
+Dickens would fill the world--men and women whose hearts were overflowing
+with true sympathy. Esther Summerson is the best type of perfect sympathy
+to be met with in literature. She expressed the central principle of
+Dickens's philosophy regarding sympathy when she said: "When I love a
+person very tenderly indeed my understanding seems to brighten; my
+comprehension is quickened when my affection is."
+
+The need of sympathy with childhood was revealed by Dickens most strongly
+by the cruelty, the coercion, and the harshness of such characters as
+Squeers, Creakle, Bumble, the Murdstones, Mrs. Gargery, John Willet, Mrs.
+Pipchin, Mrs. Clennam, and the teachers in The Grinders' school.
+
+Dickens's description of Dr. Blimber's school is the most profound
+criticism of the cramming system of teaching that was ever written. He
+treats the same subject also in Hard Times, Christmas Stories, and A
+Holiday Romance.
+
+The vital importance of a free, rich childhood, the value of the
+imagination as the basis of intellectual and spiritual development, the
+folly of the Herbartian psychology relating to the soul, the error of
+regarding fact-storing as the chief aim of education, and the terrible
+evils resulting from the tyranny of adulthood in dealing with childhood
+are all treated very ably in Hard Times, the most advanced and most
+profound of Dickens's works from the standpoint of the educator.
+
+The need of a real childhood, so well expressed in Froebel's maxim, "Let
+childhood ripen in childhood," is shown also in Nicholas Nickleby, Old
+Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son, Great
+Expectations, and Edwin Drood.
+
+The true reverence for individual selfhood is shown in Dombey and Son,
+David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual
+Friend, and Edwin Drood.
+
+The wisdom of studying the subject of nutrition as one of the most
+important subjects connected with the development of children physically,
+intellectually, and morally, and the meanness or carelessness too
+frequently shown in feeding children, were taught in Oliver Twist, Old
+Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield,
+Bleak House, Great Expectations, Edwin Drood, Christmas Stories, and
+American Notes.
+
+Play as an essential factor in education is treated in Martin Chuzzlewit,
+Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and American Notes.
+
+The folly of the old practice of attempting to educate by polishing the
+surface of the character, of training from without instead of from within,
+is revealed in Bleak House and Little Dorrit.
+
+Bleak House discusses the contents of children's minds and the need of
+early experiences to form apperceptive centres of feeling and thought in a
+comprehensive and suggestive manner.
+
+The need of practising the fundamental law of co-operation and the sharing
+of responsibilities and duties, as the foundation for the true
+comprehension of the law of community, is shown in Barnaby Rudge, David
+Copperfield, Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit.
+
+The need of child study is suggested in David Copperfield and Bleak House.
+
+The value of joyousness in the development of true, strong character is
+discussed in Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, Old Curiosity Shop, Martin
+Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Little Dorrit,
+Great Expectations, and Edwin Drood.
+
+Dickens was one of the first Englishmen to see the need of normal schools
+to train teachers, and to advocate the abolition of uninspected private
+schools and the establishment of national schools. He taught these ideals
+in the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, issued in 1839, so that he very early
+caught the spirit of Mann and Barnard in America, and saw the wisdom of
+their efforts to establish schools supported, controlled, and directed by
+the state.
+
+He says, in his preface to Nicholas Nickleby:
+
+    Of the monstrous neglect of education in England, and the disregard of
+    it by the state as a means of forming good or bad citizens, and
+    miserable or happy men, this class of schools long afforded a notable
+    example. Although any man who had proved his unfitness for any other
+    occupation in life, was free, without examination or qualification, to
+    open a school anywhere; although preparation for the functions he
+    undertook was required in the surgeon who assisted to bring a boy into
+    the world, or might one day assist, perhaps, to send him out of it; in
+    the chemist, the attorney, the butcher, the baker, the
+    candlestick-maker; the whole round of crafts and trades, the
+    schoolmaster excepted; and although schoolmasters, as a race, were the
+    blockheads and impostors who might naturally be expected to spring
+    from such a state of things, and to flourish in it, these Yorkshire
+    schoolmasters were the lowest and most rotten round in the whole
+    ladder. Traders in the avarice, indifference, or imbecility of
+    parents, and the helplessness of children; ignorant, sordid, brutal
+    men, to whom few considerate persons would have intrusted the board
+    and lodging of a horse or a dog; they formed the worthy corner-stone
+    of a structure which, for absurdity and magnificent high-handed
+    _laissez-aller_ neglect, has rarely been exceeded in the world.
+
+    We hear sometimes of an action for damages against the unqualified
+    medical practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to
+    heal it. But what about the hundreds of thousands of minds that have
+    been deformed forever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended
+    to form them?
+
+    I make mention of the race, as of the Yorkshire schoolmasters, in the
+    past tense. Though it has not yet finally disappeared, it is dwindling
+    daily. A long day's work remains to be done about us in the way of
+    education, Heaven knows; but great improvements and facilities toward
+    the attainment of a good one have been furnished of late years.
+
+This leaves no doubt in regard to the conscious purpose of Dickens in
+writing with definite educational plans.
+
+Incidentally he discusses every phase of what is called the "new
+education." He was the first and the greatest English student of Froebel,
+and his writings gave wings to the profound thought of the greatest
+philosopher of childhood. Froebel revealed the truth that feeling is the
+basis of thought. In harmony with this great psychological principle, it
+may fairly be claimed that the works of Dickens so fully aroused the heart
+of the civilized world to the wrongs inflicted on childhood, and the
+grievous errors committed in training children, as to prepare the minds of
+all who read his books for the conscious revelation of the imperfections
+of educational systems and methods, and the imperative need of radical
+educational reforms.
+
+The intense feeling caused by the writings of Dickens prepared the way for
+the thought of Froebel. Dickens studied Froebel with great care. He was
+not merely a student of theoretical principles, but he was a very frequent
+visitor to the first kindergarten opened in England. Madame Kraus-Boelte,
+who assisted Madame Ronge in the first kindergarten opened in London, says
+in a recent letter: "I remember very distinctly the frequent visits made
+by Mr. Dickens to Madame Ronge's kindergarten. He always appeared to be
+deeply interested, and would sometimes stay during the whole session."
+
+The description of the schools of the Stepney Union in the Uncommercial
+Traveller shows how keenly appreciative Dickens was of all true new ideals
+in educational work. These were charity schools conducted on an excellent
+system. The pupils worked at industrial occupations half of their school
+hours, and studied the other half. They were taught music, and the boys
+had military drill and naval training. They had no corporal punishment in
+these schools.
+
+Dickens approved most heartily of everything he saw in his frequent visits
+to the schools of the Stepney Union except the work of one of the younger
+teachers, who would, in his opinion, have been better "if she had shown
+more geniality." He commended the industrial work, the military training,
+the naval training, the music, the discipline without corporal punishment,
+and the intellectual brightness of the children. He pointed out at some
+length the difference in interest shown by the pupils in these schools
+and by the pupils in the school he himself attended when a boy, and drew
+the conclusion very definitely that shorter hours of study, with a variety
+of interesting operations, were much better for the physical and
+intellectual development of children than long hours spent in monotonous
+work.
+
+The folly and wrong of trying to make children study beyond the fatigue
+point was never more clearly pointed out than by Dickens in the
+description of the school he attended when a boy, given as a contrast to
+the life and brightness and interest shown in the schools of the Stepney
+Union:
+
+    When I was at school, one of seventy boys, I wonder by what secret
+    understanding our attention began to wander when we had pored over our
+    books for some hours. I wonder by what ingenuity we brought on that
+    confused state of mind when sense became nonsense, when figures
+    wouldn't work, when dead languages wouldn't construe, when live
+    languages wouldn't be spoken, when memory wouldn't come, when dulness
+    and vacancy wouldn't go. I can not remember that we ever conspired to
+    be sleepy after dinner, or that we ever particularly wanted to be
+    stupid, and to have flushed faces and hot, beating heads, or to find
+    blank hopelessness and obscurity this afternoon in what would become
+    perfectly clear and bright in the freshness of to-morrow morning. We
+    suffered for these things, and they made us miserable enough. Neither
+    do I remember that we ever bound ourselves, by any secret oath or
+    other solemn obligation to find the seats getting too hard to be sat
+    upon after a certain time; or to have intolerable twitches in our
+    legs, rendering us aggressive and malicious with those members; or to
+    be troubled with a similar uneasiness in our elbows, attended with
+    fistic consequences to our neighbours; or to carry two pounds of lead
+    in the chest, four pounds in the head, and several active bluebottles
+    in each ear. Yet, for certain, we suffered under those distresses, and
+    were always charged at for labouring under them, as if we had brought
+    them on of our own deliberate act and deed.
+
+It was therefore out of a full heart and an enriched mind that Dickens
+wrought the wonderful plots into which he wove the most advanced
+educational ideals of his time and of our time relating to the blighting
+influence of coercion, the divinity in the child, the recognition of
+freedom as the truest process and highest aim of education, the value of
+real sympathy, the importance of self-activity, the true reverence for the
+child leading to faith in it, the need of child study, the effect of
+joyousness on the child's development, the benefits of play, the influence
+of nutrition, the ideal of community, the importance of the imagination as
+a basis for the best intellectual growth, the narrowness of
+utilitarianism, the absolute need of apperceptive centres to which shall
+be related the progressive enlargement and enrichment of feeling and
+thought throughout the life of the individual, the arrest of development
+and the sacrifice of power and life due to cramming, and the weakness of
+all educational systems and methods that regard fact-storing as the
+highest work of the teacher.
+
+It has been said by critics of Dickens that he exaggerated the defects and
+errors in the characters of those whom he described. Two things should be
+kept in mind, however. Dickens usually described the worst, not the best
+types, and he was justified in revealing a wrong principle or practice in
+the strongest possible light, in order to make it more easily recognisable
+and more completely repugnant to the aroused feeling and startled thought
+of humanity. He was writing with the definite purpose of making the world
+so thoroughly hate the wrong in education and child training as to lead to
+definite practical reforms.
+
+Dickens himself did not admit the justness of the charge of exaggeration.
+His coarsest, most ignorant, and most brutal teacher is Squeers, yet he
+says "Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an
+existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be
+deemed impossible. There are upon record trials at law in which damages
+have been sought as a poor recompense for lasting agonies and
+disfigurements inflicted upon children by the treatment of the master in
+these places, involving such offensive and foul details of neglect,
+cruelty, and disease as no writer of fiction would have the boldness to
+imagine. Since the author has been engaged upon these Adventures he has
+received, from private quarters far beyond the reach of suspicion or
+distrust, accounts of atrocities, in the perpetration of which upon
+neglected or repudiated children these schools have been the main
+instruments, very far exceeding any that appear in these pages."
+
+Dickens discusses the charge of exaggeration in the preface to Martin
+Chuzzlewit. He says:
+
+    What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain
+    truth to another. That which is commonly called a long-sight,
+    perceives in a prospect innumerable features and bearings nonexistent
+    to a shortsighted person. I sometimes ask myself whether there may
+    occasionally be a difference of this kind between some writers and
+    some readers; whether it is _always_ the writer who colours highly, or
+    whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for colour is a little
+    dull?
+
+    On this head of exaggeration I have a positive experience more curious
+    than the speculation I have just set down. It is this: I have never
+    touched a character precisely from the life, but some counterpart of
+    that character has incredulously asked me: "Now really, did I ever
+    really see one like it?"
+
+    All the Pecksniff family upon earth are quite agreed, I believe, that
+    Mr. Pecksniff is an exaggeration, and that no such character ever
+    existed.
+
+It is worth remembering, too, that it is impossible to exaggerate the
+description of the effects of the evils Dickens attacked. Coercion in any
+form blights and dwarfs the true selfhood of the child. The coercion of
+Mrs. Crisparkle's placid but unbending will, which she kept rigid from a
+deep conviction of Christian duty, is as clearly at variance with the
+elemental laws of individual freedom and growth by self-activity as the
+more dreadful forms of coercion practised by Squeers, Creakle, Bumble, or
+Murdstone.
+
+Doctor Blimber's cramming is not exaggerated. It would be quite possible
+to find in England or the United States or Canada not only private but
+public institutions in which similar processes of illogical cramming are
+still practised. Words are still given before the thought, and as a
+substitute for thought. "Mathematical gooseberries" are yet produced "from
+mere sprouts of bushes," the "words and grammar" of literature are still
+given instead of the life and glory of the author's revelations, children
+yet are "made to bear to pattern somehow or other."
+
+Whether Dickens exaggerated or not in regard to other spheres of work or
+of existence without work, he certainly did not exaggerate in regard to
+school conditions. He studied them faithfully, and described them truly.
+He saw wrongs more clearly than other men, and he made them stand out in
+their natural hideousness.
+
+It is frequently asserted that Dickens portrayed wrong training more than
+right, that he was destructive rather than constructive. In a sense, this
+is correct. His mission was to startle men, so that they would be made
+conscious of the awful crimes that were being committed by teachers and
+parents in the name of duty, as conceived by the highest Christian
+civilization of his time. He knew that a basis of strong feeling must be
+aroused against a wrong before it can be overthrown and right practices
+substituted for it. The only sure foundation for any reform is an
+energetic feeling of dislike for present conditions. The chief work of
+Dickens was to lay bare the injustice, the meanness, and the blighting
+coercion practised on helpless children not only by "ignorant, sordid,
+brutal men called schoolmasters," but in a less degree by the best
+teachers and parents of his time. His was a noble work, and it was well
+done.
+
+The grandest movement of the nineteenth century was the development of a
+profound reverence for the child, so deep and wide that his rights are
+beginning to be clearly recognised by individuals and by national laws,
+and that intelligent adulthood is studying him as the central element of
+power in the representation of God in the accomplishment of the
+progressive evolution of the race. Christ put "the child in the midst of
+his disciples"; men are learning to follow his example, and study the
+child as the surest way to secure industrial, social, and moral reforms.
+Froebel and Dickens were the men who revealed the child. They were the
+true apostles of childhood. It must not be supposed that Dickens was not
+conscious of the positive good while describing the evils. The expressions
+"child queller," "gospel of monotony," "bear to pattern," "taught as
+parrots are," etc., and the name "McChoakumchild," reveal the possession
+of the highest consciousness of child freedom, of individuality, and of
+child reverence yet given to humanity. So in all his wonderful pictures it
+would have been impossible for him to have so vividly described the wrong
+if he had not clearly understood the right. He had perfect sympathy with
+childhood, he was a great student of the child and of the existing methods
+of training and educating him, and his insights and judgment were so clear
+and true that, as Ruskin says, "in the last analysis he was always right."
+
+If he had never written anything but his article on the kindergarten,
+published July, 1855, he would have proved himself to be an educational
+philosopher.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+INFANT GARDENS.
+
+
+Dickens wrote the following article for Household Words in 1855. It
+reveals a surprising mastery of the vital principles of "the new
+education." He wrote the article to direct attention to the work of the
+Baroness Von Buelow, who had come to England to introduce the kindergarten
+system. Dickens's works show that he had long been a close student of
+Froebel's philosophy. The article must always take a front rank as a
+strikingly clear, comprehensive, and sympathetic exposition of the
+principles and processes of the kindergarten. Kindergartens were called
+"infant gardens" when first introduced into England.
+
+    Seventy or eighty years ago there was a son born to the Pastor
+    Froebel, who exercised his calling in the village of Oberweissbach, in
+    the principality of Schwartzburg-Rudolstadt. The son, who was called
+    Frederick, proved to be a child of unusually quick sensibilities,
+    keenly alive to all impressions, hurt by discords of all kinds; by
+    quarrelling of men, women, and children, by ill-assorted colours,
+    inharmonious sounds. He was, to a morbid extent, capable of receiving
+    delight from the beauties of Nature, and, as a very little boy, would
+    spend much of his time in studying and enjoying, for their own sake,
+    the lines and angles in the Gothic architecture of his father's
+    church. Who does not know what must be the central point of all the
+    happiness of such a child? The voice of its mother is the sweetest of
+    sweet sounds, the face of its mother is the fairest of fair sights,
+    the loving touch of her lip is the symbol to it of all pleasures of
+    the sense and of the soul. Against the thousand shocks and terrors
+    that are ready to afflict a child too exquisitely sensitive, the
+    mother is the sole protectress, and her help is all-sufficient.
+    Frederick Froebel lost his mother in the first years of his childhood,
+    and his youth was tortured with incessant craving for a sympathy that
+    was not to be found.
+
+    The Pastor Froebel was too busy to attend to all the little fancies of
+    his son. It was his good practice to be the peaceful arbiter of the
+    disputes occurring in the village, and, as he took his boy with him
+    when he went out, he made the child familiar with all the quarrels of
+    the parish. Thus were suggested, week after week, comparisons between
+    the harmony of Nature and the spite and scandal current among men. A
+    dreamy, fervent love of God, a fanciful boy's wish that he could make
+    men quiet and affectionate, took strong possession of young Frederick,
+    and grew with his advancing years. He studied a good deal. Following
+    out his love of Nature, he sought to become acquainted with the
+    sciences by which her ways and aspects are explained; his
+    contemplation of the architecture of the village church ripened into a
+    thorough taste for mathematics, and he enjoyed agricultural life
+    practically, as a worker on his father's land. At last he went to
+    Pestalozzi's school in Switzerland.
+
+    Then followed troublous times, and patriotic war in Germany, where
+    even poets fought against the enemy with lyre and sword. The quick
+    instincts, and high, generous impulses of Frederick Froebel were
+    engaged at once, and he went out to battle on behalf of Fatherland in
+    the ranks of the boldest, for he was one of Luetzow's regiment--a troop
+    of riders that earned by its daring an immortal name. Their fame has
+    even penetrated to our English concert rooms, where many a fair
+    English maiden has been made familiar with the dare-devil patriots of
+    which it was composed by the refrain of the German song in honour of
+    their prowess--"Das ist Luetzow's fliegende, wilde Jagd." Having
+    performed his duty to his country in the ranks of its defenders,
+    Froebel fell back upon his love of nature and his study of triangles,
+    squares, and cubes. He had made interest that placed him in a position
+    which, in many respects, curiously satisfied his tastes--that of
+    Inspector to the Mineralogical Museum in Berlin. The post was
+    lucrative, its duties were agreeable to him, but the object of his
+    life's desire was yet to be attained.
+
+    For the unsatisfied cravings of his childhood had borne fruit within
+    him. He remembered the quick feelings and perceptions, the incessant
+    nimbleness of mind proper to his first years, and how he had been
+    hemmed in and cramped for want of right encouragement and sympathy. He
+    remembered, too, the ill-conditioned people whose disputes had been
+    made part of his experience, the dogged children, cruel fathers,
+    sullen husbands, angry wives, quarrelsome neighbours; and surely he
+    did not err when he connected the two memories together. How many men
+    and women go about pale-skinned and weak of limb, because their
+    physical health during infancy and childhood was not established by
+    judicious management. It is just so, thought Froebel, with our minds.
+    There would be fewer sullen, quarrelsome, dull-witted men or women if
+    there were fewer children starved or fed improperly in heart and
+    brain. To improve society--to make men and women better--it is
+    requisite to begin quite at the beginning, and to secure for them a
+    wholesome education during infancy and childhood. Strongly possessed
+    with this idea, and feeling that the usual methods of education, by
+    restraint and penalty, aim at the accomplishment of far too little,
+    and by checking natural development even do positive mischief, Froebel
+    determined upon the devotion of his entire energy, throughout his
+    life, to a strong effort for the establishment of schools that should
+    do justice and honour to the nature of a child. He resigned his
+    appointment at Berlin, and threw himself, with only the resources of a
+    fixed will, a full mind, and a right purpose, on the chances of the
+    future.
+
+    At Keilhau, a village of Thuringia, he took a peasant's cottage, in
+    which he proposed to establish his first school--a village boys'
+    school. It was necessary to enlarge the cottage; and, while that was
+    being done, Froebel lived on potatoes, bread, and water. So scanty was
+    his stock of capital on which his enterprise was started, that, in
+    order honestly to pay his workmen, he was forced to carry his
+    principle of self-denial to the utmost. He bought each week two large
+    rye loaves, and marked on them with chalk each day's allowance.
+    Perhaps he is the only man in the world who ever, in so literal a way,
+    chalked out for himself a scheme of diet.
+
+    After labouring for many years among the boys at Keilhau,
+    Froebel--married to a wife who shared his zeal, and made it her labour
+    to help to the utmost in carrying out the idea of her husband's
+    life--felt that there was more to be accomplished. His boys came to
+    him with many a twist in mind or temper, caught by wriggling up
+    through the bewilderments of a neglected infancy. The first sproutings
+    of the human mind need thoughtful culture; there is no period of life,
+    indeed, in which culture is so essential. And yet, in nine out of ten
+    cases, it is precisely while the little blades of thought and buds of
+    love are frail and tender that no heed is taken to maintain the soil
+    about them wholesome, and the air about them free from blight. There
+    must be Infant Gardens, Froebel said; and straightway formed his
+    plans, and set to work for their accomplishment.
+
+    He had become familiar in cottages with the instincts of mothers, and
+    the faculties with which young children are endowed by Nature. He
+    never lost his own childhood from memory, and being denied the
+    blessing of an infant of his own, regarded all the little ones with
+    equal love. The direction of his boys' school--now flourishing
+    vigorously--he committed to the care of a relation, while he set out
+    upon a tour through parts of Germany and Switzerland to lecture upon
+    infant training and to found Infant Gardens where he could. He founded
+    them at Hamburg, Leipzig, Dresden, and elsewhere. While labouring in
+    this way he was always exercising the same spirit of self-denial that
+    had marked the outset of his educational career. Whatever he could
+    earn was for the children, to promote their cause. He would not spend
+    upon himself the money that would help in the accomplishment of his
+    desire, that childhood should be made as happy as God in his wisdom
+    had designed it should be, and that full play should be given to its
+    energies and powers. Many a night's lodging he took, while on his
+    travels, in the open fields, with an umbrella for his bedroom and a
+    knapsack for his pillow.
+
+    So beautiful a self-devotion to a noble cause won recognition. One of
+    the best friends of his old age was the Duchess Ida of Weimar, sister
+    to Queen Adelaide of England, and his death took place on the 21st of
+    June, three years ago, at a country seat of the Duke of Meiningen. He
+    died at the age of seventy, peaceably, upon a summer day, delighting
+    in the beautiful scenery that lay outside his window, and in the
+    flowers brought by friends to his bedside. Nature, he said, bore
+    witness to the promises of revelation. So Froebel passed away.
+
+        And Nature's pleasant robe of green,
+        Humanity's appointed shroud, enwraps
+        His monument and his memory.
+
+    Wise and good people have been endeavouring of late to obtain in this
+    country a hearing for the views of this good teacher, and a trial for
+    his system. Only fourteen years have elapsed since the first Infant
+    Garden was established, and already Infant Gardens have been
+    introduced into most of the larger towns of Germany. Let us now
+    welcome them with all our hearts to England.
+
+    The whole principle of Froebel's teaching is based on a perfect love
+    for children, and a full and genial recognition of their nature, a
+    determination that their hearts shall not be starved for want of
+    sympathy; that since they are by Infinite Wisdom so created as to find
+    happiness in the active exercise and development of all their
+    faculties, we, who have children round about us, shall no longer
+    repress their energies, tie up their bodies, shut their mouths, and
+    declare that they worry us by the incessant putting of the questions
+    which the Father of us all has placed in their mouths, so that the
+    teachable one forever cries to those who undertake to be its guide,
+    "What shall I do?" To be ready at all times with a wise answer to that
+    question, ought to be the ambition of every one upon whom a child's
+    nature depends for the means of healthy growth. The frolic of
+    childhood is not pure exuberance and waste. "There is often a high
+    meaning in childish play," said Froebel. Let us study it, and act upon
+    hints--or more than hints--that Nature gives. They fall into a fatal
+    error who despise all that a child does as frivolous. Nothing is
+    trifling that forms part of a child's life.
+
+        That which the mother awakens and fosters,
+          When she joyously sings and plays;
+        That which her love so tenderly shelters.
+          Bears a blessing to future days.
+
+    We quote Froebel again, in these lines, and we quote others in which
+    he bids us
+
+        Break not suddenly the dream
+        The blessed dream of infancy;
+        In which the soul unites with all
+        In earth, or heaven, or sea, or sky.
+
+    But enough has already been said to show what he would have done. How
+    would he do it?
+
+    Of course it must be borne in mind, throughout the following sketch of
+    Froebel's scheme of infant training, that certain qualities of mind
+    are necessary to the teacher. Let nobody suppose that any scheme of
+    education can attain its end, as a mere scheme, apart from the
+    qualifications of those persons by whom it is to be carried out. Very
+    young children can be trained successfully by no person who wants
+    hearty liking for them, and who can take part only with a proud sense
+    of restraint in their chatter and their play. It is in truth no
+    condescension to become in spirit as a child with children, and nobody
+    is fit to teach the young who holds a different opinion. Unvarying
+    cheerfulness and kindness, the refinement that belongs naturally to a
+    pure, well-constituted woman's mind are absolutely necessary to the
+    management of one of Froebel's Infant Gardens.
+
+    Then, again, let it be understood that Froebel never wished his system
+    of training to be converted into mere routine to the exclusion of all
+    that spontaneous action in which more than half of every child's
+    education must consist. It was his purpose to show the direction in
+    which it was most useful to proceed, how best to assist the growth of
+    the mind by following the indications Nature furnishes. Nothing was
+    farther from his design, in doing that, than the imposition of a check
+    on any wholesome energies. Blindman's buff, romps, puzzles, fairy
+    tales, everything in fact that exercises soundly any set of the
+    child's faculties, must be admitted as a part of Froebel's system. The
+    cardinal point of his doctrine is--take care that you do not exercise
+    a part only of the child's mind or body; but take thorough pains to
+    see that you encourage the development of its whole nature. If
+    pains--and great pains--be not taken to see that this is done,
+    probably it is not done. The Infant Gardens are designed to help in
+    doing it.
+
+    The mind of a young child must not be trained at the expense of its
+    body. Every muscle ought, if possible, to be brought daily into
+    action; and, in the case of a child suffered to obey the laws of
+    Nature by free tumbling and romping, that is done in the best manner
+    possible. Every mother knows that by carrying an infant always on the
+    same arm its growth is liable to be perverted. Every father knows the
+    child's delight at being vigorously danced up and down, and much of
+    this delight arises from the play then given to its muscles. As the
+    child grows, the most unaccustomed positions into which it can be
+    safely twisted are those from which it will receive the greatest
+    pleasure. That is because play is thus given to the muscles in a form
+    they do not often get, and Nature--always watchful on the child's
+    behalf--cries, We will have some more of that. It does us good. As it
+    is with the body, so it is with the mind, and Froebel's scheme of
+    infant education is, for both, a system of gymnastics.
+
+    He begins with the newborn infant, and demands that, if possible, it
+    shall not be taken from its mother. He sets his face strongly against
+    the custom of committing the child during the tenderest and most
+    impressible period of its whole life to the care and companionship of
+    an ignorant nursemaid, or of servants who have not the mother's
+    instinct, or the knowledge that can tell them how to behave in its
+    presence. Only the mother should, if possible, be the child's chief
+    companion and teacher during at least the first three years of its
+    life, and she should have thought it worth while to prepare herself
+    for the right fulfilment of her duties. Instead of tambour work, or
+    Arabic, or any other useless thing that may be taught at girls'
+    schools, surely it would be a great blessing if young ladies were to
+    spend some of their time in an Infant Garden, that might be attached
+    to every academy. Let them all learn from Froebel what are the
+    requirements of a child, and be prepared for the wise performance of
+    what is after all to be the most momentous business of their lives.
+
+    The carrying out of this hint is indeed necessary to the complete and
+    general adoption of the infant-garden system. Froebel desired his
+    infants to be taught only by women, and required that they should be
+    women as well educated and refined as possible, preferring amiable
+    unmarried girls. Thus he would have our maidens spending some part of
+    their time in playing with little ones, learning to understand them,
+    teaching them to understand; our wives he would have busy at home,
+    making good use of their experience, developing carefully and
+    thoughtfully the minds of their children, sole teachers for the first
+    three years of their life; afterward, either helped by throwing them
+    among other children in an Infant Garden for two or three hours every
+    day, or, if there be at home no lack of little company, having Infant
+    Gardens of their own.
+
+    Believing that it is natural to address infants in song, Froebel
+    encouraged nursery songs, and added to their number. Those contributed
+    by him to the common stock were of course contributed for the sake of
+    some use that he had for each; in the same spirit--knowing play to be
+    essential to a child--he invented games; and those added by him to the
+    common stock are all meant to be used for direct teaching. It does not
+    in the least follow, and it was not the case, that he would have us
+    make all nursery rhymes and garden sports abstrusely didactic. He
+    meant no more than to put his own teaching into songs and games, to
+    show clearly that whatever is necessary to be said or done to a young
+    child may be said or done merrily or playfully; and although he was
+    essentially a schoolmaster, he had no faith in the terrors commonly
+    associated with his calling.
+
+    Froebel's nursery songs are associated almost invariably with bodily
+    activity on the part of the child. He is always, as soon as he becomes
+    old enough, to do something while the song is going on, and the
+    movements assigned to him are cunningly contrived so that not even a
+    joint of a little finger shall be left unexercised. If he be none the
+    better, he is none the worse for this. The child is indeed unlucky
+    that depends only on care of this description for the full play of its
+    body; but there are some children so unfortunate, and there are some
+    parents who will be usefully reminded by those songs, of the necessity
+    of procuring means for the free action of every joint and limb. What
+    is done for the body is done in the same spirit for the mind, and
+    ideas are formed, not by song only. The beginning of a most ingenious
+    course of mental training by a series of playthings is made almost
+    from the very first.
+
+    A box containing six soft balls, differing in colour, is given to the
+    child. It is Froebel's "first gift." Long before it can speak the
+    infant can hold one of these little balls in its fingers, become
+    familiar with its spherical shape and its colour. It stands still, it
+    springs, it rolls. As the child grows, he can roll it and run after
+    it, watch it with sharp eyes, and compare the colour of one ball with
+    the colour of another, prick up his ears at the songs connected with
+    his various games with it, use it as a bond of playfellowship with
+    other children, practise with it first efforts at self-denial, and so
+    forth. One ball is suspended by a string, it jumps--it
+    rolls--here--there--over--up; turns left--turns
+    right--ding-dong--tip-tap--falls--spins; fifty ideas may be connected
+    with it. The six balls, three of the primary colours, three of the
+    secondary, may be built up in a pyramid; they may be set rolling, and
+    used in combination in a great many ways giving sufficient exercise to
+    the young wits that have all knowledge and experience before them.
+
+    Froebel's "second gift" is a small box containing a ball, cube, and
+    roller (the last two perforated), with a stick and string. With these
+    forms of the cube, sphere, and cylinder, there is a great deal to be
+    done and learned. They can be played with at first according to the
+    child's own humour: will run, jump, represent carts, or anything. The
+    ancient Egyptians, in their young days as a nation, piled three cubes
+    on one another and called them the three Graces. A child will, in the
+    same way, see fishes in stones, and be content to put a cylinder upon
+    a cube, and say that is papa on horseback. Of this element of ready
+    fancy in all childish sport Froebel took full advantage. The ball,
+    cube, and cylinder may be spun, swung, rolled, and balanced in so many
+    ways as to display practically all their properties. The cube, spun
+    upon the stick piercing it through opposite edges, will look like a
+    circle, and so forth. As the child grows older, each of the forms may
+    be examined definitely, and he may learn from observation to describe
+    it. The ball may be rolled down an inclined plane and the acceleration
+    of its speed observed. Most of the elementary laws of mechanics may be
+    made practically obvious to the child's understanding.
+
+    The "third gift" is the cube divided once in every direction. By the
+    time a child gets this to play with he is three years old--of age ripe
+    for admission to an Infant Garden. The Infant Garden is intended for
+    the help of children between three years old and seven. Instruction in
+    it--always by means of play--is given for only two or three hours in
+    the day; such instruction sets each child, if reasonably helped at
+    home, in the right train of education for the remainder of its time.
+
+    An Infant Garden must be held in a large room abounding in clear space
+    for child's play, and connected with a garden into which the children
+    may adjourn whenever weather will permit. The garden is meant chiefly
+    to assure, more perfectly, the association of wholesome bodily
+    exercise with mental activity. If climate but permitted, Froebel would
+    have all young children taught entirely in the pure, fresh air, while
+    frolicking in sunshine among flowers. By his system he aimed at
+    securing for them bodily as well as mental health, and he held it to
+    be unnatural that they should be cooped up in close rooms, and glued
+    to forms, when all their limbs twitch with desire for action, and
+    there is a warm sunshine out of doors. The garden, too, should be
+    their own; every child the master or mistress of a plot in it, sowing
+    seeds and watching day by day the growth of plants, instructed
+    playfully and simply in the meaning of what is observed. When weather
+    forbids use of the garden, there is the great, airy room which should
+    contain cupboards, with a place for every child's toys and implements;
+    so that a habit of the strictest neatness may be properly maintained.
+    Up to the age of seven there is to be no book work and no ink work;
+    but only at school a free and brisk, but systematic strengthening of
+    the body, of the senses, of the intellect, and of the affections,
+    managed in such a way as to leave the child prompt for subsequent
+    instruction, already comprehending the elements of a good deal of
+    knowledge.
+
+    We must endeavour to show in part how that is done. The third
+    gift--the cube divided once in every direction--enables the child to
+    begin the work of construction in accordance with its own ideas, and
+    insensibly brings the ideas into the control of a sense of harmony and
+    fitness. The cube divided into eight parts will manufacture many
+    things; and, while the child is at work helped by quiet suggestion now
+    and then, the teacher talks of what he is about, asks many questions,
+    answers more, mixes up little songs and stories with the play.
+    Pillars, ruined castles, triumphal arches, city gates, bridges,
+    crosses, towers, all can be completed to the perfect satisfaction of a
+    child, with the eight little cubes. They are all so many texts on
+    which useful and pleasant talk can be established. Then they are
+    capable also of harmonious arrangement into patterns, and this is a
+    great pleasure to the child. He learns the charm of symmetry,
+    exercises taste in the preference of this or that among the hundred
+    combinations of which his eight cubes are susceptible.
+
+    Then follows the "fourth gift," a cube divided into eight planes cut
+    lengthways. More things can be done with this than with the other.
+    Without strain on the mind, in sheer play, mingled with songs, nothing
+    is wanted but a liberal supply of little cubes, to make clear to the
+    children the elements of arithmetic. The cubes are the things
+    numbered. Addition is done with them; they are subtracted from each
+    other; they are multiplied; they are divided. Besides these four
+    elementary rules they cause children to be thoroughly at home in the
+    principle of fractions, to multiply and divide fractions--as real
+    things; all in good time it will become easy enough to let written
+    figures represent them--to go through the rule of three, square root,
+    and cube root. As a child has instilled into him the principles of
+    arithmetic, so he acquires insensibly the groundwork of geometry, the
+    sister science.
+
+    Froebel's "fifth gift" is an extension of the third, a cube divided
+    into twenty-seven equal cubes, and three of these further divided into
+    halves, three into quarters. This brings with it the teaching of a
+    great deal of geometry, much help to the lessons in number,
+    magnificent accessions to the power of the little architect, who is
+    provided, now, with pointed roofs and other glories, and the means of
+    producing an almost infinite variety of symmetrical patterns, both
+    more complex and more beautiful than heretofore.
+
+    The "sixth gift" is a cube so divided as to extend still farther the
+    child's power of combining and discussing it. When its resources are
+    exhausted and combined with those of the "seventh gift" (a box
+    containing every form supplied in the preceding series), the little
+    pupil--seven years old--has had his inventive and artistic powers
+    exercised, and his mind stored with facts that have been absolutely
+    comprehended. He has acquired also a sense of pleasure in the
+    occupation of his mind.
+
+    But he has not been trained in this way only. We leave out of account
+    the bodily exercise connected with the entire round of occupation, and
+    speak only of the mental discipline. There are some other "gifts" that
+    are brought into service as the child becomes able to use them. One is
+    a box containing pieces of wood, or pasteboard, cut into sundry forms.
+    With these the letters of the alphabet can be constructed; and, after
+    letters, words, in such a way as to create out of the game a series of
+    pleasant spelling lessons. The letters are arranged upon a slate ruled
+    into little squares, by which the eye is guided in preserving
+    regularity. Then follows the gift of a bundle of small sticks, which
+    represent so many straight lines; and, by laying them upon his slate,
+    the child can make letters, patterns, pictures; drawing, in fact, with
+    lines that have not to be made with pen or pencil, but are provided
+    ready made and laid down with the fingers. This kind of Stick-work
+    having been brought to perfection, there is a capital extension of the
+    idea with what is called Pea-work. By the help of peas softened in
+    water, sticks may be joined together, letters, skeletons of cubes,
+    crosses, prisms may be built; houses, towers, churches may be
+    constructed, having due breadth as well as length and height, strong
+    enough to be carried about or kept as specimens of ingenuity. Then
+    follows a gift of flat sticks, to be used in plaiting. After that
+    there is a world of ingenuity to be expended on the plaiting, folding,
+    cutting, and pricking of plain or coloured paper. Children five years
+    old, trained in the Infant Garden, will delight in plaiting slips of
+    paper variously coloured into patterns of their own invention, and
+    will work with a sense of symmetry so much refined by training as to
+    produce patterns of exceeding beauty. By cutting paper, too, patterns
+    are produced in the Infant Garden that would often, though the work of
+    very little hands, be received in schools of design with acclamation.
+    Then there are games by which the first truths of astronomy, and other
+    laws of Nature, are made as familiar as they are interesting. For our
+    own parts, we have been perfectly amazed at the work we have seen done
+    by children of six or seven--bright, merry creatures, who have all the
+    spirit of their childhood active in them, repressed by no parent's
+    selfish love of ease and silence, cowed by no dull-witted teacher of
+    the A B C and the pothooks.
+
+    Froebel discourages the cramping of an infant's hand upon a pen, but
+    his slate ruled into little squares, or paper prepared in the same
+    way, is used by him for easy training in the elements of drawing.
+    Modelling in wet clay is one of the most important occupations of the
+    children who have reached about the sixth year, and is used as much as
+    possible, not merely to encourage imitation, but to give some play to
+    the creative power. Finally, there is the best possible use made of
+    the paint-box, and children engaged upon the colouring of pictures and
+    the arrangement of nosegays are further taught to enjoy, not merely
+    what is bright, but also what is harmonious and beautiful.
+
+    We have not left ourselves as much space as is requisite to show how
+    truly all such labour becomes play to the child. Fourteen years'
+    evidence suffices for a demonstration of the admirable working of a
+    system of this kind; but as we think there are some parents who may be
+    willing to inquire a little further into the subject here commended
+    earnestly to their attention, we will end by a citation of the source
+    from which we have ourselves derived what information we possess.
+
+    At the educational exhibition in St. Martin's Hall last year, there
+    was a large display of the material used and results produced in
+    Infant Gardens which attracted much attention. The Baroness von
+    Marenholtz, enthusiastic in her advocacy of the children's cause, came
+    then to England, and did very much to procure the establishment in
+    this country of some experimental Infant Gardens. By her, several
+    months ago--and at about the same time by M. and Madame Ronge who had
+    already established the first English Infant Garden--our attention was
+    invited to the subject. We were also made acquainted with M. Hoffman,
+    one of Froebel's pupils, who explained the system theoretically at the
+    Polytechnic Institution. When in this country, the Baroness von
+    Marenholtz published a book called Woman's Educational Mission, being
+    an explanation of Frederick Froebel's System of Infant Gardens. We
+    have made use of the book in the preceding notice, but it appeared
+    without the necessary illustrations, and is therefore a less perfect
+    guide to the subject than a work published more recently by M. and
+    Madame Ronge: A Practical Guide to the English Kindergarten. This last
+    book we exhort everybody to consult who is desirous of a closer
+    insight into Froebel's system than we have been able here to give. It
+    not only explains what the system is, but, by help of an unstinted
+    supply of little sketches, enables any one at once to study it at home
+    and bring it into active operation. It suggests conversations, games;
+    gives many of Froebel's songs, and even furnishes the music (which
+    usually consists of popular tunes--Mary Blane, Rousseau's Dream, etc.)
+    to which they may be sung. Furthermore, it is well to say that any one
+    interested in this subject, whom time and space do not forbid, may see
+    an Infant Garden in full work by calling, on a Tuesday morning between
+    the hours of ten and one, on M. and Madame Ronge, at number 32
+    Tavistock Place, Tavistock Square. That day these earliest and
+    heartiest of our established infant gardeners have set apart, for the
+    help of a good cause, to interruptions and investigations from the
+    world without, trusting, of course, we suppose, that no one will
+    disturb them for the satisfaction of mere idle curiosity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE OVERTHROW OF COERCION.
+
+
+Dickens, in the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, states that, as Pickwick
+Papers had given him an audience, he determined to carry out a
+long-cherished plan and write for the purpose of driving out of existence
+a class of bad private schools, of which certain schools in Yorkshire were
+the worst types. He drew a picture of low cunning, avarice, ignorance,
+imposture, and brutality in Squeers that astounded his audience, and led
+to the closing of most of the Yorkshire private schools and to the
+overthrow of tyranny in schools throughout the civilized world. Tyranny
+and corporal punishment still exist, but not in the best schools. Not one
+child weeps now on account of corporal punishment for every hundred who
+wailed bitterly for the same reason when Froebel and Dickens began their
+loving work. Year by year the good work goes on. Men are learning the
+better ways of guiding and governing childhood. We can not yet say when
+men and women in the homes and schools everywhere shall understand the
+child and their own powers so thoroughly that there shall be no more
+corporal punishment inflicted, but we do know that the abatement of the
+terrible brutality began with the revelations of Froebel and Dickens.
+Froebel taught the new philosophy, Dickens sent it quivering through the
+hearts and consciences of mankind.
+
+Members of the highest classes in England have been imprisoned near the
+close of the nineteenth century for improper methods of punishing children
+that would have excited no comment when Dickens described Squeers a little
+more than half a century earlier. In the report to the British
+Government, at the close of his remarkable half-century of honourable and
+very able educational work, Sir Joshua Fitch said: "In watching the
+gradual development of the training colleges for women from year to year,
+nothing is more striking than the increased attention which is being paid
+in those institutions to the true principles of infant teaching and
+discipline. The circular which has recently been issued by your lordships,
+and which is designed to enforce and explain these principles, would, if
+put forth a few years ago, have fallen on unprepared soil, and would
+indeed have seemed to many teachers both in and out of training colleges
+to be scarcely intelligible. Now its counsels will be welcomed with
+sympathy and full appreciation."
+
+Dickens describes Squeers as a man "whose appearance was not
+prepossessing."
+
+    He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two.
+    The eye he had was unquestionably useful, but decidedly not
+    ornamental: being of a greenish gray, and in shape resembling the
+    fanlight of a street door. The blank side of his face was much
+    wrinkled and puckered up, which gave him a very sinister appearance,
+    especially when he smiled, at which times his expression bordered
+    closely on the villainous. His hair was very flat and shiny, save at
+    the ends, where it was brushed stiffly up from a low protruding
+    forehead, which assorted well with his harsh voice and coarse manner.
+
+He then proceeds to reveal the character of Squeers by a series of
+incidents:
+
+    Mr. Squeers was standing in a box by one of the coffee-room
+    fireplaces. In a corner of the seat was a very small deal trunk, tied
+    round with a scanty piece of cord; and on the trunk was perched--his
+    lace-up half-boots and corduroy trousers dangling in the air--a
+    diminutive boy, with his shoulders drawn up to his ears, and his hands
+    planted on his knees, who glanced timidly at the schoolmaster, from
+    time to time, with evident dread and apprehension.
+
+    "Half-past three," muttered Mr. Squeers, turning from the window, and
+    looking sulkily at the coffee-room clock. "There will be nobody here
+    to-day."
+
+    Much vexed by this reflection, Mr. Squeers looked at the little boy to
+    see whether he was doing anything he could beat him for. As he
+    happened not to be doing anything at all, he merely boxed his ears,
+    and told him not to do it again.
+
+    "At midsummer," muttered Mr. Squeers, resuming his complaint, "I took
+    down ten boys; ten twentys is two hundred pound. I go back at eight
+    o'clock to-morrow morning, and have got only three--three oughts is an
+    ought--three twos is six--sixty pound. What's come of all the boys?
+    what's parents got in their heads? what does it all mean?"
+
+    Here the little boy on the top of the trunk gave a violent sneeze.
+
+    "Halloa, sir!" growled the schoolmaster, turning round. "What's that,
+    sir?"
+
+    "Nothing, please, sir," said the little boy.
+
+    "Nothing, sir?" exclaimed Mr. Squeers.
+
+    "Please, sir, I sneezed," rejoined the boy, trembling till the little
+    trunk shook under him.
+
+    "Oh! sneezed, did you?" retorted Mr. Squeers. "Then what did you say
+    'nothing' for, sir?"
+
+    In default of a better answer to this question, the little boy screwed
+    a couple of knuckles into each of his eyes and began to cry, wherefore
+    Mr. Squeers knocked him off the trunk with a blow on one side of his
+    face, and knocked him on again with a blow on the other.
+
+    "Wait till I get you down into Yorkshire, my young gentleman," said
+    Mr. Squeers, "and then I'll give you the rest. Will you hold that
+    noise, sir?"
+
+    "Ye--ye--yes," sobbed the little boy, rubbing his face very hard with
+    the Beggar's Petition in printed calico.
+
+    "Then do so at once, sir," said Squeers. "Do you hear?"
+
+The waiter at this juncture announced a gentleman who wished to interview
+Mr. Squeers, and the schoolmaster, in an undertone, said to the poor boy:
+"Put your handkerchief in your pocket, you little scoundrel, or I'll
+murder you when the gentleman goes."
+
+Affecting not to see the gentleman when he entered, Mr. Squeers feigned to
+be mending a pen and trying to comfort the boy he had so grossly abused.
+
+"My dear child," said Squeers, "all people have their trials. This early
+trial of yours, that is fit to make your little heart burst and your very
+eyes come out of your head with crying, what is it? Nothing--less than
+nothing. You are leaving your friends, but you will have a father in me,
+my dear, and a mother in Mrs. Squeers."
+
+Our indignation is still further aroused when we hear the conversation
+between Mr. Squeers and his visitor, who is named Snawley, and who was "a
+sleek, flat-nosed man, bearing in his countenance an expression of much
+mortification and sanctity."
+
+He had brought with him two little boys, whose stepfather he was. Their
+mother had a little money in her own right and he was afraid she might
+squander it on her boys, so he wished to dispose of them. Our blood runs
+cold as we hear the two scoundrels plotting against the unfortunate boys.
+They are to be kept by Squeers till grown up. No questions are to be asked
+"so long as the payments are regular." "They are to be supplied with
+razors when grown up, and never allowed home for holidays, and not
+permitted to write home, except a circular at Christmas to say they never
+were so happy and hope they may never be sent for, and no questions are to
+be asked in case anything happens to them."
+
+We learn the unutterable selfishness of Squeers as he sits eating a
+sumptuous breakfast, while the five wretched and hungry little boys, who
+are to accompany him to Yorkshire to Dotheboys Hall, look at him. He had
+ordered bread and butter for three, which he cut into five portions, and
+"two-penn'orth of milk" for the five boys. While waiting for the bread to
+come he said, as he took a large mouthful of beef and toast, "Conquer your
+passions, boys, and don't be eager after vittles. Subdue your appetites,
+my dears, and you've conquered human natur."
+
+Nicholas Nickleby had been engaged to teach under Squeers in Dotheboys
+Hall. He was shocked at many things he heard and saw the night he arrived
+in Yorkshire.
+
+But the school itself and the appearance of the wretched pupils completed
+his discomfiture.
+
+    The pupils--the young noblemen! How the last faint traces of hope, the
+    remotest glimmering of any good to be derived from his efforts in this
+    den, faded from the mind of Nicholas as he looked in dismay around!
+    Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the
+    countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys
+    of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear
+    their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were
+    the bleared eye, the harelip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or
+    distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for
+    their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of
+    infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There
+    were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the
+    scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light
+    of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone
+    remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, with leaden eyes, like
+    malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins
+    of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary
+    nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With
+    every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every
+    young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every
+    revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil
+    way to their core in silence, what an incipient hell was breeding
+    here!
+
+It was Mr. Squeers's custom on the first afternoon after his return from
+London to call the school together to make announcements, and read letters
+written by himself, which he pretended had been written by the relatives
+of the boys. Accordingly, the first afternoon after the arrival of
+Nicholas, Squeers entered the schoolroom "with a small bundle of papers in
+his hand, and Mrs. S. followed with a pair of canes."
+
+"Let any boy speak a word without leave," said Mr. Squeers, "and I'll take
+the skin off his back."
+
+Two letters will serve as samples of the rest:
+
+"Graymarsh. Stand up, Graymarsh."
+
+Graymarsh stood up, while Squeers read his letter:
+
+    "Graymarsh's maternal aunt is very glad to hear he's so well and
+    happy, and sends her respectful compliments to Mrs. Squeers, and
+    thinks she must be an angel. She likewise thinks Mr. Squeers is too
+    good for this world; but hopes he may long be spared to carry on the
+    business. Would have sent the two pair of stockings as desired, but is
+    short of money, so forwards a tract instead, and hopes Graymarsh will
+    put his trust in Providence. Hopes, above all, that he will study in
+    every thing to please Mr. and Mrs. Squeers, and look upon them as his
+    only friends; and that he will love Master Squeers; and not object to
+    sleeping five in a bed, which no Christian should. Ah!" said Squeers,
+    folding it up, "a delightful letter. Very affecting indeed."
+
+"Mobbs" was next called, and his letter was read to him:
+
+    "Mobbs's stepmother," said Squeers, "took to her bed on hearing that
+    he wouldn't eat fat, and has been very ill ever since. She wishes to
+    know, by an early post, where he expects to go to, if he quarrels with
+    his vittles; and with what feelings he could turn up his nose at the
+    cow's-liver broth, after his good master had asked a blessing on it.
+    This was told her in the London newspapers--not by Mr. Squeers, for he
+    is too kind and too good to set anybody against anybody--and it has
+    vexed her so much, Mobbs can't think. She is sorry to find he is
+    discontented, which is sinful and horrid, and hopes Mr. Squeers will
+    flog him into a happier state of mind; with this view, she has also
+    stopped his halfpenny a week pocket-money, and given a double-bladed
+    knife with a corkscrew in it to the missionaries, which she had bought
+    on purpose for him."
+
+    "A sulky state of feeling," said Squeers, after a terrible pause,
+    during which he had moistened the palm of his right hand again, "won't
+    do. Cheerfulness and contentment must be kept up. Mobbs, come to me!"
+
+    Mobbs moved slowly toward the desk, rubbing his eyes in anticipation
+    of good cause for doing so; and he soon afterward retired by the side
+    door, with as good a cause as a boy need have.
+
+There are still school tyrants who talk with philosophic air of flogging
+children to make them happier, and others who say with hard tones and
+clenched hands that "the one thing they will not allow in their schools is
+a sulky boy or girl," and they mean, when they say so, that if a boy is
+sulky they take no steps to find out the cause of his disease or the
+natural remedy for it, but they apply the universal remedy of the
+old-fashioned quack trainer and whip the poor boy, who is already
+suffering from some physical or nervous derangement. Squeers and such
+teachers are brother tyrants. They practise the Squeers's doctrine--"A
+sulky state of feeling won't do. Cheerfulness and contentment must be kept
+up. Mobbs, come to me"--to make children cheerful and contented.
+
+One of the most heart-stirring cases in Dotheboys Hall was that of poor
+Smike. He had been sent to Squeers when an infant. He was a young man now,
+but he had been starved so that he wore still around his long neck the
+frill of the collar that loving hands had placed there when he was a
+little child. Ill treatment and lack of proper food had made him almost an
+imbecile, and he was the drudge of the institution. Nicholas was attracted
+by the anxious, longing looks of the boy, as his eyes followed Squeers
+from place to place on their arrival from London.
+
+    He was lame; and as he feigned to be busy in arranging the table,
+    glanced at the letters with a look so keen, and yet so dispirited and
+    hopeless, that Nicholas could hardly bear to watch him.
+
+    "What are you bothering about there, Smike?" cried Mrs. Squeers; "let
+    the things alone, can't you."
+
+    "Eh!" said Squeers, looking up. "Oh! it's you, is it?"
+
+    "Yes, sir," replied the youth, pressing his hands together, as though
+    to control, by force, the nervous wandering of his fingers; "is
+    there----"
+
+    "Well!" said Squeers.
+
+    "Have you--did anybody--has nothing been heard--about me?"
+
+    "Devil a bit," replied Squeers testily.
+
+    The lad withdrew his eyes, and, putting his hand to his face, moved
+    toward the door.
+
+    "Not a word," resumed Squeers, "and never will be."
+
+This is one of the pathetic pictures that awoke the heart of humanity.
+Nicholas was the first person who had ever sympathized with Smike, so the
+poor fellow naturally gave to Nicholas the pent-up love of his dwarfed
+nature, and kept near him whenever it was possible to do so.
+
+Dickens made Smike the centre of the terrible interest in Dotheboys Hall.
+
+Poor Smike was so badly treated that he ran away, but, after a long chase,
+he was brought home in triumph by Mrs. Squeers, bound like an animal.
+Squeers, of course, determined to flog him before all the boys as an
+example, and this led to the first great step toward the overthrow of the
+power of Squeers in Dotheboys Hall.
+
+    The news that Smike had been caught and brought back in triumph, ran
+    like wildfire through the hungry community, and expectation was on
+    tiptoe all the morning. On tiptoe it was destined to remain, however,
+    until afternoon; when Squeers, having refreshed himself with his
+    dinner, and further strengthened himself by an extra libation or so,
+    made his appearance (accompanied by his amiable partner) with a
+    countenance of portentous import, and a fearful instrument of
+    flagellation, strong, supple, wax-ended, and new--in short, purchased
+    that morning, expressly for the occasion.
+
+    "Is every boy here?" asked Squeers, in a tremendous voice.
+
+    Every boy was there, but every boy was afraid to speak; so Squeers
+    glared along the lines to assure himself; and every eye drooped, and
+    every head cowered down, as he did so.
+
+    "Each boy keep his place," said Squeers, administering his favourite
+    blow to the desk, and regarding with gloomy satisfaction the universal
+    start which it never failed to occasion. "Nickleby! to your desk,
+    sir."
+
+    It was remarked by more than one small observer that there was a very
+    curious and unusual expression in the usher's face; but he took his
+    seat, without opening his lips in reply. Squeers, casting a triumphant
+    glance at his assistant, and a look of most comprehensive despotism on
+    the boys, left the room, and shortly afterward returned, dragging
+    Smike by the collar--or rather by that fragment of his jacket which
+    was nearest the place where his collar would have been had he boasted
+    such a decoration.
+
+    In any other place the appearance of the wretched, jaded, spiritless
+    object would have occasioned a murmur of compassion and remonstrance.
+    It had some effect, even there; for the lookers-on moved uneasily in
+    their seats, and a few of the boldest ventured to steal looks at each
+    other, expressive of indignation and pity.
+
+    They were lost on Squeers, however, whose gaze was fastened on the
+    luckless Smike, as he inquired, according to custom in such cases,
+    whether he had anything to say for himself.
+
+    "Nothing, I suppose?" said Squeers, with a diabolical grin.
+
+    Smike glanced round, and his eye rested for an instant on Nicholas, as
+    if he had expected him to intercede; but his look was riveted on his
+    desk.
+
+    "Have you anything to say?" demanded Squeers again; giving his right
+    arm two or three flourishes to try its power and suppleness. "Stand a
+    little out of the way, Mrs. Squeers, my dear; I've hardly got room
+    enough."
+
+    "Spare me, sir!" cried Smike.
+
+    "Oh! that's all, is it?" said Squeers. "Yes, I'll flog you within an
+    inch of your life, and spare you that."
+
+    "Ha, ha, ha," laughed Mrs. Squeers, "that's a good 'un!"
+
+    "I was driven to do it," said Smike faintly, and casting another
+    imploring look on him.
+
+    "Driven to do it, were you?" said Squeers. "Oh! it wasn't your fault;
+    it was mine, I suppose--eh?"
+
+    "A nasty, ungrateful, pig-headed, brutish, obstinate, sneaking dog,"
+    exclaimed Mrs. Squeers, taking Smike's head under her arm, and
+    administering a cuff at every epithet; "what does he mean by that?"
+
+    "Stand aside, my dear," replied Squeers. "We'll try and find out."
+
+    Mrs. Squeers, being out of breath with her exertions, complied.
+    Squeers caught the boy firmly in his grip; one desperate cut had
+    fallen on his body--he was wincing from the lash, and uttering a
+    scream of pain--it was raised again, and again about to fall--when
+    Nicholas Nickleby suddenly starting up, cried: "Stop!" in a voice that
+    made the rafters ring.
+
+    "Who cried stop?" said Squeers, turning savagely round.
+
+    "I," said Nicholas, stepping forward. "This must not go on."
+
+    "Must not go on!" cried Squeers, almost in a shriek.
+
+    "No!" thundered Nicholas.
+
+    Aghast and stupefied by the boldness of the interference, Squeers
+    released his hold of Smike, and, falling back a pace or two, gazed
+    upon Nicholas with looks that were positively frightful.
+
+    "I say must not," repeated Nicholas, nothing daunted; "shall not. I
+    will prevent it."
+
+    Squeers continued to gaze upon him, with his eyes starting out of his
+    head; but astonishment had actually, for the moment, bereft him of
+    speech.
+
+    "You have disregarded all my quiet interference in the miserable lad's
+    behalf," said Nicholas; "you have returned no answer to the letter in
+    which I begged forgiveness for him, and offered to be responsible that
+    he would remain quietly here. Don't blame me for this public
+    interference. You have brought it upon yourself, not I."
+
+    "Sit down, beggar!" screamed Squeers, almost beside himself with rage,
+    and seizing Smike as he spoke.
+
+    "Wretch!" rejoined Nicholas fiercely, "touch him at your peril! I will
+    not stand by and see it done. My blood is up, and I have the strength
+    of ten such men as you. Look to yourself, for, by Heaven, I will not
+    spare you, if you drive me on!"
+
+    "Stand back!" cried Squeers, brandishing his weapon.
+
+    "I have a long series of insults to avenge," said Nicholas, flushed
+    with passion; "and my indignation is aggravated by the dastardly
+    cruelties practised on helpless infancy in this foul den. Have a care;
+    for, if you do raise the devil within me, the consequences shall fall
+    heavily upon your own head!"
+
+    He had scarcely spoken, when Squeers, in a violent outbreak of wrath,
+    and with a cry like the howl of a wild beast, spit upon him, and
+    struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture,
+    which raised up a bar of livid flesh as it was inflicted. Smarting
+    with the agony of the blow, and concentrating into that one moment all
+    his feelings of rage, scorn, and indignation, Nicholas sprang upon
+    him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat,
+    beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.
+
+    The boys--with the exception of Master Squeers, who, coming to his
+    father's assistance, harassed the enemy in the rear--moved not hand or
+    foot; but Mrs. Squeers, with many shrieks for aid, hung on to the tail
+    of her partner's coat, and endeavoured to drag him from his infuriated
+    adversary; while Miss Squeers, who had been peeping through the
+    keyhole in expectation of a very different scene, darted in at the
+    very beginning of the attack, and after launching a shower of
+    inkstands at the usher's head, beat Nicholas to her heart's content:
+    animating herself at every blow with the recollection of his having
+    refused her proffered love, and thus imparting additional strength to
+    an arm which (as she took after her mother in this respect) was, at no
+    time, one of the weakest.
+
+    Nicholas, in the full torrent of his violence, felt the blows no more
+    than if they had been dealt with feathers; but, becoming tired of the
+    noise and uproar, and feeling that his arm grew weak besides, he threw
+    all his remaining strength into half a dozen finishing cuts and flung
+    Squeers from him, with all the force he could muster. The violence of
+    his fall precipitated Mrs. Squeers completely over an adjacent form;
+    and Squeers, striking his head against it in his descent, lay at his
+    full length on the ground, stunned and motionless.
+
+    Having brought affairs to this happy termination, and ascertained, to
+    his thorough satisfaction, that Squeers was only stunned, and not dead
+    (upon which point he had had some unpleasant doubts at first),
+    Nicholas left his family to restore him and retired to consider what
+    course he had better adopt. He looked anxiously round for Smike, as he
+    left the room, but he was nowhere to be seen.
+
+    After a brief consideration, he packed up a few clothes in a small
+    leathern valise, and, finding that nobody offered to oppose his
+    progress, marched boldly out by the front door and started to walk to
+    London.
+
+    Near the school he met John Browdie, the honest corn factor.
+
+John saw that Nicholas had received a severe blow, and asked the reason.
+
+    "The fact is," said Nicholas, not very well knowing how to make the
+    avowal, "the fact is, that I have been ill-treated."
+
+    "Noa!" interposed John Browdie, in a tone of compassion; for he was a
+    giant in strength and stature, and Nicholas, very likely, in his
+    eyes, seemed a mere dwarf; "dean't say thot."
+
+    "Yes, I have," replied Nicholas, "by that man Squeers, and I have
+    beaten him soundly, and am leaving this place in consequence."
+
+    "What!" cried John Browdie, with such an ecstatic shout, that the
+    horse quite shied at it. "Beatten the schoolmeasther! Ho! ho! ho!
+    Beatten the schoolmeasther! who ever heard o' the loike o' that noo!
+    Giv' us thee hond agean, yongster. Beatten the schoolmeasther! Dang
+    it, I loove thee for't."
+
+And the world agreed, and still agrees, with John Browdie.
+
+Squeers and Smike began the real movement against cruelty and corporal
+punishment not only in schools, but in homes. Dickens described both
+characters so admirably that the world hated Squeers and pitied Smike to
+the limit of its power to hate and pity, and unconsciously the world
+associated cruelty and corporal punishment with Squeers. This was exactly
+what Dickens desired. The hatred of Squeers led to a strong disapproval of
+his practices. Corporal punishment was associated with an unpopular man,
+and it lost its respectable character and never regained it. The dislike
+for Squeers was accentuated by the long-continued sympathy and hopefulness
+felt for Smike as he gradually succumbed to the terrible disease,
+consumption, induced by poor food, neglect, and cruelty.
+
+Squeers and Smike are doing their good work still, and doing it well. They
+could do it much better if men and women when they have become acquainted
+with Squeers would candidly ask themselves the question, "In what respects
+am I like Squeers?" instead of yielding to the feeling of
+self-satisfaction that they are so very unlike him.
+
+Just before writing about the coercive tyranny of Squeers in his school,
+Dickens had written Oliver Twist, in which he had made a most vigorous
+attack upon two classes of characters for their tyrannical treatment of
+children, and especially on account of their frequent use of corporal
+punishment. Bumble represented the officials in institutions for children,
+and "the gentleman in the white waistcoat" was given as a type of the
+advanced Christian philanthropy of his time. He meant well, gave his time
+freely to attend the meetings of the board, and supposed he was doing
+right; but Dickens wished to let philanthropists see that they were
+terribly cruel to the helpless children, and that their good intentions
+could not condone their harshness, even though it resulted from ignorance
+and lack of reverence for childhood, and not from deliberate evil
+intentions.
+
+Poor, friendless little Oliver! His beautiful face and gentle spirit might
+have touched the hardest heart, but the institutional heart becomes hard
+easily, even two generations after the time of Bumble and "the gentleman
+in the immaculate white waistcoat."
+
+Dickens says:
+
+    It must not be supposed that Oliver was denied the benefit of
+    exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages of religious
+    consolation in the workhouse. As for exercise, it was nice cold
+    weather, and he was allowed to perform his ablutions every morning
+    under the pump, in a stone yard, in the presence of Mr. Bumble, who
+    prevented his catching cold, and caused a tingling sensation to
+    pervade his frame, by repeated applications of the cane. As for
+    society, he was carried every other day into the hall, where the boys
+    dined, and there sociably flogged as a public warning and example. And
+    so far from being denied the advantage of religious consolation, he
+    was kicked into the same apartment every evening at prayer time, and
+    there permitted to listen to, and console his mind with, a general
+    supplication of the boys, containing a special clause, therein
+    inserted by authority of the board, in which they entreated to be made
+    good, virtuous, contented, and obedient, and to be guarded from the
+    sins and vices of Oliver Twist.
+
+After Oliver had been sent to work for Mr. Sowerberry he was goaded to
+desperation one evening by the disrespectful remarks of Noah Claypole
+about his mother, and bravely gave the mean bully the personal
+chastisement he so richly deserved. Noah was sent to complain to the
+parish board, and the gentleman in the white waistcoat said:
+
+    "Bumble, just step up to Sowerberry's with your cane, and see what's
+    best to be done. Don't spare him, Bumble."
+
+    "No, I will not, sir," replied the beadle, adjusting the wax end which
+    was twisted round the bottom of his cane, for purposes of parochial
+    flagellation.
+
+    "Tell Sowerberry not to spare him either. They'll never do anything
+    with him without stripes and bruises," said the gentleman in the white
+    waistcoat.
+
+The innocent, manly child was beaten unmercifully and abused cruelly by
+Sowerberry and Bumble, yet he bore all their taunts and floggings without
+a tear until he was alone. Then, "when there was none to see or hear him,
+he fell upon his knees on the floor, and, hiding his face in his hands,
+wept such tears as, God send for the credit of our nature, few so young
+may ever have cause to pour out before him!"
+
+There are not many "gentlemen in white waistcoats" of the type described
+by Dickens now on charitable boards, and the enlightened sentiment of
+civilized countries turns the legal processes of nations upon officials
+who dare to treat children unkindly. Dickens made humane people everywhere
+sympathize with Mr. Meagles, who said: "Whenever I see a beadle in full
+fig coming down a street on a Sunday at the head of a charity school, I am
+obliged to turn and run away, or I should hit him."
+
+Ten years after Squeers began his good work Dickens produced Squeers's
+associate, Mr. Creakle, the master of Salem House.
+
+David Copperfield was sent to Salem House by his stepfather, Mr.
+Murdstone, because he bit his hand when he was punishing him unjustly. For
+this offence he was compelled to wear a placard on his back on which was
+written: "Take care of him. He bites." This dastardly practice of
+labelling youthful offenders persisted until very recent times. Children
+in schools are even yet in some places degraded by inconsiderate teachers
+by being compelled to wear some indication of their misconduct. Dickens
+vigorously condemned this outrage in 1849.
+
+David was sent to school during the holidays, and was soon brought before
+Mr. Creakle by Tungay, his servant with the wooden leg.
+
+    "So," said Mr. Creakle, "this is the young gentleman whose teeth are
+    to be filed! Turn him round."
+
+    Mr. Creakle's face was fiery, and his eyes were small and deep in his
+    head; he had thick veins in his forehead, a little nose, and a large
+    chin. He was bald on the top of his head; and had some thin,
+    wet-looking hair that was just turning gray brushed across each
+    temple, so that the two sides interlaced on his forehead.
+
+    "Now," said Mr. Creakle. "What's the report of this boy?"
+
+    "There's nothing against him yet," returned the man with the wooden
+    leg. "There has been no opportunity."
+
+    I thought Mr. Creakle was disappointed. I thought Mrs. and Miss
+    Creakle (at whom I now glanced for the first time, and who were, both,
+    thin and quiet) were not disappointed.
+
+    "Come here, sir!" said Mr. Creakle, beckoning to me.
+
+    "Come here!" said the man with the wooden leg, repeating the gesture.
+
+    "I have the happiness of knowing your stepfather," whispered Mr.
+    Creakle, taking me by the ear; "and a worthy man he is, and a man of
+    strong character. He knows me, and I know him. Do _you_ know me! Hey?"
+    said Mr. Creakle, pinching my ear with ferocious playfulness.
+
+    "Not yet, sir," I said, flinching with the pain.
+
+    "Not yet! Hey?" repeated Mr. Creakle. "But you will soon. Hey?"
+
+    "You will soon. Hey?" repeated the man with the wooden leg. I
+    afterward found that he generally acted, with his strong voice, as Mr.
+    Creakle's interpreter to the boys.
+
+    I was very much frightened, and said, I hoped so, if he pleased. I
+    felt all this while as if my ear were blazing; he pinched it so hard.
+
+    "I'll tell you what I am," whispered Mr. Creakle, letting it go at
+    last, with a screw at parting that brought the water to my eyes, "I'm
+    a Tartar."
+
+Mr. Creakle proved to be as good as his word. He was a Tartar.
+
+On the first day of school he revealed himself. His opening address was
+very brief and to the point.
+
+    "Now, boys, this is a new half. Take care what you're about in this
+    new half. Come fresh up to the lessons, I advise you, for I come fresh
+    up to the punishment. I won't flinch. It will be of no use your
+    rubbing yourselves; you won't rub the marks out that I shall give you.
+    Now get to work, every boy!"
+
+    When this dreadful exordium was over, Mr. Creakle came to where I sat,
+    and told me that if I were famous for biting, he was famous for
+    biting, too. He then showed me the cane, and asked me what I thought
+    of _that_, for a tooth? Was it a sharp tooth, hey? Was it a double
+    tooth, hey? Had it a deep prong, hey? Did it bite, hey? Did it bite?
+    At every question he gave me a fleshy cut with it that made me writhe.
+
+    Not that I mean to say these were special marks of distinction, which
+    only I received. On the contrary, a large majority of the boys
+    (especially the smaller ones) were visited with similar instances of
+    notice, as Mr. Creakle made the round of the schoolroom. Half the
+    establishment was writhing and crying before the day's work began; and
+    how much of it had writhed and cried before the day's work was over I
+    am really afraid to recollect, lest I should seem to exaggerate.
+
+    I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed his
+    profession more than Mr. Creakle did. He had a delight in cutting at
+    the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite. I am
+    confident that he couldn't resist a chubby boy especially; that there
+    was a fascination in such a subject which made him restless in his
+    mind until he had scored and marked him for the day. I was chubby
+    myself, and ought to know. I am sure when I think of the fellow now,
+    my blood rises against him with the disinterested indignation I should
+    feel if I could have known all about him without having ever been in
+    his power; but it rises hotly, because I know him to have been an
+    incapable brute, who had no more right to be possessed of the great
+    trust he held than to be Lord High Admiral or Commander-in-chief: in
+    either of which capacities it is probable that he would have done
+    infinitely less mischief.
+
+    Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless idol, how abject we
+    were to him! what a launch in life I think it now, on looking-back, to
+    be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!
+
+Twenty years after Dickens described Creakle a new teacher stood before a
+class in a large American city, and, holding a long rattan cane above his
+head, said in a fierce, threatening tone: "Do you see that cane? Would you
+like to feel it? Hey? Well, break any one of my forty-eight rules and you
+will feel it all right." The tyrant in adulthood dies hard. No wonder.
+Tyranny has been wrought into our natures by centuries of blind faith in
+corporal punishment as the supreme agency in saving the race from moral
+wreck and anarchy in childhood and youth. Men sought no agency for the
+development of the good in young lives. As they conceived it, their duty
+was done if they prevented their children from doing wrong, and the
+quickest, easiest, most effective way they knew to secure coercion was by
+corporal punishment. The most successful tyrant, he who could most
+thoroughly terrorize children and keep them down most completely, was
+regarded as the best disciplinarian. Squeers and Creakle were fair
+exponents of the almost universally recognised theory of their day, and
+they had many successors in the real schools of the generation that
+followed them. No man could remain a week in a school now if he began on
+the opening day in the way Creakle did.
+
+Dickens was right in revealing the position of the teacher as one of
+"great trust," and he was right, too, in insisting that Creakle was no
+more fitted to be a teacher "than to be Lord High Admiral or
+Commander-in-chief, in either of which capacities it is probable he would
+have done infinitely less mischief." This was another plea for good normal
+schools and for state supervision.
+
+Dickens makes a good point in his remark about the degradation of abject
+submission to a man of such parts and pretensions as Creakle.
+Subordination always dwarfs the human soul, but when the child is forced
+to a position of abject subordination to a coarse tyrant the degradation
+is more complete and more humiliating. It does not mend matters for the
+child when the tyrant is his father. The tyranny of parenthood is usually
+the hardest to escape from.
+
+In the same book in which Creakle is described--David Copperfield--Dickens
+deals with the tyranny of the home. David's widowed mother married Mr.
+Murdstone, a hard, severe, austere, religious man, with an equally
+dreadful sister--Jane Murdstone.
+
+    Firmness was the grand quality on which both Mr. and Miss Murdstone
+    took their stand. However I might have expressed my comprehension of
+    it at that time, if I had been called upon, I nevertheless did clearly
+    comprehend in my own way that it was another name for tyranny, and for
+    a certain gloomy, arrogant, devil's humour, that was in them both. The
+    creed, as I should state it now, was this: Mr. Murdstone was firm;
+    nobody in his world was to be so firm as Mr. Murdstone; nobody else in
+    his world was to be firm at all, for everybody was to be bent to his
+    firmness.
+
+There was no more depressing tyranny in the time of Dickens than the
+tyranny exercised in the name of a rigid and repressive religion.
+
+    The gloomy taint that was in the Murdstone blood darkened the
+    Murdstone religion, which was austere and wrathful. I have thought,
+    since, that its assuming that character was a necessary consequence of
+    Mr. Murdstone's firmness, which wouldn't allow him to let anybody off
+    from the utmost weight of the severest penalties he could find any
+    excuse for. Be this as it may, I well remember the tremendous visages
+    with which we used to go to church, and the changed air of the place.
+    Again, the dreaded Sunday comes round, and I file into the old pew
+    first, like a guarded captive brought to a condemned service. Again,
+    Miss Murdstone, in a black-velvet gown, that looks as if it had been
+    made out of a pall, follows close upon me; then my mother; then her
+    husband. Again, I listen to Miss Murdstone mumbling the responses, and
+    emphasizing all the dread words with a cruel relish. Again, I see her
+    dark eyes roll round the church when she says "miserable sinners," as
+    if she were calling all the congregation names. Again, I catch rare
+    glimpses of my mother, moving her lips timidly between the two, with
+    one of them muttering at each ear like low thunder. Again, I wonder
+    with a sudden fear whether it is likely that our good old clergyman
+    can be wrong, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone right, and that all the
+    angels in heaven can be destroying angels. Again, if I move a finger
+    or relax a muscle of my face, Miss Murdstone pokes me with her prayer
+    book, and makes my side ache.
+
+Mrs. Chillip said: "Mr. Murdstone sets up an image of himself and calls it
+the Divine Nature," and "what such people as the Murdstones call their
+religion is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance." Mild and cautious
+Mr. Chillip observed, "I don't find authority for Mr. and Miss Murdstone
+in the New Testament," and his good wife added, "The darker tyrant Mr.
+Murdstone becomes, the more ferocious is his religious doctrine."
+
+When David first learned that Mr. Murdstone had married his mother he
+relieved the swelling in his little heart by crying in his bedroom. His
+mother naturally felt a sympathy for her boy. Mr. Murdstone reproved her
+for her lack of "firmness," ordered her out of the room, and gave David
+his first lesson in "obedience."
+
+    "David," he said, making his lips thin, by pressing them together, "if
+    I have an obstinate horse or dog to deal with, what do you think I
+    do?"
+
+    "I don't know."
+
+    "I beat him."
+
+    I had answered in a kind of breathless whisper, but I felt, in my
+    silence, that my breath was shorter now.
+
+    "I make him wince, and smart. I say to myself, 'I'll conquer that
+    fellow;' and if it were to cost him all the blood he had, I should do
+    it."
+
+There are still a few schoolmaster tyrants who boast of their ability "to
+subdue children." They are barbarians, who understand neither the new
+education nor the new theology, who have not learned to recognise and
+reverence the individual selfhood of each child, who themselves fear God's
+power more than they feel his love.
+
+When David was at home for the holidays he remained in his own room a
+considerable part of the time reading. This aroused the anger of Mr.
+Murdstone, and he charged David with being sullen.
+
+    "I was sorry, David," said Mr. Murdstone, turning his head and his
+    eyes stiffly toward me, "to observe that you are of a sullen
+    disposition. This is not a character that I can suffer to develop
+    itself beneath my eyes without an effort at improvement. You must
+    endeavour, sir, to change it. We must endeavour to change it for you."
+
+    "I beg your pardon, sir," I faltered. "I have never meant to be sullen
+    since I came back."
+
+    "Don't take refuge in a lie, sir!" he returned so fiercely, that I saw
+    my mother involuntarily put out her trembling hand as if to interpose
+    between us. "You have withdrawn yourself in your sullenness to your
+    own room. You have kept your room when you ought to have been here.
+    You know now, once for all, that I require you to be here, and not
+    there. Further, that I require you to bring obedience here. You know
+    me, David. I will have it done."
+
+    Miss Murdstone gave a hoarse chuckle.
+
+    "I will have a respectful, prompt, and ready bearing toward myself,"
+    he continued, "and toward Jane Murdstone, and toward your mother. I
+    will not have this room shunned as if it were infected, at the
+    pleasure of a child. Sit down."
+
+    He ordered me like a dog, and I obeyed like a dog.
+
+David's lessons, which had been "along a path of roses" when his mother
+was alone with him, became a path of thorns after the Murdstones came.
+
+    The lessons were a grievous daily drudgery and misery. They were very
+    long, very numerous, very hard--perfectly unintelligible.
+
+    Let me remember how it used to be. I come into the parlour after
+    breakfast with my books, an exercise book and a slate. My mother is
+    ready for me, but not half so ready as Mr. Murdstone, or as Miss
+    Murdstone, sitting near my mother stringing steel beads. The very
+    sight of these two has such an influence over me, that I begin to feel
+    the words I have been at infinite pains to get into my head all
+    sliding away, and going I don't know where. I wonder where they _do_
+    go, by the bye?
+
+    I hand the first book to my mother. I take a last drowning look at
+    the page as I give it into her hand, and start off aloud at a racing
+    pace while I have got it fresh. I trip over a word. Mr. Murdstone
+    looks up. I trip over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden,
+    tumble over half a dozen words, and stop. I think my mother would show
+    me the book if she dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly:
+
+    "Oh, Davy, Davy!"
+
+    "Now, Clara," says Mr. Murdstone, "be firm with the boy. Don't say
+    'Oh, Davy, Davy!' That's childish. He knows his lesson, or he does not
+    know it."
+
+    "He does _not_ know it," Miss Murdstone interposed awfully.
+
+    "I am really afraid he does not," says my mother.
+
+    "Then you see, Clara," returns Miss Murdstone, "you should just give
+    him the book back, and make him know it."
+
+    "Yes, certainly," says my mother; "that's what I intended to do, my
+    dear Jane. Now, Davy, try once more, and don't be stupid."
+
+    I obey the first clause of the injunction by trying once more, but am
+    not so successful with the second, for I am very stupid. I tumble down
+    before I get to the old place, at a point where I was all right
+    before, and stop to think. But I can't think about the lesson. I think
+    of the number of yards of net in Miss Murdstone's cap, or of the price
+    of Mr. Murdstone's dressing-gown, or any such ridiculous problem that
+    I have no business with, and don't want to have anything at all to do
+    with. Mr. Murdstone makes a movement of impatience which I have been
+    expecting for a long time. Miss Murdstone does the same. My mother
+    glances submissively at them, shuts the book, and lays it by as an
+    arrear to be worked out when my other tasks are done.
+
+    There is a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a
+    rolling snowball. The bigger it gets the more stupid I get. The case
+    is so hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such a bog of
+    nonsense, that I give up all idea of getting out, and abandon myself
+    to my fate. The despairing way in which my mother and I look at each
+    other, as I blunder on, is truly melancholy. But the greatest effect
+    in these miserable lessons is when my mother (thinking nobody is
+    observing her) tries to give me the cue by the motion of her lips. At
+    that instant, Miss Murdstone, who has been lying in wait for nothing
+    else all along, says in a deep warning voice:
+
+    "Clara!"
+
+    My mother starts, colours, and smiles faintly. Mr. Murdstone comes out
+    of his chair, takes the book, throws it at me or boxes my ears with
+    it, and turns me out of the room by the shoulders.
+
+    It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if my unfortunate studies
+    generally took this course. I could have done very well if I had been
+    without the Murdstones; but the influence of the Murdstones upon me
+    was like the fascination of two snakes on a wretched young bird. Even
+    when I did get through the morning with tolerable credit, there was
+    not much gained but dinner; for Miss Murdstone never could endure to
+    see me untasked, and if I rashly made any show of being unemployed,
+    called her brother's attention to me by saying, "Clara, my dear,
+    there's nothing like work--give your boy an exercise."
+
+    One morning when I went into the parlour with my books, I found my
+    mother looking anxious, Miss Murdstone looking firm, and Mr. Murdstone
+    binding something round the bottom of a cane--a lithe and limber cane,
+    which he left off binding when I came in, and poised and switched in
+    the air.
+
+    "I tell you, Clara," said Mr. Murdstone, "I have been often flogged
+    myself."
+
+    "To be sure; of course," said Miss Murdstone.
+
+    "Certainly, my dear Jane," faltered my mother meekly. "But--but do you
+    think it did Edward good?"
+
+    "Do you think it did Edward harm, Clara?" asked Mr. Murdstone,
+    gravely.
+
+    "That's the point!" said his sister.
+
+    To this my mother returned "Certainly, my dear Jane," and said no
+    more.
+
+    I felt apprehensive that I was personally interested in this dialogue,
+    and sought Mr. Murdstone's eye as it lighted on mine.
+
+    "Now, David," he said--and I saw that cast again, as he said it--"you
+    must be far more careful to-day than usual." He gave the cane another
+    poise, and another switch; and having finished his preparation of it,
+    laid it down beside him, with an expressive look, and took up his
+    book.
+
+    This was a good freshener to my presence of mind, as a beginning. I
+    felt the words of my lesson slipping off, not one by one, or line by
+    line, but by the entire page. I tried to lay hold of them; but they
+    seemed, if I may so express it, to have put skates on, and to skim
+    away from me with a smoothness there was no checking.
+
+    We began badly, and went on worse. I had come in, with an idea of
+    distinguishing myself rather, conceiving that I was very well
+    prepared; but it turned out to be quite a mistake. Book after book was
+    added to the heap of failures, Miss Murdstone being firmly watchful of
+    us all the time. And when we came at last to the five thousand cheeses
+    (canes he made it that day, I remember), my mother burst out crying.
+
+    "Clara!" said Miss Murdstone, in her warning voice.
+
+    "I am not quite well, my dear Jane, I think," said my mother.
+
+    I saw him wink, solemnly, at his sister, as he rose and said, taking
+    up the cane.
+
+    "Why, Jane, we can hardly expect Clara to bear, with perfect firmness,
+    the worry and torment that David has occasioned her to-day. That would
+    be stoical. Clara is greatly strengthened and improved, but we can
+    hardly expect so much from her. David, you and I will go upstairs,
+    boy."
+
+They went upstairs. David was beaten unmercifully, notwithstanding his
+piteous cries, and in his desperation he bit the hand of Murdstone. For
+this it seemed as if Murdstone would have beaten him to death but for the
+interference of the women. "Then he was gone, and the door locked outside;
+and I was lying, fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, and raging in my
+puny way, upon the floor."
+
+Oh! Blind, self-satisfied "child-quellers," who so ignorantly boast of
+your ability to conquer children! Dickens described Murdstone for you.
+Think of that awful picture of the beautiful boy, created in the image of
+God, lying on the floor, "fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, and
+raging," with every element of sweetness and strength in his life turned
+to darkness and fury, and next time you propose to "conquer a child" who
+has been rendered partially insane, possibly by your treatment, and with
+whom you have unnecessarily forced a crisis, remember the Murdstone
+tragedy--a real tragedy, notwithstanding the fact that the boy's life was
+spared.
+
+Remember, too, that your very presence and manner may blight the young
+lives that you are supposed to develop.
+
+When Mr. Murdstone was sending David away to work he gave him his
+philosophy of coercion as his parting advice:
+
+    "David," said Mr. Murdstone, "to the young, this is a world for
+    action; not for moping and droning in."
+
+    --"As you do," added his sister.
+
+    "Jane Murdstone, leave it to me, if you please. I say, David, to the
+    young, this is a world for action, and not for moping and droning in.
+    It is especially so for a young boy of your disposition, which
+    requires a great deal of correcting; and to which no greater service
+    can be done than to force it to conform to the ways of the working
+    world, and to bend it and break it."
+
+    "For stubbornness won't do here," said his sister. "What it wants is
+    to be crushed. And crushed it must be. Shall be, too!"
+
+First he fills the boy as full as possible of self-depreciation, and then
+trains him to expect that his leading experiences in life will consist of
+being forced into submission, conforming to the plans of others, bending
+to authority, the breaking of his will, and the crushing of his interests
+and purposes. What a depressing outlook to give a child!
+
+John Willet, in Barnaby Rudge, is used as a means of convincing parents
+that they should respect the feelings and opinions of children. No two
+maxims relating to child training are more utterly wrong in principle,
+more devoid of the simplest elements of child sympathy and child
+reverence, than the time-honoured nonsense that "children should be seen
+and not heard," and "children should speak only when they are spoken to."
+
+Dickens exposes these maxims to deserved ridicule in John Willet's
+treatment of his son Joe. John kept the Maypole Inn. Joe was a fine,
+sturdy young man, but his father still ruled him with an unbending
+stubbornness that he believed to be a necessary exercise of authority.
+John was encouraged in his tyranny over his son by some of his old
+cronies, who were in the habit of sitting in the Maypole in the evenings
+and praising John for his firmness in training his son. One evening a
+stranger made a remark about a gentleman, to which Joe replied.
+
+    "Silence, sir!" cried his father.
+
+    "What a chap you are, Joe!" said Long Parkes.
+
+    "Such a inconsiderate lad!" murmured Tom Cobb.
+
+    "Putting himself forward and wringing the very nose off his own
+    father's face!" exclaimed the parish clerk metaphorically.
+
+    "What _have_ I done?" reasoned poor Joe.
+
+    "Silence, sir!" returned his father; "what do you mean by talking,
+    when you see people that are more than two or three times your age
+    sitting still and silent and not dreaming of saying a word?"
+
+    "Why that's the proper time for me to talk, isn't it?" said Joe
+    rebelliously.
+
+    "The proper time, sir!" retorted his father, "the proper time's no
+    time."
+
+    "Ah, to be sure!" muttered Parkes, nodding gravely to the other two
+    who nodded likewise, observing under their breaths that that was the
+    point.
+
+    "The proper time's no time, sir," repeated John Willet; "when I was
+    your age I never talked, I never wanted to talk. I listened and
+    improved myself, that's what I did."
+
+    "It's all very fine talking," muttered Joe, who had been fidgeting in
+    his chair with divers uneasy gestures. "But if you mean to tell me
+    that I'm never to open my lips----"
+
+    "Silence, sir!" roared his father. "No, you never are. When your
+    opinion's wanted, you give it. When you're spoke to you speak. When
+    your opinion's not wanted and you're not spoke to, don't give an
+    opinion and don't you speak. The world's undergone a nice alteration
+    since my time, certainly. My belief is that there an't any boys
+    left--that there isn't such a thing as a boy--that there's nothing now
+    between a male baby and a man--and that all the boys went out with his
+    blessed majesty King George the Second."
+
+On another occasion Joe had been hit with a whip by a stranger, and he
+expressed his opinion to Mr. Varden about the character of the man who hit
+him.
+
+    "Hold your tongue, sir," said his father.
+
+    "I won't, father. It's all along of you that he ventured to do what he
+    did. Seeing me treated like a child, and put down like a fool, _he_
+    plucks up a heart and has a fling at a fellow that he thinks--and may
+    well think, too--hasn't a grain of spirit. But he's mistaken, as I'll
+    show him, and as I'll show all of you before long."
+
+    "Does the boy know what he's saying of!" cried the astonished John
+    Willet.
+
+    "Father," returned Joe, "I know what I say and mean, well--better than
+    you do when you hear me. I can bear with you, but I can not bear the
+    contempt that your treating me in the way you do brings upon me from
+    others every day. Look at other young men of my age. Have they no
+    liberty, no will, no right to speak? Are they obliged to sit
+    mumchance, and to be ordered about till they are the laughingstock of
+    young and old? I am a byword all over Chigwell, and I say--and it's
+    fairer my saying so now, than waiting till you are dead, and I have
+    got your money--I say, that before long I shall be driven to break
+    such bounds, and that when I do, it won't be me that you'll have to
+    blame, but your own self, and no other."
+
+John never trusted his son, never entered into his plans, and treated even
+the most sacred things of Joe's life with contempt.
+
+Joe was about to start to London on business for his father, and he was to
+ride a mare that was so slow that a young man could not enjoy the prospect
+of riding her.
+
+    "Don't you ride hard," said his father.
+
+    "I should be puzzled to do that, I think, father," Joe replied,
+    casting a disconsolate look at the animal.
+
+    "None of your impudence, sir, if you please," retorted old John. "What
+    would you ride, sir? A wild ass or zebra would be too tame for you,
+    wouldn't he, eh, sir? You'd like to ride a roaring lion, wouldn't you,
+    sir, eh, sir? Hold your tongue, sir." When Mr. Willet, in his
+    differences with his son, had exhausted all the questions that
+    occurred to him, and Joe had said nothing at all in answer, he
+    generally wound up by bidding him hold his tongue.
+
+    "And what does the boy mean," added Mr. Willet, after he had stared at
+    him for a little time, in a species of stupefaction, "by cocking his
+    hat, to such an extent! Are you going to kill the wintner, sir?"
+
+    "No," said Joe tartly; "I'm not. Now your mind's at ease, father."
+
+    "With a military air, too!" said Mr. Willet, surveying him from top to
+    toe; "with a swaggering, fire-eating, biling-water drinking sort of
+    way with him! And what do you mean by pulling up the crocuses and
+    snowdrops, eh, sir?"
+
+    "It's only a little nosegay," said Joe, reddening. "There's no harm in
+    that, I hope?"
+
+    "You're a boy of business, you are, sir!" said Mr. Willet
+    disdainfully, "to go supposing that wintners care for nosegays."
+
+    "I don't suppose anything of the kind," returned Joe. "Let them keep
+    their red noses for bottles and tankards. These are going to Mr.
+    Varden's house."
+
+    "And do you suppose _he_ minds such things as crocuses?" demanded
+    John.
+
+    "I don't know, and to say the truth, I don't care," said Joe. "Come,
+    father, give me the money, and in the name of patience let me go."
+
+    "There it is, sir," replied John; "and take care of it; and mind you
+    don't make too much haste back, but give the mare a long rest. Do you
+    mind?"
+
+    "Ay, I mind," returned Joe. "She'll need it, Heaven knows."
+
+    "And don't you score up too much at the Black Lion," said John. "Mind
+    that too."
+
+    "Then why don't you let me have some money of my own?" retorted Joe
+    sorrowfully; "why don't you, father? What do you send me into London
+    for, giving me only the right to call for my dinner at the Black Lion,
+    which you're to pay for next time you go, as if I was not to be
+    trusted with a few shillings? Why do you use me like this? It's not
+    right of you. You can't expect me to be quiet under it."
+
+Dickens in this interview condemns several mistakes often made by parents
+in restraining instead of sympathizing with their children in the natural
+unfolding of their young manhood or womanhood. It was wrong for John
+Willet to ridicule Joe's desire to ride a smart horse. It was wrong to bid
+him "hold his tongue." It was wrong to criticise his method of dressing to
+look his very best. It was wrong to sneer at him because his consciousness
+of unfolding manhood and his hope of Dolly Varden's love made him carry
+himself with a "military air." What a difference it would make in the
+characters of young men if they all carried themselves with a military
+air, and walked with a consciousness of power and hope!
+
+It was especially wrong to make fun of the nosegay Joe had pulled for
+Dolly Varden. What a pity it is that so few fathers or mothers can truly
+sympathize with their boys and girls during the period of courtship! Why
+should the most sacred feelings that ever stir the soul be made the
+subject of jest and levity by those whose hearts should most truly beat in
+unison with the young hearts that are aflame? If there is a time in the
+life of young men or women when father or mother may enter the hearts of
+their children as benedictions and form a blessed unity that can never be
+broken or undone it is surely when young hearts are hallowed by love. Yet
+there are few parents to whom their children can speak freely about the
+mysteries and the deep experiences of love that come into their lives.
+
+It was wrong to treat Joe as if he was unworthy to be trusted with money.
+
+Every wrong revealed by Dickens in this interview had its root in John's
+feeling that it was his duty to keep Joe down, to prevent the outflow of
+his inner life.
+
+    Old John having long encroached a good standard inch, full measure, on
+    the liberty of Joe, and having snipped off a Flemish ell in the matter
+    of the parole, grew so despotic and so great, that his thirst for
+    conquest knew no bounds. The more young Joe submitted, the more
+    absolute old John became. The ell soon faded into nothing. Yards,
+    furlongs, miles arose; and on went old John in the pleasantest manner
+    possible, trimming off an exuberance in this place, shearing away some
+    liberty of speech or action in that, and conducting himself in this
+    small way with as much high mightiness and majesty as the most
+    glorious tyrant that ever had his statue reared in the public ways,
+    of ancient or of modern times.
+
+    As great men are urged on to the abuse of power (when they need
+    urging, which is not often) by their flatterers and dependents, so old
+    John was impelled to these exercises of authority by the applause and
+    admiration of his Maypole cronies, who, in the intervals of their
+    nightly pipes and pots, would shake their heads and say that Mr.
+    Willet was a father of the good old English sort; that there were no
+    newfangled notions or modern ways in him; that he put them in mind of
+    what their fathers were when they were boys; that there was no mistake
+    about him; that it would be well for the country if there were more
+    like him, and more was the pity that there were not; with many other
+    original remarks of that nature. Then they would condescendingly give
+    Joe to understand that it was all for his good, and he would be
+    thankful for it one day; and in particular, Mr. Cobb would acquaint
+    him, that when he was his age, his father thought no more of giving
+    him a parental kick, or a box on the ears, or a cuff on the head, or
+    some little admonition of that sort, than he did of any other ordinary
+    duty of life; and he would further remark, with looks of great
+    significance, that but for this judicious bringing up, he might have
+    never been the man he was at that present speaking; which was probable
+    enough, as he was, beyond all question, the dullest dog of the party.
+    In short, between old John and old John's friends, there never was an
+    unfortunate young fellow so bullied, badgered, worried, fretted, and
+    browbeaten; so constantly beset, or made so tired of his life, as poor
+    Joe Willet.
+
+The end came at last. One evening Mr. Cobb was more aggravating than
+usual, and Joe's patience could hold out no longer. He knocked the
+offending Cobb into a corner among the spittoons, and ran away from the
+unbearable tyranny of home.
+
+What a moral catastrophe occurs when a young man leaves home with a
+feeling of relief! Dickens develops this thought in the case of Tom
+Gradgrind. With the best of intentions, with a single desire of training
+his son in the best possible way, Mr. Gradgrind had repressed his natural
+tendencies and robbed him of the joys of childhood and youth to such an
+extent that when he was about to go to live with Mr. Bounderby, and his
+sister, Louisa, asked him "if he was pleased with his prospect?" he
+replied, "Well, it will be getting away from home." The boy is never to
+blame for such a catastrophe.
+
+Dickens attacked another phase of the flogging mania in Barnaby Rudge, in
+a brief but suggestive scene. Barnaby and his mother were travelling, and
+were resting at the gate of a gentleman's grounds, when the proprietor
+himself came along and demanded to know who they were.
+
+    "Vagrants," said the gentleman, "vagrants and vagabonds. Thee wish to
+    be made acquainted with the cage, dost thee--the cage, the stocks, and
+    the whipping post? Where dost come from?"
+
+Learning that Barnaby was weak-minded, he asked how long he had been
+idiotic.
+
+    "From his birth," said the widow.
+
+    "I don't believe it," cried the gentleman, "not a bit of it. It's an
+    excuse not to work. There's nothing like flogging to cure that
+    disorder. I'd make a difference in him in ten minutes, I'll be bound."
+
+    "Heaven has made none in more than twice ten years, sir," said the
+    widow mildly.
+
+    "Then why don't you shut him up? We pay enough for county
+    institutions, damn 'em. But thou'd rather drag him about to excite
+    charity--of course. Ay, I know thee."
+
+    Now, this gentleman had various endearing appellations among his
+    intimate friends. By some he was called "a country gentleman of the
+    true school," by some "a fine old country gentleman," by some "a
+    sporting gentleman," by some "a thoroughbred Englishman," by some "a
+    genuine John Bull"; but they all agreed in one respect, and that was,
+    that it was a pity that there were not more like him, and that because
+    there were not, the country was going to rack and ruin every day.
+
+Dickens always enjoyed ridiculing the people who long for the good old
+times and approve of the good old customs. There are some who even yet
+deplore the fact that children are not repressed and coerced as they used
+to be, and who prophesy untold evils unless the good old customs are
+re-established. They long for the recurrence of the days when "lickin' and
+larnin' went hand in hand," when "Wallop the boy, develop the man" was the
+popular motto, expressive of the general faith. Dickens pictured them in
+John Willet and this "country gentleman of the true school." He also
+criticised them severely in the Chimes.
+
+The depressing influence of another form of coercion is shown in Our
+Mutual Friend by the effect of Mr. Podsnap's character on his daughter
+Georgiana. Mr. Podsnap was one of the absolutely positive people who know
+everything about everything, who never allow other people to express
+opinions without contradicting them, and who take every possible
+opportunity of expressing their own opinions in a loud, emphatic, dogmatic
+manner. Of course, no woman should hold opinions, according to Mr.
+Podsnap's way of thinking, although Mrs. Podsnap, in her own way, did
+credit to her more Podsnappery master. It was therefore not to be dreamt
+of for a moment that a "young person" like their daughter Georgiana could
+have any views of her own regarding life or any of its conditions, past,
+present, or future. She was a "young person" to be protected, and kept in
+the background, and guarded from evil, and sheltered, so that she should
+not even hear of anything improper, and shielded from temptation to do
+wrong, or to do anything, indeed, right or wrong. Her father was rich; why
+should she wish to do anything but listen to him, and go away when he told
+her to do so, if he wished to speak of subjects that he deemed it unwise
+to let a "young person" hear discussed?
+
+    There was a Miss Podsnap. And this young rocking-horse was being
+    trained in her mother's art of prancing in a stately manner without
+    ever getting on. But the high parental action was not yet imparted to
+    her, and in truth she was but an undersized damsel, with high
+    shoulders, low spirits, chilled elbows, and a rasped surface of nose,
+    who seemed to take occasional frosty peeps out of childhood into
+    womanhood, and to shrink back again, overcome by her mother's
+    headdress and her father from head to foot--crushed by the mere dead
+    weight of Podsnappery.
+
+Georgiana explained the reason of her shyness to Mrs. Lammle, for, strange
+as it may seem, considering her heredity, Georgiana was shy. Podsnappery
+as environment is always much stronger than Podsnappery as heredity.
+
+    "What I mean is," pursued Georgiana, "that ma being so endowed with
+    awfulness, and pa being so endowed with awfulness, and there being so
+    much awfulness everywhere--I mean, at least, everywhere where I
+    am--perhaps it makes me who am so deficient in awfulness, and
+    frightened at it--I say it very badly--I don't know whether you can
+    understand what I mean?"
+
+Thoughtful people need no explanation regarding the influence of
+Podsnappery on children.
+
+The time will come when in normal schools character analysis will be the
+supreme qualification of those who are to decide who may and who may not
+teach. When that time comes, as come it must, no Podsnaps will be allowed
+to teach.
+
+It was no wonder that--
+
+    Whenever Georgiana could escape from the thraldom of Podsnappery;
+    could throw off the bedclothes of the custard-coloured phaeton, and
+    get up; could shrink out of the range of her mother's rocking, and (so
+    to speak) rescue her poor little frosty toes from being rocked over;
+    she repaired to her friend, Mrs. Alfred Lammle.
+
+Dickens fired another thunderbolt, in Our Mutual Friend, to set the world
+thinking about its method of teaching children, by his brief description
+of Pleasant Riderhood, the daughter of Rogue Riderhood.
+
+    Show her a christening, and she saw a little heathen personage having
+    a quite superfluous name bestowed upon it, inasmuch as it would be
+    commonly addressed by some abusive epithet; which little personage was
+    not in the least wanted by anybody, and would be shoved and banged out
+    of everybody's way, until it should grow big enough to shove and bang.
+    Show her a live father, and she saw but a duplicate of her own father,
+    who from her infancy had been taken with fits and starts of
+    discharging his duty to her, which duty was always incorporated in the
+    form of a fist or a leather strap, and being discharged hurt her.
+
+In Little Dorrit Dickens gives one of his most striking verbal
+descriptions of the effects of coercion in Arthur Clennam's account of his
+own early training. He said to Mr. Meagles, when the kind old gentleman
+spoke of working with a will:
+
+    "I have no will. That is to say," he coloured a little, "next to none
+    that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent;
+    heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which
+    was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I
+    was of age, and exiled there until my father's death there, a year
+    ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected
+    from me in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were
+    extinguished before I could sound the words."
+
+    "Light 'em up again!" said Mr. Meagles.
+
+    "Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr. Meagles, of a hard father and
+    mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and
+    priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and
+    priced had no existence. Strict people, as the phrase is, professors
+    of a stern religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of
+    tastes and sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part
+    of a bargain for the security of their possessions. Austere faces,
+    inexorable discipline, penance in this world and terror in the
+    next--nothing graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed
+    heart everywhere--this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word
+    as to apply it to such a beginning of life."
+
+When he returned to the presence of his mother, after an absence of many
+years in China, "the old influence of her presence, and her stern, strong
+voice, so gathered about her son that he felt conscious of a renewal of
+the timid chill and reserve of his childhood."
+
+It was a terrible indictment of all coercive, child-quelling,
+will-breaking training that Arthur made when he said to his stern mother:
+
+    "I can not say that I have been able to conform myself, in heart and
+    spirit, to your rules; I can not say that I believe my forty years
+    have been profitable or pleasant to myself, or any one; but I have
+    habitually submitted, and I only ask you to remember it."
+
+Speaking of her own training, Mrs. Clennam said: "Mine were days of
+wholesome repression, punishment, and fear," and she frankly avowed her
+deliberate purpose of "bringing Arthur up in fear and trembling."
+
+Those were the dreadful ideals that Dickens aimed to destroy. Repression,
+punishment, fear, and trembling are no longer the dominant ideals of the
+Christian world regarding child training. They are rapidly giving way to
+the new and true gospel of stimulation, happiness, freedom, and creative
+self-activity.
+
+Great Expectations was a valuable contribution to the literature of child
+training. Mrs. Gargery was a type of repressive, coercive, unsympathetic
+women, who regard children as necessarily nuisances, and who are
+continually thankful for the fact that by the free use of "the tickler"
+they may be subdued and kept in a state of bearable subjection.
+
+Mrs. Gargery had no children of her own, but she had a little brother,
+Pip, whom she "brought up by hand." Her husband, Joe Gargery, was an
+honest, affectionate, sympathetic man, who pitied poor Pip and tried to
+comfort him when his wife was not present. The dear old fellow said to Pip
+one evening, as they sat by the fire and he beat time to his kindly
+thoughts with the poker:
+
+    "Your sister is given to government."
+
+    "Given to government, Joe?" I was startled, for I had some shadowy
+    idea (and I am afraid I must add hope) that Joe had divorced her in
+    favour of the lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.
+
+    "Given to government," said Joe. "Which I meantersay the government of
+    you and myself."
+
+    "Oh!"
+
+    "And she ain't over partial to having scholars on the premises," Joe
+    continued, "and in particular would not be over partial to my being a
+    scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don't you
+    see?"
+
+    I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as "Why----"
+    when Joe stopped me.
+
+    "Stay a bit. I know what you're a-going to say, Pip? stay a bit! I
+    don't deny that your sister comes the mo-gul over us, now and again. I
+    don't deny that she do throw us back-falls, and that she do drop down
+    upon us heavy. At such times as when your sister is on the ram-page,
+    Pip," Joe sunk his voice to a whisper and glanced at the door,
+    "candour compels fur to admit that she is a buster....
+
+    "I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I wish there warn't no
+    tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all on myself; but
+    this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you'll
+    overlook shortcomings."
+
+Poor Joe! His father had been a blacksmith, but he took to drink, and, as
+Joe said, "Hammered at me with a wigour only to be equalled by the wigour
+with which he didn't hammer at his anwil."
+
+Dickens gives an illustration of Mrs. Gargery's training which reveals not
+only her coercive and unsympathetic tendencies, but points to other errors
+in training children that are yet too common. Pip was warming himself
+before going to bed one night, when a cannon sounded from the Hulks, or
+prison ships, near the Gargery home.
+
+    "Ah!" said Joe; "there's another conwict off."
+
+    "What does that mean?" said I.
+
+    Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said snappishly:
+    "Escaped. Escaped." Administering the definition like medicine.
+
+    "There was a conwict off last night," said Joe, aloud, "after sunset
+    gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it appears they're firing
+    warning of another."
+
+    "Who's firing?" said I.
+
+    "Drat that boy," interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work;
+    "what a questioner he is! Ask no questions and you'll be told no
+    lies."
+
+    It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should
+    be told lies by her, even if I did ask questions. But she never was
+    polite, unless there was company.
+
+    "Mrs. Joe," said I, as a last resort, "I should like to know--if you
+    wouldn't much mind--where the firing comes from?"
+
+    "Lord bless the boy!" exclaimed my sister, as if she didn't quite mean
+    that, but rather the contrary. "From the hulks!"
+
+    "And please, what's hulks?" said I.
+
+    "That's the way with this boy!" exclaimed my sister, pointing me out
+    with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. "Answer him
+    one question, and he'll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison
+    ships, right 'cross th' country."
+
+    "I wonder who's put into prison ships, and why they're put there?"
+    said I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.
+
+    It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. "I tell you what,
+    young fellow," said she, "I didn't bring you up by hand to badger
+    people's lives out. It would be blame to me, and not praise, if I had.
+    People are put in the hulks because they murder, and because they rob,
+    and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking
+    questions. Now, you get along to bed!"
+
+    I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went
+    upstairs in the dark, with my head tingling--from Mrs. Joe's thimble
+    having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words--I
+    felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were
+    handy for me. I was clearly on my way there.
+
+    Pip said later: "I suppose myself to be better acquainted than any
+    living authority with the ridgy effect of a wedding ring passing
+    unsympathetically over the human countenance."
+
+    My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in
+    which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there
+    is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may
+    be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the
+    child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands
+    as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.
+    Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict
+    with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my
+    sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I
+    had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by the
+    hand gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my
+    punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential
+    performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much
+    with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the
+    fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive.
+
+Mrs. Gargery's training was bad because she refused to answer the boy's
+questions, or abused him for asking them; and when she did condescend to
+answer she answered in a snappy, unsympathetic way. The cruelty of first
+scolding a child, then trying to terrify him from asking questions by
+telling him that "robbers, murderers, and all kinds of criminals began
+their downward career by asking questions," then rapping him on the head,
+and finally sending him to bed without a light, is admirably described.
+All these practices are terribly unjust to children. Parents and teachers,
+in the picture of Mrs. Gargery, are warned against scolding, against
+threatening, against falsehood and misrepresentation in order to reduce
+children to submission, against corporal punishment with "the tickler,"
+against the more dastardly and more exasperating corporal punishment by
+snapping and rapping the head, and against sending children to bed in the
+dark. He was especially careful to make the retiring hour in his own home
+a period of joyousness and freedom from all fear. He made the crime of
+sending children to bed without light and without sympathy one of the
+practices of that model of bad training--Mrs. Pipchin; and one of the most
+dreaded of little Oliver Twist's experiences was to be sent to sleep among
+the coffins in the dark at Sowerberry's.
+
+The hour of retiring is the special time when children most need the
+affectionate spirit of motherhood, and wise mothers try to use this sacred
+hour to form their closest unity with the hearts of the little ones, and
+to sow in their young lives the apperceptive seeds of sweetness, and joy,
+and faith.
+
+The wrong of making children sensitive, and then blaming them for being
+sensitive, is admirably shown in Pip's training.
+
+The revelation of the child's consciousness of the sense of injustice in
+the treatment of those who train it is worthy of most careful study and
+thought by parents and teachers. There can be no doubt that infants have a
+clear sense of wrongs inflicted on them, even before they can speak.
+
+The comparison of the child's rocking-horse with the big-boned Irish
+hunter reveals one of the most essential lessons for adulthood: that what
+may appear trifling to an adult may mean much to a child. Kind but
+thoughtless adulthood is often most grievously unjust to childhood,
+because it fails to consider how things appear to the child. However kind
+and good such adults are, they are utterly unsympathetic with the child.
+Many people are very considerate for childhood who are very unsympathetic
+with children. Consideration can never take the place of sympathy. An
+ounce of true sympathy is worth a ton of consideration to a child.
+Adulthood has measured a child's corn in the bushel of adulthood. Mr.
+Gradgrind, for instance, was a good man, and he meant to be kind and
+helpful to his children. He was most considerate for them, and spared no
+money to promote their welfare and happiness. But he did it in accordance
+with the tastes and opinions of adulthood, and totally ignored the fact
+that children have opinions and tastes, and he ruined the children whom he
+most loved. "The rocking-horse and the big-boned Irish hunter" suggest
+rich mines of child psychology.
+
+The pernicious habit of so many adults who fill the imaginations of
+children with bogies and terrors of an abnormal kind in order to keep them
+in the path of rectitude by falsehood, is exposed in Mrs. Gargery's method
+of stopping Pip's questions by telling him that asking questions was the
+first step in a career of crime. This habit leads parents insensibly into
+a most dishonest attitude toward their children. It leads, too, in due
+time, to a lack of reverence for adulthood. Falseness is certain to lead
+to the disrespect it deserves. Parents who make untruthfulness a basis
+for terror should not be surprised at the irreverence or the scepticism of
+their children.
+
+In The Schoolboy's Story, old Cheeseman was brought to school by a woman
+who was always taking snuff and shaking him.
+
+There is a great deal of pedagogical thought in Dombey and Son. At the
+period of its issue (1846-48) Dickens appears to have devoted more
+attention to the study of wrong methods of teaching than at any other
+time, so in Dr. Blimber, Cornelia Blimber, and Mr. Feeder he gave his best
+illustrations of what in his opinion should be condemned in the popular
+methods of teaching. But while this was evidently his chief educational
+purpose in writing the book, he gave a good deal of attention to wrong
+methods of training, especially to the most awful doctrine of the
+ages--that children must be coerced, and repressed, and checked, and
+subdued. He evidently accepted as his supreme duty the responsibility for
+securing a free childhood for children. Mrs. Pipchin is an admirable
+delineation of the worst features of what was regarded as respectable
+child training. Her training is treated at length in Chapter XI. It is
+sufficient here to deal with her coerciveness, and recall the epithet
+"child-queller" which Dickens applied to her. No more expressive term was
+ever used to describe the wickedness of the coercionists. It means more
+than most volumes. It has new meaning every day as our reverence for the
+divinity in the child grows stronger, and the absolute need of the
+development of his selfhood by his own self-activity becomes clearer. It
+reveals a perfect charnel house full of dwarfed souls and blighted
+selfhood, and weak characters that should have been strong, and false
+characters that should have been true, and wailings that should have been
+music, and tears that should have been laughter, and darkness that should
+have been light, and wickedness that should have been a blessing. The one
+awful word "child-queller" means all of evil that can result from daring
+to stand between the child and God in our self-satisfied ignorance to
+check the free, natural output of its selfhood which God meant to be
+wrought out with increasing power throughout its life. Our work is to
+change the direction of the outflowing selfhood when it is wrong, to
+direct it to new and better interest centres, but never to stop it or turn
+it back upon itself.
+
+There are thousands of child-quellers teaching still. Would that they
+could see truly the dwarfed souls they have blighted, and the ghosts of
+the selfhood they have sacrificed on the altar of what they call
+discipline!
+
+The term child-queller was the creation of genius.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin disdained the idea of reasoning with children. "Hoity-toity!"
+exclaimed Mrs. Pipchin, shaking out her black bombazine skirts, and
+plucking up all the ogress within her. "If she don't like it, Mr. Dombey,
+she must be taught to lump it." She would "shake her head and frown down a
+legion of children," and "the wild ones went home tame enough after
+sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof." She tamed them
+by robbing them of their power, as Froebel's boy tamed flies by tearing
+off their wings and legs, and then saying, "See how tame they are."
+
+Teachers used to boast about their ability to tame children, when their
+ability really meant the power to destroy the tendency to put forth
+effort, to substitute negativeness for positiveness.
+
+Susan Nipper, in her usual graphic style, expressed her views regarding
+the coercive practices of Mrs. Pipchin and the Blimbers.
+
+    "Goodness knows," exclaimed Miss Nipper, "there's a-many we could
+    spare instead, if numbers is a object; Mrs. Pipchin as a overseer
+    would come cheap at her weight in gold, and if a knowledge of black
+    slavery should be required, them Blimbers is the very people for the
+    sitiwation."
+
+One of Mrs. Pipchin's favourite methods of coercing, or taming, or
+child-quelling was to send children to bed.
+
+    "The best thing you can do is to take off your things and go to bed
+    this minute." This was the sagacious woman's remedy for all
+    complaints, particularly lowness of spirits and inability to sleep;
+    for which offence many young victims in the days of the Brighton
+    Castle had been committed to bed at ten o'clock in the morning.
+
+Another assault on coercion was made in Dombey and Son in the brief
+description of the Grinders' school.
+
+    Biler's life had been rendered weary by the costume of the Charitable
+    Grinders. The youth of the streets could not endure it. No young
+    vagabond could be brought to bear its contemplation for a moment
+    without throwing himself upon the unoffending wearer and doing him a
+    mischief. His social existence had been more like that of an early
+    Christian than an innocent child of the nineteenth century. He had
+    been stoned in the streets. He had been overthrown into gutters;
+    bespattered with mud; violently flattened against posts. Entire
+    strangers to his person had lifted his yellow cap off his head and
+    cast it to the winds. His legs had not only undergone verbal criticism
+    and revilings, but had been handled and pinched. That very morning he
+    had received a perfectly unsolicited black eye on his way to the
+    Grinders' establishment, and had been punished for it by the master: a
+    superannuated old Grinder of savage disposition, who had been
+    appointed schoolmaster because he didn't know anything and wasn't fit
+    for anything, and for whose cruel cane all chubby little boys had a
+    perfect fascination.
+
+Poor Biler went wrong, and when he was taken to task for it by Mr. Carker
+he gave his theory to account for the fact that he had not done better at
+school.
+
+    "You're a nice young gentleman!" said Mr. Carker, shaking his head at
+    him. "There's hemp-seed sown for _you_, my fine fellow!"
+
+    "I'm sure, sir," returned the wretched Biler, blubbering again, and
+    again having recourse to his coat cuff: "I shouldn't care, sometimes,
+    if it was growed too. My misfortunes all began in wagging, sir, but
+    what could I do, exceptin' wag?"
+
+    "Excepting what?" said Mr. Carker.
+
+    "Wag, sir. Wagging from school."
+
+    "Do you mean pretending to go there, and not going?" said Mr. Carker.
+
+    "Yes, sir, that's wagging, sir," returned the quondam Grinder, much
+    affected. "I was chivied through the streets, sir, when I went there,
+    and pounded when I got there. So I wagged and hid myself, and that
+    began it."
+
+When Mr. Dombey, by whose act of superior grace Biler had been sent to the
+Charitable Grinders' school, upbraided the boy's father for his failure to
+turn out well,
+
+    the simple father said that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder,
+    huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are,
+    by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness
+    for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan.
+
+Sagacious teachers and parents often blame and punish children for being
+what they made them.
+
+Still another illustration of the cruel coercion practised on children is
+found in Dombey and Son, in the training of Alice Marwood.
+
+    "There was a child called Alice Marwood," said the daughter, with a
+    laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself,
+    "born among poverty and neglect, and nursed in it. Nobody taught her,
+    nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her."
+
+    "Nobody!" echoed the mother, pointing to herself, and striking her
+    breast.
+
+    "The only care she knew," returned the daughter, "was to be beaten,
+    and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better
+    without that."
+
+The picture of George Silverman's early life is one of the most touching
+of all the appeals of Dickens on behalf of childhood. He lived in a
+cellar, and when he was removed at length he knew only the sensations of
+"cold, hunger, thirst, and the pain of being beaten." The poor child used
+to speculate on his mother's feet having a good or ill temper as she
+descended the stairs to their cellar home, and he watched her knees, her
+waist, her face, as they came into view, to learn whether he was likely to
+be abused or not. Many mothers realized their own cruelty by reading such
+descriptions of cruelty toward little children.
+
+The whole system of training of Mr. Gradgrind and his teacher, Mr.
+M'Choakumchild (the latter name contains volumes of coercion) was a
+scientific system of coerciveness and restraint, planned and carried out
+by a good man misguided by false ideas about child training and character
+building. Coercion was only one of several bad elements in his system, but
+he was terribly coercive. His children were lavishly supplied with almost
+everything they did not care for, and robbed of everything they should
+naturally be interested in.
+
+The results were, as might be expected, disastrous. His son Tom became a
+monster of selfishness, sensuality, and criminality. Dickens uses the name
+"whelp" to describe him, and, in a satirical manner, accounts for his
+meanness and weaknesses in the following summary:
+
+    It was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been brought up
+    under one continuous system of unnatural restraint should be a
+    hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom. It was very strange
+    that a young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for
+    five consecutive minutes should be incapable at last of governing
+    himself; but so it was with Tom. It was altogether unaccountable that
+    a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle
+    should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling
+    sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.
+
+When Mr. Gradgrind became convinced that he had been altogether wrong in
+his educational ideals and was endeavouring to explain the matter to Mr.
+Bounderby, that gentleman gave expression to the views of many people of
+his time. Fortunately there are few Bounderbys now, but there are some
+even yet.
+
+    "Well, well!" returned Mr. Gradgrind, with a patient, even a
+    submissive air. And he sat for a little while pondering. "Bounderby, I
+    see reason to doubt whether we have ever quite understood Louisa."
+
+    "What do you mean by we?"
+
+    "Let me say, I, then," he returned, in answer to the coarsely blurted
+    question; "I doubt whether I have understood Louisa. I doubt whether I
+    have been quite right in the manner of her education."
+
+    "There you hit it," returned Bounderby. "There I agree with you. You
+    have found it out at last, have you? Education! I'll tell you what
+    education is--to be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon
+    the shortest allowance of everything except blows. That's what _I_
+    call education."
+
+In his last book--Edwin Drood--Dickens pictured Mr. Honeythunder as a type
+of coercive philanthropists, whom he regarded as intolerable as well as
+intolerant nuisances--people who would use force to compel everybody to
+think and act as they are told to think and act by the Honeythunders.
+
+In speaking of Mr. Honeythunder and his class of philanthropists, Rev.
+Canon Crisparkle said:
+
+    It is a most extraordinary thing that these philanthropists are so
+    given to seizing their fellow-creatures by the scruff of the neck, and
+    (as one may say) bumping them into the paths of peace.
+
+Neville Landless described his training to Canon Crisparkle in telling
+words:
+
+    "And to finish with, sir: I have been brought up among abject and
+    servile dependents of an inferior race, and I may easily have
+    contracted some affinity with them. Sometimes I don't know but that it
+    may be a drop of what is tigerish in their blood."
+
+There is a profound philosophy of one phase of the evils of coercion in
+this statement. Coercion does not always destroy power by blighting it.
+Often the power that was intended to bless turns to poison when it is
+repressed, and makes men hypocritical and tigerish. It is true, too, that
+a child who is brought up with the idea of dominating a servile class, or
+even servile individuals, can never have a true conception of his own
+freedom.
+
+Dickens was not satisfied with his numerous and sustained attacks on the
+more violent forms of coercion and repression. He began in Edwin Drood to
+draw a picture of Mrs. Crisparkle, the mother of the Canon, to show that
+the placid firmness of her strong will had a baleful influence on
+character. Her character was not completed, but the outlines given are
+most suggestive. What could surpass the absolute indifference she showed
+to the slightest consideration for the individuality or opinions of other
+people when she spoke of her wards, who were grown up, it should be
+remembered, to young manhood and womanhood.
+
+    "I have spoken with my two wards, Neville and Helena Landless, on the
+    subject of their defective education, and they give in to the plan
+    proposed; as I should have taken good care they did, whether they
+    liked it or not."
+
+How exquisitely he reveals the character of the eminently dogmatic, though
+quiet, Christian lady by her remarking so definitely to her son, the
+Canon:
+
+    "I have no objection to discuss it, Sept. I trust, my dear, I am
+    always open to discussion." There was a vibration in the old lady's
+    cap, as though she internally added, "And I should like to see the
+    discussion that would change _my_ mind!"
+
+Dickens meant to show that whether the coercion partook of the nature of
+that exercised by Squeers or Mrs. Crisparkle, it resulted in forcing those
+compelled to submit to it to "give in," and that all children who are
+regularly made to "give in" acquire the habit of "giving in," and
+eventually become "give-iners" and hypocrites until circumstances make
+them rebels and anarchists. So he condemned every form of coercion, and
+taught the doctrine of true freedom for the child as a necessary element
+in his best development. When this doctrine is fully understood men will
+soon become truly free. All true education has been a movement toward
+freedom. All true national advancement has been toward more perfect
+freedom. The ideal of national, constitutional liberty has changed in
+harmony with the educational revelations of the broadening conception of
+freedom; and more progressive conceptions of national liberty have
+rendered it necessary for the educators to reveal truer, freer methods of
+training children in harmony with the higher national organization.
+
+When the ideal of national organization was the divine right of kings to
+rule their subjects by absolute authority, the system of national
+organization required passive obedience on the part of the subject. To
+secure this coercive discipline the prompt submission of the child to the
+immediate authority over him was the ideal process. Passive submission was
+required as the full duty of the citizen, and passive obedience was the
+desired product of the school. But the new ideal of government is rule by
+the people through their representatives, and national citizenship means
+the intelligent co-operation of independent individuals; so the true
+educational ideal is a free selfhood, and a free selfhood in maturity
+demands a free selfhood in childhood. To secure this it is essential that
+schools shall become "free republics of childhood."
+
+"But a free selfhood in childhood must lead to anarchy," say those who
+cling to the coercive ideal. Anarchy never springs from freedom. Anarchy
+is the foul son of coercion. True freedom does not include liberty to do
+wrong. The "perfect law of liberty" is the only basis for perfect
+happiness, because it is not freedom beyond law, but freedom within law,
+freedom because of law. Law should never be coercive to the child. When it
+becomes so the law is wrong and it makes the child wrong, and produces the
+apperceptive centres of anarchy in feeling and thought out of the very
+elements that should have produced joyous co-operation. Law should give
+the child consciousness of power, and not of restraint. Undirected
+selfhood, uncontrolled selfhood, is not true freedom. The exercise of
+power without limitations leads to confusion, indecision, and anarchy in
+everything except its spirit of rebellion. The guidance and control of
+adulthood and the limitations of law are necessary to the accomplishment
+of the best results in the immediate product of effort put forth by the
+child, in the effect on his character, and in the development of a true
+consciousness of freedom in his life.
+
+The terrible blunder of the past in child training has been to make law
+coercive instead of directive. Law has been prohibitive, not stimulative.
+Law has defined barriers to prevent effort, instead of outlining the
+direction effort should take. The limitations of law have been used to
+define the course the child should not take; they should have defined the
+course he ought to take, and within the range of which course he should
+use his selfhood in the freest possible way. Law has said "thou shalt not"
+when it should have said "thou shalt"; it has said "don't" when it should
+have said "do"; it has said "quit" when it should have said "go on"; it
+has said "be still" when it should have said "work"; it has stood in the
+way to check when it should have moved on to lead to victory and progress
+along the most direct lines; it has given a consciousness of weakness
+instead of a consciousness of power; it has developed moroseness instead
+of joyousness, self-depreciation instead of self-reverence; and children
+for these reasons have been led to dislike law, and the apperceptive
+centres of anarchy have been laid by a coercive instead of a stimulative
+use of law.
+
+By false ideals of coercive law adulthood has been made repressive instead
+of suggestive, depressive instead of helpful, dogmatic instead of
+reasonable, tyrannical instead of free, "child-quellers" instead of
+sympathetic friends of childhood, executors of penalties instead of wise
+guides, agents to keep children under instead of helping them up; and so
+children have learned to dislike school, and work, and teachers, and often
+home and parents. And the children have not been to blame for their
+dislike of law and their distrust of adulthood.
+
+And the children themselves by coercion have been made don'ters instead of
+doers, quitters instead of workers, give-iners instead of persevering
+winners, yielders to opposition instead of achievers of victory, negative
+instead of positive, apathetic instead of energetic, passive instead of
+active, imitative instead of original, followers instead of leaders,
+dependent instead of independent, servile instead of free, conscious of
+weakness instead of power, defect shunners instead of triumphant creative
+representatives of the God in whose image man was created.
+
+Every agency that robs a child of his originality and freedom and prevents
+the spontaneous output of his creative self-activity destroys the image of
+God in him. Man is most like God when he is freely working out the plans
+of his own creative selfhood for good purposes. Coercion has been the
+greatest destroyer of the image of God in the child, and anarchy is the
+product of the perversion of the very powers that should have made man
+hopefully constructive. The seeds of anarchy are sown in the child's life,
+when his selfhood is blighted and checked. The fountain that finds free
+outlet for its waters forms a pure stream that remains always a blessing,
+but the fountain that is obstructed forms a noisome marsh, wasting the
+good land it should have watered and destroying the plant life it should
+have nourished.
+
+The great salt seas and lakes and marshes of the world have been formed by
+the checking of beautiful fresh-water streams and rivers and the
+prevention of their outflow to the ocean they should have reached. So when
+the outflow of the soul of the child is checked the powers that should
+have ennobled his own life and enriched the lives of others turn to evil
+instead of good, and make a dangerous instead of a helpful character. So
+far as coercion can influence selfhood it destroys its power for good and
+makes it a menace to civilization, instead of a beneficent agency in the
+accomplishment of high purposes. The reason that coercion does not more
+effectively blight and dwarf the child is that childhood is not under the
+direct influence of adulthood all the time. The blessed hours of freedom
+in play and work have saved the race.
+
+The absurd idea that "anarchy will result from giving true freedom to the
+child" persists in the minds of so many people, partly through the
+strength of the race conception of the need of coercion, from which we
+have not yet been able fully to free ourselves; partly from a terrible
+misconception regarding the true function of law; partly through gross
+ignorance of the child and lack of reverence for him; and partly from
+failure to understand our own higher powers for guiding the child
+properly, or the vital relationships of adulthood to childhood.
+
+The child should recognise law as a beneficent guide in the accomplishment
+of his own plans. In Froebel's wonderful kindergarten system the child is
+always guided by law, but he is always perfectly free to work out his own
+designs, and in doing so he is aided by law, not kept back or down by law.
+Law is, to the truly trained child, a revealer of right outlets for power,
+and the supreme duties of adulthood in training childhood are to change
+the centre of its interest when from lack of wisdom its interest centre is
+wrong, and to reveal to it in logical sequence the laws of nature, of
+beauty, of harmony, and of life. With such training life and law will
+always be in harmony, and the seeds of anarchy will find no soil in human
+hearts or minds in which to take root.
+
+Dickens uses the French Revolution, in A Tale of Two Cities, to show that
+anarchy results from coercion, from the unreasoning subordination of a
+lower to a higher or ruling class. Against the reasoning of wisdom the
+Marquis said: "Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark
+deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to
+the whip as long as this roof shuts out the sky." The roof came off one
+wild night--burned off by an infuriated mob of the dogs who had been
+repressed and whipped into anarchy. Yet the aristocracy of France claimed,
+as coercionist educators claim, that the anarchy was the result of
+insufficient coercion, instead of the natural harvest of the seed they had
+sown.
+
+    It was too much the way of monseigneur under his reverses as a
+    refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy,
+    to talk of this terrible revolution as if it were the one only harvest
+    ever known under the skies that had not been sown--as if nothing had
+    ever been done that had led to it--as if the observers of the wretched
+    millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
+    should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
+    years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw.
+
+When the Revolution was at its fearful height, and the repressed dogs were
+having their wild carnival of revenge, Dickens says:
+
+    Along the Paris streets the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six
+    tumbrels carry the day's wine to la guillotine. All the devouring and
+    insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are
+    fused in the one realization, guillotine. And yet there is not in
+    France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a
+    root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under
+    conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.
+    Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it
+    will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of
+    rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield
+    the same fruit according to its kind.
+
+    Six tumbrels roll along the streets. Change these back again to what
+    they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be
+    the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles,
+    the toilets of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not My Father's
+    house but dens of thieves, and huts of millions of starving peasants!
+
+This is the most profound and most ably written exposition of the
+philosophy of anarchy.
+
+"But by coercion I can make the child do right, and in this way I can form
+habits of doing right that will control the child when he grows up."
+
+The habit that is really formed by coercion is the habit of submission, of
+passive yielding to authority, of subordination, and, in the last
+analysis, this means the degradation and enslavement of the soul. Two
+habits are thus wrought into the child's nature by coercion: the habit of
+doing things because ordered to do them, which is slavery; and the habit
+of doing things he does not like or wish to do, which is the basis of
+hypocrisy. The meanest products that can be made from beings created in
+God's image are slaves and hypocrites. One of the remarkable facts
+regarding coercionists is that they blame God for creating the
+monstrosities they have themselves produced by false methods of training.
+
+"We should break the child's will, if it is wrong, to set it right, just
+as we should break a crooked leg to make it straight."
+
+This is a statement that betrays a lack of modern surgical knowledge, and
+a carelessness of psychological thought. Modern treatment for the cure of
+deformity of body avoids harsh treatment whenever it is possible to do so.
+It has been found that many deformities of body may be cured by proper
+exercise of the undeveloped part or parts, and with wider knowledge of
+Nature's laws will come a wiser use of the law of self-transformation, and
+a smaller and smaller use of the severer methods of treatment. But no good
+child psychologist now doubts that a child's will possesses the power of
+self-development and self-adjustment under proper guidance, nor should any
+one be ignorant of the fact that all true will development comes from
+within outward.
+
+It is only necessary that man should study the child more thoroughly, and
+learn how to change his interest centres from wrong to right, and how to
+surround him with an environment suitable to his progressive stages of
+development, in order to keep his own will in operation along productive
+lines of self-reformation and self-regulation by creative self-activity.
+Thus the will can be set to work truly with undiminished power. When a
+will is broken, however, it can never regain its full power; the breaking
+process blights it forever. More rational processes retain its tendency to
+act and its energy of action while changing the purpose and direction of
+its action.
+
+One of the interesting anomalies of our language is the marvellous fact
+that the term "self-willed" should ever have been considered a term of
+reproach or a description of a defect in character. The child with
+strongest self-will may become the greatest champion for righteousness if
+properly trained. He needs a wise and sympathetic trainer, who will be
+reverently grateful for his strong self-will, and whose reverence will
+prevent him from doing anything that would weaken the strength or selfhood
+of the will. The attempt to break his will may make him a destroying force
+instead of a leader for truth and progress. If a strangled will ever
+regains vitality it rarely acts truly. There is perhaps no other relic of
+the theories of barbaric ignorance concerning child training still left
+that is so baneful and so illogical as the theory that justifies will
+breaking.
+
+"But God punishes the child. The child who touches the fire gets burned,
+and therefore it is right that coercive punishment should be used by
+adulthood in dealing with the child."
+
+The punishments referred to are the revelation of natural laws. There is
+no personal element of the punishing agency manifest to the child. God
+does not appear to the child as a punisher, and it is an astounding error
+in training to reveal such a consciousness of God to the child.
+Responsibility for the consequences of their acts is a law of which all
+children approve. This appeals to their sense of justice, and there is no
+other sense to which we can appeal with success so universally in children
+as the sense of justice. "Squareness" is the highest quality named in the
+lexicon of childhood. A boy would rather be deemed "square" than receive
+praise for any other characteristic or accomplishment. So he recognises
+the justice of being held accountable for the directly resulting
+consequences of his acts quite as readily as he accepts the fact, without
+blaming any one else, that he will be burned if he touches fire. There is
+no element of coercion in the law of consequences. It is a just and
+universal law in harmony with his moral responsibility; therefore he will
+respect it. Coercion is directly contrary to the fundamental laws of his
+happiness and his true growth, and therefore he naturally and properly
+dislikes and disapproves of it, and of the individual who outrages justice
+by using it.
+
+The wonderful stories of Dickens set the world thinking by first arousing
+the strongest feelings of sympathy for the child and then developing
+sentiment and thought against every form of coercion, more especially
+coercion by corporal punishment. The awakening has been most satisfactory
+in its results. When Dickens began his writing against corporal punishment
+the rod was the almost universal remedy for all defects in animals or
+human beings. Whatever the defect, the superior in the eyes of the law
+used the one agency to overcome it. Mothers used the rod to subdue their
+children. Husbands used the rod to keep their children and wives in order.
+Men whipped their horses with impunity, as they did their children or
+wives. They owned them, and their right to punish them as they chose was
+unquestioned. Men trained animals to perform tricks in menageries by
+beating them, and they trained dancing, or performing, or learning girls
+and boys quite as inhumanly. Ownership or subordination justified
+unspeakable cruelty. The weakness of the child, the helplessness of the
+animal, appealed to the hardness of human nature, and not to its chivalry
+or sympathy. Even the poor feeble-minded and idiotic, who were confined in
+asylums, were terribly flogged by the most advanced philanthropists of the
+highest Christian civilization. They were weak. It was the duty of the
+authorities to control them, and "stripes and bruises" were regarded as
+the only true agencies for securing obedience. The rod was the highest
+controlling and directing force in the world.
+
+What a change has been wrought! Horses and children and wives are
+protected from brutal treatment now by law. The insane are not flogged to
+make them sane in any well-conducted institutions. More than half the
+children in the schools of the civilized world are free from the terror
+and degradation of corporal punishment by law, or by the higher
+consciousness of more intelligent teachers. Parenthood everywhere is
+studying the child and trying to become conscious of its own higher powers
+of guiding character so that it may be able to train the children in truer
+and more productive and less dangerous ways than formerly. And Charles
+Dickens was the great apostle of these grand reforms.
+
+We shudder now as we read of the outrages practised on helpless children
+and on the insane half a century ago not by the heathen, but by earnest,
+conscientious Christians. The men who live half a century hence will
+shudder when they read that in some schools at the close of the nineteenth
+century children who were partially or temporarily insane from hereditary
+taint, or imperfect nutrition, or cruel treatment, or anger, or from some
+other removable or remediable cause were whipped, and that men, some of
+whom occupied respectable positions, advocated the breaking of children's
+wills! If these "will-breaking" educators were in charge of asylums they
+would resurrect the straitjacket and the whipping post for the insane.
+
+The few who advocate corporal punishment openly claim that they have the
+authority of the Bible for their faith in the rod. They should remember
+that good men have stood with Bibles in their hands misrepresenting God
+and attempting to stop the progress of every great movement toward freedom
+and reform. Galileo was imprisoned by the Church because he taught that
+the earth turns round. Men had no difficulty in showing that the Bible
+approved of slavery, or that it prohibited woman from the exercise of the
+right or the performance of the duties of responsible individuality. So
+men still quote Solomon to show that corporal punishment is approved by
+God, though such a conclusion would be rejected by the highest
+interpreters.
+
+"Whipping makes strong characters." No, it makes hard characters, and
+hardness is but one element of strength, and not the best element of
+strength. The strength of the English character has not been developed, as
+is claimed by some, by the whipping done in English schools and homes. It
+comes partly by race heredity from the sturdiness of the Saxon and Norman
+founders of the race, partly from the general practice of working hard
+from youth up, and largely from the fact that the English playgrounds are
+so universally used, and are the scenes of the severest struggles for
+supremacy in skill and power that are witnessed in any part of the world.
+The winning half inch or half length, the valorous struggle for
+leadership on track or river--these are the things that have preserved and
+developed English force and bravery, in spite of the fact that England in
+her schools and homes has done fully her share of whipping. A boy or girl
+who spends as much time in free strong play as the English boy, works out
+the effects of a great many evils from his or her life. When men see the
+futility of dependence on flogging for developing energetic strength of
+character they will study the influence of play to the great advantage of
+racial vigour, and courage, and moral energy.
+
+Corporal punishment, like all other forms of coercion, robs the child of
+joyousness, and joyousness is one of the most essential elements in the
+true growth of a child. Corporal punishment affects the nervous systems of
+children injuriously, and when applied to certain parts of the body it
+stimulates prematurely the action of the sexual nature, and leads to one
+of the worst forms of depravity.
+
+Corporal punishment is ineffective as a disciplinary agency. In one
+American city during the generation after Dickens began his great crusade
+against corporal punishment it was the practice to whip with a rawhide all
+children who came late, but the lateness steadily increased in defiance of
+the rawhide. It was reduced to less than one one-hundredth part of its
+former proportion when whipping for lateness was entirely abolished and
+more rational means adopted.
+
+The order and co-operation of pupils is best in those schools in which no
+corporal punishment is used. If in any school only one teacher relies on
+the rod as a stimulator to work and a restrainer of evil, her class is
+sure to be the most disorderly, the least co-operative, and the most
+defective in original power in the school. As the children throughout the
+school come from the same homes, play with the same companions, attend the
+same churches, and are subject to the same general influences, it is
+perfectly clear that the whipping is the distinctive feature of character
+training that deforms the children. They will become normal, reasonable
+children when they reach the next room. This illustration assumes that
+all the teachers are possessed of good natural ability to direct the child
+properly. The one who uses corporal punishment fails because she has been
+dwarfed by her faith in corporal punishment. She has believed in it so
+fully that she has not sought to understand higher and better means. She
+has studied neither the child nor her own powers of child guidance.
+
+Dickens taught the inefficiency of coercion to accomplish what men hoped
+to accomplish by it in his criticism of the revolting use of capital
+punishment in former times. In A Tale of Two Cities he says:
+
+    Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
+    was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death;
+    the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the
+    holder of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to
+    Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
+    three fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of crime were put to
+    Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention--it
+    might always have been worth remarking that the fact was _exactly the
+    reverse_.
+
+The great prophets of modern education--Pestalozzi, Froebel, Barnard, and
+Mann--strongly condemned corporal punishment. These were men of clear
+insight and correct judgment. The opinion of one such man is worth more
+than the views of ten thousand ordinary men in regard to the subject of
+their special study. They were prophet souls who saw the higher truth
+toward which the race had been slowly growing, and revealed it.
+
+Their revelations have been appreciated and adopted more and more fully as
+they have been understood more and more clearly. In the case of corporal
+punishment and all forms of coercion Dickens has been the John the Baptist
+and the Paul of the revelation of the gospel of sympathy for the child.
+
+Not one blow in a thousand is given to a child now as compared with the
+time of Dickens's childhood. Corporal punishment is prohibited in the
+schools of France, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, Brazil, New Jersey, and
+in the following cities: New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Albany, Syracuse,
+Toledo, and Savannah. In Washington and Philadelphia teachers voluntarily
+gave up the practice of whipping. This is true of the majority of
+individual teachers in the cities of America, and the number of those who
+do without all forms of coercive discipline is rapidly increasing.
+
+The whipping of girls is prohibited in Saxony, Hessen, Oldenburg, and in
+many cities. Few girls are now whipped in schools anywhere. Corporal
+punishment has been abolished for the higher grades in Norway and in the
+lower grades in Saxony, Hessen, Bremen, and Hamburg. In the last-named
+city the cane is kept under lock and key. In some places the consent of
+parents must be obtained before children may be whipped, in some places
+the number of strokes is limited; in other places a record is kept of
+every case of corporal punishment and reports made monthly to the school
+boards. Everywhere action has been taken to prohibit or restrict the use
+of the once universally respected and universally dominant rod.
+
+All wise trainers of children recognise the value of obedience, but truly
+wise trainers no longer aim to make children merely submissively obedient,
+nor even willingly responsive in their obedience. They try to make them
+independently, co-operatively, and reverently obedient; independent in
+free development of will, co-operative in unity of effort with their
+fellows and their adult guides, and reverent in their attitude to law. The
+substitution of independence for subserviency, of co-operation for formal,
+responsive obedience, and of reverence for law for fear of law are the
+most important development in child training.
+
+In Dickens's ideal school, Doctor Strong's, there was "plenty of liberty."
+
+Gladstone's criticism, when over seventy, of his own teachers was that
+they were afraid of freedom. He said: "I did not learn to set a due value
+on the imperishable and inestimable principles of human liberty. The
+temper which I think prevailed among them was that liberty was regarded
+with jealousy, and fear could not be wholly dispensed with." The true
+teacher is not afraid of freedom, but makes it the dominant element in his
+training and in his educational theory.
+
+May the profounder truth in regard to child training spread to the ends of
+the earth! May the time soon come when there shall be no disciples of
+Susan Nipper's doctrine, "that childhood, like money, must be shaken and
+rattled and jostled about a good deal to keep it bright"! May Christian
+civilization soon be free from such memories as the remembrance of Mr.
+Obenreizer, in No Thoroughfare, had of his parents: "I was a famished
+naked little wretch of two or three years when they were men and women
+with hard hands to beat me"! May Christ's teaching soon be so fully
+understood that there will be no child anywhere like the shivering little
+boy in The Haunted Man, who was "used already to be worried and hunted
+like a beast, who crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back
+again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow, and
+threatened to bite if he was hit"! May teachers and all trainers of
+children learn the underlying philosophy of the statement made by Dickens,
+in connection with the schools of the Stepney Union, in The Uncommercial
+Traveller: "In the moral health of these schools--where corporal
+punishment is unknown--truthfulness stands high"!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE DOCTRINE OF CHILD DEPRAVITY.
+
+
+Dickens heartily accepted Froebel's view of the doctrine of child
+depravity. They did not teach that the child is totally divine, but
+neither did they believe that a being created in God's image is entirely
+depraved.
+
+They recognised very clearly that the doctrine of child depravity was the
+logical (or illogical) basis of the theory of corporal punishment and all
+forms of coercion. What more natural or more logical than the practice of
+checking the outflow of a child's inner life if we believe his inner life
+to be depraved? The firm belief in the doctrine of child depravity
+compelled conscientious men to be repressive and coercive in their
+discipline. Dickens understood this fully, and therefore he gave the
+doctrine no place in his philosophy.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin's training was based squarely on the doctrine of child
+depravity, for "the secret of her management of children was to give them
+everything that they didn't like, and nothing that they did." If the
+training of children under the "good old _regime_," for which some
+reactionary philosophers are still pleading, is carefully analyzed, it
+will be found that Mrs. Pipchin's plan was the commonly approved plan, and
+it was the perfectly logical outcome of the doctrine that the child, being
+wholly depraved, desired everything it should not have and objected to
+everything it should have.
+
+That was a touching question addressed by a little boy to his father:
+"Say, papa, did mamma stop you from doing everything you wished to do when
+_you_ were a little boy?"
+
+How Dickens despised the awful theology of the Murdstones, who would not
+let David play with other children, because they believed "all children to
+be a swarm of little vipers [though there _was_ a child once set in the
+midst of the Disciples], and held that they contaminated one another"!
+
+How he laughed at Mrs. Varden and Miggs, her maid!
+
+    "If you hadn't the sweetness of an angel in you, mim, I don't think
+    you could abear it, I raly don't."
+
+    "Miggs," said Mrs. Varden, "you're profane."
+
+    "Begging your pardon, mim," returned Miggs with shrill rapidity, "such
+    was not my intentions, and such I hope is not my character, though I
+    am but a servant."
+
+    "Answering me, Miggs, and providing yourself," retorted her mistress,
+    looking round with dignity, "is one and the same thing. How dare you
+    speak of angels in connection with your sinful
+    fellow-beings--mere"--said Mrs. Varden, glancing at herself in a
+    neighbouring mirror, and arranging the ribbon of her cap in a more
+    becoming fashion--"mere worms and grovellers as we are!"
+
+    "I do not intend, mim, if you please, to give offence," said Miggs,
+    confident in the strength of her compliment, and developing strongly
+    in the throat as usual, "and I did not expect it would be took as
+    such. I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate and despise
+    myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable Christian
+    should."
+
+Oliver Twist was described by the philanthropists who cared for him as
+"under the exclusive patronage and protection of the powers of wickedness,
+and an article direct from the manufactory of the very devil himself."
+
+Mr. Grimwig had no faith in boys, and he tried hard to shake Mr.
+Brownlow's faith in Oliver.
+
+    "He is a nice-looking boy, is he not?" inquired Mr. Brownlow.
+
+    "I don't know," replied Mr. Grimwig pettishly.
+
+    "Don't know?"
+
+    "No. I don't know. I never see any difference in boys. I only know two
+    sorts of boys: mealy boys and beef-faced boys."
+
+    "And which is Oliver?"
+
+    "Mealy. I know a friend who has a beef-faced boy--a fine boy, they
+    call him; with a round head, and red cheeks, and glaring eyes; a
+    horrid boy; with a body and limbs that appear to be swelling out of
+    the seams of his blue clothes; with the voice of a pilot, and the
+    appetite of a wolf. I know him! The wretch!"
+
+    "Come," said Mr. Brownlow, "these are not the characteristics of young
+    Oliver Twist; so he needn't excite your wrath."
+
+    "They are not," replied Mr. Grimwig. "He may have worse. He is
+    deceiving you, my good friend."
+
+    "I'll swear he is not," replied Mr. Brownlow warmly.
+
+    "If he is not," said Mr. Grimwig, "I'll----" and down went the stick.
+
+    "I'll answer for that boy's truth with my life!" said Mr. Brownlow,
+    knocking the table.
+
+    "And I for his falsehood with my head!" rejoined Mr. Grimwig, knocking
+    the table also.
+
+    "We shall see," said Mr. Brownlow, checking his rising anger.
+
+    "We will," replied Mr. Grimwig, with a provoking smile; "we will."
+
+Dickens always pleaded for more faith in children.
+
+In Great Expectations poor Pip was continually reminded of the fact that
+he was "naterally wicious," and at the great Christmas dinner party Mr.
+Pumblechook took him as the illustration of his theological discourse on
+"swine" and Mrs. Hubble commiserated Mrs. Gargery about the trouble he had
+caused her by all his waywardness.
+
+    "Trouble?" echoed my sister, "trouble?" And then entered on a fearful
+    catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts
+    of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had
+    tumbled from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the
+    injuries I had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my
+    grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go there.
+
+Again, when Pip was just beginning his life away from home his guardian,
+Mr. Jaggers, said to him at their first interview: "I shall by this means
+be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you outrunning
+the constable. Of course you'll go wrong somehow, but that's no fault of
+mine."
+
+"Of course you'll go wrong somehow," was an inspiring start in life for a
+young gentleman.
+
+Abel Magwitch, Pip's friend, told him near the close of his career how he
+came to lead such a dissipated and criminal life. He evidently had ability
+and possessed a deep sense of gratitude, and might have developed the
+other virtues if he had been treated properly. Dickens used him as an
+illustration of the fact that society fails often to do the best for a boy
+and make the most out of him through sheer lack of faith in childhood, and
+that this lack of faith results from the belief that a boy is so depraved
+that he would rather do wrong than right, and that when he starts to do
+wrong there is no hope of his reform.
+
+    "Dear boy and Pip's comrade. I am not a-going fur to tell you my life,
+    like a song or a story-book. But to give it you short and handy, I'll
+    put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in
+    jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you've got it.
+    That's _my_ life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off,
+    arter Pip stood my friend.
+
+    "I've been done everything to, pretty well--except hanged. I've been
+    locked up, as much as a silver teakittle. I've been carted here and
+    carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that town, and
+    stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I've no more
+    notion where I was born, than you have--if so much. I first become
+    aware of myself, down in Essex, a-thieving turnips for my living.
+    Summun had run away from me--a man--a tinker--and he'd took the fire
+    with him, and left me wery cold.
+
+    "I know'd my name to be Magwitch, chrisen'd Abel. How did I know it?
+    Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch,
+    sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies altogether, only
+    as the birds' names come out true, I supposed mine did.
+
+    "So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel
+    Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at
+    him, and either drove him off or took him up. I was took up, took up,
+    took up, to that extent that I reg'larly grow'd up took up.
+
+    "This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as
+    much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for
+    there warn't many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the
+    name being hardened. 'This is a terrible hardened one,' they says to
+    prison wisitors, picking out me. 'May be said to live in jails, this
+    boy.' Then they looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured
+    my head, some on 'em--they had better a-measured my stomach--and
+    others on 'em giv' me tracts what I couldn't read, and made me
+    speeches what I couldn't understand. They always went on agen me about
+    the devil."
+
+Poor old Toby Veck, in The Chimes, reflected the theories that Dickens
+wished to overthrow.
+
+    "It seems as if we can't go right, or do right, or be righted," said
+    Toby. "I hadn't much schooling, myself, when I was young; and I can't
+    make out whether we have any business on the face of the earth, or
+    not. Sometimes I think we must have--a little; and sometimes I think
+    we must be intruding. I get so puzzled sometimes that I am not even
+    able to make up my mind whether there is any good at all in us, or
+    whether we are born bad. We seem to be dreadful things; we seem to
+    give a deal of trouble; we are always being complained of and guarded
+    against."
+
+The most realistic picture of the influence of the child-depravity ideal
+on the training of childhood is given in Mrs. Clennam, in Little Dorrit.
+She was a hard, malignant, dishonest, unsympathetic woman, who had
+deliberately driven Arthur's mother to madness and blighted his father's
+life in the name of her false religion, and blasphemously claimed that she
+was doing it in God's stead, as his devoted servant. Yet she was sure she
+was truly religious, and had a pious vanity in the fact that she was
+"filled with an abhorrence of evil doers." She was filled with gladness,
+too, at the prospect of marrying a man of like training with herself.
+Speaking of the training of herself and her husband she said:
+
+    "You do not know what it is to be brought up strictly and straitly. I
+    was so brought up. Mine was no light youth of sinful gaiety and
+    pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment, and
+    fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse
+    that is upon us, the terrors that surround us--these were the themes
+    of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me with an
+    abhorrence of evil doers. When old Mr. Gilbert Clennam proposed his
+    orphan nephew to my father for my husband, my father impressed upon me
+    that his bringing-up had been, like mine, one of severe restraint. He
+    told me, that besides the discipline his spirit had undergone, he had
+    lived in a starved house, where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and
+    where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last. He told me
+    that he had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged
+    him as one; and that from his school days to that hour, his uncle's
+    roof had been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious
+    and dissolute."
+
+Speaking of her training of Arthur, she said:
+
+    "I devoted myself to reclaim the otherwise predestined and lost boy;
+    to bring him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of practical
+    contrition for the sins that were heavy on his head before his
+    entrance into this condemned world."
+
+Dickens describes her religious character as such as might naturally be
+expected to develop in a woman whose childhood revealed to her only the
+self-abnegation and terrors of religion and the utter contempt for
+humanity shrouded in the doctrine of child depravity. She had seen God as
+an awful character of sleepless watchfulness to see her evil doing and
+record it, of wrathfulness, and of vengeance, but never of loving sympathy
+and forgiveness. So she fitted her religion to the character that such
+training had formed in her.
+
+    Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion, veiled in
+    gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and
+    destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts
+    as we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her.
+    Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I
+    would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower
+    of stone she built up to scale heaven.
+
+The old discipline and the old training were based on the belief that
+children like to do wrong better than to do right. There could be no
+greater error, or one more certain to lead to false principles of
+training, and prevent the recognition of the true methods of developing
+character in childhood.
+
+Children do not like to do wrong better than to do right. They like to do.
+They like to do the things they themselves plan to do. They like to do the
+things that are interesting to themselves. Their lack of wisdom leaves
+them at the mercy of their interests, and without guidance their
+constructiveness may turn to destructiveness. When it does so, it is
+because of the neglect of their adult guides to surround them with plenty
+of suitable material for construction or transformation adapted to their
+stage of development. With a sufficient variety of material for
+constructive plays the child will rarely exhibit destructive tendencies,
+and when he does so, the wisdom of his adult guide should find little
+trouble in changing his interest centre from the wrong to the right. The
+skilful trainer changes the interest centre without making the child
+conscious of adult interference.
+
+It costs little to supply the child with sand and blocks, and soft clay,
+and colors, and colored paper, and blunt scissors and gum, and other
+similar materials--much less than is usually spent for toys; yet such
+materials would save parents from much worry, and help them to get rid of
+the wrong ideals, and they would preserve the natural tendency of children
+to constructiveness, and afford them an opportunity for the comfort and
+the development of real self-activity.
+
+The child's most dominant tendency is activity in using the material
+things of his environment to transform them into new forms or
+relationships in harmony with his own plans. This tendency is intended to
+accomplish four great purposes in the child's development. It reveals the
+child's own powers to himself, it develops his originality, it trains him
+to use his constructive powers, and it gives him the habit of transforming
+his environment to suit his own plans. If he is not supplied with suitable
+material to play with he will appropriate the material he finds most
+available. In this way, through the absolute neglect of his adult guides,
+he has acquired a bad reputation.
+
+The instinct that leads the child to transform his material environment
+should lead to the conscious desire and determination to improve the
+physical, intellectual, and spiritual conditions around him at maturity.
+It is therefore a very essential element in his training, and to check or
+neglect it may weaken and warp his character as much as it was intended to
+strengthen and direct it.
+
+Thus the children have been coerced because men believed them to be
+depraved, and the coercion has developed the apparent depravity.
+
+The darkest clouds have been lifted from the vision of adults and from the
+lives of the little ones by the breaking of the power of the doctrine of
+child depravity. The teacher especially has a more hopeful field opened to
+him. His great work of training is no longer restricted to putting
+blinders on the eyes of children to prevent their seeing evil, and bits in
+their mouths to keep them from going wrong. He believes that every child
+has an element of divinity, however small and enfeebled by heredity or
+encrusted by evil environment, and that his chief duty is to arouse this
+divinity (his selfhood or individuality) to consciousness and start it on
+its conscious growth toward the divine. The revelation of this new and
+grander ideal has led to all intelligent child study for the purpose of
+discovering what adulthood can do, and especially what childhood itself
+can do, in accomplishing its most perfect training for its highest
+destiny.
+
+Dickens expressed his general faith in childhood in Mrs. Lirriper's remark
+to the Major about Jemmy:
+
+    "Ah, Major," I says, drying my eyes, "we needn't have been afraid. We
+    might have known it. Treachery don't come natural to beaming youth;
+    but trust and pity, love and constancy--they do, thank God!"
+
+He taught his philosophy of the origin of many of the evils that are
+attributed to child depravity in Nobody's Story. "Nobody" means the
+workingman. He says to the Master:
+
+    "The evil consequences of imperfect instruction, the evil consequences
+    of pernicious neglect, the evil consequences of unnatural restraint
+    and the denial of humanizing enjoyments, will all come from us, and
+    none of them will stop with us. They will spread far and wide. They
+    always do; they always have done--just like the pestilence. I
+    understand so much, I think, at last."
+
+There is profoundness in these doctrines.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+CRAMMING.
+
+
+Although Dickens paid much more attention in his writings to the methods
+of training than to the methods of teaching, he studied the methods of
+teaching sufficiently to recognise some of their gravest defects. Dombey
+and Son is unquestionably the greatest book ever written to expose the
+evils of cramming. Doctor Blimber, Cornelia, and Mr. Feeder, when closely
+studied, represent in the varied phases of their work all the worst forms
+of cramming.
+
+    Whenever a young gentleman was taken in hand by Doctor Blimber, he
+    might consider himself sure of a pretty tight squeeze. The doctor only
+    undertook the charge of ten young gentlemen, but he had always ready a
+    supply of learning for a hundred, on the lowest estimate; it was at
+    once the business and delight of his life to gorge the unhappy ten
+    with it.
+
+    In fact, Doctor Blimber's establishment was a great hothouse, in which
+    there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys blew
+    before their time. Mental green peas were produced at Christmas, and
+    intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries
+    (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere
+    sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber's cultivation. Every
+    description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the dryest twigs
+    of boys, under the frostiest circumstances. Nature was of no
+    consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to
+    bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern, somehow or other. This
+    was all very pleasant and ingenious, but the system of forcing was
+    attended with its usual disadvantages. There was not the right taste
+    about the premature productions, and they didn't keep well. Moreover,
+    one young gentleman, with a swollen nose and an excessively large head
+    (the oldest of the ten who had "gone through" everything) suddenly
+    left off blowing one day, and remained in the establishment a mere
+    stalk. And people did say that the doctor had rather overdone it with
+    young Toots, and that when he began to have whiskers he left off
+    having brains.
+
+    The doctor was a portly gentleman in a suit of black, with strings at
+    his knees, and stockings below them. He had a bald head, highly
+    polished; a deep voice, and a chin so very double that it was a wonder
+    how he ever managed to shave into the creases. He had likewise a pair
+    of little eyes that were always half shut up and a mouth that was
+    always half expanded into a grin, as if he had, that moment, posed a
+    boy, and were waiting to convict him from his own lips. Insomuch that
+    when the doctor put his right hand into the breast of his coat, and,
+    with his other hand behind him and a scarcely perceptible wag of his
+    head, made the commonest observation to a nervous stranger, it was
+    like a sentiment from the sphinx, and settled his business.
+
+    Miss Blimber, too, although a slim and graceful maid, did no soft
+    violence to the gravity of the house. There was no light nonsense
+    about Miss Blimber. She kept her hair short and crisp, and wore
+    spectacles. She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of
+    deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They
+    must be dead--stone dead--and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a
+    ghoul.
+
+    As to Mr. Feeder, B. A., Dr. Blimber's assistant, he was a kind of
+    human barrel organ, with a little list of tunes at which he was
+    continually working, over and over again, without any variation. He
+    might have been fitted up with a change of barrels, perhaps, in early
+    life, if his destiny had been favourable; but it had not been; and he
+    had only one, with which, in a monotonous round, it was his occupation
+    to bewilder the young ideas of Dr. Blimber's young gentlemen. The
+    young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew
+    no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage
+    noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of
+    exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing
+    system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in three
+    weeks. He had all the care of the world on his head in three months.
+    He conceived bitter sentiments against his parents or guardians in
+    four; he was an old misanthrope in five; envied Curtius that blessed
+    refuge in the earth in six; and at the end of the first twelvemonth
+    had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterward departed,
+    that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages, were a
+    mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the
+    world.
+
+    But he went on blow, blow, blowing, in the doctor's hothouse all the
+    time; and the doctor's glory and reputation were great when he took
+    his wintry growth home to his relations and friends.
+
+    Upon the doctor's doorsteps one day, Paul stood with a fluttering
+    heart, and with his small right hand in his father's. His other hand
+    was locked in that of Florence. How tight the tiny pressure of that
+    one; and how loose and cool the other!
+
+    The doctor was sitting in his portentous study, with a globe at each
+    knee, books all round him, Homer over the door, and Minerva on the
+    mantelshelf. "And how do you do, sir?" he said to Mr. Dombey; "and how
+    is my little friend?"
+
+    "Very well I thank you, sir," returned Paul, answering the clock quite
+    as much as the doctor.
+
+    "Ha!" said Dr. Blimber. "Shall we make a man of him?"
+
+    "Do you hear, Paul?" added Mr. Dombey; Paul being silent.
+
+    "Shall we make a man of him?" repeated the doctor.
+
+    "I had rather be a child," replied Paul.
+
+Paul's reply is one of the most touchingly beautiful of even Dickens's
+wonderful expressions--wonderful in their exquisite simplicity and their
+profound philosophy. When this book was written Dickens was beginning to
+get the conception of the great truth, which he illustrated at length in
+Hard Times and other works, that it is a crime against a child to rob it
+of its childhood.
+
+When Doctor Blimber in his cold, formal manner asked Paul "why he
+preferred to be a child," the little fellow was unable to answer, and as
+they stared at him, he at length put his hand on the neck of Florence and
+burst into tears.
+
+    "Mrs. Pipchin," said his father in a querulous manner, "I am really
+    very sorry to see this."
+
+    "Never mind," said the doctor blandly, nodding his head to keep Mrs.
+    Pipchin back. "Nev-er mind; we shall substitute new cares and new
+    impressions, Mr. Dombey, very shortly. You would still wish my little
+    friend to acquire----"
+
+    "Everything, if you please, doctor," returned Mr. Dombey firmly.
+
+    "Yes," said the doctor, who, with his half-shut eyes and his usual
+    smile, seemed to survey Paul with the sort of interest that might
+    attach to some choice little animal he was going to stuff. "Yes,
+    exactly. Ha! We shall impart a great variety of information to our
+    little friend, and bring him quickly forward, I dare say. I dare say.
+    Quite a virgin soil, I believe you said, Mr. Dombey?"
+
+On leaving, Mr. Dombey said to Paul:
+
+    "You'll try and learn a great deal here, and be a clever man, won't
+    you?"
+
+    "I'll try," returned the child wearily.
+
+    "And you'll soon be grown up now?" said Mr. Dombey.
+
+    "Oh! very soon!" replied the child. Once more the old, old look passed
+    rapidly across his features like a strange light.
+
+After his father and Florence had left him the doctor said to Cornelia:
+
+    "Cornelia, Dombey will be your charge at first. Bring him on,
+    Cornelia, bring him on. Take him round the house, Cornelia, and
+    familiarize him with his new sphere. Go with that young lady, Dombey."
+
+    Cornelia took him first to the schoolroom. Here there were eight young
+    gentlemen in various stages of mental prostration, all very hard at
+    work, and very grave indeed.
+
+    Mr. Feeder, B. A., had his Virgil stop on, and was slowly grinding
+    that tune to four young gentlemen. Of the remaining four, two, who
+    grasped their foreheads convulsively, were engaged in solving
+    mathematical problems; one, with his face like a dirty window from
+    much crying, was endeavouring to flounder through a hopeless number of
+    lines before dinner; and one sat looking at his task in stony
+    stupefaction and despair--which, it seemed, had been his condition
+    ever since breakfast time.
+
+After being shown through the dormitories, Cornelia told him dinner would
+be ready in fifteen minutes, and that in the meantime he had better go
+into the schoolroom among his "friends."
+
+    His friends were all dispersed about the room except the stony friend,
+    who remained immovable. Mr. Feeder was stretching himself in his gray
+    gown, as if, regardless of expense, he were resolved to pull the
+    sleeves off.
+
+    "Heigh-ho-hum!" cried Mr. Feeder, shaking himself like a cart horse
+    "oh dear me, dear me! Ya-a-a-ah!"
+
+    "You sleep in my room, don't you?" asked a solemn young gentleman,
+    whose shirt collar curled up the lobes of his ears.
+
+    "Master Briggs?" inquired Paul.
+
+    "Tozer," said the young gentleman.
+
+    Paul answered yes; and Tozer, pointing out the stony pupil, said that
+    it was Briggs. Paul had already felt certain that it must be either
+    Briggs or Tozer, though he didn't know why.
+
+    "Is yours a strong constitution?" inquired Tozer.
+
+    Paul said he thought not. Tozer replied that _he_ thought not also,
+    judging from Paul's looks, and that it was a pity, for it need be. He
+    then asked Paul if he were going to begin with Cornelia; and on Paul
+    saying "Yes," all the young gentlemen (Briggs excepted) gave a low
+    groan.
+
+At dinner no boy was allowed to speak; every one was compelled to listen
+to the tedious discourse of Doctor Blimber on the customs of the Romans.
+The cramming of youth was continued with great dignity even during meals.
+One boy, Johnson, was unfortunate enough to choke himself by too suddenly
+swallowing his water in order to catch Doctor Blimber's eye when he began
+an account of the dinners of Vitellius; and to punish him for his breach
+of manners, Doctor Blimber said before the boys were dismissed from the
+table:
+
+    "Johnson will repeat to-morrow morning before breakfast, without book,
+    and from the Greek Testament, the first chapter of the Epistle of
+    Saint Paul to the Ephesians. We will resume our studies, Mr. Feeder,
+    in half an hour."
+
+It used to be a common practice to cultivate a loving reverence for God by
+using the Bible as a means of punishment. This was in harmony with the old
+educational and the old theological ideal of punishment, as the supreme
+means available for guiding children properly. It was considered a
+perfectly appropriate use of the best book to use it for this best of
+purposes.
+
+    The young gentlemen bowed and withdrew; Mr. Feeder did likewise.
+    During the half hour the young gentlemen, broken into pairs, loitered
+    arm in arm up and down a small piece of ground behind the house. But
+    nothing happened so vulgar as play. Punctually at the appointed time
+    the gong was sounded, and the studies, under the joint auspices of
+    Doctor Blimber and Mr. Feeder, were resumed.
+
+    Tea was served in a style no less polite than dinner; and after tea
+    the young gentlemen, rising and bowing as before, withdrew to fetch up
+    the unfinished tasks of that day or to get up the already looming
+    tasks of to-morrow. After prayers and light refreshments at eight
+    o'clock or so, the "young gentlemen" were sent to bed by the doctor
+    rising and solemnly saying, "We will resume our studies at seven
+    to-morrow"; the pupils bowed again, and went to bed.
+
+    In the confidence of their own room upstairs, Briggs said his head
+    ached ready to split, and that he should wish himself dead if it
+    wasn't for his mother and a blackbird he had at home. Tozer didn't say
+    much, but he sighed a good deal, and told Paul to look out, for his
+    turn would come to-morrow. After uttering those prophetic words, he
+    undressed himself moodily and got into bed. Briggs was in his bed too,
+    and Paul in his bed too, before the weak-eyed young man appeared to
+    take away the candle, when he wished them good-night and pleasant
+    dreams. But his benevolent wishes were in vain as far as Briggs and
+    Tozer were concerned; for Paul, who lay awake for a long while, and
+    often woke afterward, found that Briggs was ridden by his lesson as a
+    nightmare; and that Tozer, whose mind was affected in his sleep by
+    similar causes, in a minor degree, talked unknown tongues, or scraps
+    of Greek and Latin--it was all one to Paul--which, in the silence of
+    night, had an inexpressibly wicked and guilty effect.
+
+As Paul was going downstairs in the morning Miss Blimber called him into
+her room, and, pointing to a pile of new books on her table, said:
+
+    "These are yours, Dombey."
+
+    "All of 'em, ma'am?" said Paul.
+
+    "Yes," returned Miss Blimber; "and Mr. Feeder will look you out some
+    more very soon, if you are as studious as I expect you will be,
+    Dombey."
+
+    "Thank you, ma'am," said Paul.
+
+    "I am going out for a constitutional," resumed Miss Blimber; "and
+    while I am gone--that is to say, in the interval between this and
+    breakfast, Dombey--I wish you to read over what I have marked in these
+    books, and to tell me if you quite understand what you have got to
+    learn. Don't lose time, Dombey, for you have none to spare, but take
+    them downstairs, and begin directly."
+
+    "Yes, ma'am," answered Paul.
+
+    There were so many of them, that although Paul put one hand under the
+    bottom book and his other hand and his chin on the top book, and
+    hugged them all closely, the middle book slipped out before he reached
+    the door, and then they all tumbled down on the floor. Having at last
+    amassed the whole library and climbed into his place, he fell to work,
+    encouraged by a remark from Tozer to the effect that he "was in for it
+    now"; which was the only interruption he received till breakfast time.
+    At that meal, for which he had no appetite, everything was quite as
+    solemn and genteel as at the others; and when it was finished, he
+    followed Miss Blimber upstairs.
+
+    "Now, Dombey," said Miss Blimber, "how have you got on with those
+    books?"
+
+    They comprised a little English, and a deal of Latin--names of things,
+    declensions of articles and substantives, exercises thereon, and
+    preliminary rules--a trifle of orthography, a glance at ancient
+    history, a wink or two at modern ditto, a few tables, two or three
+    weights and measures, and a little general information. When poor Paul
+    had spelled out number two, he found he had no idea of number one;
+    fragments whereof afterward obtruded themselves into number three,
+    which slided into number four, which, grafted itself on to number two.
+    So that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic haec hoc was troy
+    weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three
+    times four was Taurus a bull, were open questions with him.
+
+    "Oh, Dombey, Dombey!" said Miss Blimber, "this is very shocking."
+
+So Paul's cramming went on day by day. The delicate little boy, who should
+not have been sent to school at all, was forced to memorize confused
+masses of words that had no meaning to him, but he learned to repeat the
+words, and so got the credit of doing well, and because he learned easily
+was driven harder and harder. The more easily he carried his burden the
+higher it was piled on his back.
+
+    It was not that Miss Blimber meant to be too hard upon him, or that
+    Doctor Blimber meant to bear too heavily on the young gentlemen in
+    general. Cornelia merely held the faith in which she had been bred;
+    and the doctor, in some partial confusion of his ideas, regarded the
+    young gentlemen as if they were all doctors, and were born grown up.
+    Comforted by the applause of the young gentlemen's nearest relations,
+    and urged on by their blind vanity and ill-considered haste, it would
+    have been strange if Doctor Blimber had discovered his mistake, or
+    trimmed his swelling sails to any other tack.
+
+    Thus in the case of Paul. When Doctor Blimber said he made great
+    progress, and was naturally clever, Mr. Dombey was more bent than ever
+    on his being forced and crammed. In the case of Briggs, when Doctor
+    Blimber reported that he did not make great progress yet, and was not
+    naturally clever, Briggs senior was inexorable in the same purpose. In
+    short, however high and false the temperature at which the doctor kept
+    his hothouse, the owners of the plants were always ready to lend a
+    helping hand at the bellows and to stir the fire.
+
+    When the midsummer vacation approached, no indecent manifestations of
+    joy were exhibited by the leaden-eyed young gentlemen assembled at
+    Doctor Blimber's. Any such violent expression as "breaking up" would
+    have been quite inapplicable to that polite establishment. The young
+    gentlemen oozed away, semi-annually, to their own homes; but they
+    never broke up. They would have scorned the action.
+
+    Tozer, who was constantly galled and tormented by a starched white
+    cambric neckerchief, which he wore at the express desire of Mrs.
+    Tozer, his parent, who, designing him for the Church, was of opinion
+    that he couldn't be in that forward state of preparation too
+    soon--Tozer said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he thought
+    he would rather stay where he was, than go home. However inconsistent
+    this declaration might appear with that passage in Tozer's essay on
+    the subject, wherein he had observed "that the thoughts of home and
+    all its recollections awakened in his mind the most pleasing emotions
+    of anticipation and delight," and had also likened himself to a Roman
+    general, flushed with a recent victory over the Iceni, or laden with
+    Carthaginian spoil, advancing within a few hours' march of the
+    Capitol, presupposed, for the purposes of the simile, to be the
+    dwelling place of Mrs. Tozer, still it was very sincerely made. For it
+    seemed that Tozer had a dreadful uncle, who not only volunteered
+    examinations of him, in the holidays, on abstruse points, but twisted
+    innocent events and things, and wrenched them to the same fell
+    purpose. So that if this uncle took him to the play, or, on a similar
+    pretence of kindness, carried him to see a giant, or a dwarf, or a
+    conjurer, or anything, Tozer knew he had read up some classical
+    allusion to the subject beforehand, and was thrown into a state of
+    mortal apprehension; not foreseeing where he might break out, or what
+    authority he might not quote against him.
+
+    As to Briggs, _his_ father made no show of artifice about it. He never
+    would leave him alone. So numerous and severe were the mental trials
+    of that unfortunate youth in vacation time, that the friends of the
+    family (then resident near Bayswater, London) seldom approached the
+    ornamental piece of water in Kensington Gardens without a vague
+    expectation of seeing Master Briggs's hat floating on the surface and
+    an unfinished exercise lying on the bank. Briggs, therefore, was not
+    at all sanguine on the subject of holidays; and these two sharers of
+    little Paul's bedroom were so fair a sample of the young gentlemen in
+    general, that the most elastic among them contemplated the arrival of
+    those festive periods with genteel resignation.
+
+Dickens did not wish to lay all the blame for the stupid process of
+cramming on the teachers. He properly revealed to parents that they were
+even more to blame than the teachers, because they got what they
+demanded. Doctor Blimber summed up the whole philosophy of the adulthood
+of his time in regard to a child's education when he said to his daughter,
+"Bring him on, Cornelia! Bring him on!"
+
+The standard of knowledge cramming fixed by parents and school boards is
+changing very slowly. Even yet a teacher's success is measured and his
+chances of re-engagement decided in most places by the answer to the
+question, "How does he bring the children on?"
+
+When asked by Doctor Blimber what he wished his little sickly son to
+learn, Mr. Dombey answered, "Oh, everything."
+
+When Paul learned easily, his father pressed for more studies; and because
+Briggs was dull, his father demanded that he be driven harder at school,
+and made the poor boy's life miserable at home by tedious lessons during
+the holidays.
+
+The uncle who made Tozer wretched by asking him unexpected questions on
+all occasions is a type of an ogre who sometimes blights the lives of
+children still.
+
+Dickens had a beautiful sympathy with childhood in its sufferings not
+merely on account of deliberate cruelty and neglect, but because of the
+burdens placed upon it by adults who, with the best intentions, robbed it
+of its natural rights of joyousness and freedom.
+
+Whenever Doctor Blimber was informed that Paul was "old-fashioned" or
+"peculiar," he said, as he had said when Paul first came, that study would
+do much; and he also said, as he said on that occasion, "Bring him on,
+Cornelia! Bring him on!"
+
+Just before the close of the term Paul fainted and had to be carried to
+his room, and after an examination the physician advised Doctor Blimber to
+"release the young gentleman from his books just now, the vacation being
+so near at hand."
+
+It was so very considerate to release him from study, when he was utterly
+unable to study any longer.
+
+At the close of the school party when he was leaving--
+
+    Cornelia, taking both Paul's hands in hers, said, "Dombey, Dombey, you
+    have always been my favourite pupil. God bless you!" And it showed,
+    Paul thought, how easily one might do injustice to a person; for Miss
+    Blimber meant it--though she _was_ a Forcer.
+
+Paul never returned to school. His life was sacrificed to his father's
+desire to have him "learn everything."
+
+In a brief look at the results of Doctor Blimber's teaching, Dickens
+tersely outlines three common results of cramming:
+
+    Mr. Tozer, now a young man of lofty stature, in Wellington boots, was
+    so extremely full of antiquity as to be nearly on a par with a genuine
+    ancient Roman in his knowledge of English; a triumph that affected his
+    good parents with the tenderest emotions, and caused the father and
+    mother of Mr. Briggs (whose learning, like an ill-arranged luggage,
+    was so tightly packed that he couldn't get at anything he wanted) to
+    hide their diminished heads. The fruit laboriously gathered from the
+    tree of knowledge by this latter young gentleman, in fact, had been
+    subjected to so much pressure, that it had become a kind of
+    intellectual Norfolk Biffin, and had nothing of its original form or
+    flavour remaining. Master Bitherstone now, on whom the forcing system
+    had the happier and not uncommon effect of leaving no impression
+    whatever, when the forcing apparatus ceased to work was in a much more
+    comfortable plight; and being then on shipboard, bound for Bengal,
+    found himself forgetting with such admirable rapidity, that it was
+    doubtful whether his declensions of noun-substantives would hold out
+    to the end of the voyage.
+
+Dickens, in his very able description of Doctor Blimber's school, directs
+attention to nearly every phase of the evils of cramming. Toots is an
+illustration of the destruction of mental power by the "hard mathematics"
+and other subjects, when they are taught improperly. It is a serious
+result of an educational system, when the brightest young men "cease to
+have brains when they begin to have whiskers."
+
+Paul's experience is used to show the terrible physical evils of cramming
+in any life, especially in the life of a delicate child. Paul was killed
+by his father and Doctor Blimber. He should have lived.
+
+Cornelia's aversion to live languages and her delight in "digging up the
+dead languages like a ghoul," and the address presented to Doctor Blimber
+"which contained very little of the mother tongue, but fifteen quotations
+from the Latin and seven from the Greek," were intended as a protest
+against paying too much attention to the classics to the neglect of other
+studies. He returned to this subject again in Bleak House. Richard
+Carstone "could make Latin verses," but although his powers were naturally
+excellent he was a complete failure in life. He was not educated properly,
+notwithstanding his ability to make Latin verses.
+
+Mr. Feeder is the perfect type of a mechanical crammer, "a sort of barrel
+organ with a little list of tunes at which he was continually working,
+over and over again, without any variation." What suggestiveness there is
+in the sentence "Mr. Feeder had his Virgil stop on, and was grinding that
+tune to four young gentlemen"!
+
+"Bewilder the young ideas of Doctor Blimber's young gentlemen," used to be
+considered too strong a criticism, but modern psychology fully sustains
+Dickens in his view. "Arrested development" is well understood now to
+result from too much grinding at any one subject or department of a
+subject, from the monotonous drill of the crammer, or from directing the
+child's attention too much to any one study.
+
+The influence of uninteresting study on the spirits was clear to Dickens.
+There is inspiration and physical advantage of a decided character in the
+successful study of an interesting subject--interesting to the child, of
+course--if the process of study includes the true self-activity of the
+child. There is blight, and nervous irritation, and "carking anxiety," if
+the child works under compulsion at the dead matter of study. No wonder
+the young gentlemen at Doctor Blimber's took leave of their spirits in
+three weeks, and passed through the subsequent stages of deeper gloom
+described by Dickens. They had none of the joy of living interest in their
+study, none of the vital enthusiasm connected with independent thought,
+none of the health that comes from pleasant occupation, none of the
+happiness that is found in self-activity alone.
+
+One of the best criticisms of wrong methods of teaching done by Mr. Feeder
+is the criticism of the method of teaching literature. "At the end of the
+first twelvemonth the boys had arrived at the conclusion, from which they
+never afterward departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and the
+lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had
+no other meaning in the world." There are high schools yet in which more
+attention is paid to the "words and grammar" than to the sacred and
+inspiring thought of the author.
+
+A professor in one of the leading educational institutions of America
+travelled in Scotland with his daughters. They were graduates of a high
+school. He observed with deep regret that they visited the mountains, and
+valleys, and rivers, and islands, and battlefields, and cathedrals of the
+land, that to him had been filled with sacred interests by the writings of
+Scott, and saw them all without emotion. One day he said to them: "Why are
+you not interested here? To me every foot of ground here is full of living
+memories. Scott describes it in The Lady of the Lake." One of them
+explained the reason. "Oh!" she said, "we're sick of Scott; we had enough
+of him in the high school."
+
+There are Feeders yet who profane the temple of literature; who never
+connect the souls of their pupils with the soul life of the authors they
+study. Very few of the graduates of high schools have learned the high art
+of loving literature for its beauty and ennobling thought, fewer still
+have learned how to dig successfully in the rich mines of wealth that
+literature contains, and even a smaller number have learned to transmute
+the revelations of literature into character and new revelations in life
+or richer literature for the happiness and culture of coming generations.
+We may yet learn from Dickens.
+
+Tozer became an antique pedant, learned but not educated.
+
+Briggs grew to be dull and heavy-witted, and had his "knowledge so tightly
+packed that he couldn't get at anything he wanted."
+
+Bitherstone was one of the few fortunate fellows who are gifted with
+natural power to pass through the cramming system without being affected
+seriously in any way. They get little, if any, good, and they speedily
+forget the wrongs inflicted upon them and the learning with which their
+teachers attempted to cram them.
+
+Briggs showed the evil effects of cramming in the destruction of
+individuality. "His fruit had nothing of its original flavour remaining."
+This is one of the general charges made against Doctor Blimber's forcing
+establishment, or hothouse. "Nature was of no consequence at all. No
+matter what a young gentleman was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made
+him bear to pattern somehow or other." The destruction of selfhood was the
+great evil of the old system of teaching.
+
+Another important criticism made by Dickens of the hothouse system is
+worthy of special attention by educators. He recognised the evil effects
+of giving any study or work to children, that is naturally adapted to a
+later stage of their development. The development of children is always
+arrested when the work of a higher stage is forced into a lower stage of
+their growth. The true evolution of the child consists in a growth through
+a series of progressive and interdependent stages. This was not recognised
+in the educational system Dickens desired to improve. It is not yet
+recognised to a very large extent in practice. "All the boys blew before
+their time," in Doctor Blimber's school. "The doctor, in some partial
+confusion of ideas, regarded the young gentlemen as if they were all
+doctors, and were born grown up."
+
+Dickens was so careful to make his names and terms express volumes of
+meaning that he probably meant the phrase "mathematical gooseberries" to
+be especially significant. The fact that they were grown on "mere sprouts
+of bushes," and as a consequence were "very sour ones, too," reveals the
+philosophy since made so clear by Doctor Harris, that early "drilling" in
+arithmetic has been one of the prolific causes of arrested development in
+children. The appeal against the common practice of growing "every
+description of Greek and Latin vegetable" _from_ "_dry twigs of boys_" was
+comprehensive and timely. They were not merely twigs, but dry twigs in
+whom the sap had not begun to circulate freely. No expressions, no
+volumes, could state the evil of untimely cramming more clearly than this
+group of phrases used by Dickens in describing Doctor Blimber's school.
+
+"The frostiest circumstances" is another of the thought-laden phrases,
+which was evidently intended to warn teachers against the mistake of
+trying to produce any intellectual fruit at untimely periods of the
+child's development. "Wintry growth" means unseasonable or untimely
+development.
+
+The condemnation of the feeling shown by Paul in parting from Florence,
+and the Doctor's cold-blooded observation, "Never mind; we shall
+substitute new cares and new impressions, Mr. Dombey, very shortly," were
+intended to show how utterly the knowledge cramming ideal had prevented
+the recognition of the fundamental fact that feeling is the basis and the
+battery power of intellectual force and energy. The same principle is
+taught by Cornelia's shock at Paul's affection for old Glubb, and her
+father's summary settlement of the case, when he realized that the little
+child was intensely affectionate and sympathetic. "Ha!" said the Doctor,
+shaking his head, "this--is--bad, but study will do much."
+
+Dickens deals in a most thorough manner with the absolute wickedness of
+neglecting, or attempting to smother feeling in the training and education
+of children in Hard Times. He undoubtedly received his clear conceptions
+relating to the intellectual value of feeling from Froebel's writings.
+
+The bad effects of cramming on the physical constitution of children are
+pointed out in "the convulsive grasping of their foreheads" by the two
+boys engaged in solving mathematical problems. Nervous exhaustion is here
+plainly indicated. They were "very feverish," too, and poor Briggs was in
+even a worse condition, for "he was in a state of stupefaction and was
+flabby and quite cold." Both Briggs and Tozer frightened Paul the first
+night he tried to sleep in their room by talking Latin and Greek in their
+dreams. Paul thought they were swearing. Education should never interfere
+with a child's sleep, either with its soundness or its duration. Even the
+boys told Paul on the first day of his school life that he would need a
+good constitution to withstand the strain at Doctor Blimber's.
+
+The exhaustive and exasperating practice of piling up arrears of work, so
+naturally connected with cramming--in fact, so essential a part of the
+unnatural process--comes in for its share of condemnation, too. One of the
+boys, "whose face was like a dirty window, from much crying, was
+endeavouring to flounder through a hopeless number of lines." The friends
+of Briggs were constantly in terror "lest they should find his hat
+floating on a pond and an unfinished exercise on the bank."
+
+The same practice of charging up arrears of work is condemned in David
+Copperfield by associating it with the hateful Murdstones.
+
+The crammer's absolute indifference and contempt for any semblance of
+correlation in studies is revealed by Cornelia's action in giving him a
+collection of books on his first morning before school with instructions
+to study them at the places she had marked for him. No wonder that "when
+poor Paul had spelled out number two he found he had no idea of number
+one; fragments whereof afterward obtruded themselves into number three,
+which sidled into number four, which grafted itself on to number two--so
+that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic haec hoc was troy
+weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three times
+four was Taurus, a bull, were open questions with him."
+
+Whenever words are given before thought, or as a substitute for thought,
+and without definite relationship to the thought already in the mind, they
+lie in the mind as unrelated, and therefore unavailable knowledge.
+
+A boy in London had received considerable historical teaching, and his
+mind had made a certain kind of unity out of the confused mass. When asked
+at his final examination "What he knew about Cromwell," he answered:
+"Cromwell interfered with the Irish, and he was put in prison. When he was
+in prison he wrote the Pilgrim's Progress, and he afterward married Mrs.
+O'Shea."
+
+This was equalled by the other boy who wrote at an examination: "Wolsey
+was a famous general who fought in the Crimean War, and who, after being
+decapitated several times, said to Cromwell: 'If I had served you as you
+have served me I would not have been deserted in my old age.'"
+
+Paul's studies were always dark and crooked to him till Florence bought
+copies of his books and studied them, and by patient sympathy made all
+that had been dark light, and all that had been crooked straight.
+
+The habit of giving definitions of abstractions to children, and expecting
+the definitions alone to be comprehended by children, is held up to
+deserved ridicule in the explanation of the word "analysis" to Paul, when
+Cornelia proposed to read the analysis of his character.
+
+"If my recollection serves me, the word analysis, as opposed to synthesis,
+is thus defined by Walker: 'The resolution of an object, whether of the
+senses or of the intellect, into its first elements.' As opposed to
+synthesis, you observe. _Now_ you know what analysis is, Dombey."
+
+How perfectly simple and clear and expanding this would be to a child's
+mind! Dickens says: "Dombey didn't seem absolutely blinded by the light
+let in upon his intellect, but he made Miss Blimber a little bow."
+
+What loose habits of thought, and how much hypocrisy and mental vagueness
+are caused by using words instead of realities in the early teaching of
+children, and then asking them if they understand what we have been
+telling them! The "little bow" has usually a demoralizing effect.
+
+It is a mere farce to call the committing to memory of definitions
+"education."
+
+Whatever the subjects, it is a dwarfing process, whether the definitions
+are memorized at home or at school, silently, by oral repetition, or by
+singing them. All definition learning as the origin of thought is certain
+to destroy interest and arrest development and lead to inaccuracy of
+thought. Miss Le Row's collection of blunders made by children could never
+have been made if the children had been taught properly.
+
+Such mistakes as "The body is mostly composed of water, and about one half
+of avaricious tissue" or "Parasite, a kind of umbrella," or "Emphasis,
+putting more distress on one word than on another," should suggest to
+teachers the absurdity of committing definitions to memory. It is one of
+the weakest forms of cramming, and is most ridiculous and least useful
+when the memorizing is done by simultaneous oral repetition.
+
+Hard Times exposes the evils of cramming in the teaching practised in the
+normal school in which Mr. M'Choakumchild was trained, and in the
+definition repetition as given by Bitzer, and so highly praised by Mr.
+Gradgrind:
+
+    "Bitzer, your definition of a horse:"
+
+    "Quadruped, graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders,
+    four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in
+    marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be
+    shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth."
+
+How clear this would make the conception of a horse to a man who had never
+seen one! Sissy Jupe, too, is used to show the failure of cramming to
+educate a girl of quick intellect and strong emotions. She could not be
+crammed.
+
+    M'Choakumchild reported that she had a very dense head for figures;
+    that, once possessed with a general idea of the globe, she took the
+    smallest conceivable interest in its exact measurements; that she was
+    extremely slow in the acquisition of dates, unless some pitiful
+    incident happened to be connected therewith; that she would burst into
+    tears on being required (by the mental process) immediately to name
+    the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteenpence
+    half-penny; that she was as low down in the school as low as could be;
+    that after eight weeks of induction into the elements of political
+    economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler three
+    feet high, for returning to the question, "What is the first principle
+    of this science?" the absurd answer, "To do unto others as I would
+    that they should do unto me."
+
+    Mr. Gradgrind observed, shaking his head, that all this was very bad;
+    that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of
+    knowledge as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular
+    statements A to Z; and that Jupe "must be kept to it." So Jupe was
+    kept to it, and became low-spirited, but no wiser.
+
+Dickens makes the artist in Somebody's Luggage say:
+
+    "Who are you passing every day at your competitive excruciations? The
+    fortunate candidates whose heads and livers you have turned upside
+    down for life? Not you, you are really passing the crammers and
+    coaches."
+
+And Jemmy Lirriper, in describing his teacher, said: "Oh, he was a Tartar!
+Keeping the boys up to the mark, holding examinations once a month,
+lecturing upon all sorts of subjects at all sorts of times, and knowing
+everything in the world out of a book."
+
+Dickens saw the evils of competitive examinations more clearly than many
+educators do two generations after him.
+
+When educators in schools, colleges, and universities learn a better way
+to promote pupils, to classify men and women and to rank them at
+graduation, than by holding promotion and graduation examinations cramming
+will be of no use, and there shall be no more cramming.
+
+Dickens was right as usual. The crammers and coaches are those who are
+tested by "competitive excruciations"; and how those who force through
+most students boast and strut and lord it over the less successful
+crammers and coaches on commencement days and other public occasions! What
+a misleading mockery examinations are as tests of power and character!
+
+Few even of Dickens's phrases contain such a condensation of fact and
+philosophy as the phrase "whose heads and livers you have turned upside
+down for life." Few phrases deserve more careful consideration from
+educators.
+
+Dickens makes the effect on the head still more startling by the
+description of Miss Wozenham's brother in Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy. "Miss
+Wozenham out of her small income had to support a brother that had had the
+misfortune to soften his brain against the hard mathematics."
+
+In the same story he laughs at the practical results of language cramming
+usually done in the schools:
+
+    And the way in which Jemmy spoke his French was a real charm. It was
+    often wanted of him, for whenever anybody spoke a syllable to me I
+    says "Noncomprenny, you're very kind but it's no use--Now Jemmy!" and
+    then Jemmy he fires away at 'em lovely, the only thing wanting in
+    Jemmy's French being as it appeared to me that he hardly ever
+    understood a word of what they said to him, which made it scarcely of
+    the use it might have been.
+
+Dickens attempted to picture the feelings of a boy toward his teachers in
+the days when cramming was almost universally practised in the story of
+Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Redforth, aged nine. When the Latin master was
+captured, he was saved by Captain Boldheart from the punishment of death
+to which he was condemned by the crew of The Beauty. Captain Boldheart had
+been one of his pupils, and he said: "Without taking your life, I must yet
+forever deprive you of the power of spiting other boys. I shall turn you
+adrift in this boat. You will find in her two oars, a compass, a bottle of
+rum, a small cask of water, a piece of pork, a bag of biscuit, and my
+Latin grammar. Go! and spite the natives if you can find any."
+
+When he afterward released him from the savages who were about to eat him,
+he granted him his life for the second time on condition:
+
+"1. That he should never under any circumstances presume to teach any boy
+anything any more.
+
+"2. That, if taken back to England, he should pass his life in travelling
+to find out boys who wanted their exercises done, and should do their
+exercises for nothing, and never say a word about it."
+
+When it finally became necessary to hang the Latin master, Boldheart
+"impressively pointed out to him that this is what spiters come to."
+
+There are many kinds of cram that yet pass as fairly respectable in
+schools and universities. When the teachers or the professors give notes
+to be copied by the pupils and memorized, they are cramming. When teachers
+are storing the memories of children with facts, tables, dates, etc., to
+be used at some future time, they are cramming. All memorizing by
+repetition of words, even if they are understood, is cram, if the pupil
+can work the thought into his life by repetition of process or of
+operation. Words can never take the place of self-activity, nor even of
+activity.
+
+So long as knowledge storing is placed above character development,
+examinations by "examiners" will retain their power for evil, and so long
+as such examinations are held cramming will continue.
+
+All processes that attempt to educate from without inward, instead of from
+within outward, are in the last analysis cram. The selfhood must be active
+in going out for the new knowledge. The child must himself be originative,
+directive, and executive in the learning process if cram is to be avoided
+completely. This is the only sure way to secure perfect apperception, and
+without apperception the new knowledge lies dormant, if not dead, and
+unrelated in the memory until it disappears, as did Bitherstone's. His
+declensions, according to Dickens, were not likely to last out his journey
+from England to India.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+FREE CHILDHOOD.
+
+
+Adulthood can never be truly free till childhood is free. Perfect freedom
+can not be developed in a soul filled with the apperceptive experiences of
+tyranny. No man is fully free in the freest country in the world who
+wishes to dominate even his child. The practice of tyranny develops the
+tyrant. Guiding control is entirely different from domination.
+
+Dickens taught the doctrine of a rich, full, free childhood from the time
+he wrote Nicholas Nickleby in 1839.
+
+    Even the sunburned faces of gipsy children, half naked though they be,
+    suggest a drop of comfort. It is a pleasant thing to see that the sun
+    has been there; to know that the air and light are on them every day;
+    to feel that they _are_ children, and lead children's lives; that if
+    their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of heaven, and not with
+    tears; that the limbs of their girls are free, and that they are not
+    crippled by distortions, imposing an unnatural and horrible penance
+    upon their sex; that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least
+    among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which
+    make young children old before they know what childhood is, and give
+    them the exhaustion and infirmity of age, without, like age, the
+    privilege to die. God send that old nursery tales were true, and that
+    gipsies stole such children by the score!
+
+If he had written nothing but this exquisite quotation from Nicholas
+Nickleby he would have deserved recognition as an educator. It shows a
+clear insight into the great principles of physical freedom, intellectual
+freedom, and spiritual freedom.
+
+In The Old Curiosity Shop he made the world sympathize with a child who
+lived with an old man. He gives the keynote to this fundamental thought of
+the book in the opening chapter:
+
+    It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into
+    the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks
+    their confidence and simplicity--two of the best qualities that Heaven
+    gives them--and demands that they share our sorrows before they are
+    capable of entering into our enjoyments.
+
+Little Nell had the sadness of a lonely childhood, though her grandfather
+lived with but the one aim of making her happy.
+
+In Martin Chuzzlewit--
+
+    Tom Pinch's sister was governess in a family, a lofty family; perhaps
+    the wealthiest brass and copper founder's family known to mankind.
+    They lived at Camberwell; in a house so big and fierce that its mere
+    outside, like the outside of a giant's castle, struck terror into
+    vulgar minds and made bold persons quail.
+
+When Mr. Pecksniff and his daughters went to visit Miss Pinch she
+
+    was at that moment instructing her eldest pupil; to wit, a premature
+    little woman of thirteen years old, who had already arrived at such a
+    pitch of whalebone and education that she had nothing girlish about
+    her, which was a source of great rejoicing to all her relations and
+    friends.
+
+One of the unsolved mysteries is the fact that such a large proportion of
+parents are so anxious to have their children grow up. The desire may be
+understood when poverty longs for the time when the little hands may help
+to win bread, but that wealthy parents should hasten the premature state
+of adulthood in their children is incomprehensible.
+
+A great deal of attention is paid to the blunder of robbing children of
+real childhood in Dombey and Son, which is so rich in several departments
+of educational philosophy. Doctor Blimber regarded the young gentlemen "as
+if they were born grown up."
+
+Paul's life and death were intended as warnings to ambitious parents.
+Florence was robbed of a true childhood by her mother's death and her
+father's lack of sympathy. Briggs and Tozer had no childhood; they were
+persecuted by the ingenious and ignorantly learned adults at home during
+vacations, as well as by Doctor Blimber during school time; so that "Tozer
+said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he would rather stay at
+school than go home."
+
+Poor Bitherstone had no childhood. He was shipped away from his parents in
+India to the respectable hell conducted by that widely known and highly
+reputed child trainer Mrs. Pipchin.
+
+Poor little Miss Pankey spent a great deal of her time in Mrs. Pipchin's
+"correctional dungeon." What a mercy it would be if all such unfortunate
+children could be stolen by the gipsies!
+
+Mrs. Pipchin's theory taught "that it was wrong to encourage a child's
+mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by
+force like an oyster."
+
+When Doctor Blimber asked Paul, six-year-old Paul, "if he would like them
+to make a man of him," the child replied:
+
+"I had rather be a child."
+
+One of Dickens's most successful hits at the common philosophy, that the
+desired adult characteristics must be developed in childhood in their
+adult forms, was made in describing Mrs. Tozer's effort to qualify Tozer
+for the position of a clergyman by making him wear a stiff, starched
+necktie while he was a boy.
+
+When Edith upbraided her mother for practically compelling her to marry
+Mr. Dombey, her mother asked angrily:
+
+    "What do you mean? Haven't you from a child----"
+
+    "A child!" said Edith, looking at her; "when was I a child? What
+    childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman--artful, designing,
+    mercenary, laying snares for men--before I knew myself or you, or even
+    understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learned.
+    You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride
+    to-night."
+
+    "You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own mother."
+
+    "It seems so to me; stranger to me than to you," said Edith. "But my
+    education was completed long ago. I am too old now and have fallen too
+    low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to help
+    myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman's breast, and makes it
+    true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else to
+    sustain me when I despise myself."
+
+Later, on the night before she was to marry Mr. Dombey, she said:
+
+    "Oh, mother, mother, if you had but left me to my natural heart when I
+    too was a girl--a younger girl than Florence--how different I might
+    have been!"
+
+Bleak House gives Dickens's most striking picture of the deterioration
+resulting from giving no real childhood to children for a series of
+generations.
+
+    During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree,
+    the house of Smallweed, always early to go to business and late to
+    marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has
+    discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales,
+    fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the
+    gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it, and that the
+    complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed
+    to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their
+    minds.
+
+    There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several
+    generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child,
+    until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak in her
+    intellect, and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With
+    such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory,
+    understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall asleep
+    over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother has undoubtedly
+    brightened the family.
+
+There could be no more awful picture than that of a family in which for a
+series of generations the children had been, through heredity and
+training, made "little old men and women," who were never permitted to
+indulge in any childish plays, or to enjoy any stories, or in any way have
+a genuine childhood, so that they not only came to look like monkeys, but
+"like monkeys with something depressing on their minds"; and in which the
+only child for several generations had been Mr. Smallweed's grandmother,
+when she became weak in intellect and "fell (for the first time) into a
+childish state."
+
+In The Haunted House the wretched child who came to Mr. Redlaw's room is
+described as "a baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a
+child."
+
+Dickens made his greatest plea for a free childhood in Hard Times. The
+whole of the educational part of the book condemns the training of Mr.
+Gradgrind, although he was an earnest, high-minded gentleman, whose
+supreme purpose was to train his family in the best possible way. Indeed
+Mr. Gradgrind was so sure he was right in his views regarding child
+training that he founded a school to teach the children of Coketown in
+accordance with what he believed to be correct principles.
+
+Mr. Gradgrind is described as
+
+    a kind cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow
+    children clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He
+    seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical
+    substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed
+    away.
+
+    There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They
+    had been lectured at from their tenderest years; coursed, like little
+    hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone they had been made to
+    run to the lecture room. The first object with which they had an
+    association or of which they had a remembrance was a large blackboard
+    with a dry ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.
+
+    Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an ogre. Fact
+    forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing
+    castle, with heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking
+    childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the
+    hair.
+
+    No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the
+    moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever
+    learned the silly jingle, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder
+    what you are"; it had never known wonder on the subject, having at
+    five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen and
+    driven Charles's Wain like a locomotive engine driver. No little
+    Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow
+    with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who
+    killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who
+    swallowed Tom Thumb; it had never heard of those celebrities, and had
+    only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped
+    with several stomachs.
+
+The effect of preventing all kinds of enjoyment for his children in their
+own home was that they naturally sought for enjoyment surreptitiously in a
+way of which their father disapproved. But when a man disapproves of
+legitimate amusements in his family his condemnation of what is improper
+will have little weight with his children.
+
+When Mr. Gradgrind was going home from the school examination he had to
+pass near the circus, and he was amazed to find his daughter Louisa and
+his son Thomas stealing a view of the performance.
+
+    Phenomenon almost incredible though distinctly seen, what did he then
+    behold but his own metallurgical Louisa peeping with all her might
+    through a hole in a deal board, and his own mathematical Thomas
+    abasing himself on the ground to catch but a hoof of the graceful
+    equestrian Tyrolean flower act!
+
+    Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where his
+    family was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring child, and
+    said:
+
+    "Louisa! Thomas!"
+
+    Both rose, red and disconcerted. But Louisa looked at her father with
+    more boldness than Thomas did. Indeed, Thomas did not look at him, but
+    gave himself up to be taken home like a machine.
+
+    "In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!" said Mr. Gradgrind,
+    leading each away by a hand; "what do you do here?"
+
+    "Wanted to see what it was like," returned Louisa shortly.
+
+    "What it was like?"
+
+    "Yes, father."
+
+    There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in
+    the girl; yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face,
+    there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to
+    burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which
+    brightened its expression. Not with the brightness natural to cheerful
+    youth, but with uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had
+    something painful in them, analogous to the changes on a blind face
+    groping its way.
+
+    "You! Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the sciences is open,
+    Thomas and you, who may be said to be replete with facts, Thomas and
+    you, who have been trained to mathematical exactness, Thomas and you,
+    here!" cried Mr. Gradgrind. "In this degraded position! I am amazed."
+
+    "I was tired, father. I have been tired a long time," said Louisa.
+
+    "Tired? Of what?" asked the astonished father.
+
+    "I don't know of what--of everything, I think."
+
+When they reached home, Mr. Gradgrind in an injured tone said to Mrs.
+Gradgrind, after telling her where he had found the children:
+
+    "I should as soon have expected to find my children reading poetry."
+
+    "Dear me," whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind. "How can you, Louisa and Thomas!
+    I wonder at you. As if, with my head in its present throbbing state,
+    you couldn't go and look at the shells and minerals and things
+    provided for you, instead of circuses!" said Mrs. Gradgrind. "You know
+    as well as I do, no young people have circus masters, or keep circuses
+    in cabinets, or attend lectures about circuses. What can you possibly
+    want to know of circuses then? I am sure you have enough to do, if
+    that's what you want. With my head in its present state, I couldn't
+    remember the mere names of half the facts you have got to attend to."
+
+    "That's the reason!" pouted Louisa.
+
+    "Don't tell me that's the reason, because it can be nothing of the
+    sort," said Mrs. Gradgrind. "Go and be something-ological directly."
+
+After Louisa had married Mr. Bounderby, Tom and Mr. Harthouse were
+discussing her one evening, and Tom said she thought a great deal when she
+was alone:
+
+    "Ay, ay? Has resources of her own," said Harthouse.
+
+    "Not so much of that as you may suppose," returned Tom; "for our
+    governor had her crammed with all sorts of dry bones and sawdust. It's
+    his system."
+
+    "Formed his daughter on his own model?" suggested Harthouse.
+
+    "His daughter? Ah! and everybody else. Why, he formed me that way,"
+    said Tom.
+
+    "Impossible!"
+
+    "He did though," said Tom, shaking his head. "I mean to say, Mr.
+    Harthouse, that when I first left home and went to old Bounderby's, I
+    was as flat as a warming-pan, and knew no more about life than any
+    oyster does."
+
+Dickens describes a visit Louisa made to her father's house, and shows how
+little of the true home feeling was stirred in her heart, as she
+approached the place, where she should have had a happy childhood.
+
+    Neither, as she approached her old home now, did any of the best
+    influences of old home descend upon her. Her remembrances of home and
+    childhood were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and
+    fountain in her young heart as it gushed out. The golden waters were
+    not there. They were flowing for the fertilization of the land where
+    grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.
+
+When her father proposed to Louisa that she should marry Mr. Bounderby,
+she said:
+
+    "The baby preference that even I have heard of as common among
+    children has never had its innocent resting place in my breast. You
+    have been so careful of me, that I never had a child's heart. You have
+    trained me so well, that I never dreamed a child's dream. You have
+    dealt so wisely with me, father, from my cradle to this hour, that I
+    never had a child's belief or a child's fear."
+
+Mr. Gradgrind was delighted at his apparent success. He could not see, he
+was so practical and so self-opinionated, that her heart was breaking
+while she was yielding with external calmness.
+
+But the reaping time came soon. Mr. Harthouse, young, attractive, and
+unscrupulous, made love to Louisa, and finally persuaded her to run away
+with him. Unable to resist the temptation in her own strength, she fled to
+her father's house through an awful storm.
+
+    The thunder was rolling into distance, and the rain was pouring down
+    like a deluge, when the door of his room opened. He looked round the
+    lamp upon his table, and saw with amazement his eldest daughter.
+
+    "Louisa!"
+
+    "Father, I want to speak to you."
+
+    "What is the matter? What is it? I conjure you, Louisa, tell me what
+    is the matter."
+
+    She dropped into a chair before him, and put her cold hand on his arm.
+
+    "Father, you have trained me from my cradle."
+
+    "Yes, Louisa."
+
+    "I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny."
+
+    He looked at her in doubt and dread, vacantly repeating, "Curse the
+    hour! Curse the hour!"
+
+    "How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable
+    things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the
+    graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you
+    done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have
+    bloomed once, in this great wilderness here?"
+
+    She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.
+
+    "If it had ever been here, its ashes alone would save me from the void
+    in which my whole life sinks."
+
+    He tightened his hold in time to prevent her sinking on the floor, but
+    she cried out in a terrible voice, "I shall die if you hold me! Let me
+    fall upon the ground!" And he laid her down there, and saw the pride
+    of his heart and the triumph of his system lying, an insensible heap,
+    at his feet.
+
+In the Schoolboy's Story, the boy who was to have no holiday at home was
+invited to spend his holidays with "Old Cheeseman" and Mrs. Cheeseman.
+
+    So I went to their delightful house, and was as happy as I could
+    possibly be. They understand how to conduct themselves toward boys,
+    _they_ do. When they take a boy to the play, for instance, they _do_
+    take him. They don't go in after it's begun, or come out before it's
+    over. They know how to bring a boy up, too. Look at their own! Though
+    he is very little as yet, what a capital boy he is! Why, my next
+    favourite to Mrs. Cheeseman and Old Cheeseman is young Cheeseman.
+
+When Dickens came to his last book his heart was still full of sympathy
+with the child.
+
+Edwin Drood said to Mr. Jasper: "Life for you is a plum with the natural
+bloom on. It hasn't been over-carefully wiped off for _you_."
+
+In the same book Mr. Grewgious is described:
+
+    He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding
+    mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried
+    snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency
+    like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it
+    must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of
+    anybody's voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature
+    that his face presented was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves
+    that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his
+    forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them
+    into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away
+    the chisel, and said, "I really can not be worried to finish off this
+    man; let him go as he is."
+
+He tried to explain the reason for his peculiarities to Rosa:
+
+    "I mean," he explained, "that young ways were never my ways. I was the
+    only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I half believe I
+    was born advanced in life myself. No personality is intended toward
+    the name you will so soon change, when I remark that while the general
+    growth of people seem to have come into existence buds, I seem to have
+    come into existence a chip. I was a chip--and a very dry one--when I
+    first became aware of myself."
+
+Dickens takes a front rank among the educators who have tried to save the
+child from "child-quellers," and preserve for them the right to a free,
+rich, real childhood. The saddest sight in the world to him was a child
+such as he pictured in A Tale of Two Cities: "The children of St. Antoine
+had ancient faces and grave voices."
+
+In Barbox Brothers Mr. Jackson said of himself: "I am, to myself, an
+unintelligible book, with the earlier chapters all torn out and thrown
+away. My childhood had no grace of childhood, my youth had no charm of
+youth, and what can be expected from such a lost beginning?"
+
+Dickens tried to save all children from such a beginning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+INDIVIDUALITY.
+
+
+Dickens began to write definitely about individuality in Martin Chuzzlewit
+in 1844. Martin described a company he met in America "who were so
+strangely devoid of individual traits of character that any one of them
+might have changed minds with the other and nobody would have found it
+out."
+
+In David Copperfield he makes Traddles, who was trained by Mr. Creakle,
+say: "I have no invention at all, not a particle. I suppose there never
+was a young man with less originality than I have."
+
+David himself said sagely: "I have encountered some fine ladies and
+gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars."
+
+David emphasizes the phase of individuality that teaches the power of each
+individual to do some special good, when he said to Martha when she spoke
+of the river as the end of her useless life:
+
+"In the name of the great Judge, before whom you and all of us must stand
+at his dread time, dismiss that terrible idea! We can all do some good, if
+we will."
+
+In Bleak House Sir Leicester Dedlock is represented as of opinion that he
+should at least think for every one in connection with his estate.
+
+    The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He
+    supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual
+    characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born
+    to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a
+    discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned--would never
+    recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.
+
+The same absolute contempt for the individuality of the poor is ridiculed
+in The Chimes. Sir Joseph Bowley is a type of the English squire who used
+to act on the assumption that he had to care for the workmen on his
+estate, and the poor of his neighbourhood, as he did for his horses and
+other animals.
+
+    "I do my duty as the Poor Man's Friend and Father; and I endeavour to
+    educate his mind by inculcating on all occasions the one great moral
+    lesson which that class requires--that is, entire Dependence on
+    myself. They have no business whatever with--with themselves. If
+    wicked and designing persons tell them otherwise, and they become
+    impatient and discontented, and are guilty of insubordinate conduct
+    and black-hearted ingratitude--which is undoubtedly the case--I am
+    their Friend and Father still. It is so ordained. It is in the nature
+    of things. They needn't trouble themselves to think about anything. I
+    will think for them; I know what is good for them; I am their
+    perpetual parent. Such is the dispensation of an all-wise Providence."
+
+It is strange that men so commonly ascribe to Providence the dreadful
+conditions which have resulted from man's ignorance and selfishness, and
+which Providence intended man to reform.
+
+Esther, in Bleak House, speaking of the influence of the chancery suit on
+Richard Carstone, said:
+
+    "The character of much older and steadier people may be even changed
+    by the circumstances surrounding them. It would be too much to expect
+    that a boy's, in its formation, should be the subject of such
+    influences, and escape them."
+
+    I felt this to be true; though, if I may venture to mention what I
+    thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard's
+    education had not counteracted those influences or directed his
+    character. He had been eight years at a public school, and had
+    learned, I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts, in the
+    most admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody's
+    business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings
+    lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to _him_. _He_ had been adapted
+    to the verses, and had learned the art of making them to such
+    perfection, that if he had remained at school until he was of age I
+    suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over again,
+    unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it.
+    Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very
+    improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and
+    always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would
+    not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his
+    studying them quite so much.
+
+Richard was one of those unstable men who have good abilities, but who do
+not use them persistently in the accomplishment of any one purpose, and
+who never seem to find the sphere for which they are best fitted. They are
+man-products, not God-products. When Richard, after several attempts to
+work at other things with high enthusiasm for a few weeks, decided to be a
+physician, Esther said:
+
+    Mistrusting that he only came to this conclusion because, having never
+    had much chance of finding out for himself what he was fitted for, and
+    having never been guided to the discovery, he was taken with the
+    newest idea, and was glad to get rid of the trouble of consideration,
+    I wondered whether the Latin verses often ended in this, or whether
+    Richard's was a solitary case.
+
+    Richard very often came to see us while we remained in London (though
+    he soon failed in his letter writing), and with his quick abilities,
+    his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and freshness, was
+    always delightful. But though I liked him more and more the better I
+    knew him, I still felt more and more how much it was to be regretted
+    that he had been educated in no habits of application and
+    concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same
+    manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in
+    character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks,
+    always with fair credit, and often with distinction; but in a fitful,
+    dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities
+    in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They
+    were great qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously
+    won; but, like fire and water, though excellent servants, they were
+    very bad masters. If they had been under Richard's direction, they
+    would have been his friends; but Richard being under their direction,
+    they became his enemies.
+
+Any educational system that "addresses hundreds of boys exactly in the
+same manner" must destroy their individuality.
+
+In Hard Times Tom Gradgrind became a low, degraded, sensual, dissipated
+criminal, and Dickens accounts for his failure by the unnatural restraint,
+constant oversight, and the strangling of his imagination in his cradle
+and afterward. In other words, the boy's selfhood never had a chance to
+develop, and every power he had naturally to make him strong, true, and
+independent had helped to work his ruin.
+
+In Little Dorrit Mrs. General is herself a model to be avoided, and her
+system of training is ridiculed because she paid no attention whatever to
+the selfhood of her pupils except to conceal it artfully and prevent the
+recognition of any of the evils by which it was surrounded and which it
+should help to overcome.
+
+    Mrs. General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent
+    it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental
+    grooves or rails, on which she started little trains of other people's
+    opinions, which never overtook one another and never got anywhere.
+    Even her propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the
+    world; but Mrs. General's way of getting rid of it was to put it out
+    of sight, and make believe that there was no such thing. This was
+    another of her ways of forming a mind--to cram all articles of
+    difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no
+    existence. It was the easiest way and, beyond all comparison, the
+    properest.
+
+    Mrs. General was not to be told of anything shocking. Accidents,
+    miseries, and offences were never to be mentioned before her. Passion
+    was to go to sleep in the presence of Mrs. General, and blood was to
+    change to milk and water. The little that was left in the world, when
+    all these deductions were made, it was Mrs. General's province to
+    varnish. In that formation process of hers, she dipped the smallest of
+    brushes into the largest of pots, and varnished the surface of every
+    object that came under consideration. The more cracked it was, the
+    more Mrs. General varnished it.
+
+    There was varnish in Mrs. General's voice, varnish in Mrs. General's
+    touch, an atmosphere of varnish round Mrs. General's figure.
+
+Dickens wished the training of the real inner selfhood, not the varnishing
+of the surface merely. Not what George Macdonald describes as
+"sandpapering a boy into a saint," but genuine character development by
+the working out of the selfhood in the improvement of its environment,
+physically, intellectually, and spiritually.
+
+Briggs's education, in Dombey and Son, had been of such a character that
+"his intellectual fruit had nothing of its original flavour remaining."
+The character of his real selfhood had been destroyed, not developed, by
+his "education."
+
+In Our Mutual Friend Mr. Podsnap is used as a type of the men who not only
+see no need for any person else forming opinions, but who take pains to
+prevent others forming opinions, so far as possible.
+
+    As Mr. Podsnap stood with his back to the drawing-room fire, pulling
+    up his shirt collar, like a veritable cock of the walk literally
+    pluming himself in the midst of his possessions, nothing would have
+    astonished him more than an intimation that Miss Podsnap, or any young
+    person properly born and bred, could not be exactly put away like the
+    plate, brought out like the plate, polished like the plate, counted,
+    weighed, and valued like the plate. That such a young person could
+    possibly have a morbid vacancy in the heart for anything younger than
+    the plate, or less monotonous than the plate, or that such a young
+    person's thoughts could try to scale the region bounded on the north,
+    south, east, and west by the plate, was a monstrous imagination which
+    he would on the spot have flourished into space.
+
+Eugene Wrayburn's criticism of his father's habit of choosing professions
+for his sons almost as soon as they were born, or even before, without the
+slightest possible consideration for their natural aptitudes for the work
+to which they were assigned, is a severe attack on a condition which
+exists even yet through the failure of the schools or the homes to
+discover and reveal to boys and girls their highest powers, so that they
+may reach their best growth in school or college and choose the profession
+in which they can do most good and attain their most complete evolution.
+There is no better field for co-ordinate work by the home and the school
+than the joint study of the children to find their sphere of greatest
+power. Every child should be helped to find the sphere in which he can
+most successfully achieve the highest destiny for himself and for
+humanity.
+
+Eugene Wrayburn's father extended his paternal care and forethought for
+his children not only by choosing their professions without regard for
+their selfhood, but by considerately selecting partners for his sons
+without regard for their individual tastes.
+
+Eugene, speaking to Mortimer Lightwood, said:
+
+    "My respected father has found, down in the parental neighbourhood, a
+    wife for his not-generally-respected son."
+
+    "With some money, of course?"
+
+    "With some money, of course, or he would not have found her. My
+    respected father--let me shorten the dutiful tautology by substituting
+    in future M. R. F., which sounds military, and rather like the Duke of
+    Wellington."
+
+    "What an absurd fellow you are, Eugene!"
+
+    "Not at all. I assure you. M. R. F. having always in the clearest
+    manner provided (as he calls it) for his children by prearranging from
+    the hour of the birth of each, and sometimes from an earlier period,
+    what the devoted little victim's calling and course in life should be,
+    M. R. F. prearranged for myself that I was to be the barrister I am
+    (with the slight addition of an enormous practice, which has not
+    accrued), and also the married man I am not."
+
+    "The first you have often told me."
+
+    "The first I have often told you. Considering myself sufficiently
+    incongruous on my legal eminence, I have until now suppressed my
+    domestic destiny. You know M. R. F., but not as well as I do. If you
+    knew him as well as I do, he would amuse you."
+
+    "Filially spoken, Eugene!"
+
+    "Perfectly so, believe me; and with every sentiment of affectionate
+    deference toward M. R. F. But if he amuses me, I can't help it. When
+    my eldest brother was born, of course the rest of us knew (I mean the
+    rest of us would have known, if we had been in existence) that he was
+    heir to the family embarrassments--we call it before company the
+    family estate. But when my second brother was going to be born by and
+    by, 'This,' says M. R. F., 'is a little pillar of the church.' _Was_
+    born, and became a pillar of the church--a very shaky one. My third
+    brother appeared considerably in advance of his engagement to my
+    mother; but M. R. F., not at all put out by surprise, instantly
+    declared him a circumnavigator. Was pitchforked into the navy, but has
+    not circumnavigated. I announced myself, and was disposed of with the
+    highly satisfactory results embodied before you. When my younger
+    brother was half an hour old, it was settled by M. R. F. that he
+    should have a mechanical genius, and so on. Therefore I say M. R. F.
+    amuses me."
+
+In the same book Bradley Headstone's school is described as one of a
+system of schools in which "school buildings, school-teachers, and school
+pupils are all according to pattern, and all engendered in the light of
+the latest Gospel according to Monotony."
+
+Bradley Headstone himself was a mechanical product of a mechanical system
+of uniformity that destroyed independence and individuality of character.
+
+    Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent
+    white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of
+    pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its
+    decent hair guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man
+    of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there
+    was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there
+    were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics
+    in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store
+    of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically,
+    sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments
+    mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his
+    early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage.
+    The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always
+    ready to meet the demands of retail dealers--history here, geography
+    there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left--natural
+    history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics,
+    and what not, all in their several places--this care had imparted to
+    his countenance a look of care.
+
+    Suppression of so much to make room for so much had given him a
+    constrained manner over and above.
+
+The most remarkable description of a system of training that totally
+ignored individuality and chipped and battered and moulded and squeezed
+all students into the same pattern or mould is the description of the
+normal school in which Mr. Gradgrind's teacher, Mr. M'Choakumchild, was
+trained. "Mr. M'Choakumchild and 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 piano legs."
+
+Volumes could not make the sacrifice of individuality clearer than this
+sentence does.
+
+At "the grinders' school boys were taught as parrots are."
+
+Doctor Blimber was condemned because in his system "Nature was of no
+consequence at all; no matter what a boy was intended to bear, Doctor
+Blimber made him bear to pattern somehow or other."
+
+In Doctor Strong's school "we had plenty of liberty." The boys had also
+"noble games out of doors" in this model school of Dickens. Liberty and
+noble outdoor sports are the best agencies yet revealed to man for the
+development of full selfhood in harmony with the fundamental law of
+education, self-activity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE CULTURE OF THE IMAGINATION.
+
+
+In the preface to the first number of Household Words Dickens said that
+one of the objects he had in view in publishing the magazine was to aid in
+the development of the imagination of children.
+
+From the time of Barnaby Rudge his unconscious recognition of the right of
+the child to have his imagination made freer and stronger can be felt in
+his writings. His conscious recognition of the absolute necessity of child
+freedom included the ideal of the culture of the imagination.
+
+He reached his educational meridian in Hard Times, and the pedagogy of
+this book was devoted almost entirely to child freedom and the
+imagination; to revealing the fatal error of Mr. Gradgrind's philosophy,
+which taught that fact storing was the true way to form a child's mind and
+character, entirely ignoring the fact that feeling and imagination are the
+strongest elements of intellectual power and clearness.
+
+In Bleak House, which immediately preceded Hard Times, he gave a very able
+description of the effects of the neglect of the development of the
+imagination for several generations in the characteristics of the
+Smallweed family.
+
+    The Smallweeds had strengthened themselves in their practical
+    character, discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks,
+    fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities
+    whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to
+    it, and that the complete little men and women it has produced have
+    been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something
+    depressing on their minds.
+
+    Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is in a helpless condition as to his
+    lower, and nearly so as to his upper limbs; but his mind is
+    unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever held, the first four rules of
+    arithmetic, and a certain small collection of the hardest facts. In
+    respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and other such phrenological
+    attributes, it is no worse off than it used to be. Everything that Mr.
+    Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first,
+    and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single
+    butterfly.
+
+This alone is a treatise of great suggestiveness on the need of the
+development of the imagination and the means by which it should be
+developed.
+
+Hard Times was evidently intended to show the weakness of the Herbartian
+psychology. Dickens believed in the distinctive soul as the real selfhood
+of each child, and as the only true reality in his nature, the dominating
+influence in his life and character. He did not believe that knowledge
+formed the soul, but that the soul transformed knowledge. He did not
+believe that knowledge gave form, colour, and tone to the soul, but that
+the soul gave new form, colour, and tone to knowledge. He ridiculed the
+idea that the educator by using great care in the selection of his
+knowledge could produce a man of such a character as he desired; that ten
+pounds of yellow knowledge and ten pounds of blue knowledge judiciously
+mixed in a boy would certainly produce twenty pounds of green manhood.
+
+He believed that in every child there is an element "defying all the
+calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic than
+his Creator is." He did not agree with the psychology of which Mr.
+Gradgrind was the impersonation. Mr. Gradgrind believed that he could
+reduce human nature in all its complexities to statistics, and that "with
+his rule, and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table, he could
+weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it
+comes to."
+
+Mr. Gradgrind had established a school for the training of the children of
+Coketown, and had engaged Mr. M'Choakumchild to teach it. Dickens
+criticised the normal school training of his time in his description of
+Mr. M'Choakumchild's preparation for the work of stimulating young life
+to larger, richer growth.
+
+    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 as 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 through 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 watersheds 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! Mr. M'Choakumchild, rather overdone. If he had only learned a
+    little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!
+
+Dickens criticised the lack of professional training, and the fact-storing
+process which subordinated feeling and imagination.
+
+Mr. Gradgrind's school was to be opened. The government officer was
+present to examine it. Mr. Gradgrind made a short opening address:
+
+    "Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
+    facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root
+    out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals
+    upon facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is
+    the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the
+    principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to facts, sir!"
+
+    The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the
+    speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by
+    underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve.
+    The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead,
+    which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious
+    cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis
+    was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.
+    The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible,
+    dry, and dictatorial.
+
+    "In this life we want nothing but facts, sir; nothing but facts."
+
+    The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present,
+    all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of
+    little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have
+    imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the
+    brim.
+
+Most of the schoolrooms of the world are yet "plain, bare, monotonous
+vaults," although nearly fifty years after Dickens pointed out the need of
+artistic form and artistic decoration in schools we are beginning to awake
+to the idea that the architecture, the colouring, and the art on the walls
+and in the cabinets of schools may influence the characters of children
+more even than the teaching.
+
+Mr. Gradgrind proceeded to ask a few questions of the pupils, who in this
+new school were to be known by numbers--so much more statistical and
+mathematical--and not by their names.
+
+As he stood before the pupils, who were seated in rows on a gallery, "he
+seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to
+blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He
+seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical
+substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed
+away."
+
+In the last sentence Dickens reveals the true philosophy of sustaining and
+developing natural and therefore productive interest, and explains how,
+after destroying it, teachers try to galvanize it into spasmodic activity.
+
+    "Girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his
+    square forefinger. "I don't know that girl. Who is that girl?"
+
+    "Sissy Jupe, sir," explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and
+    courtesying.
+
+    "Sissy is not a name," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Don't call yourself Sissy.
+    Call yourself Cecilia."
+
+    "It's father as calls me Sissy, sir," returned the young girl in a
+    trembling voice, and with another courtesy.
+
+    "Then he has no business to do it," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Tell him he
+    mustn't. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?"
+
+    "He belongs to the horse riding, if you please, sir."
+
+    Mr. Gradgrind frowned and waved off the objectionable calling with his
+    hand.
+
+    "We don't want to know anything about that here. You mustn't tell us
+    about that here. Your father breaks horses, don't he?"
+
+    "If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break
+    horses in the ring, sir."
+
+    "You mustn't tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then, describe
+    your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?"
+
+    "Oh, yes, sir."
+
+    "Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and
+    horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse."
+
+    (Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
+
+    "Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!" said Mr. Gradgrind for
+    the general behoof of all the little pitchers. "Girl number twenty
+    possessed of no facts in reference to one of the commonest of animals!
+    Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours."
+
+    Bitzer: "Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four
+    grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the
+    spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring
+    to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth----" Thus (and much
+    more) Bitzer.
+
+    "Now, girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, "you know what a horse
+    is."
+
+The keen edge of Dickens's sarcasm will be felt when it is remembered that
+Sissy Jupe was born among horses, had lived with them, played with them,
+and ridden them all her life, but was "ignorant of the commonest facts
+regarding a horse." She could not define a horse.
+
+The government examiner then stepped forward:
+
+    "Very well," said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his
+    arms. "That's a horse. Now let me ask you girls and boys, would you
+    paper a room with representations of horses?"
+
+    After a pause, one half the children cried in chorus, "Yes, sir!" Upon
+    which the other half, seeing in the gentleman's face that "Yes" was
+    wrong, cried out in chorus, "No, sir!"--as the custom is in these
+    examinations.
+
+    "Of course, no. Why wouldn't you?"
+
+    A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing,
+    ventured the answer, because he wouldn't paper a room at all, but
+    would paint it.
+
+    "You _must_ paper it," said the gentleman rather warmly.
+
+    "You must paper it," said Thomas Gradgrind, "whether you like it or
+    not. Don't tell _us_ you wouldn't paper it. What do you mean, boy?"
+
+    "I'll explain to you, then," said the gentleman, after another and a
+    dismal pause, "why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of
+    horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms
+    in reality--in fact? Do you?"
+
+    "Yes, sir!" from one half, "No, sir!" from the other.
+
+    "Of course, no," said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the
+    wrong half. "Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don't see
+    in fact; you are not to have anywhere what you don't have in fact.
+    What is called taste is only another name for fact."
+
+    Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.
+
+    "This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery," said the
+    gentleman. "Now, I'll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet
+    a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon
+    it?"
+
+    There being a general conviction by this time that "No, sir!" was
+    always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of "No" was very
+    strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said "Yes," among them Sissy
+    Jupe.
+
+    "Girl number twenty," said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength
+    of knowledge.
+
+    Sissy blushed, and stood up.
+
+    "So you would carpet your room--or your husband's room, if you were a
+    grown woman and had a husband--with representations of flowers, would
+    you? Why would you?"
+
+    "If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers," said the girl.
+
+    "And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have
+    people walking over them with heavy boots?"
+
+    "It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They wouldn't crush and wither, if you
+    please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty, and
+    pleasant, and I would fancy----"
+
+    "Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy," cried the gentleman, quite elated
+    by coming so happily to this point. "That's it! You are never to
+    fancy."
+
+    "Fact, fact, fact," said the gentleman.
+
+    "Fact, fact, fact," repeated Mr. Gradgrind.
+
+    "You are to be in all things regulated and governed," said the
+    gentleman, "by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact,
+    composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a
+    people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word
+    Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have,
+    in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in
+    fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you can not be allowed to
+    walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and
+    butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you can not be
+    permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery.
+    You must use for all these purposes combinations and modifications (in
+    primary colours) of mathematical figures, which are susceptible of
+    proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This
+    is taste."
+
+Then Mr. M'Choakumchild was asked to teach his first lesson.
+
+    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?
+
+The "maiming and distorting" of the imagination filled Dickens with alarm.
+He recognised with great clearness the law that all evil springs from
+misused good, and he knew that if the imagination is not cultivated
+properly the child not only loses the many intellectual and spiritual
+advantages that would result from its true culture, but that it is exposed
+to the terrible danger of a distorted imagination. Tom Gradgrind is used
+as a type of the degradation that results from "the strangling of the
+imagination." Its ghost lived on to drag him down "in the form of
+grovelling sensualities." That which, truly used, has most power to
+ennoble, has also, when warped or dwarfed, most power to degrade.
+
+As Mr. Varden told his wife, "All good things perverted to evil purposes
+are worse than those which are naturally bad."
+
+The five young Gradgrinds had little opportunity to develop their
+imaginations. They were watched too closely to have any imaginative plays;
+they were not allowed to read poetry or fiction; they heard no stories;
+they had no fairies or genii in their lives; they heard nothing of giants
+or such false things; no little Boy Blue ever blew his horn for them; no
+Jack Horner took a plum out of any pie in their experience; no such
+ridiculous person as Santa Claus ever put anything in their stockings; no
+cow ever performed the impossible feat of jumping over the moon, so far as
+they knew; they had never even heard of the cow with the crumpled horn
+that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the
+malt that lay in the house that Jack built. They knew, or they could say,
+that a cow was "a graminivorous ruminating quadruped," and that was
+enough, in the philosophy of Mr. Gradgrind.
+
+Sissy Jupe's father got into difficulties in Coketown, and he became
+discouraged and ran away. Mr. Gradgrind was a good man, and meant to do
+right, so he adopted Sissy.
+
+He told her his intentions rather bluntly:
+
+    "Jupe, I have made up my mind to take you into my house, and, when you
+    are not in attendance at the school, to employ you about Mrs.
+    Gradgrind, who is rather an invalid. I have explained to Miss
+    Louisa--this is Miss Louisa--the miserable but natural end of your
+    late career; and you are to expressly understand that the whole of
+    that subject is past, and is not to be referred to any more. From
+    this time you begin your history. You are, at present, ignorant, I
+    know."
+
+    "Yes, sir, very," she answered, courtesying.
+
+    "I shall have the satisfaction of causing you to be strictly educated;
+    and you will be a living proof to all who come into communication with
+    you, of the advantages of the training you will receive. You will be
+    reclaimed and formed. You have been in the habit of reading to your
+    father and those people I found you among, I dare say?" said Mr.
+    Gradgrind, beckoning her nearer to him before he said so, and dropping
+    his voice.
+
+    "Only to father and Merrylegs, sir. At least, I mean to father, when
+    Merrylegs was always there."
+
+    "Never mind Merrylegs, Jupe," said Mr. Gradgrind with a passing frown.
+    "I don't ask about him. I understand you to have been in the habit of
+    reading to your father?"
+
+    "Oh, yes, sir, thousands of times. They were the happiest--oh, of all
+    the happy times we had together, sir!"
+
+    It was only now, when her grief broke out, that Louisa looked at her.
+
+    "And what," asked Mr. Gradgrind in a still lower voice, "did you read
+    to your father, Jupe?"
+
+    "About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the
+    Genies," she sobbed out.
+
+    "There," said Mr. Gradgrind, "that is enough. Never breathe a word of
+    such destructive nonsense any more."
+
+One night, in their study den,
+
+    Louisa had been overheard to begin a conversation with her brother by
+    saying, "Tom, I wonder--" upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person
+    overhearing, stepped forth into the light, and said, "Louisa, never
+    wonder!"
+
+    Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating
+    the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and
+    affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction,
+    multiplication, and division settle everything somehow, and never
+    wonder. "Bring to me," says Mr. M'Choakumchild, "yonder baby just able
+    to walk, and I will engage that it will never wonder."
+
+Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M'Choakumchild deliberately planned, as a result of
+a false psychology, to destroy all foolish dreamings and imaginings and
+wonderings by the children. This same wonder power is the mightiest
+stimulus to mental and spiritual effort, the source of all true interest,
+man's leader in his work of productive investigation.
+
+Wonder power should increase throughout the life of the child.
+Unfortunately, the Gradgrind philosophy is practised by many educators.
+The child's natural wonder power is dwarfed, and an unnatural interest is
+substituted for it. Teachers kill the natural interest, and then try to
+galvanize its dead body into temporary activity. The child who was made a
+wonderer and a problem finder by God is made a problem solver by teachers.
+His dreamings and fancies have been stopped, and he has been stored with
+facts and made "practical."
+
+Mr. Gradgrind was much exercised by the fact that the people of Coketown
+did not read the scientific and mathematical books in the library so much
+as poetry and fiction. It was a melancholy fact that after working for
+fifteen hours a day "they sat down to read mere fables about men and women
+more or less like themselves, and about children more or less like their
+own. They took De Foe to their bosoms instead of Euclid, and seemed to be,
+on the whole, more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker." This was very
+discouraging to Mr. Gradgrind.
+
+One night Louisa and Tom were sitting alone conversing about themselves
+and the way they were being trained by their father. In the course of
+their conversation Tom said:
+
+    "I am sick of my life, Loo; I hate it altogether, and I hate everybody
+    except you. As to me, I am a donkey, that's what I am. I am as
+    obstinate as one, I am more stupid than one, I get as much pleasure as
+    one, and I should like to kick like one."
+
+    "Not me, I hope, Tom."
+
+    "No, Loo, I wouldn't hurt _you_. I made an exception of you at first.
+    I don't know what this--jolly old--jaundiced jail"--Tom had paused to
+    find a sufficiently complimentary and expressive name for the parental
+    roof, and seemed to relieve his mind for a moment by the strong
+    alliteration of this one--"would be without you."
+
+    "Tom," said his sister, after silently watching the sparks a while,
+    "as I get older, and nearly growing up, I often sit wondering here,
+    and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can't reconcile you to
+    home better than I am able to do. I don't know what other girls know.
+    I can't play to you, or sing to you. I can't talk to you so as to
+    lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any
+    amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk
+    about, when you are tired."
+
+    "Well, no more do I. I am as bad as you in that respect; and I am a
+    mule too, which you're not. If father was determined to make me either
+    a prig or a mule, and I am not a prig, why, it stands to reason, I
+    must be a mule. And so I am."
+
+    "I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about," said
+    Tom, spitefully setting his teeth, "and all the Figures, and all the
+    people who found them out; and I wish I could put a thousand barrels
+    of gunpowder under them and blow them all up together."
+
+    Louisa sat looking at the fire so long that Tom asked, "Have you gone
+    to sleep, Loo?"
+
+    "No, Tom, I am looking at the fire."
+
+    "What do you see in it?"
+
+    "I don't see anything in it, Tom, particularly, but since I have been
+    looking at it I have been wondering about you and me, grown up."
+
+    "Wondering again?" said Tom.
+
+    "I have such unmanageable thoughts," returned his sister, "that they
+    _will_ wonder."
+
+    "Then I beg of you, Louisa," said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the
+    door without being heard, "to do nothing of that description, for
+    goodness' sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last
+    of it from your father. And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my
+    poor head continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you
+    have been, and whose education has cost what yours has, should be
+    found encouraging his sister to wonder, when he knows his father has
+    expressly said that she was not to do it."
+
+    Louisa denied Tom's participation in the offence; but her mother
+    stopped her with the conclusive answer, "Louisa, don't tell me, in my
+    state of health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and
+    physically impossible that you could have done it."
+
+    "I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking at the red
+    sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me
+    think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could
+    hope to do in it."
+
+    "Nonsense!" said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic. "Nonsense!
+    Don't stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you
+    know very well that if it was ever to reach your father's ears I
+    should never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been
+    taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the
+    experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the
+    whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master
+    about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say
+    every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to
+    hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes!"
+
+When a boy hates home, and a girl in her teens is rejoicing at the
+prospect of a short life, there has been some serious blunder in their
+training.
+
+When her father was proposing to her that she should marry old Bounderby,
+Louisa said:
+
+    "What do _I_ know, father, of tastes and fancies; of aspirations and
+    affections; of all that part of my nature in which such light things
+    might have been nourished? What escape have I had from problems that
+    could be demonstrated, and realities that could be grasped?" As she
+    said it, she unconsciously closed her hand, as if upon a solid object,
+    and slowly opened it as though she were releasing dust or ash.
+
+After her marriage to Bounderby Louisa rarely came home, and Dickens gives
+in detail a sequence of thought that passed through her mind on her
+approach to the old home after a long absence. None of the true feelings
+were stirred in her heart.
+
+    The dreams of childhood--its airy fables, its graceful, beautiful,
+    humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond, so good to be
+    believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown, for then the
+    least among them rises to the stature of a great charity in the heart,
+    suffering little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep
+    with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world,
+    wherein it were better for all the children of Adam that they should
+    oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and not
+    worldly-wise--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?
+
+This quotation shows how clearly Dickens saw the relationship between the
+imagination and the reason. Her imagination had been dwarfed and
+perverted; and her power to feel, and to think, and to appreciate beauty,
+and to love, and to see God and understand him, was dwarfed and perverted
+as a consequence.
+
+Her poor mother, who had always felt that there was something wrong with
+her husband's training, but dared not oppose him, and fully supported him
+for the sake of peace which never really came, was worn out, and had
+almost become a mental wreck. Her mind was struggling with the one great
+question. She tried and tried vainly to find what the great defect of her
+husband's system was, but she was very sure it had a great weakness
+somewhere. She tried to explain the matter to Louisa when she came to see
+her.
+
+    "You learned a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother. Ologies of
+    all kinds, from morning to night. If there is any ology left, of any
+    description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can
+    say is, I hope I shall never hear its name."
+
+    "I can hear you, mother, when you have strength to go on." This, to
+    keep her from floating away.
+
+    "But there's something--not an ology at all--that your father has
+    missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don't know what it is. I have often
+    sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its
+    name now. But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write
+    to him, to find out, for God's sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give
+    me a pen."
+
+When Louisa, unable to resist alone the temptation to go with Mr.
+Harthouse, fled to her father and told him in such earnest words that she
+cursed the hour she had been born to submit to his training, she said:
+
+    "I don't reproach you, father. What you have never nurtured in me, you
+    have never nurtured in yourself; but oh! if you had only done so long
+    ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a much better and much
+    happier creature I should have been this day!"
+
+    On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand
+    and groaned aloud.
+
+    "Father, if you had known, when we were last together here, what even
+    I feared while I strove against it--as it has been my task from
+    infancy to strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in
+    my heart; if you had known that there lingered in my breast
+    sensibilities, affections, weakness capable of being cherished into
+    strength, defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more
+    known to his arithmetic than his Creator is--would you have given me
+    to the husband whom I am now sure that I hate?"
+
+    He said, "No, no, my poor child."
+
+    "Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that
+    have hardened and spoiled me? Would you have robbed me--for no one's
+    enrichment--only for the greater desolation of this world--of the
+    immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my
+    refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my
+    school in which I should have learned to be more humble, and more
+    trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them
+    better?"
+
+    "Oh, no, no! No, Louisa."
+
+    "Yet, father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my
+    sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and
+    surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat in regard to them, I
+    should have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more
+    contented, more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am
+    with the eyes I have. Now, hear what I have come to say. With a hunger
+    and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a moment
+    appeased; with an ardent impulse toward some region where rules, and
+    figures, and definitions were not quite absolute, I have grown up,
+    battling every inch of my way.
+
+    "In this strife I have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel
+    into a demon. What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving,
+    despising, regretting what I have not learned; and my dismal resource
+    has been to think that life would soon go by, and that nothing in it
+    could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest."
+
+When she had finished the story of her acquaintance with Mr. Harthouse and
+his influence over her, she said: "All that I know is, your philosophy and
+your teaching will not save me. Now, father, you have brought me to this.
+Save me by some other means."
+
+Dickens pictured Mr. Gradgrind as a good, earnest man, who desired to do
+only good for his family.
+
+    In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise rod, and in
+    staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he
+    had meant to do great things. Within the limits of his short tether he
+    had tumbled about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater
+    singleness of purpose than many of the blatant personages whose
+    company he kept.
+
+A careful study of what Louisa said to her father will show that Dickens
+had made a profound study of Froebel's philosophy of the feelings and the
+imagination which is now the dominating theory of psychology, and that he
+clearly understood what Wordsworth meant when he wrote:
+
+  "Whose heart the holy forms of young imagination had kept pure."
+
+Sissy Jupe failed utterly to satisfy Mr. M'Choakumchild at school. She
+could not remember facts and dates. She could not be crammed successfully,
+and she had a very dense head for figures. "She actually burst into tears
+when required (by the mental process) to name immediately the cost of two
+hundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteen pence halfpenny," so Mr.
+Gradgrind told her she would have to leave school.
+
+    "I can not disguise from you, Jupe," said Mr. Gradgrind, knitting his
+    brow, "that the result of your probation there has disappointed
+    me--has greatly disappointed me. You have not acquired, under Mr. and
+    Mrs. M'Choakumchild, anything like that amount of exact knowledge
+    which I look for. You are extremely deficient in your facts. Your
+    acquaintance with figures is very limited. You are altogether
+    backward, and below the mark."
+
+    "I am sorry, sir," she returned; "but I know it is quite true. Yet I
+    have tried hard, sir."
+
+    "Yes," said Mr. Gradgrind, "yes, I believe you have tried hard; I have
+    observed you, and I can find no fault in that respect."
+
+    "Thank you, sir. I have thought sometimes"--Sissy very timid
+    here--"that perhaps I tried to learn too much, and that if I had asked
+    to be allowed to try a little less, I might have----"
+
+    "No, Jupe, no," said Mr. Gradgrind, shaking his head in his
+    profoundest and most eminently practical way. "No. The course you
+    pursued, you pursued according to the system--the system--and there is
+    no more to be said about it. I can only suppose that the circumstances
+    of your early life were too unfavourable to the development of your
+    reasoning powers, and that we began too late. Still, as I have said
+    already, I am disappointed."
+
+    "I wish I could have made a better acknowledgment, sir, of your
+    kindness to a poor forlorn girl who had no claim upon you, and of your
+    protection of her."
+
+    "Don't shed tears," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Don't shed tears. I don't
+    complain of you. You are an affectionate, earnest, good young woman,
+    and--and we must make that do."
+
+How blind a man must become when his faith in a system or a philosophy can
+make him estimate fact storing so much and character forming so little!
+Sissy could not learn facts, therefore Mr. Gradgrind mourned. The fact
+that she was "affectionate, earnest, good," was only a trifling matter--a
+very poor substitute for brilliant acquirements in dates and facts and
+mental arithmetic.
+
+Sissy became, however, the good angel of the Gradgrind household. She
+helped Louisa back to a partial hope and sweetness; she gave the younger
+children, with Mr. Gradgrind's permission, the real childhood of freedom
+and imagination, which the older children had lost forever; she
+brightened the lives even of Mrs. and Mr. Gradgrind, and she helped to
+save Tom from the disgrace of his crime.
+
+The closing picture of the book, one of the most beautiful Dickens ever
+painted, tells the story of Sissy's future:
+
+    But happy Sissy's happy children loving her; all children loving her;
+    she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty
+    fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler
+    fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality
+    with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of
+    infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally
+    stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show
+    will be the Writing on the Wall--she holding this course as part of no
+    fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or
+    covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair; but simply as a duty to be
+    done. Did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be!
+
+    Dear reader! It rests with you and me whether, in our two fields of
+    action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with
+    lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray
+    and cold.
+
+And the educational Gradgrinds of the present time sneer at Dickens
+because he puts the early training of a circus above the early training of
+a Christian home like Mr. Gradgrind's. "The logical consequence of such
+reasoning," they say, "would be that all children should be trained in
+circuses."
+
+Oh, no! Dickens did not recommend a circus as a good place to train
+children. But he did believe that even a circus is a thousand times better
+than a so-called Christian home for the true and complete development of a
+child, if in the circus the child is free and happy, and is allowed full
+play for her imagination, and is not arrested in her development by rote
+storing of facts and too early drill in arithmetic, and has the rich
+productive love of even one parent, and has blessed opportunities for
+loving service for her pets and her friends; and if in the so-called
+Christian home she is robbed of these privileges even in the name of
+religion.
+
+Sissy had a blessed, free childhood. She lived in her own imaginary world
+most of the time; she had the deep love of her kind-hearted father and of
+Merrylegs, the dog; she read poetry and fairy tales; she attended to her
+father's needs; she had many opportunities to show her love in loving
+service for Merrylegs and her father; and she was not dwarfed by fact
+cramming and formal drill. Her chances of reaching a true womanhood were
+excellent, and when she got the opportunity for the revelation of
+character, she had character to reveal, and her character developed in its
+revelation for the benefit and happiness of others. Hers was the true
+Christian training after all. Homes and schools with such training are
+centres of great power.
+
+One of the strongest pleas ever made for the cultivation of the
+imagination, "the fancies and affections," and for the teaching of
+literature, art, and music in the schools was given in Hard Times, which
+is an industrial as well as an educational story. Indeed, Dickens saw that
+the true solution of industrial questions was the proper training of the
+race. No attack on the meanness of utilitarianism and no exposition of its
+terrible dangers could be more incisive and philosophical than the
+following wonderful sentences:
+
+    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 moment 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!
+
+Altogether Hard Times is one of the most remarkable educational books ever
+written.
+
+Dickens made a plea for mental refreshment and recreation for the working
+classes in Nobody's Story, similar to that made in Hard Times:
+
+    The workingman appealed to the Bigwig family, and said: "We are a
+    labouring people, and I have a glimmering suspicion in me that
+    labouring people of whatever condition were made--by a higher
+    intelligence than yours, as I poorly understand it--to be in need of
+    mental refreshment and recreation. See what we fall into, when we rest
+    without it. Come! Amuse me harmlessly, show me something, give me an
+    escape!"
+
+Beautiful Lizzie Hexam, one of the latest and highest creations of
+Dickens, longed to read, but she did not learn to do so because her father
+objected so bitterly, and she wished to avoid everything that would weaken
+the bond of love between them, lest she might lose her influence for good
+over him.
+
+Her brother Charley said to her:
+
+    "You said you couldn't read a book, Lizzie. Your library of books is
+    the hollow down by the flare, I think."
+
+    "I should be very glad to be able to read real books. I feel my want
+    of learning very much, Charley. But I should feel it much more, if I
+    didn't know it to be a tie between me and father."
+
+Dickens was revealing the strange fact that at first many poor and
+ignorant parents strenuously objected to their children being educated;
+and he was at the same time showing that great character growth could take
+place even without the power to read. Lizzie's self-sacrifice for her
+father and Charley was a true revelation of the divinity in her nature.
+Though she had not read books, she had read a great deal by her
+imagination from "the hollow down by the flare."
+
+As Dickens grew older he saw more clearly the value of the dreaming of
+childhood while awake, of the deep reveries into which young people often
+fall, and ought to fall, so that they become oblivious to their
+environment, and sweep through the universe in strange imaginings, that
+after all are very real. He was fond of drawing pictures of young people
+giving free rein to their imaginations, unchecked by intermeddling
+adulthood, while they watched the glowing fire, or the ashes falling away
+from the dying coals. Lizzie's library from which she got her culture was
+in "the hollow down by the flare."
+
+Crippled little Jenny Wren, the doll's dressmaker, said to Lizzie Hexam
+one day, when Eugene Wrayburn was visiting them:
+
+    "I wonder how it happens that when I am work, work, working here, all
+    alone in the summer time, I smell flowers."
+
+    "As a commonplace individual, I should say," Eugene suggested
+    languidly--for he was growing weary of the person of the house--"that
+    you smell flowers because you _do_ smell flowers."
+
+    "No, I don't," said the little creature, resting one arm upon the
+    elbow of her chair, resting her chin upon that hand, and looking
+    vacantly before her; "this is not a flowery neighbourhood. It's
+    anything but that. And yet, as I sit at work, I smell miles of
+    flowers. I smell roses till I think I see the rose leaves lying in
+    heaps, bushels, on the floor. I smell fallen leaves till I put down my
+    hand--so--and expect to make them rustle. I smell the white and the
+    pink May in the hedges, and all sorts of flowers that I never was
+    among. For I have seen very few flowers indeed in my life."
+
+    "Pleasant fancies to have, Jennie dear!" said her friend, with a
+    glance toward Eugene as if she would have asked him whether they were
+    given the child in compensation for her losses.
+
+    "So I think, Lizzie, when they come to me. And the birds I hear! Oh!"
+    cried the little creature, holding out her hand and looking upward,
+    "how they sing!"
+
+How life in any stage might be filled with richness and joy, if
+imaginations were stored with apperceptive elements and allowed to
+reconstruct the universe in our fancies! How truly real our fancies might
+become!
+
+In A Child's Dream of a Star Dickens gives an exquisite picture of the
+influence of imagination in spiritual evolution.
+
+    There was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought
+    of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his
+    constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They
+    wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and
+    blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water;
+    they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely
+    world.
+
+    They used to say to one another, sometimes, Supposing all the children
+    upon earth were to die, would the flowers, and the water, and the sky
+    be sorry? They believed they would be sorry. For, said they, the buds
+    are the children of the flowers, and the little playful streams that
+    gambol down the hillsides are the children of the water; and the
+    smallest bright specks playing at hide and seek in the sky all night,
+    must surely be the children of the stars; and they would all be
+    grieved to see their playmates, the children of men, no more.
+
+    There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky
+    before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was
+    larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all the others, and
+    every night they watched for it, standing hand in hand at a window.
+    Whoever saw it first cried out, "I see the star!" And often they cried
+    out both together, knowing so well when it would rise, and where. So
+    they grew to be such friends with it, that, before lying down in their
+    beds, they always looked out once again to bid it good night; and when
+    they were turning round to sleep they used to say, "God bless the
+    star!"
+
+    But while she was still very young, oh very, very young, the sister
+    drooped, and came to be so very weak that she could no longer stand in
+    the window at night; and then the child looked sadly out by himself,
+    and when he saw the star, turned round and said to the patient pale
+    face on the bed, "I see the star!" and then a smile would come upon
+    the face, and a little weak voice used to say, "God bless my brother
+    and the star!"
+
+Dickens had shown his recognition of the inestimable value of the
+imagination, and the importance of giving it free play and of doing
+everything possible to stimulate its activity by freedom, and story, and
+play, and literature, music, and art, but his description of Jemmy Jackman
+Lirriper's training shows a keener appreciation than any of his other
+writings of the value of the child's games in which personation is the
+leading characteristic; in which spools, or spoons, or blocks, or sticks
+are people or animals, with regular names and distinct characteristics and
+responsible duties, and in which chairs and tables and boxes are coaches,
+or steamboats, or railway trains. No friends are ever more real than those
+of the child's creative imagination, with things to represent them; no
+rides ever give greater delight than those rides in trains that move only
+in the imaginations of the children, who construct them by placing the
+chairs in a row, and who act as engineers, conductors, and brakemen. Such
+games form the best elements out of which the child's life power can be
+made, especially if the adulthood of his home sympathizes with him in his
+enterprises. They afford an outlet for his imaginative plans. In them he
+forms new worlds of his own, which are adapted to his stage of
+development, and in which he can be the creator and the centre of
+executive influence.
+
+Jemmy Jackman Lirriper's training was ideal in most of his home life,
+though he had no father or mother to love and guide him.
+
+    The miles and miles that me and the Major have travelled with Jemmy in
+    the dusk between the lights are not to be calculated, Jemmy driving on
+    the coach box, which is the Major's brass-bound writing desk on the
+    table, me inside in the easy-chair, and the Major Guard up behind with
+    a brown-paper horn doing it really wonderful. I do assure you, my
+    dear, that sometimes when I have taken a few winks in my place inside
+    the coach and have come half awake by the flashing light of the fire
+    and have heard that precious pet driving and the Major blowing up
+    behind to have the change of horses ready when we got to the Inn, I
+    have believed we were on the old North Road that my poor Lirriper knew
+    so well. Then to see that child and the Major both wrapped up getting
+    down to warm their feet and going stamping about and having glasses of
+    ale out of the paper match boxes on the chimney piece, is to see the
+    Major enjoying it fully as much as the child I am very sure, and it's
+    equal to any play when Coachee opens the coach door to look in at me
+    inside and say "Wery 'past that 'tage.--'Prightened old lady?"
+
+Such plays as Dickens here describes make one of the greatest differences
+between a real childhood and a barren childhood. The lack of opportunities
+for such perfect plays and such complete sympathy in their plays gives to
+the faces of orphan children brought up in institutions the distinctive
+look which marks them everywhere, so that they can be easily recognised by
+experienced students of happy childhood.
+
+But Jemmy's make believe was not ruthlessly cut short with his early
+childhood. He continued his imaginative operations, or it might make it
+clearer to say his operative imaginations, after he went to school; and
+those beautiful old people, Mrs. Lirriper and Major Jackman, continued
+their interest, their real, perfectly sympathetic interest in his plans.
+
+    Neither should I tell you any news, my dear, in telling you that the
+    Major is still a fixture in the Parlours quite as much so as the roof
+    of the house, and that Jemmy is of boys the best and brightest, and
+    has ever had kept from him the cruel story of his poor pretty young
+    mother, Mrs. Edson, being deserted in the second floor and dying in my
+    arms, fully believing that I am his born Gran and him an orphan;
+    though what with engineering since he took a taste for it, and him and
+    the Major making Locomotives out of parasols, broken iron pots, and
+    cotton reels, and them absolutely a-getting off the line and falling
+    over the table and injuring the passengers almost equal to the
+    originals, it really is quite wonderful. And when I says to the Major,
+    "Major, can't you by _any_ means give us a communication with the
+    guard?" the Major says, quite huffy, "No, madam, it's not to be done";
+    and when I says, "Why not?" the Major says, "That is between us who
+    are in the Railway Interest, madam, and our friend, the Right
+    Honourable Vice-President of the Board of Trade"; and if you'll
+    believe me, my dear, the Major wrote to Jemmy at School to consult him
+    on the answer I should have before I could get even that amount of
+    unsatisfactoriness out of the man, the reason being that when we first
+    began with the little model and the working signals beautiful and
+    perfect (being in general as wrong as the real), and when I says,
+    laughing, "What appointment am I to hold in this undertaking,
+    gentlemen?" Jemmy hugs me round the neck and tells me, dancing, "You
+    shall be the Public, Gran," and consequently they put upon me just as
+    much as ever they like, and I sit a-growling in my easy-chair.
+
+    My dear, whether it is that a grown man as clever as the Major can
+    not give half his heart and mind to anything--even a plaything--but
+    must get into right down earnest with it, whether it is so or whether
+    it is not so, I do not undertake to say; but Jemmy is far outdone by
+    the serious and believing ways of the Major in the management of the
+    United Grand Junction Lirriper and Jackman Great Norfolk Parlour Line,
+    "for," says my Jemmy with the sparkling eyes when it was christened,
+    "we must have a whole mouthful of name, Gran, or our dear old
+    Public"--and there the young rogue kissed me--"won't stump up." So the
+    Public took the shares--ten at ninepence, and immediately when that
+    was spent twelve Preference at one and sixpence--and they were all
+    signed by Jemmy and countersigned by the Major, and between ourselves
+    much better worth the money than some shares I have paid for in my
+    time. In the same holidays the line was made and worked and opened and
+    ran excursions and collisions and had burst its boilers and all sorts
+    of accidents and offences all most regular, correct, and pretty. The
+    sense of responsibility entertained by the Major as a military style
+    of station master, my dear, starting the down train behind time and
+    ringing one of those little bells that you buy with the little coal
+    scuttles off the tray round the man's neck in the street, did him
+    honour; but noticing the Major of a night when he is writing out his
+    monthly report to Jemmy at school of the state of the Rolling Stock
+    and the Permanent Way, and all the rest of it (the whole kept upon the
+    Major's sideboard and dusted with his own hands every morning before
+    varnishing his boots), I notice him as full of thought and care, as
+    full can be, and frowning in a fearful manner; but, indeed, the Major
+    does nothing by halves, as witness his great delight in going out
+    surveying with Jemmy when he has Jemmy to go with, carrying a chain
+    and a measuring tape, and driving I don't know what improvements right
+    through Westminster Abbey, and fully believed in the streets to be
+    knocking everything upside down by Act of Parliament. As please Heaven
+    will come to pass when Jemmy takes to that as a profession!
+
+The Major's participation in the plans of Jemmy is a good illustration of
+the sympathy that Froebel and Dickens felt for childhood, a sympathy
+_with_, not _for_, the child. It meant more than approval--it meant
+co-operation, partnership.
+
+Some educators would criticise Dickens for allowing the Major to make the
+locomotives with parasols, broken pots, and cotton reels. They teach that
+Jemmy should have made these himself. Dickens was away beyond such a
+narrow view as this. The child at first has much more power to plan than
+to execute. To leave him to himself means the failure of his plans and the
+irritation of his temper. It is a terrible experience for a child to get
+the habit of failure. The wise adult will enter into partnership with the
+child to aid in carrying out the child's plans. He will not even make
+suggestions of changes in plans when he sees how they might be improved.
+The plans and the leadership should be absolutely the child's own. The
+adult should be an assistant, and that only, when skill is required beyond
+that possessed by the child--either when the mechanical work is too
+difficult for the child or when more than one person is needed to execute
+his plan.
+
+The adult may sometimes lead the child indirectly to a change of plan, but
+he should not do it by direct suggestion. The joy is lost for the child
+when he becomes conscious of the adult as interfering even sympathetically
+with his own personality. There is a great deal of well-intentioned
+dwarfing of childhood.
+
+The consciousness of partnership, of unity, of sympathetic co-operation,
+is the best result of such blessed work as the Major did with Jemmy in
+carrying out Jemmy's plans. He is the child's best friend who most wisely
+and most thoroughly develops his imagination as a basis for all
+intellectual strength and clearness, and for the highest spiritual growth.
+He is the wealthiest man who sees diamonds in the dewdrops and unsullied
+gold in the sunset tints.
+
+David Copperfield tells the names of the wonderful books he found in his
+father's blessed little room, and describes their influence upon his life.
+
+    They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something beyond that place
+    and time--they and the Arabian Nights and the Tales of the Genii. It
+    is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small
+    troubles (which were great troubles to me) by impersonating my
+    favourite characters in them, as I did, and by putting Mr. and Miss
+    Murdstone into all the bad ones, which I did, too. I have been Tom
+    Jones--a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature--for a week together.
+    I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a
+    stretch, I verily believe.
+
+    "Let us end with the Boy's story," said Mrs. Lirriper, "for the Boy's
+    story is the best that is ever told."
+
+There are no other stories so enchanting, or so stimulating, as the
+stories that fill the imaginations of childhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+SYMPATHY WITH CHILDHOOD.
+
+
+The dominant element in Dickens's character was sympathy _with_ childhood,
+not merely for it. He had the productive sympathy that feels and thinks
+from the child's standpoint.
+
+The illustration just given of Major Jackman's co-operative sympathy with
+Jemmy Lirriper in the perfect carrying out of what to most people would
+have been only "the foolish ideas" of a child, as sincerely as if he had
+been executing commissions from the prime minister, is an excellent
+exemplification of the true ideal of sympathy in practice. The Major was
+not working for Jemmy's amusement merely; he was a very active and
+genuinely interested partner with Jemmy. "Jemmy was far outdone by the
+serious and believing ways of the Major" in the imaginative plays which
+were the most real life of Jemmy. Such was the sympathy of Dickens with
+his own children; such sympathy he believed to be the most productive
+power in the teacher or child trainer for beneficent influence on the
+character of the child.
+
+There is no other characteristic of his writings so marked as his broad
+sympathy with childhood. Sympathy was the origin of all he wrote against
+coercion in all its dread forms, of all he wrote about robbing children of
+a real childhood, about the dwarfing of individuality, about the
+strangling of the imagination, about improper nutrition, about all forms
+of neglect, and cruelty, and bad training. The more fully his nature is
+known the more deeply he is loved, because of his great love for the
+child.
+
+From the beginning of his educational work his overflowing, practical
+sympathy is revealed.
+
+He tells us in the preface to Nickleby that his study of the Yorkshire
+schools and his delineation of the character of Squeers resulted from a
+resolution formed in childhood, which he was led to form by seeing a boy
+"with a suppurated abscess caused by its being ripped open by his
+Yorkshire guide, philosopher, and friend with an inky penknife."
+
+The sympathy of Nicholas, and John Browdie, and the Cheeryble brothers
+with Smike and all suffering childhood are strong features of the book.
+
+Dickens's own sympathy has cleared his mind of many fogs that still linger
+in some minds regarding a parent's rights in regard to his child, even
+though the parent has never recognised any of the child's rights. The
+movement in favour of the recognition of the rights of children even
+against their parents began with Dickens. When Nicholas discovered that
+Smike was the son of his uncle, Ralph Nickleby, he went to consult brother
+Charles Cheeryble in regard to his duty under the circumstances.
+
+    He modestly, but firmly, expressed his hope that the good old
+    gentleman would, under such circumstances as he described, hold him
+    justified in adopting the extreme course of interfering between parent
+    and child, and upholding the latter in his disobedience; even though
+    his horror and dread of his father might seem, and would doubtless be
+    represented, as a thing so repulsive and unnatural as to render those
+    who countenanced him in it fit objects of general detestation and
+    abhorrence.
+
+    "So deeply rooted does this horror of the man appear to be," said
+    Nicholas, "that I can hardly believe he really is his son. Nature does
+    not seem to have implanted in his breast one lingering feeling of
+    affection for him, and surely she can never err."
+
+    "My dear sir," replied brother Charles, "you fall into the very common
+    mistake of charging upon Nature matters with which she has not had the
+    smallest connection, and for which she is in no way responsible. Men
+    talk of Nature as an abstract thing, and lose sight of what is natural
+    while they do so. Here is a poor lad who has never felt a parent's
+    care, who has scarcely known anything all his life but suffering and
+    sorrow, presented to a man who he is told is his father, and whose
+    first act is to signify his intention of putting an end to his short
+    term of happiness by consigning him to his old fate, and taking him
+    from the only friend he has ever had--which is yourself. If Nature, in
+    such a case, put into that lad's breast but one secret prompting which
+    urged him toward his father and away from you, she would be a liar and
+    an idiot."
+
+    Nicholas was delighted to find that the old gentleman spoke so warmly,
+    and in the hope that he might say something more to the same purpose,
+    made no reply.
+
+    "The same mistake presents itself to me, in one shape or other, at
+    every turn," said brother Charles. "Parents who never showed their
+    love complain of want of natural affection in their children; children
+    who never showed their duty complain of want of natural feeling in
+    their parents; lawmakers who find both so miserable that their
+    affections have never had enough of life's sun to develop them are
+    loud in their moralizings over parents and children too, and cry that
+    the very ties of Nature are disregarded. Natural affections and
+    instincts, my dear sir, are the most beautiful of the Almighty's
+    works, but, like other beautiful works of his, they must be reared and
+    fostered, or it is as natural that they should be wholly obscured, and
+    that new feelings should usurp their place, as it is that the sweetest
+    productions of the earth, left untended, should be choked with weeds
+    and briers. I wish we could be brought to consider this, and,
+    remembering natural obligations a little more at the right time, talk
+    about them a little less at the wrong one."
+
+It was chiefly to break the power of ignorant and cruel parenthood over
+suffering childhood that Ralph Nickleby was painted with such dark and
+repellent characteristics, and that poor Smike's sufferings were detailed
+with such minuteness. The sympathy of the world was aroused against the
+one and in favour of the other, as a basis for the climax of thought which
+brother Charles expressed so truly and so forcefully.
+
+The same thought was driven home by the complaint of Squeers about one of
+the boys in Dotheboys Hall.
+
+    "The juniorest Palmer said he wished he was in heaven. I really don't
+    know, I do _not_ know what's to be done with that young fellow; he's
+    always a-wishing something horrid. He said once he wished he was a
+    donkey, because then he wouldn't have a father as didn't love him!
+    Pretty wicious that for a child of six!"
+
+It required the genius of Dickens to make such a clear picture of an
+unloving father.
+
+Even before Nicholas Nickleby was written Dickens had revealed his
+sympathetic nature. Oliver Twist's story was written to stir the hearts of
+his readers in favour of unfortunate children. What a contrast is made
+between the hardening effects of his treatment by Bumble and the
+"gentleman in the white waistcoat," and the humanizing influence of Rose
+Maylie's tear dropped on his cheek.
+
+Surely no sensitive little boy ever submitted to more unsympathetic
+treatment than poor Oliver.
+
+    When little Oliver was taken before "the gentlemen" that evening, and
+    informed that he was to go that night as general house lad to a coffin
+    maker's, and that if he complained of his situation, or ever came back
+    to the parish again, he would be sent to sea, there to be drowned or
+    knocked on the head, as the case might be, he evinced so little
+    emotion that they by common consent pronounced him a hardened young
+    rascal, and ordered Mr. Bumble to remove him forthwith.
+
+    For some time Mr. Bumble drew Oliver along, without notice or remark;
+    for the beadle carried his head very erect, as a beadle always should;
+    and, it being a windy day, little Oliver was completely enshrouded by
+    the skirts of Mr. Bumble's coat as they blew open and disclosed to
+    great advantage his flapped waistcoat and drab plush knee breeches. As
+    they drew near to their destination, however, Mr. Bumble thought it
+    expedient to look down and see that the boy was in good order for
+    inspection by his new master: which he accordingly did, with a fit and
+    becoming air of gracious patronage.
+
+    "Oliver!" said Mr. Bumble.
+
+    "Yes, sir," replied Oliver in a low, tremulous voice.
+
+    "Pull that cap off your eyes, and hold up your head, sir."
+
+    Although Oliver did as he was desired at once, and passed the back of
+    his unoccupied hand briskly across his eyes, he left a tear in them
+    when he looked up at his conductor. As Mr. Bumble gazed sternly upon
+    him, it rolled down his cheek. It was followed by another, and
+    another. The child made a strong effort, but it was an unsuccessful
+    one. Withdrawing his other hand from Mr. Bumble's, he covered his face
+    with both, and wept until the tears sprung out from between his chin
+    and bony fingers.
+
+    "Well!" exclaimed Mr. Bumble, stopping short, and darting at his
+    little charge a look of intense malignity. "Well! Of _all_ the
+    ungratefullest and worst-disposed boys as ever I see, Oliver, you are
+    the----"
+
+    "No, no, sir," sobbed Oliver, clinging to the hand which held the
+    well-known cane; "no, no, sir; I will be good indeed; indeed, indeed I
+    will, sir! I am a very little boy, sir; and it is so--so----"
+
+    "So what?" inquired Mr. Bumble in amazement.
+
+    "So lonely, sir! So very lonely!" cried the child. "Everybody hates
+    me. Oh, sir, don't, don't, pray, be cross to me!" The child beat his
+    hand upon his heart, and looked in his companion's face with tears of
+    real agony.
+
+The poor boy was put to bed by Sowerberry the first night. His master
+said, as they climbed the stairs:
+
+    "Your bed's under the counter. You don't mind sleeping among the
+    coffins, I suppose? But it doesn't much matter whether you do or
+    don't, for you can't sleep anywhere else. Come, don't keep me here all
+    night!"
+
+Dickens pitied children for the terrors with which they were threatened,
+as Oliver was threatened by the board, and he pitied them also for the
+terrors that their imaginations brought to them at night. Sowerberry's
+lack of sympathy was as great as Bumble's. When one of his own children
+showed evidence of dread of retiring alone, Dickens sat upstairs with his
+family in the evenings afterward. He did not tell the child the reason,
+but she was saved from terror.
+
+Oliver ran away from Sowerberry's, and when passing the workhouse he
+peeped between the bars of the gate into the garden. A very little boy was
+there who came to the gate to say "Good-bye" to him. He had been one of
+Oliver's little friends.
+
+    "Kiss me," said the child, climbing up the low gate and flinging his
+    little arms round Oliver's neck: "Good-bye, dear! God bless you!"
+
+    The blessing was from a young child's lips, but it was the first that
+    Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through the struggles
+    and sufferings and troubles and changes of his after-life he never
+    once forgot it.
+
+When Oliver was taken to commit burglary by Bill Sykes, and was wounded
+and brought into the home he was assisting to rob, the good lady of the
+house sent for a doctor. The doctor dressed the arm, and when the boy fell
+asleep he brought Mrs. Maylie and Rose to see the criminal.
+
+Rose sat down by Oliver's bedside and gathered his hair from his face.
+
+    As she stooped over him her tears fell upon his forehead.
+
+    The boy stirred and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity
+    and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and
+    affection he had never known. Thus a strain of gentle music, or the
+    rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the
+    mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim
+    remembrances of scenes that never were in this life; which vanish like
+    a breath; which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone
+    by, would seem to have awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the
+    mind can ever recall.
+
+    "What can this mean?" exclaimed the elder lady. "This poor child can
+    never have been the pupil of robbers!"
+
+    "Vice," sighed the surgeon, replacing the curtain, "takes up her abode
+    in many temples; and who can say that a fair outside shall not
+    enshrine her?"
+
+    "But at so early an age!" urged Rose.
+
+    "My dear young lady," rejoined the surgeon, mournfully shaking his
+    head, "crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered
+    alone. The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims."
+
+    "But can you, oh, can you really believe that this delicate boy has
+    been the voluntary associate of the worst outcasts of society?" said
+    Rose.
+
+    The surgeon shook his head in a manner which intimated that he feared
+    it was very possible, and, observing that they might disturb the
+    patient, led the way into an adjoining apartment.
+
+    "But even if he has been wicked," pursued Rose, "think how young he
+    is; think that he may never have known a mother's love, or the comfort
+    of a home; that ill usage and blows, or the want of bread, may have
+    driven him to herd with men who have forced him to guilt. Aunt, dear
+    aunt, for mercy's sake think of this, before you let them drag this
+    sick child to a prison, which in any case must be the grave of all his
+    chance of amendment. Oh! as you love me, and know that I have never
+    felt the want of parents in your goodness and affection, but that I
+    might have done so, and might have been equally helpless and
+    unprotected with this poor child, have pity upon him before it is too
+    late!"
+
+    "My dear love," said the elder lady, as she folded the weeping girl to
+    her bosom, "do you think I would harm a hair of his head?"
+
+    "Oh, no," replied Rose eagerly.
+
+    "No, surely," said the old lady; "my days are drawing to their close,
+    and may mercy be shown to me as I show it to others. What can I do to
+    save him, sir?"
+
+Dickens used the doctor to rebuke the large class of people who are ever
+ready to believe the worst about a boy, and who are always looking for his
+depravity instead of searching for the divinity in him.
+
+Rose's plea for kind treatment for the boy, "even if he has been wicked,"
+was a new doctrine propounded by Dickens. The worst boys at home or in
+school need most sympathy. Mrs. Maylie's attitude was in harmony with
+Christ's teaching, but quite out of harmony with much that was called
+Christian practice at the time Dickens wrote Oliver Twist. He taught the
+doctrine that children were turned into evil ways and confirmed in them
+through lack of sympathy. Poor Nancy said to Rose Maylie:
+
+    "Lady," cried the girl, sinking on her knees, "dear, sweet, angel
+    lady, you _are_ the first that ever blessed me with such words as
+    these; and if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me
+    from a life of sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!"
+
+In The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens gave a beautiful picture of a
+sympathetic teacher in Mr. Marton. His school was not well lighted or
+properly ventilated, the furniture was poor, there was no apparatus
+except a dunce's cap, a cane, and a ruler, his methods were old-fashioned,
+but he possessed the greatest qualification of a good teacher, deep
+sympathy with childhood. This was shown by the erasure of the blot from
+the sick boy's writing; by his asking Nell to pray for the boy; by his
+appreciation of the boy's love; by his hoping for his recovery against the
+unfavourable reports; by his favourable interpretation of the worst signs;
+by his absent-mindedness in school; by his giving the boys a half holiday
+because he could not teach; by his asking them to go away quietly so as
+not to disturb the sick scholar; by his saying "I'm glad they didn't mind
+me" when the jolly boys went shouting away; by his telling the sick boy
+that the flowers missed him and were less gay on account of his absence;
+by his hanging the boy's handkerchief out of the window at his request, as
+a token of his remembrance of the boys playing on the green; by the loving
+way in which he embraced the dying boy, and held his cold hand in his
+after he was dead, chafing it, as if he could bring back the life into it.
+
+Dombey and Son is full of appeals for the tender sympathy of adulthood for
+childhood. The story of Florence Dombey longing for the one look of
+tenderness, the one word of kindly interest, the one sympathetic caress
+from her father, which never came to her during her childhood, is one of
+the most touching stories ever written. It was written to show that
+children in the most wealthy homes need sympathy as much as any other
+children, and that they are often most cruelly neglected by their parents.
+
+Floy pleaded to be allowed to lay her face beside her baby brother's
+because "she thought he loved her."
+
+The love that is given back in exchange for loving interest is shown by
+Paul's loving gratitude to Floy for her interest in him, which led her to
+spend her pocket money in books, so that she might help him with his
+studies that confused him so.
+
+    And high was her reward, when one Saturday evening, as little Paul was
+    sitting down as usual to "resume his studies," she sat down by his
+    side and showed him all that was rough made smooth, and all that was
+    so dark made clear and plain, before him. It was nothing but a
+    startled look in Paul's wan face--a flush--a smile--and then a close
+    embrace; but God knows how her heart leaped up at this rich payment
+    for her trouble.
+
+    "Oh, Floy," cried her brother, "how I love you! How I love you, Floy!"
+
+    "And I you, dear!"
+
+    "Oh, I am sure, sure of that, Floy!"
+
+    He said no more about it, but all that evening sat close by her, very
+    quiet; and in the night he called out from his little room within
+    hers, three or four times, that he loved her.
+
+There is no higher reward than that of the sympathetic teacher who for the
+first time lets light into a dark mind or heart.
+
+The lady whom Florence overheard talking to her little orphaned niece
+about her father's cruel coldness toward her truly said: "Not an orphan in
+the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a
+living parent's care."
+
+As Dickens was one of the first to urge that children had rights, so he
+was one of the first to show that there had been altogether too much
+thought about the duty of children to parents, and too little about the
+duty of parents to children. Alice Marwood, one of the characters in
+Dombey and Son, said to Harriet Carker:
+
+    "You brought me here by force of gentleness and kindness, and made me
+    human by woman's looks and words and angel's deeds; I have felt, lying
+    here, that I should like you to know this. It might explain, I have
+    thought, something that used to help to harden me. I had heard so
+    much, in my wrongdoing, of my neglected duty, that I took up with the
+    belief that duty had not been done to me, and that as the seed was
+    sown the harvest grew."
+
+One other point in regard to sympathy was made in Dombey and Son, that a
+rough exterior may cover a sympathetic heart.
+
+    Long may it remain in this mixed world a point not easy of decision,
+    which is the more beautiful evidence of the Almighty's goodness: the
+    delicate fingers that are formed for sensitiveness and sympathy of
+    touch, and made to minister to pain and grief, or the rough, hard
+    Captain Cuttle hand, that the heart teaches, guides, and softens in a
+    moment!
+
+In the model school of Dickens Doctor Strong is said to have been "the
+idol of the whole school"; and David adds, "it must have been a badly
+composed school if he had been anything else, for he was the kindest of
+men." Doctor Strong's wife, who had been his pupil in early life, said:
+
+    "When I was very young, quite a little child, my first associations
+    with knowledge of any kind were inseparable from a patient friend and
+    teacher--the friend of my dead father--who was always dear to me. I
+    can remember nothing that I know without remembering him. He stored my
+    mind with its first treasures, and stamped his character upon them
+    all. They never could have been, I think, as good as they have been to
+    me, if I had taken them from any other hands."
+
+David said, when telling the story of his first introduction to Mr.
+Murdstone:
+
+    "God help me, I might have been improved for my whole life, I might
+    have been made another creature, perhaps, for life, by a kind word at
+    that season. A word of encouragement and explanation, of pity for my
+    childish ignorance, of welcome home, of reassurance to me that it was
+    home, might have made me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth,
+    instead of in my hypocritical outside, and might have made me respect
+    instead of hate him."
+
+In Bleak House Dickens gave in Esther the most perfect type of human
+sympathy, and by his pathetic pictures of poor Jo, Phil, the Jellyby
+children, the Pardiggle children, and others, stirred a great wave of
+feeling, which led to a recognition of the duty of adulthood to childhood,
+and taught the value of sympathy in the training of children.
+
+Esther laid down a new law, revealed by Froebel, but given to the English
+world by Dickens in the weighty sentence, "My comprehension is quickened
+when my affection is."
+
+The lack of sympathy in adulthood is revealed for the condemnation of his
+readers in Mrs. Rachael's parting from Esther.
+
+    Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was
+    not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to have known
+    her better after so many years, and ought to have made myself enough
+    of a favourite with her to make her sorry then. When she gave me one
+    cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw drop from the stone
+    porch--it was a very frosty day--I felt so miserable and
+    self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I
+    knew, that she could say good-bye so easily.
+
+    "No, Esther!" she returned. "It is your misfortune!"
+
+Poor child, she cried afterward because Mrs. Rachael was not sorry to part
+with her.
+
+What a different parting she had when leaving the Miss Donnys' school,
+where for six years she had been a pupil, and for part of the time a
+teacher!
+
+She received a letter informing her that she was to leave Greenleaf.
+
+    Oh, never, never, never shall I forget the emotion this letter caused
+    in the house! It was so tender in them to care so much for me; it was
+    so gracious in that Father who had not forgotten me, to have made my
+    orphan way so smooth and easy, and to have inclined so many youthful
+    natures toward me, that I could hardly bear it. Not that I would have
+    had them less sorry--I am afraid not; but the pleasure of it, and the
+    pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, and the humble regret of it,
+    were so blended, that my heart seemed almost breaking while it was
+    full of rapture.
+
+    The letter gave me only five days' notice of my removal. When every
+    minute added to the proofs of love and kindness that were given me in
+    those five days; and when at last the morning came, and when they took
+    me through all the rooms that I might see them for the last time; and
+    when some one cried, "Esther, dear, say good-bye to me here, at my
+    bedside, where you first spoke so kindly to me!" and when others asked
+    me only to write their names, "With Esther's love"; and when they all
+    surrounded me with their parting presents, and clung to me weeping,
+    and cried, "What shall we do when dear, dear Esther's gone!" and when
+    I tried to tell them how forbearing and how good they had all been to
+    me, and how I blessed and thanked them every one--what a heart I had!
+
+    And when the two Miss Donnys grieved as much to part with me as the
+    least among them; and when the maids said, "Bless you, miss, wherever
+    you go!" and when the ugly lame old gardener, who I thought had hardly
+    noticed me in all those years, came panting after the coach to give me
+    a little nosegay of geraniums, and told me I had been the light of his
+    eyes--indeed the old man said so!--what a heart I had then!
+
+This was intended to show the results of her sympathy toward the pupils
+and everybody connected with the school.
+
+Mrs. Jellyby is an immortal picture of the woman who neglects her family
+on account of her interest in Borrioboola Gha, or some other place for
+which her sympathy is aroused. Dickens held that a woman's first duty is
+to her children. The wretched Mr. Jellyby, almost distracted by the poor
+meals, the disorder of his home, and the wild condition of his unfortunate
+family, said to his daughter, "Never have a mission, my dear."
+
+Caddy emphasized the thought Dickens had given in Dombey and Son through
+Alice Marwood when she said to Esther:
+
+    "Oh, don't talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where's ma's duty
+    as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I suppose! Then
+    let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it's much more their
+    affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say! Very well, so am I
+    shocked, too; so we are both shocked, and there's an end of it!"
+
+On another occasion, overcome by emotion at the thought of her mother's
+neglect, she said to Esther:
+
+    "I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead. It would be a great deal
+    better for us."
+
+    In a moment afterward she kneeled on the ground at my side, hid her
+    face in my dress, passionately begged my pardon, and wept. I comforted
+    her, and would have raised her, but she cried, No, no; she wanted to
+    stay there!
+
+    "You used to teach girls," she said. "If you could only have taught
+    me, I could have learned from you! I am so very miserable, and like
+    you so much!"
+
+How the Jellyby children loved and trusted Esther! How all children loved
+and trusted her for her true sympathy!
+
+Poor Jo swept the steps at the graveyard where the friend who spoke kindly
+to him lay buried, and he always said of him, "He wos wery good to me, he
+wos."
+
+And Jo's other friends, Mr. Snagsby, whose sympathy drew half crowns from
+his pocket, and Mr. George, and Doctor Woodcourt, and Mr. Jarndyce, and
+Esther, showed their kindly sympathy for the wretched boy so fully that
+the reading world loved them as real friends, and this loving admiration
+led the Christian world to think more clearly in regard to Christ's
+teachings about the little ones.
+
+No heart can resist the plea for sympathy for such as Jo in the
+description of his last illness and death. When the end was very near, as
+Allan Woodcourt was watching the heavy breathing of the sufferer,
+
+    After a short relapse into sleep or stupor he makes of a sudden a
+    strong effort to get out of bed.
+
+    "Stay, Jo! What now?"
+
+    "It's time for me to go to that there berryin'-ground, sir," he
+    returns with a wild look.
+
+    "Lie down, and tell me. What burying-ground, Jo?"
+
+    "Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed,
+    he wos. It's time fur me to go down to that there berryin'-ground,
+    sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be
+    berried. He used fur to say to me, 'I am as poor as you to-day, Jo,'
+    he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now, and have
+    come there to be laid along with him."
+
+    "By and bye, Jo. By and bye."
+
+    "Ah! P'raps they wouldn't do it if I was to go myself. But will you
+    promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?"
+
+    "I will, indeed."
+
+    "Thank'ee, sir. Thank'ee, sir. They'll have to get the key of the gate
+    afore they can take me in, for it's allus locked. And there's a step
+    there, as I used for to clean with my broom.--It's turned wery dark,
+    sir. Is there any light a-comin'?"
+
+    "It is coming fast, Jo."
+
+    Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very
+    near its end.
+
+    "Jo, my poor fellow!"
+
+    "I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a-gropin'--a-gropin'--let me
+    catch hold of your hand."
+
+    "Jo, can you say what I say?"
+
+    "I'll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it's good."
+
+    "OUR FATHER."
+
+    "Our Father!--yes, that's wery good, sir."
+
+    "WHICH ART IN HEAVEN."
+
+    "Art in Heaven--is the light a-comin', sir?"
+
+    "It is close at hand. HALLOWED BE THY NAME!"
+
+    "Hallowed be--thy----"
+
+    The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!
+
+    Dead, your majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right
+    reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women,
+    born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us
+    every day.
+
+One of the best of Dickens's illustrations of gratitude for sympathy is
+the case of Phil Squod, Mr. George's assistant in the shooting gallery. He
+was a mere child in everything but years of hard experiences, but he was
+devoted heart and soul to Mr. George for a kindly word of hearty sympathy.
+So devoted was he that he attached himself to Mr. George and became his
+faithful servant, and found his truest happiness in his service of love.
+
+Phil recalled the story to Mr. George.
+
+    "It was after the case-filling blow-up when I first see you,
+    commander. You remember?"
+
+    "I remember, Phil. You were walking along in the sun."
+
+    "Crawling, guv'ner, again a wall----"
+
+    "True, Phil--shouldering your way on----"
+
+    "In a nightcap!" exclaims Phil, excited.
+
+    "In a nightcap----"
+
+    "And hobbling with a couple of sticks!" cries Phil, still more
+    excited.
+
+    "With a couple of sticks. When----"
+
+    "When you stops, you know," cries Phil, putting down his cup and
+    saucer, and hastily removing his plate from his knees, "and says to
+    me, 'What, comrade! You have been in the wars!' I didn't say much to
+    you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise that a person so
+    strong and healthy and bold as you was should stop to speak to such a
+    limping bag of bones as I was. But you says to me, says you,
+    delivering it out of your chest as hearty as possible, so that it was
+    like a glass of something hot: 'What accident have you met with? You
+    have been badly hurt. What's amiss, old boy? Cheer up, and tell us
+    about it!' Cheer up! I was cheered already! I says as much to you, you
+    says more to me, I says more to you, you says more to me, and here I
+    am, commander! Here I am, commander!" cries Phil, who has started from
+    his chair and unaccountably begun to sidle away. "If a mark's wanted,
+    or if it will improve the business, let the customers take aim at me.
+    They can't spoil _my_ beauty. _I'm_ all right. Come on! If they want a
+    man to box at, let 'em box at me. Let 'em knock me well about the
+    head. _I_ don't mind! if they want a light weight, to be throwed for
+    practice, Cornwall, Devonshire, or Lancashire, let 'em throw me. They
+    won't hurt _me_. I have been throwed all sorts of styles all my life!"
+
+Pip said in Great Expectations:
+
+    It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable,
+    honest-hearted, duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is
+    very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by, and I
+    know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my
+    apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restless
+    aspiring discontented me.
+
+Dear, simple-hearted Joe Gargery! When every one else was abusing Pip at
+the great dinner party, he showed his sympathy for him by putting some
+more gravy on his plate.
+
+In Our Mutual Friend Lizzie Hexam, sympathizing with her father so much
+that she would not learn to read because he was bitterly prejudiced
+against education, but sympathizing so much with her brother Charley that
+she had him educated secretly so that he might become a teacher, is an
+illustration of nearly perfect sympathy.
+
+The happiness of the little "minders" at old Betty Higden's is in sharp
+contrast to the misery of the boarders of the respectable (?)
+establishment of Mrs. Pipchin. In the one case was abject poverty and
+loving sympathy, in the other plenty and cruel selfishness. When Mr. and
+Mrs. Boffin were adopting Johnnie from Betty Higden's care, the brave old
+woman said:
+
+    "If I could have kept the dear child without the dread that's always
+    upon me of his coming to that fate I have spoken of, I could never
+    have parted with him, even to you. For I love him, I love him, I love
+    him! I love my husband long dead and gone, in him; I love my children
+    dead and gone, in him; I love my young and hopeful days dead and gone,
+    in him. I couldn't sell that love, and look you in your bright kind
+    face. It's a free gift."
+
+    Betty was not a logically reasoning woman, but God is good, and hearts
+    may count in heaven as high as heads.
+
+Dickens spoke with great enthusiasm in his American Notes of the practical
+sympathy of Doctor Howe with all afflicted children, especially with blind
+children, closing his sketch of the wonderful work he had done with the
+sentence: "There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who after
+reading these passages can ever hear that name with indifference." He
+noted that Laura Bridgman had a special desire for sympathy.
+
+    She is fond of having other children noticed and caressed by the
+    teachers, and those whom she respects; but this must not be carried
+    too far, or she becomes jealous. She wants to have her share, which,
+    if not the lion's, is the greater part; and if she does not get it,
+    she says, "_My mother will love me_."
+
+Dickens's types of sympathy with children grew more perfect as he grew
+older. In his later years his head began to catch up with his heart.
+Major Jackman, Mrs. Lirriper, and Doctor Marigold are among his most
+wonderfully sympathetic characters.
+
+What an ideal sending away to school Jemmy Lirriper had!
+
+    So the Major being gone out and Jemmy being at home, I got the child
+    into my little room here and I stood him by my chair and I took his
+    mother's own curls in my hand and I spoke to him loving and serious.
+    And when I had reminded the darling how that he was now in his tenth
+    year, and when I had said to him about his getting on in life pretty
+    much what I had said to the Major, I broke to him how that we must
+    have this same parting, and there I was forced to stop, for there I
+    saw of a sudden the well-remembered lip with its tremble, and it so
+    brought back that time! But with the spirit that was in him he
+    controlled it soon, and he says gravely, nodding through his tears: "I
+    understand, Gran--I knew it _must_ be, Gran--go on, Gran, don't be
+    afraid of _me_." And when I had said all that ever I could think of,
+    he turned his bright steady face to mine, and he says just a little
+    broken here and there: "You shall see, Gran, that I can be a man, and
+    that I can do anything that is grateful and loving to you; and if I
+    don't grow up to be what you would like to have me--I hope it will
+    be--because I shall die." And with that he sat down by me, and I went
+    on to tell him of the school, of which I had excellent
+    recommendations, and where it was and how many scholars, and what
+    games they played as I had heard, and what length of holidays, to all
+    of which he listened bright and clear. And so it came that at last he
+    says: "And now, dear Gran, let me kneel down here where I have been
+    used to say my prayers, and let me fold my face for just a minute in
+    your gown and let me cry, for you have been more than father--more
+    than mother--more than brothers, sisters, friends--to me!" And so he
+    did cry, and I too, and we were both much the better for it.
+
+Dear old Doctor Marigold, the travelling auctioneer, in his tender
+sympathy for his little girl when her mother was so cruel to her,
+whispering comforting words in her ear as he was calling for bids on his
+wares while she was dying, and afterward loving the deaf-mute child whom
+he adopted in memory of his own child whom he had lost, has made thousands
+more kindly sympathetic with children.
+
+In the novel that he was writing when he died Dickens makes Canon
+Crisparkle say to Helena Landless: "You have the wisdom of Love, and it
+was the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, remember."
+
+David Copperfield said, "I hope that real love and truth are stronger in
+the end than any evil or misfortune in the world."
+
+The effect of lack of true sympathy on the heart that should have felt and
+shown it is revealed in what Sydney Carton said to Mr. Lorry: "If you
+could say with truth to your own solitary heart to-night, 'I have secured
+to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude and respect, of no human
+creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done
+nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by,' your seventy-eight years
+would be seventy-eight curses; would they not?"
+
+The contrast between the coldness and heartlessness of his parents or
+guardians and the encouraging sympathy of his teacher is one of the
+strongest features in the story of Barbox Brothers (Mugby Junction).
+
+    "You remember me, Young Jackson?"
+
+    "What do I remember if not you? You are my first remembrance. It was
+    you who told me that was my name. It was you who told me that on every
+    20th of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called a
+    birthday. I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!"
+
+    "What am I like, Young Jackson?"
+
+    "You are like a blight all through the year to me. You hard-lined,
+    thin-lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on! You are
+    like the Devil to me--most of all when you teach me religious things,
+    for you make me abhor them."
+
+    "You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In another voice from another
+    quarter:
+
+    "Most gratefully, sir. You are the ray of hope and prospering ambition
+    in my life. When I attended your course I believed that I should come
+    to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy--even though I was
+    still the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate
+    and drank in silence and constraint with the mask before me every day.
+    As I had done every, every, every day through my school time and from
+    my earliest recollection."
+
+    "What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
+
+    "You are like a Superior Being to me. You are like Nature beginning to
+    reveal herself to me. I hear you again as one of the hushed crowd of
+    young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and
+    you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in
+    them."
+
+    "You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In a grating voice from quite
+    another quarter:
+
+    "Too well. You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and
+    announced that its course was to be suddenly and wholly changed. You
+    showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox
+    Brothers. You told me what I was to do, and what to be paid; you told
+    me afterward, at intervals of years, when I was to sign for the Firm,
+    when I became a partner, when I became the Firm. I know no more of it,
+    or of myself."
+
+    "What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
+
+    "You are like my father, I sometimes think. You are hard enough and
+    cold enough so to have brought up an acknowledged son. I see your
+    scanty figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brown wig; but
+    you, too, wear a wax mask to your death. You never by a chance remove
+    it; it never by a chance falls off; and I know no more of you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CHILD STUDY AND CHILD NATURE.
+
+
+Dickens was a profound student of children, and he revealed his
+consciousness of the need of a general study of childhood in all he wrote
+about the importance of a free childhood, individuality, the imagination,
+coercion, cramming, and wrong methods of training children.
+
+He criticised the blindness of those who saw boys as a class or in a
+limited number of classes, distinguished by external and comparatively
+unimportant characteristics, in Mr. Grimwig, "who never saw any difference
+in boys, and only knew two sorts of boys, mealy boys and beef-faced boys."
+
+He exposed the ignorance--the wilful ignorance--of vast numbers of parents
+and teachers who indignantly resent the suggestion that they need to study
+children, in Jane Murdstone. When Jane was interfering in the management
+of David, and with her brother totally misunderstanding him and
+misrepresenting him, his timid mother ventured to say:
+
+    "I beg your pardon, my dear Jane, but are you quite sure--I am certain
+    you'll excuse me, my dear Jane--that you quite understand Davy?"
+
+    "I should be somewhat ashamed of myself, Clara," returned Miss
+    Murdstone, "if I could not understand the boy, or any boy. I don't
+    profess to be profound, but I do lay claim to common sense."
+
+Many Jane Murdstones still claim that it is not necessary to study so
+common a thing as a boy. Yet a child is the most wonderful thing in the
+world, and, whether the Jane Murdstones in the schools and homes like it
+or not, the wise people _are_ studying the child with a view to finding
+out what he should be guided to do in the accomplishment of his own
+training.
+
+Richard Carstone had been eight years at school, and he was a miserable
+failure in life, although a man of good ability.
+
+"It had never been anybody's business to find out what his natural bent
+was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him."
+Esther wisely said: "I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited
+by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying Latin verses so
+much."
+
+Dickens studied every subject about which he wrote with great care and
+discrimination. As an instance of this careful study it may be stated that
+medical authorities say that the description of Smike's sickness and death
+is the best description of consumption ever written. Dickens had a
+wonderful imagination, but he never relied on his imagination for his
+facts or his philosophy. It is therefore reasonable to believe that as he
+wrote more about children than any other man or woman, he was the greatest
+and most reverent student of childhood that England has produced.
+
+In addition to the revelations of his conclusions given in the evolution
+of his child characters, and in the many illustrations of good and of bad
+training, he continually makes direct statements in regard to child nature
+and how to deal with it in its varied manifestations.
+
+His central motive was expressed by the old gentleman who found Little
+Nell astray in London: "I love these little people; and it is not a slight
+thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us."
+
+His ideal of unperverted child nature was entirely different from that
+which had been taught by theology and psychology. He believed the child to
+be pure and good, and that even when heredity was bad, its baneful
+influences need not blight the divinity in his life, if he was wisely
+trained and had a free life of self-activity, a suitable environment, and
+truly sympathetic friends.
+
+    "It would be a curious speculation," said I, after some restless turns
+    across and across the room, "to imagine her in her future life,
+    holding her solitary way among a crowd of wild, grotesque companions,
+    the only pure, fresh, youthful object in the throng."
+
+To keep children pure and fresh was the chief aim of his life work. He had
+no respect for those who treated children as if they were grown-up,
+reasonable beings; who judged children as they would judge adults, and
+therefore misjudged them. He always remembered that a child was a little
+stranger in a new world, and that his complex nature had to adjust itself
+to its environment. He had a perfect, reverent, considerate sympathy for
+the timid young soul venturing to look out upon its new conditions. One of
+the most pathetic things in the world to him was the fact that children
+are nearly universally misunderstood and misinterpreted. How he longed to
+tear down the barriers of formalism, and conventionality, and
+indifference, and misconception from the lives of parents and teachers, so
+that timid children might be true to their better natures in their
+presence.
+
+    When little Florence timidly presented herself, Mr. Dombey stopped in
+    his pacing up and down and looked toward her. Had he looked with
+    greater interest and with a father's eye, he might have read in her
+    keen glance the impulses and fears that made her waver; the passionate
+    desire to run clinging to him, crying, as she hid her face in his
+    embrace, "Oh, father, try to love me! there's no one else!" the dread
+    of a repulse; the fear of being too bold, and of offending him; the
+    pitiable need in which she stood of some assurance and encouragement;
+    and how her overcharged young heart was wandering to find some natural
+    resting place for its sorrow and affection.
+
+    But he saw nothing of this. He saw her pause irresolutely at the door
+    and look toward him; and he saw no more.
+
+    "Come in," he said, "come in; what is the child afraid of?"
+
+    She came in, and after glancing round her for a moment with an
+    uncertain air, stood pressing her small hands hard together, close
+    within the door.
+
+    "Come here, Florence," said her father coldly. "Do you know who I am?"
+
+    "Yes, papa."
+
+    "Have you nothing to say to me?"
+
+    The tears that stood in her eyes as she raised them quickly to his
+    face were frozen by the expression it wore. She looked down again and
+    put out her trembling hand.
+
+    Mr. Dombey took it loosely in his own, and stood looking down upon her
+    for a moment, as if he knew as little as the child what to say or do.
+
+    "There! Be a good girl," he said, patting her on the head, and
+    regarding her, as it were, by stealth with a disturbed and doubtful
+    look. "Go to Richards. Go!"
+
+    His little daughter hesitated for another instant as though she would
+    have clung about him still, or had some lingering hope that he might
+    raise her in his arms and kiss her. She looked up in his face once
+    more. He thought how like her expression was then to what it had been
+    when she looked round at the doctor--that night--and instinctively
+    dropped her hand and turned away.
+
+    It was not difficult to perceive that Florence was at a great
+    disadvantage in her father's presence. It was not only a constraint
+    upon the child's mind, but even upon the natural grace and freedom of
+    her actions.
+
+    The child, in her grief and neglect, was so gentle, so quiet and
+    uncomplaining, was possessed of so much affection that no one seemed
+    to care to have, and so much sorrowful intelligence that no one seemed
+    to mind or think about the wounding of, that Polly's heart was sore
+    when she was left alone again.
+
+The same lesson was given to parents and teachers in Murdstone's treatment
+of Davy. The sensitive, shy boy was regarded as sullen, and treated "like
+a dog" in consequence. Oh, what bitterness it puts into a child's life to
+be misunderstood by its dearest friends! If there were no other reason for
+the co-operative study of children by parents and teachers, it would be a
+sufficient reason that they might be understood and appreciated. Many
+lives are made barren and wicked by the failure of parents and teachers to
+understand them.
+
+It is so easy for children to get the impression that they are not liked
+by adults. When Walter started life in Mr. Dombey's great warehouse, his
+uncle, old Solomon Gills, with whom he lived, asked him on his return
+from work the first day:
+
+    "Has Mr. Dombey been there to-day?"
+
+    "Oh, yes! In and out all day."
+
+    "He didn't take any notice of you, I suppose?"
+
+    "Yes, he did. He walked up to my seat--I wish he wasn't so solemn and
+    stiff, uncle--and said, 'Oh! you are the son of Mr. Gills, the ships'
+    instrument maker.' 'Nephew, sir,' I said. 'I said nephew, boy,' said
+    he. But I could take my oath he said son, uncle."
+
+    "You're mistaken, I dare say. It's no matter."
+
+    "No, it's no matter, but he needn't have been so sharp, I thought.
+    There was no harm in it, though he did say son. Then he told me that
+    you had spoken to him about me, and that he had found me employment in
+    the house accordingly, and that I was expected to be attentive and
+    punctual, and then he went away. I thought he didn't seem to like me
+    much."
+
+    "You mean, I suppose," observed the instrument maker, "that you didn't
+    seem to like him much."
+
+    "Well, uncle," returned the boy, laughing, "perhaps so; I never
+    thought of that."
+
+This short selection reveals the disrespect for childhood which leads
+adulthood to flatly contradict what a child says, whether he is making a
+statement of fact or of opinion. This is most inconsiderate, and naturally
+leads to a corresponding disrespect for adulthood on the part of the
+child. The selection clearly intimates that childhood would be more happy,
+and like adulthood better, if adulthood was not so "solemn and stiff."
+Parents and teachers should learn from Solomon's philosophy that a child's
+feelings toward an adult partly determine his impressions regarding the
+attitude of adulthood toward him.
+
+The first thing necessary in training a child to be his real, best self is
+to win his affectionate regard and confidence. One has to be very true,
+very unconventional, and very joyous, to do this fully.
+
+Dickens pitied the child because, even when he is understood, his wishes,
+plans, and decisions are not treated with respect. This is a gross
+injustice to the child's nature. As Pip so truly said: "It may be only
+small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small,
+and its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as many hands high,
+according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter."
+
+Adulthood needs to learn no lesson more than that childhood lives a life
+of its own, that that life should not be tested by the scales and tape
+lines of adulthood, and that within its range of action its choice should
+be respected, and its opinions treated with reverent consideration.
+
+Mrs. Lirriper said that when she used to read the Bible to Mrs. Edson,
+when that lady was dying, "though she took to all I read to her, I used to
+fancy that next to what was taught upon the Mount she took most of all to
+his gentle compassion for us poor women, and to his young life, and to how
+his mother was proud of him, and treasured his sayings in her heart."
+
+The divinity in any child will grow more rapidly if his mother "treasures
+his sayings in her heart." We need more reverence for the child.
+
+Dickens tried to make parents regard the child as a sacred thing, which
+should always be the richest joy of his parents.
+
+Speaking of Mrs. Darnay, in The Tale of Two Cities, he says:
+
+    The time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among
+    the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the
+    sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they
+    would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those
+    coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh,
+    and the divine Friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had
+    confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as he took the
+    child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.
+
+Dickens had profound faith in children whose true development had not been
+arrested.
+
+    Doctor Strong had a simple faith in him that might have touched the
+    stone hearts of the very urns upon the wall.... He appealed in
+    everything to the honour and good faith of the boys, and relied on
+    their possession of those qualities unless they proved themselves
+    unworthy.
+
+Reliance begets reliance. Faith increases the qualities that merit faith.
+
+David said the doctor's reliance on the boys "worked wonders." No wonder
+it worked wonders. We can help a boy to grow no higher than our faith in
+him can reach.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+BAD TRAINING.
+
+
+In addition to the bad training found in so many of his best-known
+schools, to show the evils of coercion in all forms, of the child
+depravity ideal, of the loss of a free, real, rich childhood, of the
+dwarfing of individuality, of the deadening of the imagination, and other
+similar evils, Dickens's books, from Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood, contain
+many illustrations of utterly wrong methods of training children.
+
+The mean and cruel way in which children used to be treated by the
+managers of institutions is described in Oliver Twist. Dickens said that
+when Oliver was born he cried lustily.
+
+    If he could have known that he was an orphan, left to the tender
+    mercies of church wardens and overseers, perhaps he would have cried
+    the louder.
+
+    "Bow to the board," said Bumble, when he was brought before that
+    august body. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were
+    lingering in his eyes, and seeing no board but the table, fortunately
+    bowed to that.
+
+    "What's your name, boy?" said the gentleman in the high chair.
+
+    Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made
+    him tremble; and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made
+    him cry. These two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating
+    voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool.
+    Which was a capital way of raising his spirits and putting him quite
+    at his ease.
+
+    "Boy," said the gentleman in the high chair, "listen to me. You know
+    you're an orphan, I suppose?"
+
+    "What's that, sir?" inquired poor Oliver.
+
+    "The boy is a fool--I thought he was," said the gentleman in the white
+    waistcoat.
+
+    "Hush!" said the gentleman who had spoken first. "You know you've got
+    no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don't
+    you?"
+
+    "Yes, sir," replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.
+
+    "What are you crying for?" inquired the gentleman in the white
+    waistcoat. And, to be sure, it was very extraordinary. What _could_
+    the boy be crying for?
+
+    "I hope you say your prayers every night," said another gentleman in a
+    gruff voice, "and pray for the people who feed and take care of
+    you--like a Christian."
+
+    "Yes, sir," stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was
+    unconsciously right. It would have been _very_ like a Christian, and a
+    marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people
+    who fed and took care of _him_.
+
+The dreadful practices of first making children self-conscious and
+apparently dull by abuse and formalism, and then calling them "fools," or
+"stupid," or "dunces," are happily not so common now.
+
+In Barnaby Rudge he makes Edward Chester complain to his father about the
+way he had been educated.
+
+    From my childhood I have been accustomed to luxury and idleness, and
+    have been bred as though my fortune were large and my expectations
+    almost without a limit. The idea of wealth has been familiarized to me
+    from my cradle. I have been taught to look upon those means by which
+    men raise themselves to riches and distinction as being beyond my
+    breeding and beneath my care. I have been, as the phrase is, liberally
+    educated, and am fit for nothing.
+
+Dickens was in terrible earnest to kill all the giants that preyed on the
+lifeblood of the joy, the hope, the freedom, the selfhood, and the
+imagination of childhood. He waged unceasing warfare against the system
+which he described as
+
+    The excellent and thoughtful old system, hallowed by long
+    prescription, which has usually picked out from the rest of mankind
+    the most dreary and uncomfortable people that could possibly be laid
+    hold of, to act as instructors of youth.
+
+The selfish and mercenary ideal and its consequences are dealt with in the
+training of Jonas Chuzzlewit:
+
+    The education of Mr. Jonas had been conducted from his cradle on the
+    strictest principles of the main chance. The very first word he
+    learned to spell was "gain," and the second one (when he got into two
+    syllables) "money." But for two results, which were not clearly
+    foreseen perhaps by his watchful parent in the beginning, his training
+    may be said to have been unexceptionable. One of these flaws was, that
+    having been long taught by his father to overreach everybody, he had
+    imperceptibly acquired a love of overreaching that venerable monitor
+    himself. The other, that from his early habits of considering
+    everything as a question of property, he had gradually come to look
+    with impatience on his parent as a certain amount of personal estate
+    which had no right whatever to be going at large, but ought to be
+    secured in that particular description of iron safe which is commonly
+    called a coffin, and banked in the grave.
+
+When Charity Pecksniff reproved Jonas for speaking irreverently of her
+father, he said:
+
+    "Ecod, you may say what you like of _my_ father, then, and so I give
+    you leave," said Jonas. "I think it's liquid aggravation that
+    circulates through his veins, and not regular blood. How old should
+    you think my father was, cousin?"
+
+    "Old, no doubt," replied Miss Charity; "but a fine old gentleman."
+
+    "A fine old gentleman!" repeated Jonas, giving the crown of his hat an
+    angry knock. "Ah! It's time he was thinking of being drawn out a
+    little finer, too. Why, he's eighty!"
+
+    "Is he, indeed?" said the young lady.
+
+    "And ecod," cried Jonas, "now he's gone so far without giving in, I
+    don't see much to prevent his being ninety; no, nor even a hundred.
+    Why, a man with any feeling ought to be ashamed of being eighty, let
+    alone more. Where's his religion, I should like to know, when he goes
+    flying in the face of the Bible like that? Threescore and ten's the
+    mark; and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what's
+    expected of him, has any business to live longer."
+
+When Jonas was particularly brutal in the treatment of Chuffey, the old
+clerk, his father seemed to enjoy his son's sharpness.
+
+    It was strange enough that Anthony Chuzzlewit, himself so old a man,
+    should take a pleasure in these gibings of his estimable son at the
+    expense of the poor shadow at their table; but he did, unquestionably,
+    though not so much--to do him justice--with reference to their ancient
+    clerk, as in exultation at the sharpness of Jonas. For the same
+    reason, that young man's coarse allusions, even to himself, filled him
+    with a stealthy glee, causing him to rub his hands and chuckle
+    covertly, as if he said in his sleeve, "_I_ taught him. _I_ trained
+    him. This is the heir of my bringing up. Sly, cunning, and covetous,
+    he'll not squander my money. I worked for this; I hoped for this; it
+    has been the great end and aim of my life."
+
+    What a noble end and aim it was to contemplate in the attainment,
+    truly! But there be some who manufacture idols after the fashion of
+    themselves, and fail to worship them when they are made; charging
+    their deformity on outraged Nature. Anthony was better than these at
+    any rate.
+
+Exaggerated! Slightly exaggerated, but terribly true to Nature. Centring
+the life of a child on one base materialistic aim is certain to make a
+degraded if not a dangerous character. Every noble energy that should have
+given spiritual strength and beauty is devoured by the material monster as
+he grows in the heart. Respect for age, even for parents, is lost with all
+other virtues, and humanity becomes not a brotherhood to be co-operated
+with for noble purposes, but a horde to be entrapped and cheated. Jonas
+delighted his father with his rule in business: "Here's the rule for
+bargains--'Do other men, for they would do you.' That's the true business
+precept. All others are counterfeits."
+
+Speaking of the conversation heard by Martin Chuzzlewit at the boarding
+house in New York, he said:
+
+    It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater
+    part of it may be summed up in one word: Dollars. All their cares,
+    hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations seemed to be melted
+    down into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into
+    the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab
+    with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by
+    their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked
+    down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any
+    venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that
+    worthless ballast, honour and fair dealing, which any man cast
+    overboard from the ship of his good name and good intent, the more
+    ample stowage room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and
+    mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute
+    it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a
+    degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars! What is a flag to _them_!
+
+This was a solemn warning against the training of a race with such low
+ideals.
+
+In the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens shows that he deliberately
+planned Jonas Chuzzlewit as a psychological study. He says:
+
+    I conceive that the sordid coarseness and brutality of Jonas would be
+    unnatural, if there had been nothing in his early education, and in
+    the precept and example always before him, to engender and develop the
+    vices that make him odious. But, so born and so bred--admired for that
+    which made him hateful, and justified from his cradle in cunning,
+    treachery, and avarice--I claim him as the legitimate issue of the
+    father upon whom those vices are seen to recoil. And I submit that
+    their recoil upon that old man, in his unhonoured age, is not a mere
+    piece of poetical justice, but is the extreme exposition of a direct
+    truth.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin was described as a child trainer of great respectability. She
+adopted the business of child training because her husband lost his money.
+Dickens did great service to the world by ridiculing the outrageous
+practice of sending children to be trained by women or taught by men whose
+only qualification for the most sacred of all duties was the fact that
+they had lost their money, and were therefore likely to be bad tempered
+and severe. He had already introduced Squeers to the world, but he knew
+that many people who shuddered at Squeers would send their own children to
+such as Mrs. Pipchin, because she was respectable and poor. He wished to
+alarm such people; hence Mrs. Pipchin.
+
+Mrs. Chick, Mr. Dombey's sister, and Miss Tox called Mr. Dombey's
+attention to Mrs. Pipchin's establishment.
+
+    "Mrs. Pipchin, my dear Paul," returned his sister, "is an elderly
+    lady--Miss Tox knows her whole history--who has for some time devoted
+    all the energies of her mind, with the greatest success, to the study
+    and treatment of infancy, and who has been extremely well connected."
+
+    This celebrated Mrs. Pipchin was a marvellous, ill-favoured,
+    ill-conditioned old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face
+    like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard gray eye that looked as if it
+    might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any injury.
+    Forty years at least had elapsed since the Peruvian mines had been the
+    death of Mr. Pipchin; but his relict still wore black bombazine, of
+    such a lustreless, deep, dead, sombre shade that gas itself couldn't
+    light her up after dark, and her presence was a quencher to any number
+    of candles. She was generally spoken of as "a great manager" of
+    children; and the secret of her management was, to give them
+    everything that they didn't like and nothing that they did--which was
+    found to sweeten their dispositions very much.
+
+When Paul and Florence were taken to Mrs. Pipchin's establishment, Mrs.
+Pipchin gave them an opportunity to study her disciplinary system as soon
+as Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox went away. "Master Bitherstone was divested of
+his collar at once, which he had worn on parade," and Miss Pankey, the
+only other little boarder at present, was walked off to the castle dungeon
+(an empty apartment at the back, devoted to correctional purposes), for
+having sniffed thrice in the presence of visitors.
+
+    At one o'clock there was a dinner, chiefly of the farinaceous and
+    vegetable kind, when Miss Pankey (a mild little blue-eyed morsel of a
+    child, who was shampooed every morning, and seemed in danger of being
+    rubbed away altogether) was led in from captivity by the ogress
+    herself, and instructed that nobody who sniffed before visitors ever
+    went to heaven. When this great truth had been thoroughly impressed
+    upon her, she was regaled with rice; and subsequently repeated the
+    form of grace established in the castle, in which there was a special
+    clause thanking Mrs. Pipchin for a good dinner. Mrs. Pipchin's niece,
+    Berinthia, took cold pork. Mrs. Pipchin, whose constitution required
+    warm nourishment, made a special repast of mutton chops, which were
+    brought in hot and hot, between two plates, and smelled very nice.
+
+    As it rained after dinner and they couldn't go out walking on the
+    beach, and Mrs. Pipchin's constitution required rest after chops, they
+    went away with Berry (otherwise Berinthia) to the dungeon--an empty
+    room looking out upon a chalk wall and a water butt, and made ghastly
+    by a ragged fireplace without any stove in it. Enlivened by company,
+    however, this was the best place after all; for Berry played with them
+    there, and seemed to enjoy a game at romps as much as they did; until
+    Mrs. Pipchin knocking angrily at the wall, like the Cock Lane Ghost
+    revived, they left off, and Berry told them stories in a whisper until
+    twilight.
+
+    For tea there was plenty of milk and water, and bread and butter, with
+    a little black teapot for Mrs. Pipchin and Berry, and buttered toast
+    unlimited for Mrs. Pipchin, which was brought in, hot and hot, like
+    the chops. Though Mrs. Pipchin got very greasy outside over this dish,
+    it didn't seem to lubricate her internally at all; for she was as
+    fierce as ever, and the hard gray eye knew no softening.
+
+    After tea, Berry brought out a little workbox, with the Royal Pavilion
+    on the lid, and fell to working busily; while Mrs. Pipchin, having put
+    on her spectacles and opened a great volume bound in green baize,
+    began to nod. And whenever Mrs. Pipchin caught herself falling forward
+    into the fire, and woke up, she filliped Master Bitherstone on the
+    nose for nodding too.
+
+    At last it was the children's bedtime, and after prayers they went to
+    bed. As little Miss Pankey was afraid of sleeping alone in the dark,
+    Mrs. Pipchin always made a point of driving her upstairs herself, like
+    a sheep; and it was cheerful to hear Miss Pankey moaning long
+    afterward, in the least eligible chamber, and Mrs. Pipchin now and
+    then going in to shake her. At about half-past nine o'clock the odour
+    of a warm sweetbread (Mrs. Pipchin's constitution wouldn't go to sleep
+    without sweetbread) diversified the prevailing fragrance of the house,
+    which Mrs. Wickam said was "a smell of building," and slumber fell
+    upon the castle shortly after.
+
+    The breakfast next morning was like the tea overnight, except that
+    Mrs. Pipchin took her roll instead of toast, and seemed a little more
+    irate when it was over. Master Bitherstone read aloud to the rest a
+    pedigree from Genesis (judiciously selected by Mrs. Pipchin), getting
+    over the names with the ease and clearness of a person tumbling up the
+    treadmill. That done, Miss Pankey was borne away to be shampooed, and
+    Master Bitherstone to have something else done to him with salt water,
+    from which he always returned very blue and dejected. Paul and
+    Florence went out in the meantime on the beach with Wickam--who was
+    constantly in tears--and at about noon Mrs. Pipchin presided over some
+    Early Readings. It being a part of Mrs. Pipchin's system not to
+    encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young
+    flower, but to open it by force like an oyster, the moral of these
+    lessons was usually of a violent and stunning character; the hero--a
+    naughty boy--seldom, in the mildest catastrophe, being finished off by
+    anything less than a lion or a bear.
+
+    Sunday evening was the most melancholy evening in the week; for Mrs.
+    Pipchin always made a point of being particularly cross on Sunday
+    nights. Miss Pankey was generally brought back from an aunt's at
+    Rottingdean, in deep distress; and Master Bitherstone, whose relatives
+    were all in India, and who was required to sit, between the services,
+    in an erect position with his head against the parlour wall, neither
+    moving hand nor foot, suffered so acutely in his young spirits that he
+    once asked Florence, on a Sunday night, if she could give him any idea
+    of the way back to Bengal.
+
+    But it was generally said that Mrs. Pipchin was a woman of system with
+    children; and no doubt she was. Certainly the wild ones went home tame
+    enough, after sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof.
+
+    At this exemplary old lady Paul would sit staring in his little
+    armchair by the fire for any length of time. He never seemed to know
+    what weariness was when he was looking fixedly at Mrs. Pipchin. He
+    was not fond of her; he was not afraid of her; but in those old, old
+    moods of his, she seemed to have a grotesque attraction for him. There
+    he would sit, looking at her, and warming his hands, and looking at
+    her, until he sometimes quite confounded Mrs. Pipchin, ogress as she
+    was. Once she asked him, when they were alone, what he was thinking
+    about.
+
+    "You," said Paul, without the least reserve.
+
+    "And what are you thinking about me?" asked Mrs. Pipchin.
+
+    "I'm thinking how old you must be," said Paul.
+
+    "You mustn't say such things as that, young gentleman," returned the
+    dame. "That'll never do."
+
+    "Why not?" asked Paul.
+
+    "Because it's not polite," said Mrs. Pipchin snappishly.
+
+    "Not polite?" said Paul.
+
+    "No."
+
+    "It's not polite," said Paul innocently, "to eat all the mutton chops
+    and toast, Wickam says."
+
+    "Wickam," retorted Mrs. Pipchin, colouring, "is a wicked, impudent,
+    bold-faced hussy."
+
+    "What's that?" inquired Paul.
+
+    "Never you mind, sir," retorted Mrs. Pipchin. "Remember the story of
+    the little boy that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking
+    questions."
+
+    "If the bull was mad," said Paul, "how did he know that the boy had
+    asked questions? Nobody can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I
+    don't believe that story."
+
+    "You don't believe it, sir?" repeated Mrs. Pipchin, amazed.
+
+    "No," said Paul.
+
+    "Not if it should happen to have been a tame bull, you little
+    infidel?" said Mrs. Pipchin.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "Berry's very fond of you, ain't she?" Paul once asked Mrs. Pipchin
+    when they were sitting by the fire with the cat.
+
+    "Yes," said Mrs. Pipchin.
+
+    "Why?" asked Paul.
+
+    "Why?" returned the disconcerted old lady. "How can you ask such
+    things, sir? Why are you fond of your sister Florence?"
+
+    "Because she's very good," said Paul. "There's nobody like Florence."
+
+
+
+    "Well!" retorted Mrs. Pipchin shortly, "and there's nobody like me, I
+    suppose."
+
+    "Ain't there really, though?" asked Paul, leaning forward in his
+    chair, and looking at her very hard.
+
+    "No," said the old lady.
+
+    "I am glad of that," observed Paul, rubbing his hands thoughtfully.
+    "That's a very good thing."
+
+To which every one would say "Amen," if they could believe Mrs. Pipchin's
+statement to be actually true.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin combined in her "system" many of the evils of child training.
+
+She was not good-looking, and those who train children should be decidedly
+good-looking. They need not be handsome; they ought to be winsome. Her
+"mottled face like bad marble, and hard grey eye" meant danger to
+childhood.
+
+She was gloomy in appearance, in manner, and in dress, all
+disqualifications for any position connected with child development.
+
+She was "a bitter old lady," and children should be surrounded with an
+atmosphere of sweetness and joyousness.
+
+Her one diabolical rule was "to give children everything they didn't like
+and nothing they did like." This rule is the logical limit of the doctrine
+of child depravity.
+
+She was generally spoken of as a "great manager," simply because she
+compelled children to do her bidding by fear of punishment in the
+"dungeon," or of being sent to bed, or robbed of their meals, or by some
+other mean form of contemptible coercion. These processes were praised as
+excellent till Dickens destroyed their respectability. His title
+"child-queller" is admirable, and full of philosophy. Many a man has been
+able to form a truer conception regarding child freedom through the
+influence of the word "child-queller." Every teacher should ask himself
+every day, "Am I a child-queller?" It will be a blessed thing for the
+children when there shall be no more Pipchinny teachers.
+
+The environment of the ogress was not attractive. The gardens grew only
+marigolds, snails were on the doors, and bad odours in the house. "In the
+winter time the air couldn't be got out of the castle, and in the summer
+time it couldn't be got in." Dickens knew that the environment of children
+has a direct influence on their characters, and that ventilation is
+essential to good health. These lessons were needed fifty years ago.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin made children dishonest by putting on collars for parade.
+
+"The farinaceous and vegetable" diet, the "regaled with rice" criticisms
+show that Dickens anticipated by half a century the present interest in
+the study of nutrition as one of the most important educational subjects.
+
+The combination of coercion and religion is ridiculed in the theological
+constraint of Mrs. Pipchin, when she told little Miss Pankey "that nobody
+who sniffed before visitors ever went to heaven."
+
+The outrageous selfishness of adulthood was exposed by the description of
+Mrs. Pipchin's anger at the play of the children in the back room when it
+was raining and they could not go out.
+
+The injustice of the "child-queller" was shown because she filliped Master
+Bitherstone on the nose for nodding in the evening, whenever she woke up
+from her own nodding.
+
+The sacrilege of having prayers between two processes of cruelty is worthy
+of note. Religion should never be associated in the mind of a child with
+injustice, cruelty, or any meanness.
+
+The dreadful practice of driving timid children to sleep in the dark was
+another of Mrs. Pipchin's accomplishments. The retiring hour of childhood
+should be made the happiest and most nerve soothing of the day. Wise and
+sympathetic adulthood, especially motherhood, can then reach the central
+nature of the child most successfully.
+
+The formal reading of a meaningless selection from the Bible by
+Bitherstone tended to prevent the development of a true interest in that
+most interesting of all books.
+
+The Early Readings, with the bad boy in the story "being finished off
+generally by a lion or a bear," were a fit accompaniment to a system in
+which no child's mind was encouraged to expand like a flower naturally,
+but to be opened by force like an oyster.
+
+Dickens began with Mrs. Pipchin his revelation of the great blunder of
+checking the questions of children. "Remember the story of the little boy
+that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking questions," she said to
+Paul. The same evil is pointed out in the training of Pip in Great
+Expectations.
+
+Another common error is revealed by Mrs. Pipchin, when she called Paul "a
+little infidel," because he did not accept her statement about the mad
+bull, although she knew it to be false herself. Even when children doubt
+the truth they should not be called "infidels," unless, indeed, it is
+desired to make them definitely and consciously sceptical.
+
+The Puritan Sabbath was a part of Mrs. Pipchin's quelling system too.
+
+It was little wonder, therefore, that the wild children went home tame
+enough after a few months in her awful institution.
+
+Few men who have ever lived have studied the child and his training so
+thoroughly as to be able to condense into such brief space so many of the
+evils of bad training.
+
+Mrs. Pipchin and Mr. Squeers have been made to do good work for childhood.
+
+Biler was so badly treated at the grinders' school that he played hookey,
+but that was not the worst feature of his education. They did not feel any
+responsibility for character development in the school of the Charitable
+Grinders.
+
+    But they never taught honour at the grinders' school, where the system
+    that prevailed was particularly strong in the engendering of
+    hypocrisy; insomuch that many of the friends and masters of past
+    grinders said, if this were what came of education for the common
+    people, let us have none. Some more rational said, Let us have a
+    better one; but the governing powers of the grinders' company were
+    always ready for _them_, by picking out a few boys who had turned out
+    well in spite of the system, and roundly asserting that they could
+    have only turned out well because of it. Which settled the business of
+    those objectors out of hand, and established the glory of the
+    grinders' institution.
+
+In David Copperfield, Uriah Heep, utterly detestable in character, is the
+natural product of the system of training under which both he and his
+father were brought up. Uriah said:
+
+    "Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys;
+    and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of
+    charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness--not
+    much else that I know of--from morning to night. We was to be umble to
+    this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to
+    make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves
+    before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the
+    monitor medal by being umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by
+    being umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being
+    such a well-behaved man that they were determined to bring him on. 'Be
+    umble, Uriah,' says father, 'and you'll get on. It was what was always
+    being dinned into you and me at school; it's what goes down best. Be
+    umble,' says father, 'and you'll do!' And really it ain't done bad!"
+
+    It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that this detestable
+    cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I
+    had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed. I had never
+    doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended
+    now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful
+    spirit must have been engendered by this early, and this long,
+    suppression.
+
+David himself tells how he suffered after the death of his mother from the
+cold neglect of Mr. Murdstone and Jane Murdstone. No child can be so
+destitute as the child who is neglected through dislike.
+
+    And now I fell into a state of neglect, which I can not look back upon
+    without compassion. I fell at once into a solitary condition--apart
+    from all friendly notice, apart from the society of all other boys of
+    my own age, apart from all companionship but my own spiritless
+    thoughts--which seems to cast its gloom upon this paper as I write.
+
+    What would I have given to have been sent to the hardest school that
+    ever was kept! to have been taught something, anyhow, anywhere! No
+    such hope dawned upon me. They disliked me, and they sullenly,
+    sternly, steadily overlooked me. I think Mr. Murdstone's means were
+    straitened at about this time; but it is little to the purpose. He
+    could not bear me; and in putting me from him he tried, as I believe,
+    to put away the notion that I had any claim upon him--and succeeded.
+
+    I was not actively ill used. I was not beaten or starved; but the
+    wrong that was done to me had no intervals of relenting, and was done
+    in a systematic, passionless manner. Day after day, week after week,
+    month after month, I was coldly neglected. I wonder sometimes, when I
+    think of it, what they would have done if I had been taken with an
+    illness--whether I should have lain down in my lonely room and
+    languished through it in my usual solitary way, or whether anybody
+    would have helped me out.
+
+But the greatest lesson in wrong training given in David Copperfield is
+the character development of Steerforth. He was ruined by the misdirected
+love of his mother, and his life is a fine psychological study.
+
+He was a boy of unusually good ability and great attractiveness. He
+possessed by nature every element of power and grace required to make him
+a strong, true, and very successful man; but the love of his mother
+degenerated to pride and admiration, indulgence was substituted for
+guidance, and the strong woman became weak at the vital point of training
+her boy. She allowed him to become selfish and vain by yielding to his
+caprices. She thought she was making his character strong by allowing no
+restraint to be put upon it. She failed to distinguish between license and
+liberty. She had conceived the ideal of the need of freedom, but she knew
+naught of the true harmony between control and spontaneity. She allowed
+the spontaneity, and gloried in his resistance to control. She was blind
+to the balancing element in "the perfect law of liberty." She made her boy
+a powerful engine without a governor valve. So his selfhood became
+selfishness, and his character was wrecked. Among other immoral opinions
+that he gained from his mother's training was the idea that he belonged to
+a select class superior to common humanity. How Dickens hated this
+thought! Rosa Dartle asked Steerforth about
+
+    "That sort of people--are they really animals and clods, and beings of
+    another order? I want to know so much."
+
+    "Why, there's a pretty wide separation between them and us," said
+    Steerforth, with indifference. "They are not to be expected to be as
+    sensitive as we are. Their delicacy is not to be shocked or hurt very
+    easily. They are wonderfully virtuous, I dare say--some people contend
+    for that, at least, and I am sure I don't want to contradict them; but
+    they have not very fine natures, and they may be thankful that, like
+    their coarse, rough skins, they are not easily wounded."
+
+He was trained to despise work, which is a good start toward the utter
+loss of character. A boy who despises his fellow-beings whom he assumes to
+rank below him, and who also despises work, instead of recognising the
+duty of every man to be a producer or a distributor of power, may easily
+fall into moral degeneracy.
+
+    "Help yourself, Copperfield!" said Steerforth. "We'll drink the
+    daisies of the field, in compliment to you; and the lilies of the
+    valley that toil not, neither do they spin, in compliment to me--the
+    more shame for me!"
+
+His character lacked seriousness. He had the fatal levity that led him to
+discuss the most sacred subjects in a flippant manner.
+
+His mother knew that Creakle's school was not a proper place for him, but
+she wished to make him conscious of his superiority even over his teacher,
+and she knew that Creakle, tyrannical bully though he was, would yield to
+Steerforth, because his mother was wealthy.
+
+    "It was not a fit school generally for my son," said she; "far from
+    it; but there were particular circumstances to be considered at the
+    time, of more importance even than that selection. My son's high
+    spirit made it desirable that he should be placed with some man who
+    felt its superiority, and would be content to bow himself before it;
+    and we found such a man there."
+
+What a perversion of the ideal of freedom in the development of character,
+to suppose that it could only reach perfection by a consciousness of
+superiority; by having some one who should control him bow down before
+him! No man in the world is truly free who has a desire to dominate some
+one else--another man, a woman, or a child. Yet Mrs. Steerforth sacrificed
+her son's education in order that his manly spirit might be cultivated by
+the subordination of the man who should have governed him. She showed
+better judgment in deciding that a coercive tyrant like Creakle would make
+a subservient sycophant.
+
+    "My son's great capacity was tempted on there by a feeling of
+    voluntary emulation and conscious pride," the fond lady went on to
+    say. "He would have risen against all constraint; but he found himself
+    the monarch of the place, and he haughtily determined to be worthy of
+    his station. It was like himself."
+
+As Steerforth began consciously to feel his better nature surrendering to
+his sensuality, he experienced the pangs that all strong natures feel at
+the loss of moral power, and one time when he and David were visiting Mr.
+Peggotty at Yarmouth he seemed to be moody and disposed to sadness. He
+said suddenly to David when they were alone one day:
+
+    "David, I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last twenty
+    years!"
+
+    "My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?"
+
+    "I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!" he exclaimed. "I
+    wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!"
+
+    There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me.
+    He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.
+
+    "It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a
+    nephew," he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney
+    piece, with his face toward the fire, "than to be myself, twenty
+    times richer and twenty times wiser and be the torment to myself that
+    I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat, within the last half
+    hour!"
+
+He had already begun to poison the fountains of little Emily's purity.
+
+When Steerforth, after running away with Emily and deserting her, was
+drowned and brought home, Rosa Dartle, who had loved him, charged his
+mother with his ruin. She had a scar on her lip, made by a hammer thrown
+by Steerforth when he was a boy.
+
+    "Do you remember when he did this?" she proceeded. "Do you remember
+    when in his inheritance of your nature, and in your pampering of his
+    pride and passion, he did this, and disfigured me for life? Look at
+    me, marked until I die with his high displeasure, and moan and groan
+    for what you made him!"
+
+    "Miss Dartle," I entreated her, "for Heaven's sake----"
+
+    "I _will_ speak," she said, turning on me with her lightning eyes. "Be
+    silent you! Look at me, I say, proud mother of a proud false son! Moan
+    for your nurture of him, moan for your corruption of him, moan for
+    your loss of him, moan for mine!"
+
+    She clinched her hand, and trembled through her spare, worn figure, as
+    if her passion were killing her by inches.
+
+    "YOU resent his self-will!" she exclaimed. "YOU injured by his haughty
+    temper! YOU, who opposed to both, when your hair was gray, the
+    qualities which made both when you gave him birth! YOU, who from his
+    cradle reared him to be what he was, and stunted what he should have
+    been! Are you rewarded, _now_, for your years of trouble?"
+
+    "Miss Dartle," said I, "if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for
+    this afflicted mother----"
+
+    "Who feels for me?" she sharply retorted. "She has sown this. Let her
+    moan for the harvest that she reaps to-day!"
+
+To show that the seed for the harvest had been sown by his mother was
+Dickens's aim in the delineation of his character. Yet she loved him as a
+part of her own life. She said to Mr. Peggotty, when he came to plead with
+her for Emily:
+
+    "My son, who has been the object of my life, to whom its every thought
+    has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish,
+    from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth."
+
+There was a double sadness in David's soliloquy about Steerforth, who had
+been his friend:
+
+    In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought
+    more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more toward all that
+    was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have
+    made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had
+    done in the height of my devotion to him.
+
+In Bleak House a great deal of attention is paid to child training.
+
+Esther's sadness because of her neglected birthday touches a tender chord.
+
+    It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other birthdays;
+    none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as I
+    knew from what I heard the girls relate to one another; there were
+    none on mine. My birthday was the most melancholy day at home in the
+    whole year.
+
+There is more than mere sentiment in birthday celebrations both at home
+and in school. It develops a pleasant consciousness of individuality and
+community--two of the greatest educational ideals.
+
+The cruelty of telling children of any supposed blight of heredity or of
+any other shadow that arrogant conventionality dares to throw over them,
+is criticised in the hard, gloomy way in which Esther's godmother referred
+to her mother.
+
+Even worse than this in the refinement of its cruelty was her parting
+injunction. It is a shameful thing to make a child believe that she is
+different from other children in any sense of either badness or goodness.
+
+    "Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a
+    life begun with such a shadow on it. You are different from other
+    children, Esther, because you were not born, like them, in common
+    sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart."
+
+    I went up to my room and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek
+    against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon my
+    bosom cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my
+    sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy, at any time, to
+    anybody's heart, and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to
+    me.
+
+Dickens evidently meant to reveal more than her godmother's cruelty in her
+closing moralizings. She made the mistake of using self-denial and
+diligent work as curses instead of blessings. They were for the time none
+the less curses to the child, however.
+
+The gross negligence of parents in regard to the sacredness of the
+children's retiring hour is exposed in the management of the Jellyby
+children. Indeed, Mrs. Jellyby may be regarded as several volumes of
+treatises on how not to train children. Caddy expressed her views of the
+training they received by saying: "I wish I was dead. I wish we were all
+dead. It would be a great deal better for us." She wisely added: "Oh,
+don't talk of duty as a child! where's ma's duty as a parent?" Esther said
+wisely:
+
+    It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural
+    duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope
+    in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against
+    becoming absurd; but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to
+    myself.
+
+Esther describes the process of putting the children to bed one evening
+she was visiting at the Jellyby home:
+
+    Mrs. Jellyby stopped for a moment her conversation with Mr. Quale, on
+    the Brotherhood of Humanity, long enough to order the children to bed.
+
+    As Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs,
+    where the young woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst
+    of the little family like a dragon, and overturned them into cribs.
+
+    Peepy was the unfortunate child who had fallen downstairs, who now
+    interrupted the correspondence by presenting himself with a slip of
+    plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his wounded knees, in which Ada
+    and I did not know which to pity most, the bruises or the dirt. Mrs.
+    Jellyby merely added, with the serene composure with which she said
+    everything, "Go along, you naughty Peepy!" and fixed her fine eyes on
+    Africa again.
+
+Here Mrs. Jellyby was guilty of two wrongs, one of commission, the other
+of omission. She did a positive wrong in unjustly calling the child
+"naughty" when he was merely unfortunate. Even if children are so badly
+guided that they do wrong, it is a serious mistake to make them feel
+consciously "bad" by calling them unpleasant names. It is always wrong to
+define in the child's consciousness a passing wave of evil.
+
+Mrs. Jellyby's sin of omission was her neglect of the opportunity of
+sympathizing with the suffering boy, and of training him to bear suffering
+bravely by the suggestion that he was "a brave little soldier home from
+the war."
+
+Mr. Jarndyce, in speaking of Harold Skimpole's children, said, when
+Richard Carstone asked if he had any children:
+
+    "Yes, Rick! Half a dozen. More! Nearer a dozen, I should think. But he
+    has never looked after them. How could he? He wanted somebody to look
+    after _him_. He is a child, you know!" said Mr. Jarndyce.
+
+    "And have the children looked after themselves at all, sir?" inquired
+    Richard.
+
+    "Why, just as you may suppose," said Mr. Jarndyce, his countenance
+    suddenly falling. "It is said that the children of the very poor are
+    not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole's children have
+    tumbled up somehow or other----"
+
+Again Dickens was impressing the responsibility of parents for the care
+and proper training of their children.
+
+Mr. Jarndyce accounted for the utterly unpractical nature of Mr. Skimpole
+by saying:
+
+    "Why, he is all sentiment, and--and susceptibility, and--and
+    sensibility--and--and imagination. And these qualities are not
+    regulated in him, somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for
+    them in his youth attached too much importance to them, and too little
+    to any training that would have balanced and adjusted them; and so he
+    became what he is."
+
+Mrs. Pardiggle was given as a type of the philanthropic woman who does
+_not_ neglect her children, but whose training is worse--much worse than
+Mrs. Jellyby's neglect. The Jellyby children had as much motherly sympathy
+as the Pardiggles, and they had freedom. There is always this advantage in
+neglect. Louisa Gradgrind gave utterance to a philosophical principle when
+she said to her father: "Oh! if you had only neglected me, what a much
+better and much happier creature I should have been." Dickens did not
+teach that neglect is good training, but he did teach that it is a lighter
+curse than the Gradgrind or Pardiggle training.
+
+The Jellyby children had a slight chance to turn out moderately well, but
+the Pardiggle children were certain to be morose, hypocritical, and
+vicious. They were certain to hate all forms of Christian philanthropy.
+Mrs. Pardiggle's intentions were undoubtedly good, but she destroyed the
+character of her children, nevertheless.
+
+    "These, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility,
+    after the first salutations, "are my five boys. You may have seen
+    their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in
+    the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest
+    (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket money, to the amount of
+    five and threepence to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten
+    and a half), is the child who contributed two and ninepence to the
+    Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one and
+    sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the
+    Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily
+    enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never
+    through life to use tobacco in any form."
+
+    We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that
+    they were weazened and shrivelled--though they were certainly that
+    too--but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the
+    mention of the Tockahoopo Indians I could really have supposed Egbert
+    to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave me such a
+    savage frown. The face of each child as the amount of his contribution
+    was mentioned darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was
+    by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the
+    Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable.
+
+    "You have been visiting, I understand," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "at Mrs.
+    Jellyby's?"
+
+    We said yes, we had passed one night there.
+
+    "Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society, and deserves a helping hand.
+    My boys have contributed to the African project--Egbert, one and six,
+    being the entire allowance of nine weeks; Oswald, one and a penny
+    halfpenny, being the same; the rest, according to their little means.
+    Nevertheless, I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in all things. I do not go
+    with Mrs. Jellyby in her treatment of her young family. It has been
+    noticed. It has been observed that her young family are excluded from
+    participation in the objects to which she is devoted. She may be
+    right, she may be wrong; but, right or wrong, this is not my course
+    with _my_ young family. I take them everywhere."
+
+    I was afterward convinced (and so was Ada) that from the
+    ill-conditioned eldest child these words extorted a sharp yell. He
+    turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a yell.
+
+    "They attend matins with me (very prettily done) at half past six
+    o'clock in the morning all the year round, including, of course, the
+    depth of winter," said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, "and they are with me
+    during the revolving duties of the day. I am a school lady, I am a
+    visiting lady, I am a reading lady, I am a distributing lady; I am on
+    the local linen box committee, and many general committees; and my
+    canvassing alone is very extensive--perhaps no one's more so. But they
+    are my companions everywhere; and by these means they acquire that
+    knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing charitable business
+    in general--in short, that taste for the sort of thing--which will
+    render them in after life a service to their neighbours, and a
+    satisfaction to themselves. My young family are not frivolous; they
+    expend the entire amount of their allowance in subscriptions, under my
+    direction; and they have attended as many public meetings, and
+    listened to as many lectures, orations, and discussions as generally
+    fall to the lot of few grown people. Alfred (five), who, as I
+    mentioned, has of his own election joined the Infant Bonds of Joy, was
+    one of the very few children who manifested consciousness on one
+    occasion, after a fervid address of two hours from the chairman of
+    the evening."
+
+    Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the
+    injury of that night.
+
+    "You may have observed, Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "in some
+    of the lists to which I have referred, in the possession of our
+    esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family are
+    concluded with the name of O. A. Pardiggle, F. R. S., one pound. That
+    is their father. We usually observe the same routine. I put down my
+    mite first; then my young family enrol their contributions, according
+    to their ages and their little means; and then Mr. Pardiggle brings up
+    the rear. Mr. Pardiggle is happy to throw in his limited donation,
+    under my direction; and thus things are made, not only pleasant to
+    ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others."
+
+Mrs. Pardiggle invited Esther and Ada to go out with her to visit a
+"wicked brickmaker" in the neighbourhood. Ada walked ahead with Mrs.
+Pardiggle and Esther followed with the five children. She had an
+interesting experience.
+
+    I am very fond of being confided in by children, and am happy in being
+    usually favoured in that respect, but on this occasion it gave me
+    great uneasiness. As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert, with the
+    manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me, on the ground
+    that his pocket money was "boned" from him. On my pointing out the
+    great impropriety of the word, especially in connection with his
+    parent (for he added sulkily "By her!"), he pinched me and said, "Oh,
+    then! Now! Who are you? _You_ wouldn't like it, I think! What does she
+    make a sham for, and pretend to give me money, and take it away again?
+    Why do you call it _my_ allowance, and never let me spend it?" These
+    exasperating questions so inflamed his mind, and the minds of Oswald
+    and Francis, that they all pinched me at once, and in a dreadfully
+    expert way; screwing up such little pieces of my arms that I could
+    hardly forbear crying out. Felix at the same time stamped upon my
+    toes. And the Bond of Joy, who, on account of always having the whole
+    of his little income anticipated, stood, in fact, pledged to abstain
+    from cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we
+    passed a pastry-cook shop, that he terrified me by becoming purple. I
+    never underwent so much, both in body and mind, in the course of a
+    walk with young people, as from these unnaturally constrained
+    children, when they paid me the compliment of being natural.
+
+In the brickmaker's hovel they heard something of how the very poor
+brought up children, or failed to bring them up, in Dickens's time. The
+brickmaker was lying at full length on the floor, smoking his pipe. He
+gave them no welcome.
+
+    I wants a end of these liberties took with my place. I wants a end of
+    being drawed like a badger. Now you are a-going to poll-pry and
+    question according to custom--I know what you're a-going to be up to.
+    Well! You haven't got no occasion to be up to it. I'll save you the
+    trouble. Is my daughter a-washin'? Yes, she is a-washin'. Look at the
+    water. Smell it! That's wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do
+    you think of gin, instead? An't my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty--it's
+    nat'rally dirty, and it's nat'rally onwholesome; and we've had five
+    dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much
+    the better for them, and for us besides.
+
+The utter carelessness of some "society gentlemen" in regard to the
+education of their children is referred to in the description Caddy
+Jellyby gave of her lover, the son of the great Turveydrop.
+
+    Caddy told me that her lover's education had been so neglected that it
+    was not always easy to read his notes. She said if he were not so
+    anxious about his spelling, and took less pains to make it clear, he
+    would do better; but he put so many unnecessary letters into short
+    words that they sometimes quite lost their English appearance. "He
+    does it with the best intention," observed Caddy, "but it hasn't the
+    effect he means, poor fellow!" Caddy then went on to reason how could
+    he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole life in
+    the dancing school, and had done nothing but teach and fag, fag and
+    teach, morning, noon, and night! And what did it matter? She could
+    write letters enough for both, as she knew to her cost, and it was far
+    better for him to be amiable than learned. "Besides, it's not as if I
+    was an accomplished girl, who had any right to give herself airs,"
+    said Caddy. "I know little enough, I am sure, thanks to ma!"
+
+The products of the fashionable education of Dickens's time (there is not
+so much of it now, thanks largely to Dickens) were shown in the cousins of
+Sir Leicester Dedlock.
+
+    The rest of the cousins are ladies and gentlemen of various ages and
+    capacities; the major part, amiable and sensible, and likely to have
+    done well enough in life if they could have overcome their cousinship;
+    as it is, they are almost all a little worsted by it, and lounge in
+    purposeless and listless paths, and seem to be quite as much at a loss
+    how to dispose of themselves as anybody else can be how to dispose of
+    them.
+
+In Little Dorrit Mrs. General is used as a type of two varieties of false
+training. Her pupils were never to be allowed to know that there was
+anything vulgar or wrong in the world. She believed the good old theory,
+that adulthood had two duties in developing purity of character, one to
+prevent children knowing that there was any evil, the other to chain them
+back or beat them back from evil, if they accidentally found it and wished
+to investigate it. She never thought of training a child to do its part in
+reducing the evil around him. Seclusion and exclusion took the place of
+community in her perverted philosophy.
+
+She believed, too, in educating the surface. She did not work from within
+intellectually or spiritually. She varnished the surface that it might
+receive the proper society polish, therefore neither heart nor head
+required much attention. According to her theory, young ladies should
+never be so unladylike as to have great purposes or great ideas.
+Unfortunately some of her descendants are still living.
+
+    "Fanny," observed Mrs. General, "at present forms too many opinions.
+    Perfect breeding forms none, and is never demonstrative.
+
+    "I have conversed with Amy several times since we have been residing
+    here on the general subject of the formation of a demeanour. She has
+    expressed herself to me as wondering exceedingly at Venice. I have
+    mentioned to her that it is better not to wonder."
+
+Her father sent for Amy to reprove her for her lack of what Mrs. General
+regarded as true culture, and Amy said:
+
+    "I think, father, I require a little time."
+
+    "Papa is a preferable mode of address," observed Mrs. General. "Father
+    is rather vulgar, my dear. The word papa, besides, gives a pretty form
+    to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very
+    good words for the lips; especially prunes and prism. You will find it
+    serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to
+    yourself in company--on entering a room, for instance--papa, potatoes,
+    poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.
+
+    "If Miss Amy Dorrit will direct her own attention to, and will accept
+    of my poor assistance in, the formation of a surface, Mr. Dorrit will
+    have no further cause of anxiety. May I take this opportunity of
+    remarking, as an instance in point, that it is scarcely delicate to
+    look at vagrants with the attention which I have seen bestowed upon
+    them by a very dear young friend of mine? They should not be looked
+    at. Nothing disagreeable should ever be looked at. Apart from such a
+    habit standing in the way of that graceful equanimity of surface which
+    is so expressive of good breeding, it hardly seems compatible with
+    refinement of mind. A truly refined mind will seem to be ignorant of
+    the existence of anything that is not perfectly proper, placid, and
+    pleasant."
+
+Great Expectations has numerous illustrations of bad training. Mrs.
+Gargery had many of the worst characteristics of disrespectful and
+coercive adulthood. She abused Pip for asking questions, scolded him,
+thimbled him, and sent him to bed in the dark. She told him he was on the
+way to commit murder and a great variety of crimes, because criminals
+always "begin by asking questions." She kept him in a state of constant
+terror. She tried in every possible way to lower his opinion of himself,
+which is a crime against childhood. One of the worst features of the old
+education was its teaching of a spurious humility, a depreciation of
+selfhood. One of the greatest weaknesses of humanity is the general lack
+of true faith of men and women in their own powers. He was told that he
+was "naterally wicious," and made the butt of all the observations
+relating to boys who possessed any vices whatever.
+
+Dickens revealed all these characteristics to condemn them.
+
+Pip discussed a very grave question for students of children when he was
+accounting for the fact that he deliberately misstated facts so
+systematically in answering the questions of his sister and Mr.
+Pumblechook, in regard to Miss Havisham and the peculiarities of her
+mysterious home.
+
+    When I reached home my sister was very curious to know all about Miss
+    Havisham's, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found myself
+    getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the
+    small of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved against the
+    kitchen wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient
+    length.
+
+    If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other
+    young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden
+    in mine--which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to
+    suspect myself of having been a monstrosity--it is the key to many
+    reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham's as
+    my eyes had seen it I should not be understood.
+
+    Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy
+    perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my
+    obstinacy was adamantine.
+
+Two thoughts are worthy of note in this part of Pip's training: abuse,
+especially of the thumping, bumping, shaking variety, makes a child
+obstinate; and many of childhood's difficulties arise from not being
+understood, or the fear of being misunderstood.
+
+Pip resented, as all children do, more than they can show, the unpleasant
+habit of taking patronizing liberties with them.
+
+    And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he
+    considered it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and
+    poke it into my eyes. I can not conceive why everybody of his standing
+    who visited at our house should always have put me through the same
+    inflammatory process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to
+    mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our
+    social family circle, but some large-handed person took some such
+    ophthalmic steps to patronize me.
+
+And Mr. Pumblechook! What could a boy do but hate him?
+
+    Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with
+    almost insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That ass,
+    Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose of
+    discussing my prospects with my sister; and I really do believe (to
+    this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel) that if these
+    hands could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise cart, they would
+    have done it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity
+    of mind that he could not discuss my prospects without having me
+    before him--as it were, to operate upon--and he would drag me up from
+    my stool (usually by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and,
+    putting me before the fire as if I were going to be cooked, would
+    begin by saying, "Now, mum, here is this boy! Here is this boy which
+    you brought up by hand. Hold up your head, boy, and be forever
+    grateful unto them which so did so. Now, mum, with respections to this
+    boy!" And then he would rumple my hair the wrong way--which from my
+    earliest remembrance, as already hinted, I have in my soul denied the
+    right of any fellow-creature to do--and would hold me before him by
+    the sleeve: a spectacle of imbecility only to be equalled by himself.
+
+Mrs. Pocket's training was given as an illustration of the folly of giving
+girls no practical education.
+
+    Her father had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle
+    as one who, in the nature of things, must marry a title, and who was
+    to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge.
+
+    So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young
+    lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly
+    ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless.
+
+Her home proved that she had grown up a credit to her training. There
+never was a family more utterly without order, management, or system than
+Mrs. Pocket's. Servants and children indulged in unending turmoil and
+conflict. Dickens added a grim humour to the picture by saying:
+
+    Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for he was a most delightful lecturer on
+    domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and
+    servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But
+    Mrs. Pocket was at home and was in a little difficulty, on account of
+    the baby's having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him
+    quiet during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot
+    Guards) of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be
+    regarded as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either
+    to apply externally or to take as a tonic.
+
+Mrs. Pocket continued to read her one book about the dignities of the
+titled aristocracy, and prescribed "Bed" as a sovereign remedy for baby.
+
+Dickens believed a mother should find her highest joy and most sacred duty
+in training her own children. Mrs. Pocket was a type to be avoided.
+
+The description of the dinner at Mr. Pocket's, after which the six
+children were brought in, and Mrs. Pocket attempted to mind the baby, is
+one of the raciest bits of Dickens's humour. One observation in connection
+with the dinner is worth studying.
+
+    After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made
+    admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs--a sagacious way of
+    improving their minds.
+
+How few yet clearly understand this profound criticism of bad training!
+How many children are still made vain and frivolous by having their
+attention directed especially to their physical attributes and their
+dress, rather than to the things that would yield them much greater
+immediate happiness and a much truer basis for future development!
+
+In his last book, Edwin Drood, Dickens showed that he still hated the
+tyranny that dwarfs and distorts the souls of children.
+
+Neville Landless described his own training to his tutor, who had won his
+confidence as it had never been won before.
+
+    "We lived with a stepfather there. Our mother died there, when we were
+    little children. We have had a wretched existence. She made him our
+    guardian, and he was a miserly wretch who grudged us food to eat and
+    clothes to wear.
+
+    "This stepfather of ours was a cruel brute as well as a grinding one.
+    It was well he died when he did, or I might have killed him."
+
+    Mr. Crisparkle stopped short in the moonlight and looked at his
+    hopeful pupil in consternation.
+
+    "I surprise you, sir?" he said, with a quick change to a submissive
+    manner.
+
+    "You shock me; unspeakably shock me."
+
+    The pupil hung his head for a little while, as they walked on, and
+    then said: "You never saw him beat your sister. I have seen him beat
+    mine, more than once or twice, and I never forgot it.
+
+    "I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly
+    and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful. I have been
+    always tyrannically held down by the strong hand. This has driven me,
+    in my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean. I have been
+    stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of
+    life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest possessions
+    of youth. This has caused me to be utterly wanting in I do not know
+    what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts--I have not even a
+    name for the thing, you see--that you have had to work upon in other
+    young men to whom you have been accustomed."
+
+Hatred instead of love; product, a secret and revengeful character.
+"Tyrannically held down by a strong hand"; product, falseness and
+meanness. "Stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very
+necessaries of life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest
+possessions of youth"; product, a manhood utterly barren in true emotions,
+or pleasant memories, or good instincts.
+
+No other writer has described so many phases of bad training as Dickens.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+GOOD TRAINING.
+
+
+Dickens wrote much less about good training than about bad training. It
+was the part of a true philosopher and a profound student of human nature
+to do so. Pictures of wrong treatment of children accomplished a double
+purpose. They made men hate the wrong, and made them more clearly
+conscious of the right than pictures of the right alone could have done.
+Descriptions of ideal conditions can not make as deep impressions as
+descriptions of utterly bad conditions in the present stage of human
+evolution.
+
+His revelation of cruel tyranny, of will breaking, of cramming, of
+dwarfing of individuality, of distorting of imagination, of harshness, of
+lack of sympathy, of evil in a hundred hideous forms, made men more
+conscious of their corresponding opposites than attempts to reveal these
+opposites by direct effort could have done; and in addition it stirred in
+human hearts everywhere the determination to remove or remedy the wrong.
+
+Little Nell's grandfather gave her a good training. Omitting poverty and
+loneliness, and some strange companionships, she had a training calculated
+to make her the supremely pure and attractive child she was. Her
+grandfather loved her passionately; he had never been unkind to her, he
+had taught her carefully in the virtues that are learned by the unselfish
+performance of duty; she had the opportunity for simple, loving service,
+and she was trained to have profound reverence for and true faith in God.
+
+Her grandfather left her alone every night, yet she was never afraid.
+Dickens describes their usual parting in the evening.
+
+    Then she ran to the old man, who folded her in his arms and bade God
+    bless her.
+
+    "Sleep soundly, Nell," he said in a low voice, "and angels guard thy
+    bed! Do not forget thy prayers, my sweet."
+
+    "No, indeed," answered the child fervently, "they make me feel so
+    happy!"
+
+    "That's well; I know they do; they should," said the old man. "Bless
+    thee a hundred times! Early in the morning I shall be home."
+
+    "You'll not ring twice," returned the child. "The bell wakes me, even
+    in the middle of a dream."
+
+The Toodle family is painted in direct contrast to the Dombey family in
+the relationship of parents to children. Mrs. Toodle came to nurse Paul
+Dombey when his mother died. Mr. Toodle himself came too, and Mr. Dombey
+called him in to speak to him.
+
+    He was a strong, loose, round-shouldered, shuffling, shaggy fellow, on
+    whom his clothes sat negligently; with a good deal of hair and
+    whisker, deepened in its natural tint, perhaps, by smoke and
+    coal-dust; hard knotty hands; and a square forehead, as coarse in
+    grain as the bark of an oak. A thorough contrast in all respects to
+    Mr. Dombey, who was one of those close-shaved, close-cut moneyed
+    gentlemen who are glossy and crisp like new bank notes, and who seem
+    to be artificially braced and tightened as by the stimulating action
+    of golden shower baths.
+
+    "You have a son, I believe?" said Mr. Dombey.
+
+    "Four on 'em, sir. Four hims and a her. All alive!"
+
+    "Why, it's as much as you can afford to keep them!" said Mr. Dombey.
+
+    "I couldn't hardly afford but one thing in the world less, sir."
+
+    "What is that?"
+
+    "To lose 'em, sir."
+
+    "Can you read?" asked Mr. Dombey.
+
+    "Why, not partick'ler, sir."
+
+    "Write?"
+
+    "With chalk, sir?"
+
+    "With anything?"
+
+    "I could make shift to chalk a little bit, I think, if I was put to
+    it," said Toodle, after some reflection.
+
+    "And yet," said Mr. Dombey, "you are two or three and thirty, I
+    suppose?"
+
+    "Thereabout, I suppose, sir," answered Toodle, after more reflection.
+
+    "Then why don't you learn?" asked Mr. Dombey.
+
+    "So I'm agoing to, sir. One of my little boys is agoing to learn me,
+    when he's old enough, and been to school himself."
+
+What a beautiful picture of the true relationship that should exist
+between a mother and her children is given in the reception to Mrs. Toodle
+when she went home to visit her family!
+
+    "Why, Polly!" cried her sister. "You! what a turn you _have_ given me!
+    who'd have thought it! come along in, Polly! How well you do look, to
+    be sure! The children will go half wild to see you, Polly, that they
+    will."
+
+    That they did, if one might judge from the noise they made, and the
+    way in which they dashed at Polly and dragged her to a low chair in
+    the chimney corner, where her own honest apple face became immediately
+    the centre of a bunch of smaller pippins, all laying their rosy cheeks
+    close to it, and all evidently the growth of the same tree. As to
+    Polly, she was full as noisy and vehement as the children; and it was
+    not until she was quite out of breath, and her hair was hanging all
+    about her flushed face, and her new christening attire was very much
+    dishevelled, that any pause took place in the confusion. Even then,
+    the smallest Toodle but one remained in her lap, holding on tight with
+    both arms round her neck; while the smallest Toodle but two mounted on
+    the back of the chair, and made desperate efforts, with one leg in the
+    air, to kiss her round the corner.
+
+Unfortunately the eldest Toodle, nicknamed Biler, was sent to the
+grinders' school by Mr. Dombey, and he was so badly treated that he played
+truant and got into bad company; but his mother clung to him and treated
+him kindly, and hoped for him still. Mr. Carker went home with Biler to
+satisfy himself in regard to his family.
+
+    "This fellow," said Mr. Carker to Polly, giving him a gentle shake,
+    "is your son, eh, ma'am?"
+
+    "Yes, sir," sobbed Polly, with a courtesy; "yes, sir."
+
+    "A bad son, I am afraid?" said Mr. Carker.
+
+    "Never a bad son to me, sir," returned Polly.
+
+    "To whom, then?" demanded Mr. Carker.
+
+    "He has been a little wild, sir," replied Polly, checking the baby,
+    who was making convulsive efforts with his arms and legs to launch
+    himself on Biler, through the ambient air, "and has gone with wrong
+    companions; but I hope he has seen the misery of that, sir, and will
+    do well again."
+
+    When Mr. Carker had concluded his visit, as he made his way among the
+    crowding children to the door, Rob retreated on his mother, and took
+    her and the baby in the same repentant hug.
+
+    "I'll try hard, dear mother, now. Upon my soul I will!" said Rob.
+
+    "Oh, do, my dear boy! I am sure you will, for our sakes and your own!"
+    cried Polly, kissing him. "But you're coming back to speak to me, when
+    you have seen the gentleman away?"
+
+    "I don't know, mother." Rob hesitated, and looked down.
+    "Father--when's he coming home?"
+
+    "Not till two o'clock to-morrow morning."
+
+    "I'll come back, mother, dear!" cried Rob. And passing through the
+    shrill cry of his brothers and sisters in reception of this promise,
+    he followed Mr. Carker out.
+
+    "What!" said Mr. Carker, who had heard this. "You have a bad father,
+    have you?"
+
+    "No, sir!" returned Rob, amazed. "There ain't a better nor a kinder
+    father going than mine is."
+
+    "Why don't you want to see him, then?" asked his patron.
+
+    "There's such a difference between a father and a mother, sir," said
+    Rob, after faltering for a moment. "He couldn't hardly believe yet
+    that I was going to do better--though I know he'd try to; but a
+    mother--_she_ always believes what's good, sir; at least I know my
+    mother does, God bless her!"
+
+It was not the fault of his home that Biler went astray.
+
+Nor did Dickens fail to give a picture for the fathers too. Mr. Toodle was
+a workman on a train, and great was the joy in the family when father came
+home.
+
+    "Polly, my gal," said Mr. Toodle, with a young Toodle on each knee and
+    two more making tea for him, and plenty more scattered about--Mr.
+    Toodle was never out of children, but always kept a good supply on
+    hand--"you ain't seen our Biler lately, have you?"
+
+    "No," replied Polly, "but he's almost certain to look in to-night.
+    It's his right evening, and he's very regular."
+
+    "I suppose," said Mr. Toodle, relishing his meal infinitely, "as our
+    Biler is a-doin' now about as well as a boy _can_ do, eh, Polly?"
+
+    "Oh! he's a-doing beautiful!" responded Polly.
+
+    "He ain't got to be at all secretlike--has he, Polly?" inquired Mr.
+    Toodle.
+
+    "No!" said Mrs. Toodle plumply.
+
+    "I'm glad he ain't got to be at all secretlike, Polly," observed Mr.
+    Toodle in his slow and measured way, and shovelling in his bread and
+    butter with a clasp knife, as if he were stoking himself, "because
+    that don't look well; do it, Polly?"
+
+    "Why, of course, it don't, father. How can you ask?"
+
+    "You see, my boys and gals," said Mr. Toodle, looking round upon his
+    family, "wotever you're up to in a honest way, it's my opinion as you
+    can't do better than be open. If you find yourselves in cuttings or in
+    tunnels, don't you play no secret games. Keep your whistles going, and
+    let's know where you are."
+
+    The rising Toodles set up a shrill murmur, expressive of their
+    resolution to profit by the paternal advice.
+
+    "But what makes you say this along of Rob, father?" asked his wife
+    anxiously.
+
+    "Polly, old 'ooman," said Mr. Toodle, "I don't know as I said it
+    partickler along o' Rob, I'm sure. I starts light with Rob only; I
+    comes to a branch; I takes on what I finds there; and a whole train of
+    ideas gets coupled on to him afore I knows where I am, or where they
+    comes from. What a Junction a man's thoughts is," said Mr. Toodle, "to
+    be sure!"
+
+    This profound reflection Mr. Toodle washed down with a pint mug of
+    tea, and proceeded to solidify with a great weight of bread and
+    butter; charging his young daughters meanwhile to keep plenty of hot
+    water in the pot, as he was uncommon dry, and should take the
+    indefinite quantity of "a sight of mugs" before his thirst was
+    appeased.
+
+And as the jolly old fellow ate his supper he was surrounded by all his
+smaller children, some on his knees, and others under his arms, and all
+getting bites of bread and butter and sups of tea in turn, although they
+had had their own supper before he came home.
+
+Dickens did not wish to teach that such relationships should exist between
+parents and children in the homes of the labouring classes only. He used
+Toodle and his family as representing one extreme of society, as at
+present constituted, in sharp contrast with Mr. Dombey's family at the
+other extreme. How happy the one home with barely enough to secure the
+necessaries of life! how miserable the other with unlimited wealth! And
+the best things in the Toodle home were the children, and the love and
+unconventional freedom between them and their parents. With such a feeling
+of community and love in all homes, and with schools of a proper
+character, the children will be trained for higher, and progressively
+advancing manhood and womanhood.
+
+David Copperfield's training was not all coercive and degrading. Before
+the Murdstones came to blight his young life he had joy and sympathy to
+stimulate all that was good in him. His mother and Peggotty were kind and
+true. The three had perfect faith in each other. They formed a blessed
+unity. "The memory of his lessons in those happy days recalled no feeling
+of disgust or reluctance. On the contrary, he seemed to have walked along
+a path of flowers, and to have been cheered by the gentleness of his
+mother's voice and manner all the way."
+
+Again, after the Murdstone interval of terror and cruelty, David was
+kindly treated and well trained by his aunt. Her relationship toward him
+throughout his whole youth is well presented in her parting words, as she
+left him at Mr. Wickfield's house, where he was to live while at Doctor
+Strong's school.
+
+    She told me that everything would be arranged for me by Mr. Wickfield,
+    and that I should want for nothing, and gave me the kindest words and
+    the best advice.
+
+    "Trot," said my aunt in conclusion, "be a credit to yourself, to me,
+    and Mr. Dick, and Heaven be with you!"
+
+    I was greatly overcome, and could only thank her again and again, and
+    send my love to Mr. Dick.
+
+    "Never," said my aunt, "be mean in anything; never be false; never be
+    cruel. Avoid these three vices, Trot, and I can always be hopeful of
+    you."
+
+In Mr. Wickfield's home and in Doctor Strong's school he had ideal
+conditions of development. He received respectful consideration, fatherly
+interest, wise counsel, and generous hospitality from Mr. Wickfield. With
+Agnes he had the most delightful relationship of sympathetic and
+stimulating friendship. There is no better influence in the life of a boy
+opening into young manhood than the true friendship of a girl of the
+character of Agnes.
+
+In Doctor Strong's school David met with the best conditions of good
+training yet revealed by the "new education."
+
+The boys were taught politeness, courtesy, and consideration for the
+feelings of others in Doctor Strong's school.
+
+    About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when
+    we went in, but they rose to give the Doctor good morning, and
+    remained standing when they saw Mr. Wickfield and me.
+
+    "A new boy, young gentlemen," said the Doctor; "Trotwood Copperfield."
+
+    One Adams, who was the head boy, then stepped out of his place and
+    welcomed me. He looked like a young clergyman, in his white cravat,
+    but he was very affable and good-humoured; and he showed me my place,
+    and presented me to the masters in a gentlemanly way that would have
+    put me at my ease if anything could.
+
+Physical education received due attention at Doctor Strong's school. "We
+had noble games out of doors." These outdoor sports have done more than
+anything else to develop the strength and energy of the British character.
+Thoughtful educators everywhere recognise the value of play in the
+development of the physical, the intellectual, and the spiritual nature as
+taught by Froebel. The love of play has been one of the distinctive
+elements of the British people.
+
+Doctor Strong's personal influence was good. "He was the idol of the whole
+school." He was not coercive nor restrictive; he was an inspiration to
+effort and to manliness of conduct. "He was the kindest of men," full of
+sympathy with boyhood and with individual boys. "He had a simple faith in
+him that might have touched the stone hearts of the very urns upon the
+wall." Mr. Wickfield told David that he feared some of the boys might take
+advantage of his kindness and faith, but boys do not abuse the confidence
+of such teachers. "He appealed in everything to the honour and good faith
+of the boys, and avowed his intention to rely on the possession of these
+qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy." David says this "worked
+wonders." He had no spies in schoolroom or grounds. He trusted his boys in
+a frank, unconventional way, and they proved themselves worthy of trust.
+In such an atmosphere a boy grows to be reliable. He does not need to be
+hypocritical or false. "The boys all became warmly attached to the
+school--I am sure I did for one, and I never knew, in all my time, of any
+other boy being otherwise--and learned with a good will, desiring to do it
+credit."
+
+They had independent self-activity. "We had plenty of liberty." Without
+this no child can reach his best growth. The boys did not abuse their
+privilege. They respected themselves more because they had liberty. "As I
+remember, we were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace,
+by our appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor
+Strong's boys."
+
+The community ideal was wrought into the lives of the boys by their
+experience in this model school. "We all felt that we had a part in the
+management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity." The
+highest work of schools, colleges, and universities is to fill the lives
+of men and women with the apperceptive centres of the community ideal.
+Christian community can not be made clear by books or teaching or sermons
+unless its foundations are laid by experience, by "sharing in the
+management" of the conditions of the life of the boy, or girl, or student.
+Froebel pleaded for a college and university education in which students
+should "share in the management." Dickens applied this high ideal.
+
+There is another most important element in Doctor Strong's influence. He
+was not "a human barrel organ," like Mr. Feeder, "playing a little list of
+Greek and Latin tunes over and over again without any variation." He was
+an original investigator. He was preparing a dictionary of Greek roots. He
+was not merely an accumulator of knowledge as it had been prepared by some
+one else. He was not a mere canal through which knowledge slowly flowed
+through artificial channels, nor a marsh in which knowledge had become
+confused and stagnant, nor a dead sea into which knowledge flowed, but
+from which there was no outlet. He was a fresh fountain from which
+knowledge came clear and pure. So the boys gained knowledge readily from
+him, but, far beyond knowledge, they learned incidentally the habit of
+work, and were filled with the desire to add to the store of knowledge as
+a basis for the progressive evolution of humanity.
+
+What a farce it is to say that Dickens was not conscious of the pedagogic
+value of his work. He had great facility in learning, but he was also a
+hard student. No one could have written so much and so wisely about
+education unless he had studied carefully the thought of the most advanced
+educators.
+
+David's aunt had the wisdom to try to develop in him the characteristics
+of excellence that were lacking in his parents. This is a thought that is
+slowly making its way in the minds of educators.
+
+    "But what I want you to be, Trot," resumed my aunt--"I don't mean
+    physically, but morally; you are very well physically--is a firm
+    fellow. A fine firm fellow, with a will of your own. With resolution,"
+    said my aunt, shaking her cap at me, and clinching her hand. "With
+    determination. With character, Trot--with strength of character that
+    is not to be influenced, except on good reason, by anybody, or by
+    anything. That's what I want you to be. That's what your father and
+    mother might both have been, Heaven knows, and been the better for
+    it."
+
+    I intimated that I hoped I should be what she described.
+
+    "That you may begin, in a small way, to have a reliance upon yourself,
+    and to act for yourself," said my aunt, "I shall send you upon your
+    trip alone."
+
+    In pursuance of my aunt's kind scheme, I was shortly afterward fitted
+    out with a handsome purse of money and a portmanteau, and tenderly
+    dismissed upon my expedition. At parting, my aunt gave me some good
+    advice and a good many kisses; and said that as her object was that I
+    should look about me, and should think a little, she would recommend
+    me to stay a few days in London, if I liked it, either on my way down
+    into Suffolk, or in coming back. In a word, I was at liberty to do as
+    I would for three weeks or a month; and no other conditions were
+    imposed upon my freedom than the before-mentioned thinking and looking
+    about me, and a pledge to write three times a week and faithfully
+    report myself.
+
+Betsy Trotwood may safely be taken as a model in dealing with boys during
+the adolescent period, and with young men just about to start in the real
+work of life.
+
+Dickens puts into the words of David Copperfield a statement of the
+elements of character which he regarded as most essential to success in
+life, and which he would take pains to develop by the training in homes
+and schools.
+
+    I will only add to what I have already written of my perseverance at
+    this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which
+    then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong
+    part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on
+    looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very
+    fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and
+    not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have
+    done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without
+    the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no
+    matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I
+    then formed. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in
+    life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have
+    devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great
+    aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have
+    never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can
+    claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain,
+    hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such
+    thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some
+    fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which
+    some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to
+    stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thoroughgoing,
+    ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything on
+    which I could throw my whole self and never to affect depreciation of
+    my work, whatever it was, I find, now, to have been my golden rules.
+
+Bleak House, which is so rich in illustrations of bad training, contains
+little direct teaching regarding the proper training of children.
+
+The value of a doll in the training of a girl is shown in Esther's early
+experience. The doll had a real personal relationship to her. She made it
+her confidant, and in various ways gave it a distinct personal standing.
+She could pour out to it the joys and sorrows of her heart more fully than
+to any real person. The doll was an outlet for the pent-up emotions that
+were checked in their flow by the adults with whom she was associated. A
+doll is more than a mere plaything to a child; or perhaps it would be more
+exact to say play with a doll means much more than most people believe.
+Dickens was able to sympathize with even a little girl.
+
+Esther says:
+
+    I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to
+    my doll, when we were alone together, "Now, Dolly, I am not clever,
+    you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!" And
+    so she used to sit propped up in a great armchair, with her beautiful
+    complexion and rosy lips, staring at me--or not so much at me, I
+    think, as at nothing--while I busily stitched away, and told her every
+    one of my secrets.
+
+    My dear old doll! I was such a shy little thing that I seldom dared to
+    open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody else. It
+    almost makes me cry to think what a relief it used to be to me, when I
+    came home from school of a day, to run upstairs to my room, and say
+    "Oh you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!" and
+    then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the elbow of her great
+    chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we parted. I had always
+    rather a noticing way--not a quick way, oh, no!--a silent way of
+    noticing what passed before me, and thinking I should like to
+    understand it better. I have not by any means a quick understanding.
+    When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it seems to brighten.
+
+When on her lonely birthday she had been told by her godmother that a
+shadow hung over her life she says:
+
+    I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek
+    against mine wet with tears; and holding that solitary friend upon my
+    bosom cried myself to sleep.
+
+    Dear, dear, to think how much time we passed alone together afterward,
+    and how often I repeated to the doll the story of my birthday, and
+    confided to her that I would try, as hard as ever I could, to repair
+    the fault I had been born with (of which I confessedly felt guilty and
+    yet innocent), and would strive as I grew up to be industrious,
+    contented, and kind-hearted, and to do some good to some one, and win
+    some love to myself if I could.
+
+Mr. Jarndyce emphasized the opinion of David Copperfield when he gave
+advice to Richard Carstone:
+
+    "Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own efforts. Never
+    separate the two, like the heathen wagoner. Constancy in love is a
+    good thing; but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in
+    every kind of effort. If you had the abilities of all the great men,
+    past and present, you could do nothing well without sincerely meaning
+    it and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition that any
+    real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever
+    will or can be, wrested from fortune by fits and starts, leave that
+    wrong idea here."
+
+Mr. George gave Woolwich Bagnet kindly counsel regarding his duty to his
+mother:
+
+    "The time will come, my boy," pursues the trooper, "when this hair of
+    your mother's will be gray, and this forehead all crossed and
+    recrossed with wrinkles--and a fine old lady she'll be then. Take
+    care, while you are young, that you can think in those days, '_I_
+    never whitened a hair of her dear head--_I_ never marked a sorrowful
+    line in her face!' For of all the many things that you can think of
+    when you are a man, you had better have _that_ by you, Woolwich!"
+
+Mr. Meagles in Little Dorrit, good, kind Mr. Meagles, explained why Little
+Dorrit, amid all her trials and all her difficulties, had grown to be so
+true a woman, loved by so many people.
+
+    If she had constantly thought of herself, and settled with herself
+    that everybody visited this place upon her, turned it against her, and
+    cast it at her, she would have led an irritable and probably a useless
+    existence. Yet I have heard tell, Tattycoram, that her young life has
+    been one of active resignation, goodness, and noble service. Shall I
+    tell you what I consider those eyes of hers that were here just now,
+    to have always looked at, to get that expression?
+
+    "Yes, if you please, sir."
+
+    "Duty, Tattycoram. Begin it early, and do it well; and there is no
+    antecedent to it, in any origin or station, that will tell against us
+    with the Almighty, or with ourselves."
+
+Although Mr. Pocket was not able to manage his own household and family,
+chiefly owing to the hopeless incompetence of Mrs. Pocket, he was an
+excellent teacher, and knew how to treat his pupils. Pip found him a most
+satisfactory guide.
+
+    He advised my attending certain places in London for the acquisition
+    of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the
+    functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that
+    with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage
+    me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through
+    his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed
+    himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner: and I
+    may state at once that he was always so zealous and honourable in
+    fulfilling his compact with me that he made me zealous and honourable
+    in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master,
+    I had no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he
+    gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice.
+
+In Our Mutual Friend Betty Higden and Mrs. Boffin are given as true types
+of the proper spirit of adulthood toward childhood. Betty, poor as she
+was, wept at the thought of parting from Johnny, and Mrs. Boffin said to
+her:
+
+    "If you trust the dear child to me he shall have the best of homes,
+    the best of care, the best of education, the best of friends. Please
+    God, I will be a true good mother to him!"
+
+Jemmy Lirriper had an ideal training in many ways. He had freedom and
+love, and his imagination and individuality were developed as fully as
+Mrs. Lirriper and the Major could secure these desirable results. His
+boyish personality received respectful consideration. The Major's method
+of revealing mathematical conceptions and processes, while it did not
+fully reveal Froebel's processes in reaching the same results (even the
+great mathematicians have been slow in doing that), was much in advance of
+the pedagogy of his time, and it shows the spirit in which Dickens would
+have the child treated, and this is much more important than mathematics.
+
+Mrs. Lirriper tells the story:
+
+    My dear, the system upon which the Major commenced, and, as I may say,
+    perfected Jemmy's learning when he was so small that if the dear was
+    on the other side of the table you had to look under it instead of
+    over it to see him with his mother's own bright hair in beautiful
+    curls, is a thing that ought to be known to the Throne and Lords and
+    Commons, and then might obtain some promotion for the Major, which he
+    well deserves, and would be none the worse for (speaking between
+    friends, L. S. D-ically). When the Major first undertook his learning
+    he says to me:
+
+    "I'm going, Madam," he says, "to make our child a Calculating Boy."
+
+    "Major," I says, "you terrify me, and may do the pet a permanent
+    injury you would never forgive yourself."
+
+    "Madam," says the Major, "I would regret if this fine mind was not
+    early cultivated. But mark me, Madam," says the Major, holding up his
+    forefinger, "cultivated on a principle that will make it a delight."
+
+    "Major," I says, "I will be candid with you and tell you openly that
+    if ever I find the dear child fall off in his appetite I shall know it
+    is his calculations, and shall put a stop to them at two minutes'
+    notice. Or if I find them mounting to his head," I says, "or striking
+    anyways cold to his stomach or leading to anything approaching
+    flabbiness in his legs, the result will be the same, but, Major, you
+    are a clever man and have seen much, and you love the child and are
+    his own godfather, and if you feel a confidence in trying, try."
+
+    "Spoken, Madam," says the Major, "like Emma Lirriper. All I have to
+    ask, Madam, is that you will leave my godson and myself to make a week
+    or two's preparations for surprising you, and that you will give leave
+    to have up and down any small articles not actually in use that I may
+    require from the kitchen."
+
+    "From the kitchen, Major!" I says, half feeling as if he had a mind to
+    cook the child.
+
+    "From the kitchen," says the Major, and smiles and swells, and at the
+    same time looks taller.
+
+    So I passed my word, and the Major and the dear boy were shut up
+    together for half an hour at a time through a certain while, and never
+    could I hear anything going on betwixt them but talking and laughing
+    and Jemmy clapping his hands and screaming out numbers, so I says to
+    myself "It has not harmed him yet," nor could I, on examining the dear
+    find any signs of it anywhere about him, which was likewise a great
+    relief. At last one day Jemmy brings me a card in joke in the Major's
+    neat writing "The Messrs. Jemmy Jackman," for we had given him the
+    Major's other name too, "request the honour of Mrs. Lirriper's company
+    at the Jackman Institution in the front parlour this evening at five,
+    military time, to witness a few slight feats of elementary
+    arithmetic." And, if you'll believe me, there in the front parlour at
+    five punctually to the moment was the Major behind the Pembroke table
+    with both leaves up and a lot of things from the kitchen tidily set
+    out on old newspapers spread atop of it, and there was the Mite stood
+    up on a chair, with his rosy cheeks flushing and his eyes sparkling
+    clusters of diamonds.
+
+    "Now, Gran," says he, "oo tit down and don't oo touch ler poople"--for
+    he saw with every one of those diamonds of his that I was going to
+    give him a squeeze.
+
+    "Very well, sir," I says, "I am obedient in this good company, I am
+    sure." And I sits down in the easy-chair that was put for me, shaking
+    my sides.
+
+    But picture my admiration when the Major, going on almost as quick as
+    if he was conjuring, sets out all the articles he names, and says,
+    "Three saucepans, an Italian iron, a hand bell, a toasting fork, a
+    nutmeg grater, four potlids, a spice box, two egg cups, and a chopping
+    board--how many?" and when that Mite instantly cries "Tifteen, tut
+    down tive and carry ler 'topping board," and then claps his hands,
+    draws up his legs, and dances on his chair!
+
+    My dear, with the same astonishing ease and correctness, him and the
+    Major added up the tables, chairs, and sofy, the picters, fender and
+    fire irons, their own selves, me and the cat, and the eyes in Miss
+    Wozenham's head, and whenever the sum was done Young Roses and
+    Diamonds claps his hands and draws up his legs and dances on his
+    chair.
+
+    The pride of the Major! ("_Here's_ a mind, Ma'am!" he says to me
+    behind his hand.)
+
+    Then he says aloud, "We now come to the next elementary rule--which is
+    called----"
+
+    "Umtraction!" cries Jemmy.
+
+    "Right," says the Major. "We have here a toasting fork, a potato in
+    its natural state, two potlids, one egg-cup, a wooden spoon, and two
+    skewers, from which it is necessary, for commercial purposes, to
+    subtract a sprat gridiron, a small pickle jar, two lemons, one pepper
+    castor, a black-beetle trap, and a knob of the dresser drawer--what
+    remains?"
+
+    "Toatin fork!" cries Jemmy.
+
+    "In numbers, how many?" says the Major.
+
+    "One!" cries Jemmy.
+
+    ("_Here's_ a boy, Ma'am!" says the Major to me, behind his hand.)
+
+    "We now approach the next elementary rule--which is entitled----"
+
+    "Tickleication," cries Jemmy.
+
+    "Correct," says the Major.
+
+    But, my dear, to relate to you in detail the way in which they
+    multiplied fourteen sticks of firewood by two bits of ginger and a
+    larding needle, or divided pretty well everything else there was on
+    the table by the heater of the Italian iron and a chamber candlestick,
+    and got a lemon over, would make my head spin round and round and
+    round, as it did at the time. So I says, "If you'll excuse my
+    addressing the chair, Professor Jackman, I think the period of the
+    lecture has now arrived when it becomes necessary that I should take a
+    good hug of this young scholar." Upon which Jemmy calls out from his
+    station on the chair, "Gran, oo open oor arms and me'll make a 'pring
+    into 'em." So I opened my arms to him, as I had opened my sorrowful
+    heart when his poor young mother lay a-dying, and he had his jump and
+    we had a good long hug together, and the Major, prouder than any
+    peacock, says to me behind his hand, "You need not let him know it,
+    Madam" (which I certainly need not, for the Major was quite audible),
+    "but he is a boy!"
+
+Doctor Marigold's training of the little deaf-mute girl and "Old
+Cheeseman's" treatment of children are revelations of the mature ideals of
+Dickens regarding the proper attitude of adulthood toward childhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+COMMUNITY.
+
+
+While the opinions of Dickens on the subject of community may not seem
+very advanced to some of the most progressive men and women of the
+present, they were much ahead of his own time, and they are beyond the
+practice of our time.
+
+    I have had my share of sorrows--more than the common lot, perhaps, but
+    I have borne them ill. I have broken where I should have bent; and
+    have mused and brooded, when my spirit should have mixed with all
+    God's great creation. The men who learn endurance are they who call
+    the whole world brother. I have turned _from_ the world, and I pay the
+    penalty.
+
+Thus spoke Mr. Haredale to Edward Chester, in Barnaby Rudge.
+
+No one who has lived since the time of Dickens could write a more striking
+statement of the responsibility of every man for his brother, and of the
+terrific consequences of neglect of the duties of brotherhood both to him
+who is neglected and to him who neglects, than Dickens wrote in Dombey and
+Son. There is no phase of sociology that has stepped beyond the position
+taken by Dickens in the following selection:
+
+    Was Mr. Dombey's master vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an
+    unnatural characteristic? It might be worth while, sometimes to
+    inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether,
+    in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be
+    unnatural. Coop any son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow
+    range, and bind the prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile
+    worship of it on the part of the few timid or designing people
+    standing round, and what is Nature to the willing captive who has
+    never risen up upon the wings of a free mind--drooping and useless
+    soon--to see her in her comprehensive truth!
+
+    Alas! are there so few things in the world about us most unnatural,
+    and yet most natural in being so! Hear the magistrate or judge
+    admonish the unnatural outcast of society; unnatural in brutal habits,
+    unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all
+    distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice,
+    in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But
+    follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at
+    every breath he draws, goes down into their dens, lying within the
+    echoes of our carriage wheels and daily tread upon the pavement
+    stones. Look round upon the world of odious sights--millions of
+    immortal creatures have no other world on earth--at the lightest
+    mention of which humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living in the
+    next street, stops her ears, and lisps, "I don't believe it!" Breathe
+    the polluted air, foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health
+    and life; and have every sense conferred upon our race for its delight
+    and happiness, offended, sickened, and disgusted, and made a channel
+    by which misery and death alone can enter. Vainly attempt to think of
+    any simple plant, or flower, or wholesome weed that, set in this fetid
+    bed, could have its natural growth or put its little leaves off to the
+    sun as God designed it. And then, calling up some ghastly child, with
+    stunted form and wicked face, hold forth on its unnatural sinfulness,
+    and lament its being so early far away from heaven--but think a little
+    of its having been conceived, and born and bred, in hell!
+
+    Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the
+    health of man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from
+    vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering
+    in a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to
+    corrupt the better portions of a town. But if the moral pestilence
+    that rises with them, and in the eternal laws of outraged nature, is
+    inseparable from them, could be made discernible too, how terrible the
+    revelation! Then should we see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft,
+    murder, and a long train of nameless sins against the natural
+    affections and repulsions of mankind, overhanging the devoted spots,
+    and creeping on, to blight the innocent and spread contagion among
+    the pure. Then should we see how the same poisoned fountains that flow
+    into our hospitals and lazar houses, inundate the jails, and make the
+    convict ships swim deep, and roll across the seas, and overrun vast
+    continents with crime. Then should we stand appalled to know that
+    where we generate disease to strike our children down and entail
+    itself on unborn generations, there also we breed, by the same certain
+    process, infancy that knows no innocence, youth without modesty or
+    shame, maturity that is mature in nothing but in suffering and guilt,
+    blasted old age that is a scandal on the form we bear. Unnatural
+    humanity! When we shall gather grapes from thorns, and figs from
+    thistles; when fields of grain shall spring up from the offal in the
+    byways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom in the fat churchyards
+    that they cherish; then we may look for natural humanity and find it
+    growing from such seed.
+
+    Oh, for a good spirit who would take the housetops off, with a more
+    potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a
+    Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to
+    swell the retinue of the destroying angel as he moves forth among
+    them! For only one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the
+    scenes of our too long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air
+    where vice and fever propagate together, raining the tremendous and
+    social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming
+    thicker! Bright and blessed the morning that should rise on such a
+    night; for men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own
+    making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and
+    eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common
+    origin, owing one duty to the father of one family, and tending to one
+    common end to make the world a better place!
+
+    Not the less bright and blessed would that day be for rousing some who
+    never have looked out upon the world of human life around them to a
+    knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted
+    with a perversion of Nature in their own contracted sympathies and
+    estimates; as great and yet as natural in its development when once
+    begun as the lowest degradation known.
+
+This selection is worth rereading. The most advanced thinkers will
+understand it best.
+
+Dickens showed that he understood clearly that a man becomes marred and
+degraded by shutting the world out of his heart, even though the reason
+for the exclusion may in itself be good. Love is the highest of all
+sentiments, and Dickens used it in the case of Mr. Wickfield to show that
+even the tender love he had for his dead wife became a source of evil to
+him, when it made him cease to think of the sorrows of his fellows, and
+only of his own affliction. Either in joy or sorrow the benefit to the
+individual results from a deepening of his consciousness of unity with the
+whole of humanity. Mr. Wickfield said to David:
+
+    "Weak indulgence has ruined me. Indulgence in remembrance and
+    indulgence in forgetfulness. My natural grief for my child's mother
+    turned to disease; my natural love for my child turned to disease. I
+    have infected everything I touched. I have brought misery on what I
+    dearly love, I know--_You_ know! I thought it possible that I could
+    truly love one creature in the world, and not love the rest; I thought
+    it possible that I could truly mourn for one creature gone out of the
+    world, and not have some part in the grief of all who mourned. Thus
+    the lessons of my life have been perverted! I have preyed on my own
+    morbid coward heart, and it has preyed on me. Sordid in my grief,
+    sordid in my love, sordid in my miserable escape from the darker side
+    of both, oh, see the ruin I am, and hate me, shun me!"
+
+In Tom Tiddler's Ground Dickens attacks the ideal that there may be merit
+in seclusion. Mr. Traveller visits the hermit who had become famous, and
+who was so vain on account of his dirt and simplicity of living, and he
+tells him some plain truths regarding himself and the duty of man to his
+fellow-men.
+
+    "Now," said he, "that a man--even behind bars, in a blanket and a
+    skewer--should tell me that he can see from day to day any orders or
+    conditions of men, women, or children, who can by any possibility
+    teach him that it is anything but the miserablist drivelling for a
+    human creature to quarrel with his social nature--not to go so far as
+    to say, to renounce his common human decency, for that is an extreme
+    case, or who can teach him that he can in any wise separate himself
+    from his kind and the habits of his kind, without becoming a
+    deteriorated spectacle calculated to give the Devil (and perhaps the
+    monkeys) pleasure--is something wonderful!"
+
+    "You think yourself profoundly wise," said the Hermit.
+
+    "Bah," returned Mr. Traveller, "there is little wisdom in knowing that
+    every man must be up and doing, and that all mankind are made
+    dependent on one another.
+
+    "It is a moral impossibility," continued Mr. Traveller, "that any son
+    or daughter of Adam can stand on this ground that I put my foot on, or
+    on any ground that mortal treads, and gainsay the healthy tenure on
+    which we hold our existence."
+
+    "Which is," sneered the Hermit, "according to you----"
+
+    "Which is," returned the Traveller, "according to Eternal Providence,
+    that we must arise and wash our faces and do our gregarious work and
+    act and react on each other, leaving only the idiot and the palsied to
+    sit blinking in the corner."
+
+Dickens saves Little Emily from her great sorrow, and lifts the load of
+"shame" from her heart by giving her the opportunity of helping to care
+for others.
+
+    But theer was some poor folks aboard as had illness among 'em, and she
+    took care of _them_; and theer was the children in our company, and
+    she took care of _them_; and so she got to be busy, and to be doing
+    good, and that helped her.
+
+And in the same great book he ridicules the misuse of the sacred word
+"society" by applying it to the sham and mockery of all that should be
+truly helpful and ennobling in the social intercourse of mankind.
+
+    Or perhaps this _is_ the Desert of Sahara! for, though Julia has a
+    stately house, and mighty company, and sumptuous dinners every day, I
+    see no green growth near her; nothing that can ever come to fruit or
+    flower. What Julia calls "society," I see among it Mr. Jack Maldon,
+    from his Patent Place, sneering at the hand that gave it to him, and
+    speaking to me of the Doctor, as "so charmingly antique."
+
+    But when society is the name of such hollow gentlemen and ladies,
+    Julia, and when its breeding is professed indifference to everything
+    that can advance or can retard mankind, I think we must have lost
+    ourselves in the same Desert of Sahara, and had better find the way
+    out.
+
+When he spoke of Little Dorrit as "inspired" he proceeded to say:
+
+    She was inspired to be something which was not what the rest were, and
+    to be that something, different and laborious, for the sake of the
+    rest. Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a
+    priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the
+    lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!
+
+Dickens had reached the great conception that the duty of every individual
+is to add something by his life to the general good. That we should not
+leave the world as we found it; that our work is not done well if we spend
+our lives in digging among the richest treasures of the past and revealing
+them unselfishly to our fellow-men, but that each should make some
+existing thing or condition better, or reveal some new thought or
+principle, or plan, or process, so that humanity may climb more easily and
+more certainly from the mists and shadows to the higher glory of the
+clearer light.
+
+Mr. Doyce had made an invention, but had met with almost insuperable
+difficulties in getting it before the people.
+
+    "It is much to be regretted," said Clennam, "that you ever turned your
+    thoughts that way, Mr. Doyce."
+
+    "True, sir, true, to a certain extent. But what is a man to do? If he
+    has the misfortune to strike out something serviceable to the nation,
+    he must follow where it leads him."
+
+    "Hadn't he better let it go?" asked Clennam.
+
+    "He can't do it," said Doyce, shaking his head, with a thoughtful
+    smile. "It's not put into his head to be buried. It's put into his
+    head to be made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to
+    the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery
+    on the same terms."
+
+    "That is to say," said Arthur, with a growing admiration of his quiet
+    companion, "you are not fully discouraged even now?"
+
+    "I have no right to be, if I am," returned the other. "The thing is as
+    true as it ever was."
+
+Throughout his writings Dickens vigorously condemns the class distinctions
+that separate mankind into sections, and thus destroy the bond of unity
+and brotherhood that should exist between them.
+
+Miss Monflathers, in Old Curiosity Shop, drew the line very definitely
+between genteel children and the children of the poor.
+
+Mr. Dombey pompously consented to have the children of the poor educated,
+because "it is necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be
+taught to know their position." Fancy using education to prevent the unity
+of men, when its highest function should be the revelation of community
+and the qualification of individuals for the functions of brotherhood.
+
+In David Copperfield the pathetic side of the evil of class distinctions
+is shown by the appeals of Mr. Peggotty to Mrs. Steerforth that she would
+consent to her son's marriage with Little Emily, and her indignant refusal
+to allow her son to do so.
+
+In Bleak House Sir Leicester Dedlock was amazed at the audacity of Mr.
+Rouncewell's democratic ideas, and his mind was filled with gloomy
+forebodings of the evil that such principles as those held by Mr.
+Rouncewell would work in the social organization as planned and fixed by
+the Dedlock class. These were his thoughts:
+
+    From the village school of Chesney Wold, intact as it is this minute,
+    to the whole framework of society; from the whole framework of
+    society, to the aforesaid framework receiving tremendous cracks in
+    consequence of people (ironmasters, lead mistresses, and what not) not
+    minding their catechism, and getting out of the station unto which
+    they are called--necessarily and forever, according to Sir Leicester's
+    rapid logic, the first station in which they happen to find
+    themselves; and from that, to their educating other people out of
+    _their_ stations, and so obliterating the landmarks, and opening the
+    flood gates, and all the rest of it; this is the swift progress of the
+    Dedlock mind.
+
+In American Notes, after describing at length the admirable co-operative
+arrangements, and the varied means of culture, amusement, and refinement
+enjoyed by the young women in the factories at Lowell, Mass., he says:
+
+    The large class of readers, startled by these facts, will exclaim with
+    one voice, "How very preposterous!" On my deferentially inquiring why,
+    they will answer, "These things are above their station." In reply to
+    that objection, I would beg to ask what their station is.
+
+    It is their station to work. And they _do_ work. They labour in these
+    mills, upon an average, twelve hours a day, which is unquestionably
+    work. And pretty tight work too. Perhaps it is above their station to
+    indulge in such amusements on any terms. Are we quite sure that we in
+    England have not formed our ideas of the "station" of working people
+    from accustoming ourselves to the contemplation of that class as they
+    are, and not as they might be? I think that if we examine our own
+    feelings, we shall find that the pianos, and the circulating
+    libraries, and even the Lowell Offering, startle us with their
+    novelty, and not by their bearing upon any abstract question of right
+    or wrong.
+
+    For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of to-day
+    cheerfully done and the occupation of to-morrow cheerfully looked to,
+    any one of these pursuits is not most humanizing and laudable. I know
+    no station which is rendered more endurable to the person in it, or
+    more safe to the person out of it, by having ignorance for its
+    associate. I know no station which has a right to monopolize the means
+    of mutual instruction, improvement, and rational entertainment; or
+    which has ever continued to be a station very long, after seeking to
+    do so.
+
+Walter Wilding planned an ideal relationship between employer and employed
+in No Thoroughfare. He advertised for a housekeeper so that he "might sit
+daily at the head of the table at which the people in my employment eat
+together, and may eat of the same roast and boiled, and drink of the same
+beer, and one and all form a kind of family."
+
+He planned, too, to train his employees to sing "Handel, Mozart, Haydn,
+Kent, Purcell, Doctor Arne, Greene, Mendelssohn, to make music a part of
+the bond between us. We will form a Choir in some quiet church near the
+Corner."
+
+He touched the true chord of community when Joey Ladle used the word
+"they." Joey asked, when Mr. Wilding unfolded his plan:
+
+    "Is all to live in the house, Young Master Wilding? The two other
+    cellarmen, the three porters, the two 'prentices, and the odd men?"
+
+    "Yes. I hope we shall all be a united family, Joey."
+
+    "Ah!" said Joey. "I hope they may be."
+
+    "They? Rather say _we_, Joey."
+
+Not many employers have reached the ideals of Dickens yet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+NUTRITION AS A FACTOR IN EDUCATION.
+
+
+The influence of diet in the development not only of physical power, but
+of intellectual and spiritual power also, has now begun to attract general
+attention. There is no longer any doubt that the character of the bones,
+of the muscles, of the nerves, and of the brain itself, is decided to a
+considerable extent by the food that is eaten. There is no longer any
+doubt that many children have been urged to do work which becomes
+destructive beyond the fatigue point of their little brains, when their
+brains have not been properly nourished, either from lack of proper food
+or of properly cooked food, or from eating too much or too little.
+
+The deterioration of the physical system, and especially the deterioration
+of the neurological system, is one of the most startling subjects within
+the range of view of educators and psychologists. One of the most
+attractive departments of child study is that which investigates the means
+of deciding from external manifestations of form, proportion, action,
+voice, and attitude the nature and condition of the brain and neurological
+system of the child. When this discovery has been made, however, it but
+prepares the way for further investigation to discover in what way
+abnormal or weak systems may be helped to become normal and strong.
+
+One of the fundamental things to be done by scientists and educators is to
+discover the kinds of food adapted to different stages of the child's
+growth, and to the varied functions of study and work required of him. By
+proper nutrition and by proper exercise much may be done to increase the
+power and efficiency of the body and the brain and the rest of the
+neurological system.
+
+Dickens saw the need of attention to the problems of nutrition very
+clearly. He began to write about it in Oliver Twist.
+
+He first exposed the horrors of baby farming, with its terrible percentage
+of deaths, resulting almost entirely from the villainous indifference to
+the diet of the children. Children yet die in homes from similar causes,
+or, if they do not die, they go through life weakened and dwarfed.
+
+    For the next eight or ten months Oliver was the victim of a systematic
+    course of treachery and deception. He was brought up by hand. The
+    hungry and destitute situation of the infant orphan was duly reported
+    by the workhouse authorities to the parish authorities. The parish
+    authorities inquired with dignity of the workhouse authorities whether
+    there was no female then domiciled "in the house" who was in a
+    situation to impart to Oliver Twist the consolation and nourishment of
+    which he stood in need. The workhouse authorities replied with
+    humility that there was not. Upon this the parish authorities
+    magnanimously and humanely resolved that Oliver should be "farmed,"
+    or, in other words, that he should be despatched to a branch workhouse
+    some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders
+    against the poor laws rolled about the floor all day, without the
+    inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the
+    parental superintendence of an elderly female, who received the
+    culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence halfpenny per
+    small head per week. Sevenpence halfpenny's worth per week is a good
+    round diet for a child; a great deal may be got for sevenpence
+    halfpenny, quite enough to overload its stomach, and make it
+    uncomfortable. The elderly female was a woman of wisdom and
+    experience; she knew what was good for children; and she had a very
+    accurate perception of what was good for herself. So she appropriated
+    the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own use, and consigned
+    the rising parochial generation to even a shorter allowance than was
+    originally provided for them. Thereby finding in the lowest depth a
+    deeper still; and proving herself a very great experimental
+    philosopher.
+
+The system did not work well for the children.
+
+    For at the very moment when a child had contrived to exist upon the
+    smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did
+    perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it
+    sickened from want or cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got
+    half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable
+    little being was usually summoned into another world, and there
+    gathered to the fathers it had never known in this.
+
+    It can not be expected that this system of farming would produce any
+    very extraordinary or luxuriant crop. Oliver Twist's ninth birthday
+    found him a pale, thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and
+    decidedly small in circumference. It _was_ his ninth birthday; and he
+    was keeping it in the coal cellar with a select party of two other
+    young gentlemen, who, after participating with him in a sound
+    thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be hungry.
+
+The famous meal in the workhouse when Oliver asked for more was intended
+to direct attention to the way children were fed and treated in
+institutions. The boys were fed on gruel.
+
+    Of this festive composition each boy had one porringer, and no
+    more--except on occasions of great public rejoicing, when he had two
+    ounces and a quarter of bread besides. The bowls never wanted washing.
+    The boys polished them with their spoons till they shone again; and
+    when they had performed this operation (which never took very long,
+    the spoons being nearly as large as the bowls), they would sit staring
+    at the copper, with such eager eyes, as if they could have devoured
+    the very bricks of which it was composed; employing themselves,
+    meanwhile, in sucking their fingers most assiduously, with the view of
+    catching up any stray splashes of gruel that might have been cast
+    thereon. Boys have generally excellent appetites. Oliver Twist and his
+    companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months;
+    at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger that one boy who
+    was tall for his age, and hadn't been used to that sort of thing (for
+    his father had kept a small cookshop), hinted darkly to his companions
+    that unless he had another basin of gruel _per diem_, he was afraid he
+    might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next to him, who
+    happened to be a weakly youth of tender age. He had a wild, hungry
+    eye; and they implicitly believed him. A council was held; lots were
+    cast who should walk up to the master after supper that evening, and
+    ask for more; and it fell to Oliver Twist.
+
+    The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in his
+    cook's uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants
+    ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long
+    grace was said over a short commons. The gruel disappeared; the boys
+    whispered each other and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbours
+    nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless
+    with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master,
+    basin and spoon in hand, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:
+
+    "Please, sir, I want some more."
+
+    The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed
+    in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and
+    then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralyzed
+    with wonder; the boys with fear.
+
+    "What!" said the master at length, in a faint voice.
+
+    "Please, sir," replied Oliver, "I want some more."
+
+    The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle; pinioned his
+    arms; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.
+
+    The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into
+    the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high
+    chair, said:
+
+    "Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for
+    more."
+
+    There was a general start. Horror was depicted in every countenance.
+
+    "For _more_!" said Mr. Limbkins. "Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer
+    me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had
+    eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?"
+
+    "He did, sir," replied Bumble.
+
+    "That boy will be hung," said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. "I
+    know that boy will be hung."
+
+Having shown how infants were starved in "farming," and how boys were
+starved in the workhouses, he next directed attention to the way
+apprentices were treated.
+
+Mr. Sowerberry was an undertaker, who decided to take Oliver from the
+workhouse. He took Oliver "upon liking," which meant that "if he could get
+enough work out of him without putting too much food into him, he should
+keep him for a term of years to do what he liked with him."
+
+When Oliver had been driven to desperation by Noah Claypole, and had
+punished him as he deserved, Mrs. Sowerberry sent for Mr. Bumble. When Mr.
+Bumble asked Oliver if he was not afraid of him, Oliver bravely answered
+"No!" The Beadle was petrified with amazement, and he accounted for
+Oliver's wickedness by saying:
+
+    "It's meat."
+
+    "What?" exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.
+
+    "Meat, ma'am, meat," replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. "You've
+    overfed him, ma'am. You've raised a artificial soul and spirit in him,
+    ma'am, unbecoming a person of his condition; as the board, Mrs.
+    Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you. What have
+    paupers to do with soul or spirit? It's quite enough that we let 'em
+    have live bodies. If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma'am, this would
+    never have happened."
+
+    "Dear, dear!" ejaculated Mrs. Sowerberry, piously raising her eyes to
+    the kitchen ceiling; "this comes of being liberal!"
+
+    The liberality of Mrs. Sowerberry to Oliver had consisted in a profuse
+    bestowal upon him of all the dirty odds and ends which nobody else
+    would eat.
+
+By this conversation Dickens meant to teach that a well-fed child is a
+different type from one who is not properly nourished; that food has an
+influence on the spirit, as well as on the body. He did not disapprove of
+Oliver's spirit, but he heartily commended him for resenting the way he
+was treated. This lesson was needed too, as children were expected to
+submit uncomplainingly to those who were their legal guardians, whether
+strangers or parents. Now, largely through Dickens, children are not only
+encouraged to defend themselves against cruel and tyrannical guardians or
+parents, and to run away from them, but the state itself will take them
+away, if cruelty is proved against those who should be their protectors.
+
+Dickens also revealed by this incident the meanness of adults not only in
+institutions but in homes, in giving to the children the "odds and ends,"
+the scraps, the parts of the fowl or the meat that older people do not
+care for. He brought the matter up again in Great Expectations. At the
+Christmas dinner Pip "was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of
+the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when
+living, had least reason to be vain."
+
+One of the reasons given by Snawley to Squeers to induce him to take his
+stepsons at a lower rate was that "they were not great eaters."
+
+The selfishness of adulthood toward childhood, and the stupidity of the
+general idea, that children do not require good food because they are
+young and do not have to work hard, were held up to deserved ridicule, in
+Squeers's manner of breakfasting in London, and the food he provided for
+the five hungry little boys to strengthen them for their long ride to
+Yorkshire in cold weather.
+
+    He found that learned gentleman sitting at breakfast, with the three
+    little boys before noticed, and two others who had turned up by some
+    lucky chance since the interview of the previous day, ranged in a row
+    on the opposite seat. Mr. Squeers had before him a small measure of
+    coffee, a plate of hot toast, and a cold round of beef; but he was at
+    that moment intent on preparing breakfast for the little boys.
+
+    "This is two penn'orth of milk, is it, waiter?" said Mr. Squeers,
+    looking down into a large blue mug, and slanting it gently, so as to
+    get an accurate view of the quantity of liquid contained in it.
+
+    "That's two penn'orth, sir," replied the waiter.
+
+    "What a rare article milk is, to be sure, in London!" said Mr. Squeers
+    with a sigh. "Just fill that mug up with lukewarm water, William, will
+    you?"
+
+    "To the wery top, sir?" inquired the waiter. "Why, the milk will be
+    drownded."
+
+    "Never you mind that," replied Mr. Squeers. "Serve it right for being
+    so dear. You ordered that thick bread and butter for three, did you?"
+
+    "Coming directly, sir."
+
+    "You needn't hurry yourself," said Squeers; "there's plenty of time.
+    Conquer your passions, boys, and don't be eager after vittles." As he
+    uttered this moral precept, Mr. Squeers took a large bite out of the
+    cold beef, and recognised Nicholas.
+
+    "Sit down, Mr. Nickleby," said Squeers. "Here we are, a-breakfasting
+    you see!"
+
+    Nicholas did _not_ see that anybody was breakfasting, except Mr.
+    Squeers; but he bowed with all becoming reverence, and looked as
+    cheerful as he could.
+
+    "Oh! that's the milk and water, is it, William?" said Squeers. "Very
+    good; don't forget the bread and butter presently."
+
+    At this fresh mention of the bread and butter the five little boys
+    looked very eager, and followed the waiter out, with their eyes;
+    meanwhile Mr. Squeers tasted the milk and water.
+
+    "Ah!" said that gentleman, smacking his lips, "here's richness! Think
+    of the many beggars and orphans in the streets that would be glad of
+    this, little boys. A shocking thing hunger is, isn't it, Mr.
+    Nickleby?"
+
+    "Very shocking, sir," said Nicholas.
+
+    "When I say number one," pursued Mr. Squeers, putting the mug before
+    the children, "the boy on the left hand nearest the window may take a
+    drink; and when I say number two, the boy next him will go in, and so
+    till we come to number five, which is the last boy. Are you ready?"
+
+    "Yes, sir," cried the little boys with great eagerness.
+
+    "That's right," said Squeers, calmly getting on with his breakfast;
+    "keep ready till I tell you to begin. Subdue your appetites, my dears,
+    and you've conquered human natur. This is the way we inculcate
+    strength of mind, Mr. Nickleby," said the schoolmaster, turning to
+    Nicholas, and speaking with his mouth very full of beef and toast.
+
+    Nicholas murmured something--he knew not what--in reply; and the
+    little boys, dividing their gaze between the mug, the bread and butter
+    (which had by this time arrived), and every morsel which Mr. Squeers
+    took into his mouth, remained with strained eyes in torments of
+    expectation.
+
+    "Thank God for a good breakfast," said Squeers, when he had finished.
+    "Number one may take a drink."
+
+    Number one received the mug ravenously, and had just drunk enough to
+    make him wish for more, when Mr. Squeers gave the signal for number
+    two, who gave up at the same interesting moment to number three; and
+    the process was repeated until the milk and water terminated with
+    number five.
+
+    "And now," said the schoolmaster, dividing the bread and butter for
+    three into as many portions as there were children, "you had better
+    look sharp with your breakfast, the horn will blow in a minute or two,
+    and then every boy leaves off."
+
+    Permission being thus given to fall to, the boys began to eat
+    voraciously, and in desperate haste, while the schoolmaster (who was
+    in high good humour after his meal) picked his teeth with a fork, and
+    looked smilingly on. In a very short time the horn was heard.
+
+    "I thought it wouldn't be long," said Squeers, jumping up and
+    producing a little basket from under the seat; "put what you haven't
+    had time to eat in here, boys! You'll want it on the road!"
+
+Young Wackford Squeers was fed on the fattest meats, so that he might be
+kept plump and energetic, in order that he might be taken to London to
+show intending patrons how well the boys were fed in Dotheboys Hall.
+
+Again, in The Old Curiosity Shop, the starving of child servants is
+condemned by the way Sally Brass fed the Marchioness. Dick Swiveller's
+curiosity led him to peep through a crack in the kitchen door one day
+while Sally was giving the little servant her dinner.
+
+    Everything was locked up; the coal cellar, the candle box, the salt
+    box, the meat safe were all padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle
+    could have lunched upon. The pinched and meagre aspect of the place
+    would have killed a chameleon; he would have known, at the first
+    mouthful, that the air was not eatable, and must have given up the
+    ghost in despair.
+
+    The small servant stood with humility in presence of Miss Sally, and
+    hung her head.
+
+    "Are you there?" said Miss Sally.
+
+    "Yes, ma'am," was the answer, in a weak voice.
+
+    "Go farther away from the leg of mutton, or you'll be picking it, I
+    know," said Miss Sally.
+
+    The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass took a key from her
+    pocket, and opening the safe, brought from it a dreary waste of cold
+    potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge. This she placed before the
+    small servant, ordering her to sit down before it, and then, taking up
+    a great carving knife, made a mighty show of sharpening it upon the
+    carving fork.
+
+    "Do you see this?" said Miss Brass, slicing off about two square
+    inches of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and holding it out
+    on the point of the fork.
+
+    The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to see
+    every shred in it, small as it was, and answered, "Yes."
+
+    "Then don't you ever go and say," retorted Miss Sally, "that you
+    hadn't meat here. There, eat it up."
+
+    This was soon done. "Now, do you want any more?" said Miss Sally.
+
+    The hungry creature answered with a faint "No." They were evidently
+    going through an established form.
+
+    "You've been helped once to meat," said Miss Brass, summing up the
+    facts; "you have had as much as you can eat, you're asked if you want
+    any more, and you answer 'No!' Then don't you ever go and say you were
+    allowanced, mind that."
+
+Dickens showed the evil effects of eating too rapidly in his description
+of the dinner in Mrs. Pawkins's boarding house in New York, where Martin
+Chuzzlewit boarded for a short time after reaching America.
+
+    It was a numerous company, eighteen or twenty perhaps. Of these, some
+    five or six were ladies, who sat wedged together in a little phalanx
+    by themselves. All the knives and forks were working away at a rate
+    that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody
+    seemed to eat his utmost in self-defence, as if a famine were expected
+    to set in before breakfast time to-morrow morning, and it had become
+    high time to assert the first law of Nature. The poultry, which may
+    perhaps be considered to have formed the staple of the
+    entertainment--for there was a turkey at the top, a pair of ducks at
+    the bottom, and two fowls in the middle--disappeared as rapidly as if
+    every bird had had the use of its wings, and had flown in desperation
+    down a human throat. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from
+    their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the
+    assembly. The sharpest pickles vanished, whole cucumbers at once, like
+    sugarplums, and no man winked his eye. Great heaps of indigestible
+    matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and an awful
+    thing to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted their food in wedges;
+    feeding not themselves, but broods of nightmares, who were continually
+    standing at livery within them. Spare men, with lank and rigid cheeks,
+    came out unsatisfied from the destruction of heavy dishes, and glared
+    with watchful eyes upon the pastry. What Mrs. Pawkins felt each day at
+    dinner time is hidden from all human knowledge. But she had one
+    comfort. It was very soon over.
+
+Dickens repeats this criticism of rapid eating in his American Notes, when
+specifying the causes of disease among American people. He says: "The
+custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food three times a
+day and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal must be
+changed."
+
+Poor Paul Dombey was sacrificed to his father's pride. Mrs. Toodle was
+dismissed by Mr. Dombey because she dared to take his infant son with her
+when she went to see her own children. Paul was thus robbed of the natural
+food, which his sensitive nature needed so much. This was largely
+responsible for the fact that Paul was delicate. By first depriving him of
+proper food, and then sending him to Doctor Blimber's school "to learn
+everything," Mr. Dombey led directly to Paul's death. His pride and vanity
+overreached themselves.
+
+In Mrs. Pipchin's meals Dickens tried to show two things: First, the
+selfishness of adulthood in regard to children's diet as compared with its
+own; second, the absolute insufficiency of the kind of food commonly
+supplied to children for building up strong, energetic, and well-developed
+men and women.
+
+She regaled the children with a repast of "farinaceous and vegetable
+foods--chiefly rice," but she herself had a good hot dinner with mutton
+chops.
+
+The children were required to repeat a form of grace thanking Mrs.
+Pipchin for a good dinner. Oliver was told he must be thankful to the kind
+gentlemen who provided food for him in the workhouse. The same mockery of
+religion by mixing it up with the starvation of childhood is made
+ridiculous in the letter which Squeers read to the unfortunate children in
+Dotheboys Hall, pretending that it had been written by the stepmother of
+Mobbs.
+
+"Mobbs's stepmother," said Squeers, "took to her bed on hearing that he
+wouldn't eat fat, and has been very ill ever since. She wishes to know, by
+an early post, where he expects to go to if he quarrels with his vittles;
+and with what feelings he could turn up his nose at the cow's liver's
+broth, after his good master had asked a blessing on it." "Cow's liver's
+broth" would not be a very strengthening diet for children even with the
+blessing of so good a man as Squeers upon it.
+
+Dickens makes a characteristic hit at the fashionable idea which was
+popular at one time, that it was rather indelicate, especially in a lady,
+to have a good robust constitution and a vigorous digestion in describing
+Mr. Vholes in Bleak House. "His digestion was impaired, which is always
+highly respectable."
+
+Mrs. Cruncher, in A Tale of Two Cities, objected to the questionable ways
+in which Mr. Cruncher earned his money sometimes. Her husband charged her
+with flying in the face of Providence by refusing the "wittles and drink"
+he provided for her, and especially for neglecting to give it to their
+son. "With you flying into the face of your own wittles and drink! I don't
+know how scarce you mayn't make the wittles and drink here by your
+flopping tricks and your unfeeling conduct. Look at your boy: he is yourn,
+ain't he? He's as thin as a lath. Do you call yourself a mother, and not
+know a mother's first duty is to blow her son out."
+
+Abel Magwitch, when describing the terrible training he received at the
+hands of a Christian community in the most advanced Christian civilization
+of the world, said that when he was in jail some philanthropists "measured
+his head to find out the cause of his wickedness," and added with great
+wisdom, "they had better a-measured my stomach."
+
+The folly of hoping that healthy infants can be nourished by mothers who
+are compelled to labour continuously through long hours without rest is
+shown in the description of the child whose mother was a waitress, in
+Somebody's Luggage. Incidentally, too, Dickens reveals in this case the
+facts that the power of assimilation of little children is usually
+impaired, and that, as a consequence, they become more peevish, and
+therefore get shaken and otherwise abused for the ignorance of the adults
+responsible for their care. Speaking of the treatment of the baby, he
+says:
+
+    You were conveyed--ere yet your dawning powers were otherwise
+    developed than to harbour vacancy in your inside--you were conveyed by
+    surreptitious means into a pantry adjoining the Admiral Nelson, Civic
+    and General Dining-Rooms, there to receive by stealth that healthful
+    sustenance which is the pride and boast of the British female
+    constitution. Under the combined influence of the smells of roast and
+    boiled, and soup, and gas, and malt liquors, you partook of your
+    earliest nourishment; your unwilling grandmother sitting prepared to
+    catch you when your mother was called and dropped you; your
+    grandmother's shawl ever ready to stifle your natural complainings;
+    your innocent mind surrounded by uncongenial cruets, dirty plates,
+    dish covers, and cold gravy; your mother calling down the pipe for
+    veals and porks, instead of soothing you with nursery rhymes. Under
+    these untoward circumstances you were early weaned. Your unwilling
+    grandmother, ever growing more unwilling as your food assimilated
+    less, then contracted habits of shaking you till your system curdled,
+    and your food would not assimilate at all.
+
+The schoolmaster in Jemmy Lirriper's original story was captured and put
+into confinement for his treatment of the boys, and he was to have nothing
+to eat but the boys' dinners, and was to drink half a cask of their beer
+every day.
+
+The schoolboy in The Schoolboy's Story describes the food given to the
+boys as one of the grievances they had against the institution.
+
+    As to the beef, it's shameful. It's _not_ beef. Regular beef isn't
+    veins. You can chew regular beef. Besides which, there's gravy to
+    regular beef, and you never see a drop to ours. Another of our fellows
+    went home ill, and heard the family doctor tell his father that he
+    couldn't account for his complaint unless it was the beer. Of course
+    it was the beer, and well it might be!
+
+    However, beef and Old Cheeseman are two different things. So is beer.
+    It was Old Cheeseman I meant to tell about; not the manner in which
+    our fellows get their constitutions destroyed for the sake of profit.
+
+    Why, look at the pie crust alone. There's no flakiness in it. It's
+    solid--like damp lead. Then our fellows get nightmares, and are
+    bolstered for calling out and waking other fellows. Who can wonder!
+
+    Old Cheeseman one night walked in his sleep, put his hat on over his
+    nightcap, got hold of a fishing rod and a cricket bat, and went down
+    into the parlour, where they naturally thought from his appearance he
+    was a Ghost. Why, he never would have done that if his meals had been
+    wholesome. When we all begin to walk in our sleeps, I suppose they'll
+    be sorry for it.
+
+At Doctor Blimber's school they used "to crib the boys' dinners." There is
+no more outrageous practice than that of depriving a child of food as a
+means of punishment.
+
+Dickens ended his sketch entitled A Walk in a Workhouse with a plea on
+behalf of the inmates for "a little more liberty--and a little more
+bread," and even in his last book, Edwin Drood, he was still directing
+attention to the poor food supplied in boarding schools.
+
+Mrs. Billickin was very plain in her hints about the poor board supplied
+to Rosa at Miss Twinkleton's when she received the schoolmistress in her
+own home. Referring to Rosa, who was now residing with Mrs. Billickin, she
+said:
+
+    "I did think it well to mention to my cook, which I 'ope you will
+    agree with, Miss Twinkleton, was a right precaution, that the young
+    lady being used to what we should consider here but poor diet, had
+    better be brought forward by degrees. For a rush from scanty feeding
+    to generous feeding, and from what you may call messing to what you
+    may call method, do require a power of constitution, which is not
+    often found in youth, particularly when undermined by boarding school!
+    I was put in youth to a very genteel boarding school, the mistress
+    being no less a lady than yourself, of about your own age, or, it may
+    be some years younger, and a poorness of blood flowed from the table
+    which has run through my life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+MINOR SCHOOLS.
+
+
+The schools of Squeers, Doctor Blimber, Mr. Creakle, Doctor Strong, and
+Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M'Choakumchild are the most celebrated schools of
+Dickens, and they contain the greater part of his pedagogical teaching.
+His other schools are, however, worthy of very careful study.
+
+One of the first of the Sketches by Boz described a man who had passed
+through many vicissitudes, and at length was reduced to such poverty that
+he applied to the parish board for charity. This led to his appointment as
+a schoolmaster. Dickens clearly intended to teach the lesson, afterward
+emphasized in Nicholas Nickleby and other books, that poverty should not
+establish a claim to the position of a school-teacher.
+
+Minerva Hall, also in Sketches by Boz, reveals "one of those public
+nuisances, a spoiled child," spoiled because his papa was too busy with
+public duties and his mamma with society duties to train him properly. It
+also shows the reason Mrs. Cornelius Brook Dingwall had for sending her
+daughter to school. She said: "One of my principal reasons for parting
+with my daughter is that she has lately acquired some sentimental ideas,
+which it is most desirable to eradicate from her young mind." Here the
+public nuisance fell out of a chair, and mamma and papa showed their usual
+mode of training him. Mamma called him "a naughty boy," and threatened "to
+send for James to take him away"--both name and threat being wrong. Papa
+merely excused the cherub on the ground of "his great flow of spirits."
+The school also shows the silly training of so-called "finishing
+schools," as chiefly intended to teach young ladies the small
+conventionalities of "society."
+
+In The Old Curiosity Shop there are four schools: Mr. Marton's two
+schools, Mrs. Wackles's school, and Miss Monflathers's school. Mr.
+Marton's first school was introduced to reveal all the good qualities that
+Mr. Squeers lacked, especially sympathy. Mr. Marton was the immediate
+successor of Mr. Squeers, and they possessed directly opposite traits of
+character in their relationship to childhood. Mr. Squeers was coarse,
+unsympathetic, and coercive. Mr. Marton was kind, considerate, and a
+perfect type of true sympathy with the child. It is reasonable to believe
+that Mr. Marton and Mr. Squeers were drawn as companion pictures to
+illustrate and enforce the same truth--that sympathy with the child is the
+fundamental element in the character of a true teacher.
+
+The old bachelor emphasized this when he said to Mr. Marton, "You are none
+the worse teacher for having learned humanity."
+
+There is a great deal of food for psychological and pedagogical study in
+the introduction of the boys he was to teach in his second school, given
+by the bachelor to Mr. Marton. The bachelor was as full of genuine boyish
+spirit as it is possible for any adult to be, and was in some respects a
+more perfect type for an ideal teacher than Mr. Marton. Mr. Marton had the
+tender, spiritual sympathy of a true woman, the motherhood spirit that
+constitutes the atmosphere in which all right elements of childhood find
+their richest development; the bachelor had the perfect manly sympathy
+that enabled him to enter heartily into boy life. He had especially the
+power of recognising in the things for which boys are often rebuked the
+best evidences of their strength, and he could remember his own boyhood so
+well as to fully sympathize _with_ the boys. Mr. Marton and the bachelor
+reveal the whole range of sympathetic possibilities.
+
+    When nothing more was left to be done he charged the boy to run off
+    and bring his schoolmates to be marshalled before their new master and
+    solemnly reviewed.
+
+    "As good a set of fellows, Marton, as you'd wish to see," he said,
+    turning to the schoolmaster when the boy was gone; "but I don't let
+    'em know I think so. That wouldn't do at all."
+
+    The messenger soon returned at the head of a long row of urchins,
+    great and small, who, being confronted by the bachelor at the house
+    door, fell into various convulsions of politeness; clutching their
+    hats and caps, squeezing them into the smallest possible dimensions,
+    and making all manner of bows and scrapes, which the little old
+    gentleman contemplated with excessive satisfaction, and expressed his
+    approval of by a great many nods and smiles. Indeed, his approbation
+    of the boys was by no means so scrupulously disguised as he had led
+    the schoolmaster to suppose, inasmuch as it broke out in sundry loud
+    whispers and confidential remarks which were perfectly audible to them
+    every one.
+
+    "This first boy, schoolmaster," said the bachelor, "is John Owen; a
+    lad of good parts, sir, and frank, honest temper; but too thoughtless,
+    too playful, too light-headed by far. That boy, my good sir, would
+    break his neck with pleasure, and deprive his parents of their chief
+    comfort--and between ourselves, when you come to see him at hare and
+    hounds, taking the fence and ditch by the finger post, and sliding
+    down the face of the little quarry, you'll never forget it. It's
+    beautiful!"
+
+    John Owen having been thus rebuked, and being in perfect possession of
+    the speech aside, the bachelor singled out another boy.
+
+    "Now look at that lad, sir," said the bachelor. "You see that fellow?
+    Richard Evans his name is, sir. An amazing boy to learn, blessed with
+    a good memory and a ready understanding, and moreover with a good
+    voice and ear for psalm singing, in which he is the best among us.
+    Yet, sir, that boy will come to a bad end; he'll never die in his bed;
+    he's always falling asleep in sermon time--and to tell you the truth,
+    Mr. Marton, I always did the same at his age, and feel quite certain
+    that it was natural to my constitution, and I couldn't help it."
+
+    This hopeful pupil edified by the above terrible reproval, the
+    bachelor turned to another.
+
+    "But if we talk of examples to be shunned," said he, "if we come to
+    boys that should be a warning and a beacon to all their fellows,
+    here's the one, and I hope you won't spare him. This is the lad, sir;
+    this one with the blue eyes and light hair. This is a swimmer, sir,
+    this fellow--a diver, Lord save us! This is a boy, sir, who had a
+    fancy for plunging into eighteen feet of water, with his clothes on,
+    and bringing up a blind man's dog, who was being drowned by the weight
+    of his chain and collar, while his master stood wringing his hands
+    upon the bank, bewailing the loss of his guide and friend. I sent the
+    boy two guineas anonymously, sir," added the bachelor, in his peculiar
+    whisper, "directly I heard of it; but never mention it on any account,
+    for he hasn't the least idea that it came from me."
+
+    Having disposed of this culprit, the bachelor turned to another, and
+    from him to another, and so on through the whole array, laying, for
+    their wholesome restriction within due bounds, the same cutting
+    emphasis on such of their propensities as were dearest to his heart,
+    and were unquestionably referable to his own precept and example.
+    Thoroughly persuaded, in the end, that he had made them miserable by
+    his severity, he dismissed them with a small present, and an
+    admonition to walk quietly home, without any leapings, scufflings, or
+    turnings out of the way; which injunction, he informed the
+    schoolmaster in the same audible confidence, he did not think he could
+    have obeyed when he was a boy had his life depended on it.
+
+What a model he was for teachers, this glorious bachelor, in his sympathy
+_with_ the boys, and in his unconventionality! When teachers begin to feel
+the grip of formalism on their better natures and begin to lose faith in
+so-called bad boys, they should read this introduction of the pupils by
+the bachelor. Bless his memory! he will always rank among the greatest
+child trainers.
+
+His pretence of not letting the boys know that he thought they were good
+fellows was a pleasant rebuke of the miserable old doctrine that a boy
+should always be told his faults, but never be spoken to about his
+virtues. This false doctrine having been so carefully applied in homes and
+schools for centuries as a religious duty, based on the unscriptural
+doctrine of child depravity, has made a large portion of humanity in
+Christian countries mere defect dodgers, instead of making them conscious
+of power to do independent work for God and their fellow-men. Dickens had
+no faith in this doctrine, and he taught that one of the highest things a
+teacher can do for a child is to recognise and show honest appreciation of
+his best powers and qualities. When superintendents search as carefully
+for the good qualities and powers of their teachers as some yet do for
+their weaknesses, and when they are so unconventional as to be able to
+show genuine appreciation frankly to the teachers themselves, the schools
+will reach their proper rate of progressive development.
+
+Through the whole series of criticisms of the boys, Dickens is showing the
+full rich sympathy of his own great heart for the whole race of boys in
+the unreasonable and unjust criticism to which they are subjected by
+forgetful and ignorant adulthood. Those who should be wisest in these
+matters--and especially many who think themselves wise--are still very
+forgetful of their own early life, and very ignorant of boyhood.
+
+Mrs. Wackles's school was called a "Ladies' Seminary," but it was in
+reality "a very small day school for young ladies of proportionate
+dimensions."
+
+    The several duties of instruction in this establishment were thus
+    discharged: English grammar, composition, geography, and the use of
+    the dumb-bells, by Miss Melissa Wackles; writing, arithmetic, dancing,
+    music, and general fascination, by Miss Sophy Wackles; the art of
+    needlework, marking, and samplery, by Miss Jane Wackles; corporal
+    punishment, fasting, and other tortures and terrors, by Mrs. Wackles.
+    Miss Melissa Wackles was the eldest daughter, Miss Sophy the next, and
+    Miss Jane the youngest. Miss Melissa might have seen five-and-thirty
+    summers or thereabout, and verged on the autumnal, Miss Sophy was a
+    fresh, good-humoured, buxom girl of twenty; and Miss Jane numbered
+    scarcely sixteen years. Mrs. Wackles was an excellent, but rather
+    venomous old lady of threescore.
+
+Mrs. Wackles's school is described to show the frivolous nature of such
+so-called private educational institutions, and to strike again the
+abominable practice of abusing children by "corporal punishment, fasting,
+and other tortures and terrors" by "a venomous old lady of threescore."
+
+Miss Monflathers's school was a boarding establishment for young ladies,
+in which they were duly impressed with the dignity of their social
+position; with the terrible danger of yielding in any way to their natural
+impulses, all of which were assumed to be very wicked; with the sinfulness
+of sympathizing with or in any way recognising the lower classes; with the
+impropriety of knowing the fact that there was any wrong in the world to
+be righted or any suffering to be relieved; with the inestimable value of
+aristocratic birth; and with the most important truth that men are very
+dangerous animals, to be carefully shunned.
+
+Little Nell was sent to the establishment of Miss Monflathers with notices
+of Mrs. Jarley's waxworks, being temporarily in the employ of that lady.
+
+    Nell had no difficulty in finding out Miss Monflathers's Boarding and
+    Day Establishment, which was a large house, with a high wall, and a
+    large garden gate with a large brass plate, and a small grating
+    through which Miss Monflathers's parlour maid inspected all visitors
+    before admitting them; for nothing in the shape of a man--no, not even
+    a milkman--was suffered, without special license, to pass that gate.
+    Even the taxgatherer, who was stout, and wore spectacles and a
+    broadbrimmed hat, had the taxes handed through the grating. More
+    obdurate than gate of adamant or brass, this gate of Miss
+    Monflathers's frowned on all mankind. The very butcher respected it as
+    a gate of mystery, and left off whistling when he rang the bell.
+
+    As Nell approached the awful door, it turned slowly upon its hinges
+    with a creaking noise, and forth from the solemn grove beyond came a
+    long file of young ladies, two and two, all with open books in their
+    hands, and some with parasols likewise. And last of the goodly
+    procession came Miss Monflathers, bearing herself a parasol of lilac
+    silk, and supported by two smiling teachers, each mortally envious of
+    the other, and devoted unto Miss Monflathers.
+
+    Confused by the looks and whispers of the girls, Nell stood with
+    downcast eyes and suffered the procession to pass on, until Miss
+    Monflathers, bringing up the rear, approached her, when she courtesied
+    and presented her little packet; on receipt whereof Miss Monflathers
+    commanded that the line should halt.
+
+    "You're the waxwork child, are you not?" said Miss Monflathers.
+
+    "Yes, ma'am," replied Nell, colouring deeply, for the young ladies had
+    collected about her, and she was the centre on which all eyes were
+    fixed.
+
+    "And don't you think you must be a very wicked little child," said
+    Miss Monflathers, who was of rather uncertain temper, and lost no
+    opportunity of impressing moral truths upon the tender minds of young
+    ladies, "to be a waxwork child at all?"
+
+    Poor Nell had never viewed her position in this light, and not knowing
+    what to say, remained silent, blushing more deeply than before.
+
+    "Don't you know," said Miss Monflathers, "that it's very naughty and
+    unfeminine, and a perversion of the properties wisely and benignantly
+    transmitted to us, with expansive powers to be roused from their
+    dormant state through the medium of cultivation?"
+
+    "Don't you feel how naughty it is of you," resumed Miss Monflathers,
+    "to be a waxwork child, when you might have the proud consciousness of
+    assisting, to the extent of your infant powers, the manufactures of
+    your country; of improving your mind by the constant contemplation of
+    the steam engine; and of earning a comfortable and independent
+    subsistence of from two and ninepence to three shillings per week?
+    Don't you know that the harder you are at work, the happier you are?"
+
+    "'How doth the little----'" murmured one of the teachers in quotation
+    from Dr. Watts.
+
+    "Eh?" said Miss Monflathers, turning smartly round. "Who said that?"
+
+    "The little busy bee," said Miss Monflathers, drawing herself up, "is
+    applicable only to genteel children.
+
+        'In books, or work, or healthful play'
+
+    is quite right as far as they are concerned; and the work means
+    painting on velvet, fancy needlework, or embroidery. In such cases as
+    these," pointing to Nell with her parasol, "and in the case of all
+    poor people's children, we should read it thus:
+
+        'In work, work, work. In work alway
+          Let my first years be passed,
+        That I may give for ev'ry day
+          Some good account at last.'"
+
+    Just then somebody happened to discover that Nell was crying, and all
+    eyes were again turned toward her.
+
+    There were indeed tears in her eyes, and drawing out her handkerchief
+    to brush them away, she happened to let it fall. Before she could
+    stoop to pick it up, one young lady of about fifteen or sixteen, who
+    had been standing a little apart from the others, as though she had no
+    recognised place among them, sprang forward and put it in her hand.
+    She was gliding timidly away again, when she was arrested by the
+    governess.
+
+    "It was Miss Edwards who did that, I _know_," said Miss Monflathers
+    predictively. "Now I am sure that was Miss Edwards."
+
+    It was Miss Edwards, and everybody said it was Miss Edwards, and Miss
+    Edwards herself admitted that it was.
+
+    "Is it not," said Miss Monflathers, putting down her parasol to take a
+    severer view of the offender, "a most remarkable thing, Miss Edwards,
+    that you have an attachment to the lower classes which always draws
+    you to their sides; or, rather, is it not a most extraordinary thing
+    that all I say and do will not wean you from propensities which your
+    original station in life has unhappily rendered habitual to you, you
+    extremely vulgar-minded girl?"
+
+    "I really intended no harm, ma'am," said a sweet voice. "It was a
+    momentary impulse, indeed."
+
+    "An impulse!" repeated Miss Monflathers scornfully. "I wonder that you
+    presume to speak of impulses to me"--both the teachers assented--"I am
+    astonished"--both the teachers were astonished--"I suppose it is an
+    impulse which induces you to take the part of every grovelling and
+    debased person that comes in your way"--both the teachers supposed so
+    too.
+
+    "But I would have you know, Miss Edwards," resumed the governess, in a
+    tone of increased severity, "that you can not be permitted--if it be
+    only for the sake of preserving a proper example and decorum in this
+    establishment--that you can not be permitted, and that you shall not
+    be permitted, to fly in the face of your superiors in this extremely
+    gross manner. If _you_ have no reason to feel a becoming pride before
+    waxwork children, there are young ladies here who have, and you must
+    either defer to those young ladies or leave the establishment, Miss
+    Edwards."
+
+    This young lady, being motherless and poor, was apprenticed at the
+    school--taught for nothing--teaching others what she learned for
+    nothing--boarded for nothing--lodged for nothing--and set down and
+    rated as something immeasurably less than nothing, by all the dwellers
+    in the house. The servant maids felt her inferiority, for they were
+    better treated; free to come and go, and regarded in their stations
+    with much more respect. The teachers were infinitely superior, for
+    they had paid to go to school in their time, and were paid now. The
+    pupils cared little for a companion who had no grand stories to tell
+    about home; no friends to come with post horses, and be received in
+    all humility, with cake and wine, by the governess; no deferential
+    servant to attend and bear her home for the holidays; nothing genteel
+    to talk about, and nothing to display. But why was Miss Monflathers
+    always vexed and irritated with the poor apprentice--how did that come
+    to pass?
+
+    Why, the gayest feather in Miss Monflathers's cap, and the brightest
+    glory of Miss Monflathers's school, was a baronet's daughter--the real
+    live daughter of a real live baronet--who, by some extraordinary
+    reversal of the laws of Nature, was not only plain in features but
+    dull in intellect, while the poor apprentice had both a ready wit and
+    a handsome face and figure. It seems incredible. Here was Miss
+    Edwards, who only paid a small premium which had been spent long ago,
+    every day outshining and excelling the baronet's daughter, who learned
+    all the extras (or was taught them all), and whose half yearly bill
+    came to double that of any other young lady's in the school, making no
+    account of the honour and reputation of her pupilage. Therefore, and
+    because she was a dependent, Miss Monflathers had a great dislike to
+    Miss Edwards, and was spiteful to her, and aggravated by her, and,
+    when she had compassion on Little Nell, verbally fell upon and
+    maltreated her, as we have already seen.
+
+    "You will not take the air to-day, Miss Edwards," said Miss
+    Monflathers. "Have the goodness to retire to your own room, and not to
+    leave it without permission."
+
+    The poor girl was moving hastily away, when she was suddenly, in a
+    nautical phrase, "brought to" by a subdued shriek from Miss
+    Monflathers.
+
+    "She has passed me without any salute!" cried the governess, raising
+    her eyes to the sky. "She has actually passed me without the slightest
+    acknowledgment of my presence!"
+
+    The young lady turned and courtesied. Nell could see that she raised
+    her dark eyes to the face of her superior, and that their expression,
+    and that of her whole attitude for the instant, was one of mute but
+    most touching appeal against this ungenerous usage. Miss Monflathers
+    only tossed her head in reply, and the great gate closed upon a
+    bursting heart.
+
+In addition to the gross evils of such institutions already suggested,
+Dickens exposed the cruelty of Miss Monflathers, as a type of Christian
+rectitude, toward Nell, whom she assumed to be very wicked, and the
+tendency of society to treat teachers with contempt, if they are not rich.
+The standard based on mere wealth is happily changing.
+
+The tone of Miss Monflathers's lofty criticism in language and thought,
+quite incomprehensible to the person admonished, is very true to the life
+in cases of conventional people, who take no pains to understand child
+nature or human nature in any phase, except its depravity.
+
+The heartlessness of the distinction between the "genteel" children and
+poor children is clearly pointed out. There could scarcely be a more
+unchristlike thought than the one that would prohibit the children of the
+poor from the enjoyment of their natural tendency to play. No civilization
+in which either by deliberate purpose or by criminal negligence the
+children of the poorest are left without the privilege and the means for
+full free play should dare to call itself Christian. Yet Miss
+Monflathers's parody aptly represented the practical outworking of
+civilization at the time of Dickens, and long since, too, in regard to
+poor children.
+
+Miss Monflathers told Miss Edwards majestically that she "must not take
+the air to-day," and contemptuously ordered her to remain in her room all
+day. This was written to condemn the common punishment of keeping children
+in at recess or confining them as a means of punishment. Dickens always
+thought it a crime against childhood to punish a child by robbing it of
+any of its natural rights to food, or fresh air, or free exercise.
+
+The ecstasy of passion reached by Miss Monflathers because Miss Edwards
+passed her without saluting her showed Dickens's attitude toward those who
+insisted and still insist on obeisance from those whom they are pleased to
+regard as "inferiors." Public school education has been criticised because
+"it does not train poor children to courtesy to their superiors." Any
+system deserves the support of all right-thinking people if it trains the
+children of the poorest to hold their heads up respectfully, and look the
+world squarely in the face without a debasing consciousness of
+inferiority. The greatest aim of education, so far as the individual is
+concerned, is freedom--spiritual freedom. Respect for properly constituted
+authority should become a part of every child's consciousness, but this
+properly involves contempt for the arrogant assumption of certain people
+that certain other people should bow down in servile humility to them.
+Education must always be the enemy of tyranny, slavery, and all kinds of
+abasement.
+
+The grinders' school was introduced to ridicule the practice of forcing
+all children in charitable institutions to wear a uniform dress, and to
+attack corporal punishment, neglect of moral training, and the practice of
+placing ignorant men in the high position of a teacher. The teacher in the
+grinders' school was "a superannuated old grinder of savage disposition,
+who had been appointed schoolmaster because he didn't know anything, and
+wasn't fit for anything, and for whose cruel cane all chubby little boys
+had a perfect fascination." The practice of dressing all children alike,
+and of dressing them all without taste, is continued in most homes for
+orphan children still. Surely the poor orphans have suffered enough
+without subjecting them to the indignity of tasteless dressing. There
+might at least be a difference of taste in colour, for instance, for the
+blondes and the brunettes.
+
+The school taught by Agnes in David Copperfield is mentioned to show that
+if a teacher works with a true spirit (Agnes was a splendid character for
+women to study with great care), teaching is a pleasant instead of an
+unhappy profession.
+
+David said: "It is laborious, is it not?" "The labour is so pleasant," she
+returned, "that it is scarcely grateful in me to call it by that name."
+
+The school attended by Uriah Heep and his father before him was described
+as an attack on the practice of instilling into the minds of poor children
+the consciousness of subserviency. David says: "I fully comprehended now
+for the first time (after hearing Uriah describe his training at school)
+what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit must have been engendered
+by this early, and this long, suppression."
+
+The first school attended by Esther in Bleak House is apparently
+introduced to point out four evils in the social training of little
+children. The other children were all older than Esther; her godmother
+refused to allow her to accept invitations to go to the homes of the other
+girls; she was never allowed out to play; and while holidays were given on
+the birthdays of other girls, none were ever given on hers. The cruelty of
+two of these evils was made still more bitter by the revelation of the
+fact that she was not treated like other girls because of some wrong her
+mother was supposed to have done.
+
+Miss Donny's school at Greenleaf was a charming place, conducted in a
+"precise, exact, and orderly way." Esther was taught well, and trained
+well. She was to be a governess, and so she taught as she learned. Her
+barren childhood made her sympathize with the girls whom she taught,
+especially the new girls, and she naturally won their love, and was
+therefore happy. Esther possessed every essential characteristic of a good
+teacher and a true woman. Miss Donny's school is one of the schools in
+which Dickens was approving, not condemning.
+
+Mr. Cripple's academy is merely mentioned in Little Dorrit to complain
+about the habit of scribbling over buildings and on desks and walls in
+which boys used to indulge, and of which many evidences may yet be found
+on the fences and walls of the present day.
+
+"The pupils of Mr. Cripple's appeared to have been making a copy book of
+the street door, it was so extensively scribbled over in pencil."
+
+Pip's early education, in Great Expectations, was received in Mr. Wopsle's
+great-aunt's school.
+
+    Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is
+    to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited
+    infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in
+    the society of youth, who paid twopence per week each, for the
+    improving opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage,
+    and Mr. Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we students used to
+    overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner,
+    and occasionally bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction that Mr.
+    Wopsle "examined" the scholars once a quarter. What he did on those
+    occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us
+    Mark Antony's oration over the body of Caesar.
+
+    Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr.
+    Wopsle's great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had
+    been a bramble bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by
+    every letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures,
+    who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves
+    and baffle recognition. But at last I began, in a purblind groping
+    way, to read, write, and cipher on the very smallest scale.
+
+    Biddy was Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's granddaughter; I confessed myself
+    quite unequal to the working out of the problem, what relation she was
+    to Mr. Wopsle.
+
+    The educational scheme or course established by Mr. Wopsle's
+    great-aunt may be resolved into the following synopsis: The pupils ate
+    apples and put straws down one another's backs, until Mr. Wopsle's
+    great-aunt collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter
+    at them with a birch rod. After receiving the charge with every mark
+    of derision, the pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged
+    book from hand to hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures
+    and tables, and a little spelling--that is to say, it had had once. As
+    soon as this volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt fell
+    into a state of coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic
+    paroxysm. The pupils then entered among themselves upon a competitive
+    examination on the subject of boots, with the view of ascertaining who
+    could tread the hardest upon whose toes. This mental exercise lasted
+    until Biddy made a rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles
+    (shaped as if they had been unskilfully cut off the chumped end of
+    something), more illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of
+    literature I have since met with, speckled all over with iron mould,
+    and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between their
+    leaves. This part of the course was usually lightened by several
+    single combats between Biddy and refractory students. When the fights
+    were over, Biddy gave out the number of a page, and then we all read
+    aloud what we could--or what we couldn't--in a frightful chorus; Biddy
+    leading with a high shrill monotonous voice, and none of us having the
+    least notion of, or reverence for, what we were reading about. When
+    this horrible din had lasted a certain time, it mechanically awoke Mr.
+    Wopsle's great-aunt, who staggered at a boy fortuitously, and pulled
+    his ears. This was understood to terminate the course for the evening,
+    and we emerged into the air with shrieks of intellectual victory.
+
+The reasons for describing this school were to renew the attack on bad
+private schools, conducted without any state control and no supervision or
+inspection by competent officers, to show the need of better appliances
+and text-books, and to teach the utter folly of allowing pupils to try to
+read any book, especially the Bible, without understanding what they were
+reading. Incidentally Dickens taught that to use the Bible as it was used
+in Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's school develops a lack of reverence for it.
+The evil of corporal punishment of the indiscriminate and irregular kind
+comes in for a share of condemnation in this wretched school.
+
+Dickens returned to the attack on bad private schools in Our Mutual
+Friend. He had made a thorough study of the evening schools conducted in
+London--conducted many of them by organizations with good intentions.
+
+There are a good many Sunday schools yet which in some respects are open
+to the criticisms made of Charley Hexam's first school.
+
+    The school at which young Charley Hexam had first learned from a
+    book--the streets being, for pupils of his degree, the great
+    preparatory establishment, in which very much that is never unlearned
+    is learned without and before book--was a miserable loft in an
+    unsavoury yard. Its atmosphere was oppressive and disagreeable; it was
+    crowded, noisy, and confusing; half the pupils dropped asleep, or fell
+    into a state of stupefaction; the other half kept them in either
+    condition by maintaining a monotonous droning noise, as if they were
+    performing, out of time and tune, on a ruder sort of bagpipe. The
+    teachers, animated solely by good intentions, had no idea of
+    execution, and a lamentable jumble was the upshot of their kind
+    endeavours.
+
+    It was a school for all ages and for both sexes. The latter were kept
+    apart, and the former were partitioned off into square assortments.
+    But all the place was pervaded by a grimly ludicrous pretence that
+    every pupil was childish and innocent. This pretence, much favoured by
+    the lady visitors, led to the ghastliest absurdities. Young women, old
+    in the vices of the commonest and worst life, were expected to profess
+    themselves enthralled by the good child's book, the Adventures of
+    Little Margery, who resided in the village cottage by the mill;
+    severely reproved and morally squashed the miller, when she was five
+    and he was fifty; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied
+    herself a new nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not
+    wear nankeen bonnets, neither did the sheep, who ate them; who plaited
+    straw and delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts
+    of unseasonable times. So unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks
+    were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having
+    resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his
+    particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came
+    into supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a
+    shining light ever afterward. (Note, that the benefactor came to no
+    good.) Several swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in
+    the same strain; it always appearing from the lessons of those very
+    boastful persons that you were to do good, not because it _was_ good,
+    but because you were to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the
+    adult pupils were taught to read (if they could learn) out of the New
+    Testament; and by dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping
+    their bewildered eyes on the particular syllables coming round to
+    their turn, were as absolutely ignorant of the sublime history as if
+    they had never seen or heard of it. An exceedingly and confoundingly
+    perplexing jumble of a school, in fact, where black spirits and gray,
+    red spirits and white, jumbled, jumbled, jumbled, jumbled, jumbled
+    every night. And particularly every Sunday night. For then an inclined
+    plane of unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and
+    worst of all the teachers with good intentions, whom nobody older
+    would endure. Who, taking his stand on the floor before them, as chief
+    executioner, would be attended by a conventional volunteer boy as
+    executioner's assistant. When and where it first became the
+    conventional system that a weary or inattentive infant in a class must
+    have its face smoothed downward with a hot hand, or when or where the
+    conventional volunteer boy first beheld such system in operation, and
+    became inflamed with a sacred zeal to administer it, matters not. It
+    was the function of the chief executioner to hold forth, and it was
+    the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping infants, yawning
+    infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth their
+    wretched faces, sometimes with one hand, as if he were anointing them
+    for a whisker; sometimes with both hands, applied after the fashion of
+    blinkers. And so the jumble would be in action in this department for
+    a mortal hour; the exponent drawling on to my dearerr childerrenerr,
+    let us say for example, about the beautiful coming to the sepulchre;
+    and repeating the word sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five
+    hundred times and never once hinting what it meant; the conventional
+    boy smoothing away right and left, as an infallible commentary; the
+    whole hotbed of flushed and exhausted infants exchanging measles,
+    rashes, whooping-cough, fever, and stomach disorders, as if they were
+    assembled in High Market for the purpose.
+
+    Even in this temple of good intentions, an exceptionally sharp boy
+    exceptionally determined to learn, could learn something, and, having
+    learned it, could impart it so much better than the teachers; as being
+    more knowing than they, and not at the disadvantage in which they
+    stood toward the shrewder pupils. In this way it had come about that
+    Charley Hexam had risen in the jumble, taught in the jumble, and been
+    received from the jumble into a better school.
+
+Dickens slaughtered evils by wholesale in this brief description. The
+influence of the great preparatory establishment, the street, was brought
+to the notice of thinking people.
+
+The need of ventilation was pointed out, and the evil of crowding a large
+number of pupils into poorly ventilated rooms was made very clear. "Half
+the pupils dropped asleep, or fell into a state of waking stupefaction."
+
+The teachers were untrained. "They were animated solely by good
+intentions, and had no idea of execution." The consequence was a
+lamentable jumble.
+
+The separation of the sexes was not approved.
+
+The stupid blunder of treating all pupils alike, without regard to
+heredity, environment, or past experience, is aptly caricatured in giving
+the Adventures of Little Margery and the Experiences of Thomas Twopence to
+young women old in vice and to young male criminals in order to reform
+them.
+
+Incidentally he disapproves of such literature for any children, and also
+of the autobiographies of "swaggering sinners."
+
+The error pointed out in Pip's education of using the New Testament as a
+book from which pupils should be taught how to read is emphasized. "By
+dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on
+the particular syllables coming round to their turn, they were as
+absolutely ignorant of the sublime history as if they had never seen or
+heard of it."
+
+He criticised severely the old custom of giving least attention to the
+choice of a teacher for the little ones. The old theory was: they can not
+learn much any way; anybody will do to teach them. "The inclined plane of
+unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all
+the teachers of good intentions, whom nobody older would endure."
+
+The dreadful practice, still kept up in some heathen-producing Sunday
+schools, of having an "executioner's assistant to keep order," is severely
+condemned. "It was the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping
+infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth, their wretched
+faces." The irritating influence of this operation on the suffering
+infants and the degrading effect on the executioner's assistant himself
+are clearly indicated.
+
+But the greatest cruelty was in having the infants talked at in a droning
+voice for an hour by the chief executioner in a voice that would sometimes
+deaden, sometimes irritate their nervous systems, and in language they
+could not comprehend, about subjects entirely foreign to their
+experiences.
+
+The danger of spreading contagious diseases in such badly ventilated
+schools was shown. Dickens was a leader in the department of sanitation
+both in homes and in schools.
+
+The schools taught by Bradley Headstone and Miss Peecher were
+
+    newly built, and there were so many like them all over the country,
+    that one might have thought the whole were but one restless edifice
+    with the locomotive gift of Aladdin's palace.
+
+    All things in these schools--buildings, teachers, and pupils--were
+    according to pattern, and engendered in the light of the latest Gospel
+    according to Monotony.
+
+These brief descriptions contained volumes of protest against the dead
+uniformity of school architecture, and against the sacrifice of
+individuality in schools. There are no other buildings in which there
+should be more care taken to have truly artistic architecture than in
+schools, because the children are influenced so much by their environment.
+Correct taste may be formed more easily and more definitely by making the
+places in which children spend so much of their lives truly artistic than
+by studying the best authorities. The child's spirits should be toned by
+the colouring of the walls of the schoolroom, and by the pictures,
+statues, and other artistic articles around them.
+
+The phrase "Gospel according to Monotony" is one of the most effective
+phrases ever used to describe the destruction of individuality.
+
+The Peecher-Headstone schools were described as one of several protests
+against separating little girls from little boys in schools.
+
+Phoebe, the happy young woman, who had never been able to sit up since
+she had been dropped by her mother when she was in a fit, is one of the
+sweetest of the characters of Dickens. She lay on a couch as high as the
+window and enjoyed the view as she made lace. She taught a little school
+part of the day, and when Barbox Brothers was at Mugby Junction he heard
+the children singing in the school, and watched them trooping home happily
+till he became so interested in what was going on in the little cottage
+that he went in to investigate. He found a small but very clean room, with
+no one there but Phoebe lying on her couch. He asked her if she was
+learned in the new system of teaching, meaning the kindergarten system,
+because he had heard her children singing as he passed.
+
+    "No," she said, "I am very fond of children, but I know nothing of
+    teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure it gives
+    me, when they learn. I have only read and been told about the new
+    system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like
+    the merry robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way. My
+    school is a pleasure to me. I began it, when I was but a child,
+    because it brought me and other children into company, don't you see?
+    I carry it on still, because it keeps children about me. I do it as
+    love, not as work."
+
+What a beautiful school! What an ideal spirit for every true teacher! What
+a wise man Dickens was to reveal so much sweetness and trueness in the
+life of such a woman as Phoebe! When Phoebe had overcome her
+restrictions so triumphantly, surely every one who dares to teach should
+try to rise above personal infirmities, and treat children like the "merry
+robins that they are."
+
+The Holiday Romance, in which three young children write romances for the
+edification of their adult friends and relatives, to show how adult
+treatment impresses young children, is usually regarded as merely an
+exquisite piece of humour. In writing to Mr. Fields about the story
+Dickens said: "It made me laugh to that extent, that my people here
+thought I was out of my wits, until I gave it to them to read, when they
+did likewise."
+
+There is more philosophy than fun in these stories, however, and when
+carefully studied they should aid in the "education of the grown-up
+people"--not merely the "grown-ups" for whom they were intended, but all
+"grown-ups." This is especially true of the last story, written by Miss
+Nettie Ashford, aged "half-past-six."
+
+The story is about Mrs. Lemon's school and Mrs. Orange's family.
+
+"The grown-up people" were the children in Nettie's story, and the
+children were the managers of all things at home and at school.
+
+Mrs. Orange went to Mrs. Lemon's and told her that "her children were
+getting positively too much for her." She had two parents, two intimate
+friends of theirs, one godfather, two godmothers, and an aunt. She wished
+to send them to school, because they were "getting too much for her." Many
+real mothers give the same reason.
+
+    "Have you as many as eight vacancies?"
+
+    "I have just eight, ma'am," said Mrs. Lemon.
+
+    "Corporal punishment dispensed with?"
+
+    "Why, we do occasionally shake," said Mrs. Lemon, "and we have
+    slapped. But only in extreme cases."
+
+Mrs. Orange was shown through the school, and had the bad "grown-ups"
+pointed out to her and their evil propensities explained to her in their
+hearing, as naturally as in a real school. She decided to send her family,
+and went home with her baby--which was a doll--saying, "These troublesome
+troubles are got rid of, please the pigs."
+
+A small party for the grown-up children was given by Mrs. Alicumpaine, and
+the arrangements made for the adults, and the ways in which they were
+treated by their child masters, and the criticisms on the way the seniors
+behaved are all instructive to thoughtful parents. The real things that
+adult people say and do appear delightfully stupid or exquisitely silly
+when made to appear as said and done by children.
+
+    When Mr. and Mrs. Orange were going home they passed the establishment
+    of Mrs. Lemon, and necessarily thought of their eight adult pupils who
+    were there.
+
+    "I wonder, James, dear," said Mrs. Orange, looking up at the window,
+    "whether the precious children are asleep!"
+
+    "I don't care much whether they are or not, myself," said Mr. Orange.
+
+    "James, dear!"
+
+    "You dote upon them, you know," said Mr. Orange. "That's another
+    thing."
+
+    "I do," said Mrs. Orange rapturously. "Oh, I do!"
+
+    "I don't," said Mr. Orange.
+
+    "But, I was thinking, James, love," said Mrs. Orange, pressing his
+    arm, "whether our dear, good, kind Mrs. Lemon would like them to stay
+    the holidays with her."
+
+    "If she was paid for it, I dare say she would," said Mr. Orange.
+
+    "I adore them, James," said Mrs. Orange, "but _suppose_ we pay her,
+    then."
+
+    This was what brought the country to such perfection, and made it such
+    a delightful place to live in. The grown-up people (that would be in
+    other countries) soon left off being allowed any holidays after Mr.
+    and Mrs. Orange tried the experiment; and the children (that would be
+    in other countries) kept them at school as long as ever they lived,
+    and made them do whatever they were told.
+
+This story was written about two years before the death of Dickens, so it
+represents his maturest thought. Its great fundamental motive was
+Froebel's motto, "Come, let us live with our children." It was a
+trenchant, though humorous criticism of the methods of treating children
+practised by adults, at home and at school. Mrs. Orange's adoration for
+children, while at the same time she was proposing to keep them at school
+during the holidays, is very suggestive to those mothers who in society
+talk so much about their "precious darlings," but who keep them in the
+nursery so that they have no share in the family life. The practice of
+calling children bad and describing their supposed evil propensities in
+the presence of others is also condemned in this story.
+
+One of the very best of the stories of Dickens to show his perfect
+sympathy with boyhood is the story told by Jemmy Jackman Lirriper about
+"the boy who went to school in Rutlandshire."
+
+It reveals the feelings of boys to the "Tartars" who teach school, as the
+boys, when they got control, put the Tartar into confinement and "forced
+him to eat the boys' dinners and drink half a cask of their beer every
+day."
+
+It reveals, too, the psychological condition of a healthy boy just
+entering the adolescent period, if he has been fortunate enough to have
+had a life of love and freedom at home; with his heart filled with love
+for the schoolmaster's daughter Seraphina, and his mind filled with
+hopeful dreams of success, and triumph, and fortune, and happiness ever
+afterward, not excluding those who had nurtured him, but sharing all with
+them, and finding his greatest joy in their affectionate pride at his
+success. Blessed is the boy who has such glorious experiences and such
+hopeful dreams in his later boyhood and onward, and thrice blessed is he
+who finds in parenthood hearts so reverently sympathetic that it is
+natural for the young heart to overflow into them.
+
+"But such dreams can never come true." They are true. Nothing is ever more
+true for the stage of evolution in which they naturally fill the life of
+the child. To stop them is a crime; to shut them up in the heart of the
+boy or girl makes them a source of great danger instead of an essential
+element in the ennoblement of character.
+
+Let the boy dream on, and help him to dream by sympathetically sharing his
+visions with him. His own visions and the most wonderful visions of
+heroism and adventure dreamed by the best authors should fill his life
+during the most important stage of his growth, adolescence, when the
+elements of his manhood are rushing into his life and require an outlet in
+the ideal life as a preparation for the real life of later days.
+
+Dickens recognises, too, in this story the great truth so little used by
+educators, that the child's imagination is not restricted by any
+conditions of impossibility or by any laws of Nature or of man. The ideal
+transcends the real, the desired is accomplished. Development is rapid
+under such conditions.
+
+    "And was there no quarrelling," asked Mrs. Lirriper, "after the boy
+    and his boy friend had gained high renown, and unlimited stores of
+    gold, and had married Seraphina and her sister, and had come to live
+    with Gran and Godfather forever, and the story was ended?"
+
+    "No! Nobody ever quarrelled."
+
+    "And did the money never melt away?"
+
+    "No! Nobody could ever spend it all."
+
+    "And did none of them ever grow older?"
+
+    "No! Nobody ever grew older after that."
+
+    "And did none of them ever die?"
+
+    "O, no, no, no, Gran!" exclaimed our dear boy, laying his cheek upon
+    her breast, and drawing her closer to him. "Nobody ever died."
+
+    "Ah, Major, Major!" says Mrs. Lirriper, smiling benignly upon me,
+    "this beats our stories. Let us end with the Boy's Story, Major, for
+    the Boy's Story is the best that is ever told."
+
+Miss Pupford's school in Tom Tiddler's Ground reveals the foolish
+conventional formalism of some teachers before their pupils; exposes the
+pretences of some teachers in private schools--"Miss Pupford's assistant
+with the Parisian accent, who never conversed with a Parisian and never
+was out of England"; and condemns the practice of sending mere children
+long distances from home to be trained and educated: "Kitty Kimmeens had
+to remain behind in Miss Pupford's school during the holidays, because her
+friends and relations were all in India, far away."
+
+In Edwin Drood Dickens had begun a description of the school: "On the trim
+gate inclosing the courtyard of which is a resplendent brass plate
+flashing forth the legend: 'Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.'"
+
+The chief thing revealed by the brief description given of it is the
+formal conventionality of most teachers in such institutions, the
+unreality of manner and tone and character shown by most teachers in the
+schoolroom.
+
+How much greater Miss Twinkleton's power would have been to help in
+developing human hearts and heads, if she could have been more truly human
+during the day! She did not deceive the young ladies either by her
+formalism. They merely said, "What a pretending old thing Miss Twinkleton
+is!"
+
+When the rumour of the quarrel between Neville Landless and Edwin Drood
+reached the seminary, and began to cause dangerous excitement among the
+young ladies, Miss Twinkleton deemed it her duty to quiet their minds.
+
+    It was reserved for Miss Twinkleton to tone down the public mind of
+    the Nuns' House. That lady, therefore, entering in a stately manner
+    what plebeians might have called the schoolroom, but what, in the
+    patrician language of the head of the Nuns' House, was euphuistically,
+    not to say roundaboutedly, denominated "the apartment allotted to
+    study," and saying with a forensic air, "Ladies!" all rose. Mrs.
+    Tisher at the same time grouped herself behind her chief, as
+    representing Queen Elizabeth's first historical female friend at
+    Tilbury Fort. Miss Twinkleton then proceeded to remark that Rumour,
+    ladies, had been represented by the Bard of Avon--needless were it to
+    mention the immortal Shakespeare, also called the Swan of his native
+    river, not improbably with some reference to the ancient superstition
+    that that bird of graceful plumage (Miss Jennings will please stand
+    upright) sung sweetly on the approach of death, for which we have no
+    ornithological authority--Rumour, ladies, had been represented by that
+    bard--hem!--
+
+          "Who drew
+        The celebrated Jew,"
+
+    as painted full of tongues. Rumour in Cloisterham (Miss Ferdinand will
+    honour me with her attention) was no exception to the great limner's
+    portrait of Rumour elsewhere. A slight _fracas_ between two young
+    gentlemen occurring last night within a hundred miles of these
+    peaceful walls (Miss Ferdinand, being apparently incorrigible, will
+    have the kindness to write out this evening, in the original language,
+    the first four fables of our vivacious neighbour, Monsieur La
+    Fontaine) had been very grossly exaggerated by Rumour's voice. In the
+    first alarm and anxiety arising from our sympathy with a sweet young
+    friend, not wholly to be dissociated from one of the gladiators in
+    the bloodless arena in question (the impropriety of Miss Reynolds's
+    appearing to stab herself in the hand with a pin is far too obvious,
+    and too glaringly unladylike to be pointed out), we descended from our
+    maiden elevation to discuss this uncongenial and this unfit theme.
+    Responsible inquiries having assured us that it was but one of those
+    "airy nothings" pointed at by the poet (whose name and date of birth
+    Miss Giggles will supply within half an hour), we would now discard
+    the subject, and concentrate our minds upon the grateful labours of
+    the day.
+
+The unnatural formalism of her manner and her language are properly held
+up to ridicule by Dickens.
+
+He incidentally shows the great blunder of interrupting a lesson to
+censure a pupil, the weakness of having to demand attention, and the error
+of punishing by impositions to be memorized or written. What a terrible
+misuse it is of the literature that should always be attractive and
+inspiring to have it associated with punishment! He exposes the greater
+crime of making children commit to memory selections from the Bible as a
+punishment in Dombey and Son, and the association of the Bible with tasks
+in Our Mutual Friend.
+
+The Schoolboy's Story deals with the problems of nutrition, coercion,
+robbing a boy of his holidays, the declaration of perpetual warfare
+between pupils and teachers in the olden days, and the surprise of the
+boys when they found that one of their teachers had a true and tender
+heart (what a commentary on teachers that boys should be surprised at
+their being true and good!), and how to treat children as Old Cheeseman
+did, when he inherited his fortune and married Jane, and took the
+disconsolate boys home to his own house, when they were condemned to spend
+their holidays at school.
+
+In Our School the chief pedagogical lessons are: the man's remembrance of
+the pug dog in the entry at the first school he attended, and his utter
+forgetfulness of the mistress of the establishment; the folly of external
+polishing or memory polishing on which "the rust has long since
+accumulated"; the gross wrong of allowing an ignorant and brutal man to be
+a teacher--"The only branches of education with which the master showed
+the least acquaintance were ruling and corporally punishing"; the
+deadening injustice of showing partiality, whether on account of a boy's
+parentage or for any other reason; sympathy for "holiday stoppers"; the
+interest all children should take in keeping and training pet animals; the
+advantages to boys of having to construct "houses and instruments of
+performance" for these pets--"some of those who made houses and invented
+appliances for their performing mice in school have since made railroads,
+engines, and telegraphs, the chairman has erected mills and bridges in
+Australia"; the fact that "we all liked Maxby the tutor, for he had a good
+knowledge of boys"; and that teachers should be very particular about
+their personal neatness, because children note so accurately every detail
+of dress and manner. This is shown by the reminiscences about Maxby, the
+Latin master, and the dancing master. The ungenerous rivalry often
+existing between schools, and schools of thought, too, was pointed out:
+"There was another school not far off, and of course our school could have
+nothing to say to that school. It is mostly the way with schools, whether
+of boys or men."
+
+"The world had little reason to be proud of Our School, and has done much
+better since in that way, and will do far better yet." This closing
+sentence of the sketch is very suggestive.
+
+Dickens described one school that he visited in America in his American
+Notes, evidently in order to show the need of more care than was then
+taken in the choice of matter for the pupils to read.
+
+    I was only present in one of these establishments during the hours of
+    instruction. In the boys' department, which was full of little urchins
+    (varying in their ages, I should say, from six years old to ten or
+    twelve), the master offered to institute an extemporary examination of
+    the pupils in algebra, a proposal which, as I was by no means
+    confident of my ability to detect mistakes in that science, I declined
+    with some alarm. In the girls' school reading was proposed, and as I
+    felt tolerably equal to that art I expressed my willingness to hear a
+    class. Books were distributed accordingly, and some half dozen girls
+    relieved each other in reading paragraphs from English history. But it
+    seemed to be a dry compilation, infinitely above their powers; and
+    when they had blundered through three or four dreary passages
+    concerning the treaty of Amiens, and other thrilling topics of the
+    same nature (obviously without comprehending ten words), I expressed
+    myself quite satisfied. It is very possible that they only mounted to
+    this exalted stave in the ladder of learning for the astonishment of a
+    visitor, and that at other times they keep upon its lower rounds; but
+    I should have been much better pleased and satisfied if I had heard
+    them exercised in simpler lessons, which they understood.
+
+"The world has done better since, and will do far better yet" in the
+choice of reading matter for children.
+
+The school recalled by memory in connection with the other ghosts of his
+childhood in The Haunted House was described briefly, but the description
+is full of suggestiveness.
+
+    Then I was sent to a great cold, bare school of big boys; where
+    everything to eat and wear was thick and clumpy, without being enough;
+    where everybody, large and small, was cruel; where the boys knew all
+    about the sale before I got there [his father's furniture had been
+    sold for debt], and asked me what I had fetched, and who had bought
+    me, and hooted at me, "Going, going, gone."
+
+The inartistic bareness of the school, the tasteless clothing, the
+unattractive, unsatisfying food, the pervading atmosphere of cruelty, and
+the heartlessness of the boys in tearing open the wounds of the sensitive
+new boy--are all condemned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+MISCELLANEOUS EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES.
+
+
+The need of apperception and correlation are shown in the result of Paul
+Dombey's first lessons under Miss Cornelia Blimber, and in the same book
+in the description of the learning Briggs carried away with him. It was
+like an ill-arranged luggage, so tightly packed that he couldn't get at
+anything he wanted. The absolute necessity for fixing apperceptive centres
+of emotion and thought in the lives of children by experience is shown in
+the case of Neville Landless in Edwin Drood. His early life had been so
+barren that, as he told his tutor, "It has caused me to be utterly wanting
+in I don't know what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts--I have
+not even a name for the thing, you see--that you have had to work upon in
+other young men to whom you have been accustomed."
+
+Dickens emphasized the fact that the lack of apperceptive centres of an
+improper kind is a great advantage.
+
+    That heart where self has found no place and raised no throne is slow
+    to recognise its ugly presence when it looks upon it. As one possessed
+    of an evil spirit was held in old time to be alone conscious of the
+    lurking demon in the breasts of other men, so kindred vices know each
+    other in their hiding places every day, when virtue is incredulous and
+    blind.
+
+There is no more suggestive work on the contents of children's minds than
+Bleak House. When Poor Jo was summoned to give evidence at the inquest he
+was questioned in regard to himself and his theology. The results were
+startling.
+
+    Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that everybody has
+    two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don't know that Jo is short
+    for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for _him_. _He_ don't find no
+    fault with it. Spell it? No. _He_ can't spell it. No father, no
+    mother, no friends. Never been to school. What's home? Knows a broom's
+    a broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect who told
+    him about the broom, or about the lie, but knows both. Can't exactly
+    say what'll be done to him after he's dead if he tells a lie to the
+    gentlemen here, but believes it'll be something wery bad to punish
+    him, and serve him right--and so he'll tell the truth.
+
+    Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any
+    link there be. He sums up his mental condition, when asked a question,
+    by replying that he "don't know nothink." He knows that it's hard to
+    keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to
+    live by doing it. Nobody taught him, even that much; he found it out.
+
+    Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone's, meeting the tardy morning, which is
+    always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of bread
+    as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and the houses
+    not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the doorstep of the
+    Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and gives
+    it a brush when he has finished, as an acknowledgment of the
+    accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice, and wonders what
+    it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual
+    destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific, or what it costs to look
+    up the precious souls among the cocoanuts and breadfruits.
+
+    He goes to his crossing, and begins to lay it out for the day. The
+    town awakes; the great teetotum is set up for its daily spin and
+    whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been
+    suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo and the other lower animals
+    get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is market day. The
+    blinded oxen, overgoaded, overdriven, never guided, run into wrong
+    places and are beaten out; and plunge, red-eyed and foaming, at stone
+    walls; and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt
+    themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!
+
+    A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog--a
+    drover's dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher's shop, and
+    evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for some
+    hours, and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three or
+    four; can't remember where he left them; looks up and down the street,
+    as half expecting to see them astray; suddenly pricks up his ears and
+    remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low
+    company and public houses; a terrific dog to sheep; ready at a whistle
+    to scamper over their backs, and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but
+    an educated, improved, developed dog, who has been taught his duties
+    and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music,
+    probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise,
+    as to awakened association, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or
+    joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a
+    par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute!
+
+    Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years
+    they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark--but not
+    their bite.
+
+When Lady Dedlock met Jo, she asked him:
+
+    "Are you the boy I've read of in the papers?"
+
+    "I don't know," says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, "nothink about
+    no papers. I don't know nothink about nothink at all."
+
+When Guster, Mr. Snagsby's servant, got him some food, she said:
+
+    "Are you hungry?"
+
+    "Jist!" says Jo.
+
+    "What's gone of your father and your mother, eh?"
+
+    Jo stops in the middle of a bite, and looks petrified. For this orphan
+    charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting, has patted
+    him on the shoulder; and it is the first time in his life that any
+    decent hand had been so laid upon him.
+
+    "I never know'd nothink about 'em," says Jo.
+
+    "No more didn't I of mine," cries Guster.
+
+When Allan Woodcourt took him to Mr. George's and had his wants attended
+to, he told Jo to be sure and tell him the truth always.
+
+"Wishermaydie, if I don't," said Jo. "I never was in no other trouble at
+all, sir--'cept knowin' nothink and starvation."
+
+When Allan saw that Jo was nearing the end, he said:
+
+    "Jo! Did you ever know a prayer?"
+
+    "Never know'd nothink, sir."
+
+    "Not so much as one short prayer?"
+
+    "No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr. Chadband he was a-prayin' wunst at Mr.
+    Snagsby's and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-speakin' to
+    hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but _I_ couldn't make out
+    nothink on it. Different times, there was other genlmen come down
+    Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin', but they all mostly sed as the t'other wuns
+    prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talkin' to theirselves,
+    or a-passin' blame on the t'others, and not a-talkin' to us. _We_
+    never know'd nothink. _I_ never know'd what it wos all about."
+
+No? Mr. Chadband, your long sermon about "the Terewth" found no place in
+Jo in which to rest; nothing to which it could attach itself. No wonder he
+went asleep. He had no apperceptive centres in his experience or his
+training to which your kind of religious teaching was related.
+
+Poor Jo! He was the first great illustration, and he is still the best, of
+the great pedagogical truth, that we see, and hear, and understand in all
+that is around us only what corresponds to what we are within; that our
+power to see, and hear, and understand increases as our inner life is
+cultured and developed; and that a life as barren as that of the great
+class of whom Jo was made the type makes it impossible to comprehend any
+teaching of an abstract kind. This revelation is of course most valuable
+to primary teachers in cities.
+
+Dickens showed his wonderful insight into the most profound problems of
+psychology in his great character sketch of poor Jo. He agreed with
+Herbart regarding the philosophy of apperception so far as it related to
+intellectual culture, but he painted Jo entirely out of harmony with
+Herbart's psychology in relation to soul development. After describing Mr.
+Chadband's sermon on "Terewth" Dickens says:
+
+    All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, ever
+    picking his cap, and putting bits of fur in his mouth. He spits them
+    out with a remorseful air, for he feels that it is in his nature to be
+    an unimprovable reprobate, and it's no good _his_ trying to keep
+    awake, for _he_ won't never know nothink. Though it may be, Jo, that
+    there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near
+    the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common
+    men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light,
+    would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it
+    unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their
+    modest aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it
+    yet!
+
+    Jo never heard of any such book. Its compilers, and the Reverend
+    Chadband, are all one to him--except that he knows the Reverend
+    Chadband, and would rather run away from him for an hour than hear him
+    talk for five minutes.
+
+When Jo was eating at Mr. Snagsby's he stopped in the middle of his bite
+and looked petrified, because Guster patted him on the shoulder. "It was
+the first time in his life that any decent hand had been so laid upon
+him."
+
+In The Haunted Man the six-year-old child was described as "a baby savage,
+a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might
+live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and
+perish a mere beast."
+
+Hugh, the splendid young animal who was John Willet's stable boy in
+Barnaby Rudge, was as deficient of most intellectual and spiritual
+apperceptive centres as poor Jo. When Mr. Chester asked him his name he
+replied:
+
+    "I'd tell it if I could. I can't. I have always been called Hugh;
+    nothing more. I never knew nor saw, nor thought about a father; and I
+    was a boy of six--that's not very old--when they hung my mother up at
+    Tyburn for a couple of thousand of men to stare at. They might have
+    let her live. She was poor enough."
+
+Little George Silverman's mind was almost a blank when his mother and
+father died. He had been brought up in a cellar at Preston. He hardly knew
+what sunlight was. His mother's laugh in her fever scared him, because it
+was the first laugh he had ever heard. When discovered alone with the
+bodies of his father and mother in the cellar, one of the horrified
+bystanders said to him:
+
+"Do you know your father and mother are both dead of fever?" and he
+replied:
+
+"I don't know what it is to be dead. I am hungry and thirsty."
+
+After he had been supplied with food and drink he told Mr. Hawkyard that
+"he didn't feel cold, or hungry, or thirsty," and in relating the story in
+manhood he said:
+
+    That was the whole round of human feelings, as far as I knew, except
+    the pain of being beaten. To that time I had never had the faintest
+    impression of duty. I had no knowledge whatever that there was
+    anything lovely in this life. When I had occasionally slunk up the
+    cellar steps into the street, and glared in at shop windows, I had
+    done so with no higher feelings than we may suppose to animate a mangy
+    young dog or wolf cub. It is equally the fact that I had never been
+    alone, in the sense of holding unselfish converse with myself. I had
+    been solitary often enough, but nothing better.
+
+Redlaw, in The Haunted Man, said to the poor boy who came to his room:
+
+    "What is your name?"
+
+    "Got none."
+
+    "Where do you live?"
+
+    "Live! What's that?"
+
+Such pictures were not drawn to entertain, or to add artistic effect to
+his stories. They were written to teach the world of wealth and culture
+that all around it were thousands of human souls with as little
+opportunity for development as young animals have; with defined
+apperceptive centres of cold, hunger, thirst, and pain only.
+
+Dickens makes a strong contrast between the condition of the mental and
+spiritual apperceptive centres in the city boy as compared with the
+country boy, in a conversation between Phil Squod and Mr. George.
+
+    "And so, Phil," says George of the Shooting Gallery, after several
+    turns in silence, "you were dreaming of the country last night?"
+
+    Phil, by the bye, said as much, in a tone of surprise, as he scrambled
+    out of bed.
+
+    "Yes, guv'ner."
+
+    "What was it like?"
+
+    "I hardly know what it was like, guv'ner," said Phil, considering.
+
+    "How did you know it was the country?"
+
+    "On account of the grass, I think. And the swans upon it," says Phil,
+    after further consideration.
+
+    "What were the swans doing on the grass?"
+
+    "They was a-eating of it, I expect," says Phil.
+
+    "The country," says Mr. George, plying his knife and fork; "why, I
+    suppose you never clapped your eyes on the country, Phil?"
+
+    "I see the marshes once," said Phil, contentedly eating his breakfast.
+
+    "What marshes?"
+
+    "_The_ marshes, commander," returns Phil.
+
+    "Where are they?"
+
+    "I don't know where they are," says Phil; "but I see 'em, guv'ner.
+    They was flat. And miste."
+
+    Governor and commander are interchangeable terms with Phil, expressive
+    of the same respect and deference, and applicable to nobody but Mr.
+    George.
+
+    "I was born in the country, Phil."
+
+    "Was you, indeed, commander?"
+
+    "Yes. And bred there."
+
+    Phil elevates his one eyebrow, and after respectfully staring at his
+    master to express interest, swallows a great gulp of coffee, still
+    staring at him.
+
+    "There's not a bird's note that I don't know," says Mr. George. "Not
+    many an English leaf or berry that I couldn't name. Not many a tree
+    that I couldn't climb yet, if I was put to it. I was a real country
+    boy once. My good mother lived in the country. Do you want to see the
+    country, Phil?"
+
+    "N-no, I don't know as I do, particular."
+
+    "The town's enough for you, eh?"
+
+    "Why, you see, commander," says Phil, "I ain't acquainted with
+    anythink else, and I doubt if I ain't a-getting too old to take to
+    novelties."
+
+    "How old are you, Phil?"
+
+Phil's answer is intended to indicate the lack of even mathematical power
+in those who, like Phil, never had any training of the imagination, nor
+any other training to define their apperceptive centres of number beyond
+ten.
+
+    "I'm something with a eight in it. It can't be eighty. Nor yet
+    eighteen. It's betwixt 'em somewheres. I was just eight, agreeable to
+    the parish calculation, when I went with the tinker. That was April
+    Fool Day. I was able to count up to ten; and when April Fool Day came
+    round again I says to myself, 'Now, old chap, you're one and a eight
+    in it.' April Fool Day after that I says, 'Now, old chap, you're two
+    and a eight in it.' In course of time I come to ten and a eight in it;
+    two tens and a eight in it. When it got so high it got the upper hand
+    of me; but this is how I always know there's a eight in it."
+
+The folly of trying to make a man moral by precept alone; the fact that
+character is developed by what we do, by true living, by what goes out in
+action, not by what comes in in maxims or theories, is shown in Martin
+Chuzzlewit.
+
+    It has been remarked that Mr. Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was.
+    Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff,
+    especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of
+    him by a homely admirer that he had a Fortunatus's purse of gold
+    sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in
+    the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which
+    fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste and shone
+    prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept
+    than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction post, which
+    is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there.
+
+    The best of architects and land surveyors kept a horse, in whom the
+    enemies already mentioned more than once in these pages pretended to
+    detect a fanciful resemblance to his master. Not in his outward
+    person, for he was a raw-boned, haggard horse, always on a much
+    shorter allowance of corn than Mr. Pecksniff; but in his moral
+    character, wherein, said they, he was full of promise, but of no
+    performance. He was always, in a manner, going to go, and never going.
+
+One of the worst results that can follow a system of training is to make a
+man a hypocrite. It is nearly as bad to store a mind with good thoughts
+or fill a heart with good feelings without giving the character the
+tendency by practical experience to carry into effect so far as possible
+its good feelings and high purposes. Mr. Pecksniff was a moral
+monstrosity. We should create no more Pecksniffs. A different ideal is
+taught in the remark made by Martin Chuzzlewit to Mary, "Endeavouring to
+be anything that's good, and being it, is, with you, all one."
+
+Executive training is emphasized in Nicholas Nickleby. Old Ralph Nickleby
+said of Nicholas: "The old story--always thinking, and never doing." The
+same thought is expressed very clearly in the pregnant sentence written
+about Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities: "Sadly, sadly, the sun rose;
+it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good
+emotions, incapable of their directed exercise." The saddest sight in the
+world is a man or woman using power for evil. It is nearly as sad to see a
+man or woman with power, but without power to use it wisely.
+
+In A Tale of Two Cities he caricatures admirably the class who cling to
+old customs and conventions, and decline even to discuss changes or
+improvements, in his description of Tellson's Bank.
+
+    Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the
+    year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very
+    dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place,
+    moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the house were
+    proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness,
+    proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence
+    in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if
+    it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no
+    passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more
+    convenient places of business. Tellson's (they said) wanted no
+    elbowroom, Tellson's wanted no light, Tellson's wanted no
+    embellishment. Noakes and Co.'s might, or Snooks Brothers' might: but
+    Tellson's, thank heaven!
+
+    Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the
+    question of rebuilding Tellson's. In this respect the house was much
+    on a par with the country; which did very often disinherit its sons
+    for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been
+    highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.
+
+Every child should get into his consciousness by experience, not by
+theory, the idea that he is expected to do his share in the improvement of
+his environment. The worst conception he can get is that "whatever is is
+right"; that things can not be improved. Every child should be encouraged
+to make suggestions for the improvement of his own environment and
+conditions in the schoolroom, in the yard, in the details of class
+management, or in anything else that he thinks he can improve.
+
+The closing sentence of Our School should ring always in the minds of
+teachers, especially the last clause: "And will do far better yet."
+
+Dickens had implicit faith in even weak humanity, and taught the hopeful
+truth, that every man and every child may be improved, if the men and
+women most directly associated with them are wise and loving. Harriet
+Carker said to Mr. Morfin:
+
+    "Oh, sir, after what I have seen, let me conjure you, if you are in
+    any place of power, and are ever wronged, never for any wrong inflict
+    punishment that can not be recalled; while there is a God above us to
+    work changes in the hearts he made."
+
+The Goblin of the Bell said to Toby Veck in The Chimes:
+
+    "Who turns his back upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind;
+    abandons them as vile; and does not trace and track with pitying eyes
+    the unfenced precipice by which they fell from good, grasping in their
+    fall some tufts and shreds of that lost soil, and clinging to them
+    still when bruised and dying in the gulf below, does wrong to Heaven
+    and man, to time and to eternity."
+
+The influence of Nature on the awakening mind of the child was outlined in
+A Child's Dream of a Star.
+
+    These children used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the
+    beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of
+    the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered
+    at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.
+
+Nature is the great centre of interest to the child, and it may be the
+child's first true revealer of God, if adulthood does not impiously come
+between the child and God by trying to give him a word God for his
+intellect too soon to take the place of the true God of his imagination.
+
+Dickens's best characters loved Nature. Esther, when recovering from her
+illness, said:
+
+    I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and
+    leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and everything in
+    Nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it
+    yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost,
+    when the wide world was so full of delight to me!
+
+The deep, spiritual influences of Nature are revealed in the effects of
+life in the growing country on Oliver Twist.
+
+    Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft
+    tranquility, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green
+    hills and rich woods of an inland village! Who can tell how scenes of
+    peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close
+    and noisy places, and carry their own freshness deep into their jaded
+    hearts! Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives
+    of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has
+    indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick
+    and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even
+    they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at
+    last for one short glimpse of Nature's face; and, carried from the
+    scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once
+    into a new state of being. Crawling forth from day to day, to some
+    green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within them
+    by the sight of sky, and hill, and plain, and glistening water, that a
+    foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they
+    have sunk into their tombs as peacefully as the sun, whose setting
+    they watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before,
+    faded from their dim and feeble sight! The memories which peaceful
+    country scenes call up are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and
+    hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands
+    for the graves of those we love--may purify our thoughts, and bear
+    down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this there
+    lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed
+    consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote
+    and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to
+    come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.
+
+    It was a lovely spot to which they repaired. Oliver, whose days had
+    been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and
+    brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence there.
+
+In the story of The Five Sisters of York Alice said to her sisters:
+
+    "Nature's own blessings are the proper goods of life, and we may share
+    them sinlessly together. To die is our heavy portion, but, oh, let us
+    die with life about us; when our cold hearts cease to beat, let warm
+    hearts be beating near; let our last look be upon the bounds which God
+    has set to his own bright skies, and not on stone walls and bars of
+    iron! Dear sisters, let us live and die, if you list, in this green
+    garden's compass."
+
+Dickens had very advanced opinions in regard to the importance of physical
+training, especially of play, as an agent not only in physical culture,
+but in the development of the mind and character. Doctor Blimber's school
+is condemned because the boys were not allowed to play, and Doctor
+Strong's school is highly commended because the boys "had noble games out
+of doors" there.
+
+What splendid runners and jumpers and divers and swimmers those grand boys
+were whom Mr. Marton had the good fortune to teach in his second school in
+The Old Curiosity Shop!
+
+Mrs. Crupp recommended David Copperfield to take up some game as an
+antidote for his despondency during his early love experience.
+
+"If you was to take to something, sir," said Mrs. Crupp, "if you was to
+take to skittles, now, which is healthy, you might find it divert your
+mind and do you good."
+
+Mrs. Chick told Mr. Dombey that Paul was delicate. "Our darling is not
+altogether as stout as we could wish. The fact is that his mind is too
+much for him. His soul is a great deal too large for his frame." Yet his
+father paid no attention to the boy's food, and sent him, when but a
+little sickly child, to Doctor Blimber's to learn everything--not to play.
+"They had nothing so vulgar as play at Doctor Blimber's."
+
+One of the most vicious conventions is that which makes vigorous play
+vulgar and unladylike for girls.
+
+He called attention in American notes to the advantages possessed by the
+students of Upper Canada College, Toronto, inasmuch as "the town is well
+adapted for wholesome exercise at all seasons." In the same book he gives
+his opinion that American girls "must go more wisely clad, and take more
+healthful exercise."
+
+He praised the free life of the gipsy children in Nicholas Nickleby.
+
+In Martin Chuzzlewit, when Tom Pinch and Martin had to walk to Salisbury
+instead of riding in Mr. Pecksniff's gig, Dickens says it was better for
+them that they were compelled to walk. What a breezy enthusiasm he throws
+into his advocacy of walking as an exercise:
+
+    Better! A rare strong, hearty, healthy walk--four statute miles an
+    hour--preferable to that rumbling, tumbling, jolting, shaking,
+    scraping, creaking, villainous old gig? Why, the two things will not
+    admit of comparison. It is an insult to the walk to set them side by
+    side. Where is an instance of a gig having ever circulated a man's
+    blood, unless when, putting him in danger of his neck, it awakened in
+    his veins and in his ears, and all along his spine, a tingling heat
+    much more peculiar than agreeable? When did a gig ever sharpen
+    anybody's wits and energies, unless it was when the horse bolted, and,
+    crashing madly down a steep hill with a stone wall at the bottom, his
+    desperate circumstances suggested to the only gentleman left inside
+    some novel and unheard-of mode of dropping out behind? Better than the
+    gig!
+
+    Better than the gig! When were travellers by wheels and hoofs seen
+    with such red-hot cheeks as those? when were they so good-humouredly
+    and merrily bloused? when did their laughter ring upon the air, as
+    they turned them round, what time the stronger gusts came sweeping up;
+    and, facing round again as they passed by, dashed on, in such a glow
+    of ruddy health as nothing could keep pace with, but the high spirits
+    it engendered? Better than the gig! Why here _is_ a man in a gig
+    coming the same way now. Look at him as he passes his whip into his
+    left hand, chafes his numbed right fingers on his granite leg, and
+    beats those marble toes of his upon the footboard. Ha, ha, ha! Who
+    would exchange this rapid hurry of the blood for yonder stagnant
+    misery, though its pace were twenty miles for one?
+
+    Better than the gig! No man in a gig could have such interest in the
+    milestones. No man in a gig could see, or feel, or think, like merry
+    users of their legs.
+
+Dickens taught comparatively little about the subjects of instruction or
+the methods of teaching them. He dealt cramming its most stunning blow in
+Doctor Blimber's school, and he criticised sharply the methods of teaching
+classics and literature in the same school. He advocated the objective
+method of teaching number in Jemmy Lirriper's training at home by Major
+Jackman.
+
+He took more interest in reading and literature than in any other
+department of school study, so far as can be judged from his writings. He
+deplored the practice of allowing children to try to read before they
+could recognise the words readily, and understand their meaning in the
+training of Pip and Charley Hexam. At the great party at Mr. Merdle's,
+
+    the Bishop consulted the great Physician on the relaxation of the
+    throat with which young curates were too frequently afflicted, and on
+    the means of lessening the great prevalence of that disorder in the
+    church. Physician, as a general rule, was of opinion that the best way
+    to avoid it was to know how to read before you made a profession of
+    reading. Bishop said, dubiously, did he really think so? And Physician
+    said, decidedly, yes, he did.
+
+He criticised, too, the reading in the school visited in an American city,
+because "the girls blundered through three or four dreary passages,
+obviously without comprehending ten words," and said "he would have been
+much better pleased if they had been asked to read some simpler selections
+which they could understand."
+
+Mr. Wegg, when reading for Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, "read on by
+rote, and attached as few ideas as possible to the text."
+
+He discusses the advantages of reading suitable books in David
+Copperfield, giving to David his own real experience in early boyhood.
+After describing the cruel treatment of the Murdstones, he says:
+
+    The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose, for some
+    six months, was to make me sullen, dull, and dogged. I was not made
+    the less so by my sense of being daily more and more shut out and
+    alienated from my mother. I believe I should have been almost
+    stupefied but for one circumstance.
+
+    It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a
+    little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it joined my own) and
+    which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little
+    room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones,
+    The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe,
+    came out, a glorious host to keep me company. They kept alive my
+    fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time--they, and
+    the Arabian Nights, and the tales of the Genii.
+
+His faith in the influence of reading increased as he grew older. In Our
+Mutual Friend he says: "No one who can read ever looks at a book, even
+unopened on a shelf, like one who can not read."
+
+Dickens taught a useful lesson in Martin Chuzzlewit regarding the way
+teachers used to be treated by society. Even yet there is need of a higher
+recognition of the teaching profession in its true dignity by a
+civilization that reverences wealth more than intellectual and spiritual
+character.
+
+Tom Pinch's sister was engaged in the family of a wealthy brass founder.
+She was treated contemptuously by him and his wife, yet they complained to
+Tom that his sister was unable to command the respect of her pupil. Tom
+was naturally indignant, and he spoke his mind very clearly to the brass
+founder.
+
+    "Sir!" cried Tom, after regarding him in silence for some time. "If
+    you do not understand what I mean I will tell you. My meaning is that
+    no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades."
+
+    "When you tell me," resumed Tom, who was not the less indignant for
+    keeping himself quiet, "that my sister has no innate power of
+    commanding the respect of your children, I must tell you it is not so;
+    and that she has. She is as well bred, as well taught, as well
+    qualified by Nature to command respect as any hirer of a governess you
+    know. But when you place her at a disadvantage in reference to every
+    servant in your house, how can you suppose, if you have the gift of
+    common sense, that she is not in a tenfold worse position in reference
+    to your daughters?"
+
+    "Pretty well! Upon my word," exclaimed the gentleman, "that is pretty
+    well!"
+
+    "It is very ill, sir," said Tom. "It is very bad and mean and wrong
+    and cruel. Respect! I believe young people are quick enough to observe
+    and imitate; and why or how should they respect whom no one else
+    respects, and everybody slights? And very partial they must grow--oh,
+    very partial!--to their studies, when they see to what a pass
+    proficiency in those same tasks has brought their governess! Respect!
+    Put anything the most deserving of respect before your daughters in
+    the light in which you place her, and you will bring it down as low,
+    no matter what it is!"
+
+    "You speak with extreme impertinence, young man," observed the
+    gentleman.
+
+    "I speak without passion, but with extreme indignation and contempt
+    for such a course of treatment, and for all who practise it," said
+    Tom. "Why, how can you, as an honest gentleman, profess displeasure or
+    surprise at your daughter telling my sister she is something beggarly
+    and humble when you are forever telling her the same thing yourself in
+    fifty plain, outspeaking ways, though not in words; and when your very
+    porter and footman make the same delicate announcement to all comers?"
+
+Dickens described a great variety of weak, and mean, and selfish, and
+degraded people in order to expose weakness, and meanness, and
+selfishness, and baseness, so that humanity might learn to overcome them,
+but he reserved his supreme contempt for those who oppose the general
+education of "the masses," because it fills their mind with ideas above
+their station, or disqualifies them for the work they were intended to do.
+This being interpreted, means in plain language that certain human beings
+who, because they possess wealth, or belong to what they arrogantly call
+the "upper classes," claim the right to dominate those who have not a
+sufficient amount of money to be independent of them; to fix what they
+selfishly call "the sphere of the lower classes"; and to prescribe the
+limits beyond which the children of the poor must not be educated, lest
+they be lifted beyond tame subserviency to their natural lords and
+masters, and fail to abase themselves dutifully or to be sufficiently
+grateful to those above them for the pittance they grudgingly give them
+for labouring in the menial occupations assigned them.
+
+Dickens despised all Barnacles, and Dedlocks, and Podsnaps, and Dombeys,
+and Merdles; he ridiculed all who violate the sacred bond of human
+brotherhood; but the vials of his bitterest wrath were poured upon those
+who because a child was born in the home of poor parents would therefore
+restrict its education and dwarf its soul.
+
+Mr. Dombey, after the christening of Paul, called Mrs. Toodle before his
+guests, and in a very condescending but rigidly majestic manner told her
+he had graciously decided to send her son to the school of the Charitable
+Grinders. He prefaced his announcement by a brief statement of his views
+regarding education:
+
+    "I am far from being friendly," pursued Mr. Dombey, "to what is called
+    by persons of levelling sentiments, general education. But it is
+    necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be taught to
+    know their position, and to conduct themselves properly. So far I
+    approve of schools."
+
+    In Mr. Dombey's eyes, as in some others that occasionally see the
+    light, they only achieved that mighty piece of knowledge, the
+    understanding of their own position, who showed a fitting reverence
+    for his. It was not so much their merit that they knew themselves, as
+    that they knew him, and bowed low before him.
+
+There are thousands of Dombeys still. Two Canadian judges recently said in
+speaking of education precisely what Mr. Dombey and his class said in the
+time of Dickens. One objected to educating the common people because it
+unfitted them for positions as house servants, and made them so
+outrageously independent that they would not bow (bend their bodies
+properly, bow their heads, and look reverently at the floor) when in the
+presence of their mistresses. The other said that the very derivation of
+the word "education" meant to lead out, and it was therefore clear that
+"education should be used to develop a few, 'lead them out,' beyond the
+masses in order that they might be qualified for leadership." The
+necessary development to be imposed upon all but the favoured few in his
+system of government is willingness to follow leaders, and ignorance is
+the only condition that can make this possible. The glory of education is
+the awakening of the consciousness of freedom in the soul of the race and
+the revelation of the perfect law of liberty--individual right, social
+duty. The shackles, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, have fallen
+from humanity, as education has done its true work of emancipating the
+individual soul and revealing its own value and its responsibility for its
+brother souls.
+
+The most brutal of all the characters described by Dickens is Bill Sikes.
+The most degraded and despicable of his characters is Dennis the hangman
+in Barnaby Rudge. Dickens makes Bill Sikes and Dennis use the very same
+arguments, from their standpoint, that the so-called upper classes have
+used and still do use against the education of the masses.
+
+Bill Sikes, referring to the need of small boys in the trade of burglary,
+said:
+
+    "I want a boy, and he mustn't be a big 'un. Lord!" said Mr. Sikes,
+    reflectively, "if I'd only got that young boy of Ned, the chimbley
+    sweeper's! He kept him small on purpose, and let him out by the job.
+    But the father gets lagged; and then the Juvenile Delinquent Society
+    comes and takes the boy away from a trade where he was arning money,
+    teaches him to read and write, and in time makes a 'prentice of him.
+    And so they go on," said Mr. Sikes, his wrath rising with the
+    recollection of his wrongs, "so they go on; and, if they'd got money
+    enough (which it's a Providence they haven't), we shouldn't have half
+    a dozen boys left in the whole trade in a year or two."
+
+And Fagin agreed with Bill Sikes.
+
+When Hugh was formally admitted as a member of Lord Gordon's mob Dennis
+the hangman was much delighted at the addition of such a strong young man
+to the ranks, and Dickens adds:
+
+    If anything could have exceeded Mr. Dennis's joy on the happy
+    conclusion of this ceremony it would have been the rapture with which
+    he received the announcement that the new member could neither read
+    nor write: those two arts being (as Mr. Dennis swore) the greatest
+    possible curse a civilized community could know, and militating more
+    against the professional emoluments and usefulness of the great
+    constitutional office he had the honour to hold than any adverse
+    circumstances that could present themselves to his imagination.
+
+Bill Sikes objected to education because it spoiled the boys for the trade
+for which he required them; Dennis the hangman objected to education
+because "it reduced the professional emoluments of his great
+constitutional office," or, in other words, reduced the number who had to
+be hanged; and their reasons are just as respectable as the reason given
+by any man in any position who objects to free education because it unfits
+boys for certain trades, or girls for "service," or because "it fills
+their minds with ideas above their station," or because they have to pay
+their just share of its cost, or for any other narrow and selfish reason.
+Selfishness is selfishness, and it is as utterly loathsome in a bishop as
+in Bill Sikes, in a judge as in Dennis the hangman.
+
+Dickens never did any more artistic work than when he painted the
+aristocratic objectors to popular education in their natural hideousness
+with Bill Sikes and Dennis the hangman for a harmonious background.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+THE TRAINING OF POOR, NEGLECTED, AND DEFECTIVE CHILDREN.
+
+
+It is a singular fact that humanity in its highest development so long
+neglected the poor, and the weak, and the defective. They were practically
+left out of consideration by educators and philanthropists. The fact that
+they more than any others needed education and care was not seen clearly
+enough to lead to definite plans for the amelioration of their misfortunes
+until the nineteenth century. Dickens must always have the honour of being
+the great English apostle of the poor--especially of neglected childhood.
+
+He wrote in the Uncommercial Traveller:
+
+    I can find--_must_ find, whether I will or no--in the open streets,
+    shameful instances of neglect of children, intolerable toleration of
+    the engenderment of paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched and
+    destructive cripples both in body and mind; a misery to themselves, a
+    misery to the community, a disgrace to civilization, and an outrage on
+    Christianity. I know it to be a fact as easy of demonstration as any
+    sum in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the State
+    would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would with the
+    strong hand take those children out of the streets while they are yet
+    children, and wisely train them, it would make them a part of
+    England's glory, not its shame--of England's strength, not its
+    weakness--would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good citizens,
+    and many great men out of the seeds of its criminal population; it
+    would clear London streets of the most terrible objects they smite the
+    sight with--myriads of little children who awfully reverse our
+    Saviour's words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the
+    Kingdom of Hell.
+
+He sympathized with childhood on account of every form of coercion and
+abuse practised upon it by tyrannical, selfish, or ignorant adulthood,
+under the most favourable conditions; but his great heart was especially
+tender toward the little ones who, in addition to coercion and abuse, and
+bad training by the selfish, the ignorant, and the careless, were
+compelled to endure the terrible sufferings and deprivations of poverty.
+He was conscious not only of the material and physical evils to which the
+children of the very poor were exposed, but of the mental and spiritual
+barrenness of their lives, and one of his most manifest educational
+purposes was to improve social conditions, to arouse the spirit of truly
+sympathetic brotherhood (not merely considerate altruism, but genuine
+brotherhood) to place the poorest children in conditions that would
+develop by experience the apperceptive centres of intellectual and
+spiritual growth, and to direct special attention to the urgent need of
+education for the blind, the deaf, and the mentally defective.
+
+No other American touched his heart and won his reverence quite so
+thoroughly as Dr. Howe, of Boston, who will undoubtedly be recognised as
+one of the greatest men yet produced by American civilization when men are
+tested by their purposes, and by their unselfish work for humanity in
+hitherto untrodden paths. After describing Dr. Howe's work for the blind,
+he reverently says: "There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who,
+after reading these passages, can ever hear that name with indifference."
+
+Dickens charged on humanity, on society, the crime of making criminals. He
+said with great force and truth in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit:
+
+    Nothing is more common in real life than a want of profitable
+    reflection on the causes of many vices and crimes that awaken general
+    horror. What is substantially true of families in this respect, is
+    true of a whole commonwealth. As we sow, we reap. Let the reader go
+    into the children's side of any prison in England, or, I grieve to
+    add, of many workhouses, and judge whether those are monsters who
+    disgrace our streets, people our hulks and penitentiaries, and
+    overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom we have
+    deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin.
+
+This thought was the motive that led him throughout his whole life to try
+to arouse sympathetic interest of the most active kind in the conditions
+and circumstances of the poor.
+
+One of his most striking appeals to thoughtful people is made in Martin
+Chuzzlewit. These profound words will always be worthy of careful study by
+teachers and reformers:
+
+    Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in
+    every sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in
+    God's highway, so smooth below your carriage wheels, so rough beneath
+    the tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift
+    descent of men who _have_ lived in their own esteem, that there are
+    scores of thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful
+    toil, who in that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a
+    chance of life! Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred bard who
+    had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never
+    seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go,
+    teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the
+    forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of
+    man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul
+    that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!
+    And, oh! ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of Christian
+    knowledge, who soundingly appeal to human nature, see that it be human
+    first. Take heed it has not been transformed, during your slumber and
+    the sleep of generations, into the nature of the beasts.
+
+Dickens saw clearly the depravity of human nature, but he looked beyond
+the depravity to its cause, and he found a natural cause for the
+degradation, but not the cause that had been commonly assigned. He taught
+that the highest and holiest elements in human nature were the causes of
+its swiftest deterioration when misused, perverted, or neglected.
+
+Alice Marwood, in Dombey and Son, was introduced to teach parents and
+society in general the duties they owe to childhood, and to show how lives
+are wrecked by neglect and by a false use of power. When she returned, an
+outcast, to her mother, and her mother upbraided her, the young woman
+said:
+
+    "I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me
+    as well as you. Come back harder? Of course I have come back harder.
+    What else did you expect?"
+
+    "Harder to me! To her own dear mother!" cried the old woman.
+
+    "I don't know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn't,"
+    she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and
+    compressed lips, as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every
+    softer feeling from her breast. "Listen, mother, to a word or two. If
+    we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps.
+    I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful
+    enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been
+    very dutiful to me?"
+
+    "I!" cried the old woman. "To my own gal! A mother dutiful to her own
+    child!"
+
+    "It sounds unnatural, don't it?" returned the daughter, looking coldly
+    on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; "but I have
+    thought of it sometimes, in the course of _my_ lone years, till I have
+    got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but
+    it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and
+    then--to pass away the time--whether no one ever owed any duty to me."
+
+    Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but whether
+    angrily, or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical
+    infirmity, did not appear.
+
+    "There was a child called Alice Marwood," said the daughter with a
+    laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself,
+    "born among poverty and neglect, and nurtured in it. Nobody taught
+    her, nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her."
+
+    "Nobody!" echoed the mother, pointing to herself and striking her
+    breast.
+
+    "The only care she knew," returned the daughter, "was to be beaten,
+    and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better
+    without that. She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a
+    crowd of little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks
+    out of this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have
+    been hunted and worried to death for ugliness."
+
+    "Go on! go on!" exclaimed the mother.
+
+    "She'll soon have ended," said the daughter. "There was a criminal
+    called Alice Marwood--a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And
+    she was tried, and she was sentenced. And Lord, how the gentlemen in
+    the court talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty,
+    and on her having perverted the gifts of Nature--as if he didn't know
+    better than anybody there that they had been made curses to her!--and
+    how he preached about the strong arm of the Law--so very strong to
+    save her, when she was an innocent and helpless little wretch! and how
+    solemn and religious it all was! I have thought of that many times
+    since, to be sure!"
+
+    She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone that
+    made the howl of the old woman musical.
+
+    "So Alice Marwood was transported, mother," she pursued, "and was sent
+    to learn her duty where there was twenty times less duty, and more
+    wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood is
+    come back a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this. In
+    good time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more
+    strong arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her; but the
+    gentlemen needn't be afraid of being thrown out of work. There's
+    crowds of little wretches, boy and girl, growing up in any of the
+    streets they live in, that'll keep them to it till they've made their
+    fortunes."
+
+Bleak House is one of the greatest of the educational works of Dickens.
+One of its chief aims was to arouse a sympathetic interest in the lives of
+poor children. The Neckett children, Charlotte, and Tom, and Emma,
+revealed a new world to many thousands of good people.
+
+    "Charley, Charley!" said my guardian. "How old are you?"
+
+    "Over thirteen, sir," replied the child.
+
+    "Oh! what a great age," said my guardian. "What a great age, Charley!"
+
+    "And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?" said my
+    guardian.
+
+    "Yes, sir," returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect
+    confidence, "since father died."
+
+    "And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley," said my guardian, turning
+    his face away for a moment, "how do you live?"
+
+    "Since my father died, sir, I've gone out to work. I'm out washing
+    to-day."
+
+    "God help you, Charley!" said my guardian. "You're not tall enough to
+    reach the tub!"
+
+    "In pattens I am, sir," she said, quickly. "I've got a high pair as
+    belonged to mother."
+
+    "And when did mother die? Poor mother!"
+
+    "Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at
+    the face upon her bosom. "Then father said I was to be as good a
+    mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home, and
+    did cleaning and nursing and washing, for a long time before I began
+    to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir?"
+
+    "And do you often go out?"
+
+    "As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes, and smiling,
+    "because of earning sixpences and shillings!"
+
+    "And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?"
+
+    "To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see?" said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder
+    comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps
+    I can run in sometimes, and they can play, you know, and Tom ain't
+    afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?"
+
+    "No-o!" said Tom stoutly.
+
+    "When it comes on dark the lamps are lighted down in the court, and
+    they show up here quite bright--almost quite bright. Don't they, Tom?"
+
+    "Yes, Charley," said Tom; "almost quite bright."
+
+The hearts must be hard that are not moved to a deeper and more practical
+interest in the children of the poor by this pathetic story, and others of
+a kindred character which Dickens told over and over again for the
+Christian world to study. And the study led to feeling and thought and
+co-operative action.
+
+The fruits of these wonderful stories are the splendid homes, and
+organizations for children, and the laws to protect them from cruelty by
+parents or teachers, or employers, and the free public schools to educate
+them, and the joy, and happiness, and freedom, that are taking the place
+of the sorrow, and tears, and coercion of the time when Dickens began his
+noble work.
+
+The tragic story of poor Jo illustrated the poverty, the ignorance, the
+destitution, the hopelessness, the barrenness, and the dreadful
+environment of a London street boy. The world has done much better since,
+as Dickens prophesied it would do, and the good work is going on. Hundreds
+of thousands of the poor Joes of London are now in the public schools of
+London alone of whom the Christian philanthropy of the world thought
+little till Dickens told his stories.
+
+In Nobody's Story Dickens returns to his special purpose of changing the
+attitude of civilization toward the education of the poor. The Bigwigs
+represent society, and "the man" means the poor man.
+
+    But the Bigwig family broke out into violent family quarrels
+    concerning what it was lawful to teach to this man's children. Some of
+    the family insisted on such a thing being primary and indispensable
+    above all other things; and others of the family insisted on such
+    another thing being primary and indispensable above all other things;
+    and the Bigwig family, rent into factions, wrote pamphlets, held
+    convocations, delivered charges, orations, and all varieties of
+    discourses; impounded one another in courts Lay and courts
+    Ecclesiastical; threw dirt, exchanged pummellings, and fell together
+    by the ears in unintelligible animosity. Meanwhile, this man, in his
+    short evening snatches at his fireside, saw the demon Ignorance arise
+    there, and take his children to itself. He saw his daughter perverted
+    into a heavy slatternly drudge; he saw his son go moping down the ways
+    of low sensuality, to brutality and crime; he saw the dawning light of
+    intelligence in the eyes of his babies so changing into cunning and
+    suspicion, that he could have rather wished them idiots.
+
+Dickens objected to a certain kind of sentimentality exhibited in his day
+toward criminals, and draws a very suggestive picture full of elements
+for psychological study in David Copperfield, in which he makes the brutal
+schoolmaster Creakle a very considerate Middlesex magistrate, with an
+unfailing system for a quick and effective method of converting the
+wickedest scoundrels into the most submissive, Scripture-quoting saints by
+solitary confinement. Dickens did not approve of the system, and he did
+not approve either of the plan of the spending of so much money by the
+state in erecting splendid buildings for criminals, while the honest poor
+were in hovels, and especially while the state allowed the boys and girls,
+through neglect, to be transformed into criminals by thousands every year.
+Dickens would have made criminals earn their own living, and he urged the
+establishment of industrial schools for the boys and girls of the streets,
+so that they might become respectable, intelligent, self-reliant,
+law-abiding citizens instead of criminals.
+
+David said:
+
+    Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was powerful.
+    It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I
+    could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar
+    would have been made in the country if any deluded man had proposed to
+    spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial
+    school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.
+
+As usual with great reformers, the philanthropists of his own day refused
+to accept the theories of Dickens, but succeeding generations adopted
+them. The reforms for which he pleaded began to be practised so soon
+because he winged his thought with living appeals to the deepest, truest
+feelings of the human heart.
+
+Dickens said truly of Barnaby Rudge:
+
+    "The absence of the soul is far more terrible in a living man than in
+    a dead one; and in this unfortunate being its noblest powers were
+    wanting."
+
+He pleaded again for those who are weak-minded in Mr. Dick's case in David
+Copperfield. Mr. Dick was evidently introduced into the story to show the
+effect of kind treatment on those who are defective in intellect. The
+insane were flogged and put in strait-jackets in the time of Dickens. His
+teaching is now the practice of the civilized world. The insane are kindly
+treated, and weak-minded children are taught in good schools by the best
+teachers that can be obtained for them.
+
+Betsy Trotwood, David's aunt, was an embodiment of a good heart united
+with an eminently practical head. She did not talk about religion, as did
+the Murdstones, but she showed her religious life in good, reasonable,
+self-sacrificing, helpful living. David asked her for an explanation of
+Mr. Dick's case.
+
+    "He has been _called_ mad," said my aunt. "I have a selfish pleasure
+    in saying he has been called mad, or I should not have had the benefit
+    of his society and advice for these last ten years and upward--in
+    fact, ever since your sister, Betsy Trotwood, disappointed me."
+
+    "So long as that?" I said.
+
+    "And nice people they were, who had the audacity to call him mad,"
+    pursued my aunt. "Mr. Dick is a sort of distant connection of mine--it
+    doesn't matter how; I needn't enter into that. If it hadn't been for
+    me, his own brother would have shut him up for life. That's all."
+
+    I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my aunt felt
+    strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt strongly too.
+
+    "A proud fool!" said my aunt. "Because his brother was a little
+    eccentric--though he is not half so eccentric as a good many
+    people--he didn't like to have him visible about the house, and sent
+    him away to some private asylum place; though he had been left to his
+    particular care by their deceased father, who thought him almost a
+    natural. And a wise man _he_ must have been to think so! Mad himself,
+    no doubt."
+
+    Again, as my aunt looked quite convinced, I endeavoured to look quite
+    convinced also.
+
+    "So I stepped in," said my aunt, "and made him an offer. I said, 'Your
+    brother's sane--a great deal more sane than you are, or ever will be,
+    it is to be hoped. Let him have his little income, and come and live
+    with me. _I_ am not afraid of him; _I_ am not proud; _I_ am ready to
+    take care of him, and shall not ill treat him as some people (besides
+    the asylum folks) have done.' After a good deal of squabbling," said
+    my aunt, "I got him; and he has been here ever since. He is the most
+    friendly and amenable creature in existence; and as for advice!--but
+    nobody knows what that man's mind is, except myself."
+
+Dickens was greatly delighted with the asylums of the United States, and
+he strongly advocated the adoption in England of American methods of
+treating the insane. He says, in American Notes:
+
+    At South Boston, as it is called, in a situation excellently adapted
+    for the purpose, several charitable institutions are clustered
+    together. One of these is the State Hospital for the Insane; admirably
+    conducted on those enlightened principles of conciliation and
+    kindness, which twenty years ago would have been worse than heretical,
+    and which have been acted upon with so much success in our own pauper
+    asylum at Hanwell. "Evince a desire to show some confidence, and
+    repose some trust, even in mad people," said the resident physician,
+    as we walked along the galleries, his patients flocking round us
+    unrestrained. Of those who deny or doubt the wisdom of this maxim
+    after witnessing its effects, if there be such people still alive, I
+    can only say that I hope I may never be summoned as a juryman on a
+    commission of lunacy whereof they are the subjects; for I should
+    certainly find them out of their senses, on such evidence alone.
+
+    Each ward in this institution is shaped like a long gallery or hall,
+    with the dormitories of the patients opening from it on either hand.
+    Here they work, read, play at skittles, and other games; and, when the
+    weather does not admit of their taking exercise out of doors, pass the
+    day together. In one of these rooms, seated, calmly, and quite as a
+    matter of course, among a throng of mad women, black and white, were
+    the physician's wife and another lady, with a couple of children.
+    These ladies were graceful and handsome; and it was not difficult to
+    perceive at a glance that even their presence there had a highly
+    beneficial influence on the patients who were grouped about them.
+
+    Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a
+    knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman whose
+    manner of dealing with his charges I have just described. At every
+    meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among them from
+    cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that influence is
+    reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even as a means of
+    restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a hundred times
+    more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, fetters, and
+    handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have manufactured
+    since the creation of the world.
+
+How much those benighted teachers who so tragically ask "What _can_ you do
+with bad boys, if you do _not_ use corporal punishment?" might learn from
+the last sentence!
+
+Blinded by old ideals, these teachers whip away, admitting that they fail
+to reform many of the best boys, and quieting their consciences with the
+horrible thought that the evil course was the natural one for the boys,
+and that they are not responsible for their blighted lives. They comfort
+themselves with the thought that it is God's business, and if he made a
+boy so bad that flogging would not reform him, they at any rate are free
+from blame, because they "have beaten, and beaten, and beaten him, and it
+did him no good." Having beaten him, and beaten him, and beaten him, they
+rest contented with the sure conviction that they have faithfully done
+their duty; and when, perchance, the poor boy becomes a criminal, they
+solemnly say without a blush or a pang: "I knew he would come to a bad
+end, but I am so thankful that I did my duty to him."
+
+Ignominious failure to save the brave boys who are not cowardly enough to
+be deterred from doing wrong by beating has taught nothing to some
+teachers. Even yet they placidly beat on, and get angry if they are
+requested to try freedom as a substitute for coercion in the training of
+beings created in God's image. They even question the sanity and the
+theology of those who dare to doubt the efficiency of the sacred rod. They
+do not deem it possible that by studying the child and their own higher
+powers they could find easier, pleasanter, and infinitely more successful
+methods of guiding a boy to a true, strong life than by beating, and
+beating, and beating him.
+
+The keepers of asylums in the time of Dickens were equally severe on the
+wise friends of the insane. They honestly believed that terrible evils
+would necessarily result from giving greater freedom to the afflicted
+patients in asylums. Dickens took the side of freedom and common sense,
+and the strait-jackets, and handcuffs, and fetters have been taken off,
+and, _even as a means of restraint_, kindness and freedom have done better
+work than all the coercive fetters that "ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty
+have manufactured since the creation of the world."
+
+So all teachers who have grown wise enough have found that kindness and
+freedom are much better even as restraining agents, and infinitely better
+in the development of true, independent, positive, progressive characters
+than all the coercive terrors of rod, rule, strap, rawhide, or any form of
+cruelty ever practised on helpless childhood by ignorance, prejudice, and
+perverted theology since the creation of the world.
+
+In American Notes Dickens gave a long description of Laura Bridgman
+written by Dr. Howe, and showed his intense interest in what was then a
+new movement in favour of the education of the blind.
+
+Speaking of Laura Bridgman, Dickens himself wrote:
+
+    The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room before a
+    girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell, and nearly so of
+    taste; before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and
+    hope, and power of goodness and affection inclosed within her delicate
+    frame, and but one outward sense--the sense of touch. There she was
+    before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any
+    ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping
+    through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that
+    an immortal soul might be awakened.
+
+    Long before I looked upon her the help had come. Her face was radiant
+    with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands,
+    was bound about her head, whose intellectual capacity and development
+    were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open
+    brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and
+    simplicity; the work she had knitted lay beside her; her writing book
+    was on the desk she leaned upon. From the mournful ruin of such
+    bereavement there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless,
+    grateful-hearted being.
+
+The touching story of Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter was intended to
+arouse interest in blind children.
+
+Doctor Marigold should be one of the best beloved of all the beautiful
+characters of Dickens. If any kind of language could awaken an intense
+interest in the education of deaf-mutes, the story of the dear old Cheap
+Jack must surely do it.
+
+The sad picture of the cruel treatment of his own little Sophy by her
+mother; of her dying on his shoulder while he was selling his wares to the
+crowd, whispering fondly to her between his jokes; and the suicide of the
+mother, when she afterward saw another woman beating her child, and heard
+the child cry piteously, "Don't beat me! Oh, mother, mother,
+mother!"--these prepare the heart for full appreciation of the tender,
+considerate, and intelligent treatment of the deaf-mute child adopted by
+Doctor Marigold in Sophy's place.
+
+    I went to that Fair as a mere civilian, leaving the cart outside the
+    town, and I looked about the back of the Vans while the performing was
+    going on, and at last, sitting dozing against a muddy cart wheel, I
+    come upon the poor girl who was deaf and dumb. At the first look I
+    might almost have judged that she had escaped from the Wild Beast
+    Show; but at the second I thought better of her, and thought that if
+    she was more cared for and more kindly used she would be like my
+    child. She was just the same age that my own daughter would have been,
+    if her pretty head had not fell down upon my shoulder that unfortunate
+    night.
+
+    It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel in
+    the cart. I at once gave her the name of Sophy, to put her ever toward
+    me in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to begin to
+    understand one another, through the goodness of the Heavens, when she
+    knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a very little time she
+    was wonderful fond of me. You have no idea what it is to have anybody
+    wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon
+    by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the
+    better of me.
+
+    You'd have laughed--or the rewerse--it's according to your
+    disposition--if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At first
+    I was helped--you'd never guess by what--milestones. I got some large
+    alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of bone, and say
+    we was going to WINDSOR; I gave her those letters in that order, and
+    then at every milestone I showed her those same letters in that same
+    order again, and pointed toward the abode of royalty. Another time I
+    give her CART, and then chalked the same upon the cart. Another time I
+    give her DOCTOR MARIGOLD, and hung a corresponding inscription outside
+    my waistcoat. People that met us might stare a bit and laugh, but what
+    did _I_ care if she caught the idea? She caught it after long patience
+    and trouble, and then we did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe
+    you! At first she was a little given to consider me the cart, and the
+    cart the abode of royalty, but that soon wore off.
+
+    The way she learned to understand any look of mine was truly
+    surprising. When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart, unseen
+    by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes when I
+    looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or articles
+    I wanted. And then she would clap her hands, and laugh for joy. And as
+    for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she was when I
+    first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged, leaning asleep
+    against the muddy cart wheel, it give me such heart that I gained a
+    greater height of reputation than ever.
+
+    This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen years old. By
+    which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole duty
+    by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching than I
+    could give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I commenced
+    explaining my views to her; but what's right is right, and you can't
+    neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character.
+
+    So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf
+    and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to speak
+    to us, I says to him: "Now, I'll tell you what I'll do with you, sir.
+    I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have laid by for a
+    rainy day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter (adopted), and you
+    can't produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her the most that can be
+    taught her in the shortest separation that can be named--state the
+    figure for it--and I am game to put the money down. I won't bate you
+    single farthing, sir, but I'll put down the money here and now, and
+    I'll thankfully throw you in a pound to take it. There!" The gentleman
+    smiled, and then, "Well, well," says he, "I must first know what she
+    has learned already. How do you communicate with her?" Then I showed
+    him, and she wrote in printed writing many names of things and so
+    forth; and we held some sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a
+    little story in a book which the gentleman showed her, and which she
+    was able to read. "This is most extraordinary," says the gentleman;
+    "is it possible that you have been her only teacher?" "I have been her
+    only teacher, sir," I says, "besides herself." "Then," says the
+    gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, "you're a
+    clever fellow, and a good fellow." This he makes known to Sophy, who
+    kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it.
+
+    "Now, Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter to
+    know?"
+
+    "I want her, sir, to be cut off from the world as little as can be,
+    considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read
+    whatever is wrote with perfect ease and pleasure."
+
+No one ever read this story and its delightful closing without being more
+deeply interested in deaf-mutes and their education.
+
+All the children, especially poor and defective children, should be taught
+how much they owe to Dickens, that they might reverently love his memory.
+
+One of the most awful pictures shown to Scrooge by the Phantom was the
+picture of the two "wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable
+children."
+
+    They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish;
+    but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should
+    have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest
+    tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and
+    twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have
+    sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no
+    degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the
+    mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and
+    dread.
+
+    "They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they
+    cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This
+    girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of
+    all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,
+    unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching
+    out its hand toward the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it
+    for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!"
+
+Dickens bravely fought the battle against the enemies of the children, and
+helped to win the grandest victories of Christian civilization.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES.
+
+_12mo, cloth, uniform binding._
+
+
+THE INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES was projected for the purpose of
+bringing together in orderly arrangement the best writings, new and old,
+upon educational subjects, and presenting a complete course of reading and
+training for teachers generally. It is edited by WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL.
+D., United States Commissioner of Education, who has contributed for the
+different volumes in the way of introduction, analysis, and commentary.
+
+1. The Philosophy of Education. By JOHANN K. F. ROSENKRANZ, Doctor of
+Theology and Professor of Philosophy. University of Koenigsberg. Translated
+by ANNA C. BRACKETT. Second edition, revised, with Commentary and complete
+Analysis. $1.50.
+
+2. A History of Education. By F. V. N. PAINTER, A. M. Professor of Modern
+Languages and Literature, Roanoke College, Va. Revised edition, 1904.
+$1.20 net.
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+3. The Rise and Early Constitution of Universities. WITH A SURVEY OF
+MEDIAEVAL EDUCATION. By S. S. LAURIE, LL. D., Professor of the Institutes
+and History of Education, University of Edinburgh. $1.50.
+
+4. The Ventilation and Warming of School Buildings. By GILBERT B.
+MORRISON, Teacher of Physics and Chemistry, Kansas City High School.
+$1.00.
+
+5. The Education of Man. By FRIEDRICH FROEBEL. Translated and annotated by
+W. N. HAILMANN, A. M., Superintendent of Public Schools, La Porte, Ind.
+$1.50.
+
+6. Elementary Psychology and Education. By JOSEPH BALDWIN, A. M., LL. D.,
+author of "The Art of School Management." $1.50.
+
+7. The Senses and the Will. (Part I of "THE MIND OF THE CHILD.") By W.
+PREYER, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated by H. W. BROWN,
+Teacher in the State Normal School at Worcester, Mass. $1.50.
+
+8. Memory: What it is and How to Improve it. By DAVID KAY, F. R. G. S.,
+author of "Education and Educators," etc. $1.50.
+
+9. The Development of the Intellect. (Part II of "THE MIND OF THE CHILD.")
+By W. PREYER, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated by H. W. BROWN.
+$1.50.
+
+10. How to Study Geography. A Practical Exposition of Methods and Devices
+in Teaching Geography which apply the Principles and Plans of Ritter and
+Guyot. By FRANCIS W. PARKER, Principal of the Cook County (Illinois)
+Normal School. $1.50.
+
+11. Education in the United States: Its History from the Earliest
+Settlements. By RICHARD G. BOONE, A. M., Professor of Pedagogy, Indiana
+University. $1.50.
+
+12. European Schools; OR, WHAT I SAW IN THE SCHOOLS OF GERMANY, FRANCE,
+AUSTRIA, AND SWITZERLAND. By L. R. KLEMM, Ph. D., Principal of the
+Cincinnati Technical School. Fully illustrated. $2.00.
+
+13. Practical Hints for the Teachers of Public Schools. By GEORGE HOWLAND,
+Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools. $1.00.
+
+14. Pestalozzi: His Life and Work. By ROGER DE GUIMPS. Authorized
+Translation from the second French edition, by J. RUSSELL, B. A. With an
+Introduction by Rev. R. H. QUICK, M. A. $1.50.
+
+15. School Supervision. By J. L. PICKARD, LL. D. $1.00.
+
+16. Higher Education of Women in Europe. By HELENE LANGE, Berlin.
+Translated and accompanied by comparative statistics by L. R. KLEMM.
+$1.00.
+
+17. Essays on Educational Reformers. By ROBERT HERBERT QUICK, M. A.,
+Trinity College, Cambridge. Only authorized edition of the work as
+rewritten in 1890. $1.50.
+
+18. A Text-Book in Psychology. By JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART. Translated by
+MARGARET K. SMITH. $1.00.
+
+19. Psychology Applied to the Art of Teaching. By JOSEPH BALDWIN, A. M.,
+LL. D. $1.50.
+
+20. Rousseau's Emile; or, TREATISE ON EDUCATION. Translated and annotated
+by W. H. PAYNE, Ph. D., LL. D. $1.50.
+
+21. The Moral Instruction of Children. By FELIX ADLER. $1.50.
+
+22. English Education in the Elementary and Secondary Schools. By ISAAC
+SHARPLESS, LL. D., President of Haverford College. $1.00.
+
+23. Education from a National Standpoint. By ALFRED FOUILLEE. $1.50.
+
+24. Mental Development of the Child. By W. PREYER, Professor of Physiology
+in Jena. Translated by H. W. BROWN. $1.00.
+
+25. How to Study and Teach History. By B. A. HINSDALE, Ph. D., LL. D.,
+University of Michigan. $1.50.
+
+26. Symbolic Education. A COMMENTARY ON FROEBEL'S "MOTHER-PLAY." By SUSAN
+E. BLOW. $1.50.
+
+27. Systematic Science Teaching. By EDWARD GARDNIER HOWE. $1.50.
+
+28. The Education of the Greek People. By THOMAS DAVIDSON. $1.50.
+
+29. The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public-School System. By G. H.
+MARTIN, A. M. $1.50.
+
+30. Pedagogics of the Kindergarten. By FRIEDRICH FROEBEL. $1.50.
+
+31. The Mottoes and Commentaries of Friedrich Froebel's Mother-Play. By
+SUSAN E. BLOW and HENRIETTA R. ELIOT. $1.50.
+
+32. The Songs and Music of Froebel's Mother-Play. By SUSAN E. BLOW. $1.50.
+
+33. The Psychology of Number. By JAMES A. MCLELLAN, A. M., and JOHN DEWEY,
+Ph. D. $1.50.
+
+34. Teaching the Language-Arts. By B. A. HINSDALE, LL. D. $1.00.
+
+35. The Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child. PART I. By
+GABRIEL COMPAYRE. Translated by MARY E. WILSON. $1.50.
+
+36. Herbart's A B C of Sense-Perception, and Introductory Works. By
+WILLIAM J. ECKOFF, Pd. D., Ph. D. $1.50.
+
+37. Psychologic Foundations of Education. By WILLIAM T. HARRIS, A. M., LL.
+D. $1.50.
+
+38. The School System of Ontario. By the Hon. GEORGE W. ROSS, LL. D.,
+Minister of Education for the Province of Ontario. $1.00.
+
+39. Principles and Practice of Teaching. By JAMES JOHONNOT. $1.50.
+
+40. School Management and Methods. By JOSEPH BALDWIN. $1.50.
+
+41. Froebel's Educational Laws for all Teachers. By JAMES L. HUGHES,
+Inspector of Schools, Toronto. $1.50.
+
+42. Bibliography of Education. By WILL S. MONROE, A. B. $2.00.
+
+43. The Study of the Child. By A. R. TAYLOR, Ph. D. $1.50.
+
+44. Education by Development. By FRIEDRICH FROEBEL. Translated by
+JOSEPHINE JARVIS. $1.50.
+
+45. Letters to a Mother. By SUSAN E. BLOW. $1.50.
+
+46. Montaigne's The Education of Children. Translated by L. E. RECTOR, Ph.
+D. $1.00.
+
+47. The Secondary School System of Germany. By FREDERICK E. BOLTON. $1.50.
+
+48. Advanced Elementary Science. By EDWARD G. HOWE. $1.50.
+
+49. Dickens as an Educator. By JAMES L. HUGHES. $1.50.
+
+50. Principles of Education Practically Applied. By JAMES M. GREENWOOD.
+Revised. $1.00.
+
+51. Student Life and Customs. By HENRY D. SHELDON, Ph. D. $1.20 net.
+
+52. An Ideal School. By PRESTON W. SEARCH. $1.20 net.
+
+53. Later Infancy of the Child. By GABRIEL COMPAYRE. Translated by MARY E.
+WILSON. Part II of Vol. 35. $1.20 net.
+
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+$1.20 net.
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+55. Genetic Psychology for Teachers. By CHARLES H. JUDD, Ph. D. $1.20 net.
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+58. Educational Issues in the Kindergarten. By SUSAN E. BLOW. $1.50 net.
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+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.
+
+
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+Principles of Educational Practice
+
+By PAUL KLAPPER, Ph.D., Department of Education, College of the City of
+New York. 8vo, Cloth, $1.75.
+
+This book studies the basic principles underlying sound and progressive
+pedagogy. In its scope and organization it aims to give (1) a
+comprehensive and systematic analysis of the principles of education, (2)
+the modern trend and interpretation of educational thought, (3) a
+transition from pure psychology to methods of teaching and discipline, and
+(4) practical applications of educational theory to the problems that
+confront the teacher in the course of daily routine. Every practical
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+classroom demonstration.
+
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+the modern social conception with those aims which have been guiding
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+The last part of the book, Part IV, The Mental Aspect of Education, is
+developed under the following sections: _Section A._ The Instinctive
+Aspect of Mind. Mind and its development through self-expression.
+Self-activity. Instincts. _Section B._ Intellectual Aspect of Mind. The
+functions of Intellect, Perception, Apperception, Memory, Imagination,
+Thought Activities. The Doctrine of Formal Discipline and its influence
+upon educational endeavor. _Section C._ Emotional Aspect of Mind. _Section
+D._ Volitional Aspect of Mind. Study of will, kinds of volitional action,
+habit vs. deliberative consciousness. The Education of the Will. Education
+and Social Responsibility, the problems of ethical instruction, and the
+social functions of the School.
+
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+
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