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.
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 physicalevils 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 subsequentstages 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 sourones, 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 exhaustionis 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 hæc 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.Nowyou 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.”
“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-sevenmuslin 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.
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-sevenmuslin 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.”
“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 acondensation 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.
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.
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 theyarechildren, 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!
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 theyarechildren, 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 sympathizewith 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.
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.
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.
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. Yougave 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.”
“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. Yougave 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!”
“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.
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 “littleold 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.
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.”
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.”
“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.”
“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.
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.”
“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.
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,theydo. When they take a boy tothe play, for instance, theydotake 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.
So I went to their delightful house, and was as happy as I could possibly be. They understand how to conduct themselves toward boys,theydo. When they take a boy tothe play, for instance, theydotake 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 foryou.”
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 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.”
“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 suchas 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.
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.