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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.