BAD TRAINING.
In addition to the bad training found in so many of his best-known
schools, to show the evils of coercion in all forms, of the child
depravity ideal, of the loss of a free, real, rich childhood, of the
dwarfing of individuality, of the deadening of the imagination, and other
similar evils, Dickens's books, from Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood, contain
many illustrations of utterly wrong methods of training children.
The mean and cruel way in which children used to be treated by the
managers of institutions is described in Oliver Twist. Dickens said that
when Oliver was born he cried lustily.
If he could have known that he was an orphan, left to the tender
mercies of church wardens and overseers, perhaps he would have cried
the louder.
"Bow to the board," said Bumble, when he was brought before that
august body. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were
lingering in his eyes, and seeing no board but the table, fortunately
bowed to that.
"What's your name, boy?" said the gentleman in the high chair.
Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made
him tremble; and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made
him cry. These two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating
voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool.
Which was a capital way of raising his spirits and putting him quite
at his ease.
"Boy," said the gentleman in the high chair, "listen to me. You know
you're an orphan, I suppose?"
"What's that, sir?" inquired poor Oliver.
"The boy is a fool--I thought he was," said the gentleman in the white
waistcoat.
"Hush!" said the gentleman who had spoken first. "You know you've got
no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don't
you?"
"Yes, sir," replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.
"What are you crying for?" inquired the gentleman in the white
waistcoat. And, to be sure, it was very extraordinary. What _could_
the boy be crying for?
"I hope you say your prayers every night," said another gentleman in a
gruff voice, "and pray for the people who feed and take care of
you--like a Christian."
"Yes, sir," stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was
unconsciously right. It would have been _very_ like a Christian, and a
marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people
who fed and took care of _him_.
The dreadful practices of first making children self-conscious and
apparently dull by abuse and formalism, and then calling them "fools," or
"stupid," or "dunces," are happily not so common now.
In Barnaby Rudge he makes Edward Chester complain to his father about the
way he had been educated.
From my childhood I have been accustomed to luxury and idleness, and
have been bred as though my fortune were large and my expectations
almost without a limit. The idea of wealth has been familiarized to me
from my cradle. I have been taught to look upon those means by which
men raise themselves to riches and distinction as being beyond my
breeding and beneath my care. I have been, as the phrase is, liberally
educated, and am fit for nothing.
Dickens was in terrible earnest to kill all the giants that preyed on the
lifeblood of the joy, the hope, the freedom, the selfhood, and the
imagination of childhood. He waged unceasing warfare against the system
which he described as
The excellent and thoughtful old system, hallowed by long
prescription, which has usually picked out from the rest of mankind
the most dreary and uncomfortable people that could possibly be laid
hold of, to act as instructors of youth.
The selfish and mercenary ideal and its consequences are dealt with in the
training of Jonas Chuzzlewit:
The education of Mr. Jonas had been conducted from his cradle on the
strictest principles of the main chance. The very first word he
learned to spell was "gain," and the second one (when he got into two
syllables) "money." But for two results, which were not clearly
foreseen perhaps by his watchful parent in the beginning, his training
may be said to have been unexceptionable. One of these flaws was, that
having been long taught by his father to overreach everybody, he had
imperceptibly acquired a love of overreaching that venerable monitor
himself. The other, that from his early habits of considering
everything as a question of property, he had gradually come to look
with impatience on his parent as a certain amount of personal estate
which had no right whatever to be going at large, but ought to be
secured in that particular description of iron safe which is commonly
called a coffin, and banked in the grave.
When Charity Pecksniff reproved Jonas for speaking irreverently of her
father, he said:
"Ecod, you may say what you like of _my_ father, then, and so I give
you leave," said Jonas. "I think it's liquid aggravation that
circulates through his veins, and not regular blood. How old should
you think my father was, cousin?"
"Old, no doubt," replied Miss Charity; "but a fine old gentleman."
"A fine old gentleman!" repeated Jonas, giving the crown of his hat an
angry knock. "Ah! It's time he was thinking of being drawn out a
little finer, too. Why, he's eighty!"
"Is he, indeed?" said the young lady.
"And ecod," cried Jonas, "now he's gone so far without giving in, I
don't see much to prevent his being ninety; no, nor even a hundred.
Why, a man with any feeling ought to be ashamed of being eighty, let
alone more. Where's his religion, I should like to know, when he goes
flying in the face of the Bible like that? Threescore and ten's the
mark; and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what's
expected of him, has any business to live longer."
When Jonas was particularly brutal in the treatment of Chuffey, the old
clerk, his father seemed to enjoy his son's sharpness.
It was strange enough that Anthony Chuzzlewit, himself so old a man,
should take a pleasure in these gibings of his estimable son at the
expense of the poor shadow at their table; but he did, unquestionably,
though not so much--to do him justice--with reference to their ancient
clerk, as in exultation at the sharpness of Jonas. For the same
reason, that young man's coarse allusions, even to himself, filled him
with a stealthy glee, causing him to rub his hands and chuckle
covertly, as if he said in his sleeve, "_I_ taught him. _I_ trained
him. This is the heir of my bringing up. Sly, cunning, and covetous,
he'll not squander my money. I worked for this; I hoped for this; it
has been the great end and aim of my life."
What a noble end and aim it was to contemplate in the attainment,
truly! But there be some who manufacture idols after the fashion of
themselves, and fail to worship them when they are made; charging
their deformity on outraged Nature. Anthony was better than these at
any rate.
Exaggerated! Slightly exaggerated, but terribly true to Nature. Centring
the life of a child on one base materialistic aim is certain to make a
degraded if not a dangerous character. Every noble energy that should have
given spiritual strength and beauty is devoured by the material monster as
he grows in the heart. Respect for age, even for parents, is lost with all
other virtues, and humanity becomes not a brotherhood to be co-operated
with for noble purposes, but a horde to be entrapped and cheated. Jonas
delighted his father with his rule in business: "Here's the rule for
bargains--'Do other men, for they would do you.' That's the true business
precept. All others are counterfeits."
Speaking of the conversation heard by Martin Chuzzlewit at the boarding
house in New York, he said:
It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater
part of it may be summed up in one word: Dollars. All their cares,
hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations seemed to be melted
down into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into
the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab
with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by
their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked
down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any
venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that
worthless ballast, honour and fair dealing, which any man cast
overboard from the ship of his good name and good intent, the more
ample stowage room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and
mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute
it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a
degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars! What is a flag to _them_!
This was a solemn warning against the training of a race with such low
ideals.
In the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens shows that he deliberately
planned Jonas Chuzzlewit as a psychological study. He says:
I conceive that the sordid coarseness and brutality of Jonas would be
unnatural, if there had been nothing in his early education, and in
the precept and example always before him, to engender and develop the
vices that make him odious. But, so born and so bred--admired for that
which made him hateful, and justified from his cradle in cunning,
treachery, and avarice--I claim him as the legitimate issue of the
father upon whom those vices are seen to recoil. And I submit that
their recoil upon that old man, in his unhonoured age, is not a mere
piece of poetical justice, but is the extreme exposition of a direct
truth.
Mrs. Pipchin was described as a child trainer of great respectability. She
adopted the business of child training because her husband lost his money.
Dickens did great service to the world by ridiculing the outrageous
practice of sending children to be trained by women or taught by men whose
only qualification for the most sacred of all duties was the fact that
they had lost their money, and were therefore likely to be bad tempered
and severe. He had already introduced Squeers to the world, but he knew
that many people who shuddered at Squeers would send their own children to
such as Mrs. Pipchin, because she was respectable and poor. He wished to
alarm such people; hence Mrs. Pipchin.
Mrs. Chick, Mr. Dombey's sister, and Miss Tox called Mr. Dombey's
attention to Mrs. Pipchin's establishment.
"Mrs. Pipchin, my dear Paul," returned his sister, "is an elderly
lady--Miss Tox knows her whole history--who has for some time devoted
all the energies of her mind, with the greatest success, to the study
and treatment of infancy, and who has been extremely well connected."
This celebrated Mrs. Pipchin was a marvellous, ill-favoured,
ill-conditioned old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face
like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard gray eye that looked as if it
might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any injury.
Forty years at least had elapsed since the Peruvian mines had been the
death of Mr. Pipchin; but his relict still wore black bombazine, of
such a lustreless, deep, dead, sombre shade that gas itself couldn't
light her up after dark, and her presence was a quencher to any number
of candles. She was generally spoken of as "a great manager" of
children; and the secret of her management was, to give them
everything that they didn't like and nothing that they did--which was
found to sweeten their dispositions very much.
When Paul and Florence were taken to Mrs. Pipchin's establishment, Mrs.
Pipchin gave them an opportunity to study her disciplinary system as soon
as Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox went away. "Master Bitherstone was divested of
his collar at once, which he had worn on parade," and Miss Pankey, the
only other little boarder at present, was walked off to the castle dungeon
(an empty apartment at the back, devoted to correctional purposes), for
having sniffed thrice in the presence of visitors.
At one o'clock there was a dinner, chiefly of the farinaceous and
vegetable kind, when Miss Pankey (a mild little blue-eyed morsel of a
child, who was shampooed every morning, and seemed in danger of being
rubbed away altogether) was led in from captivity by the ogress
herself, and instructed that nobody who sniffed before visitors ever
went to heaven. When this great truth had been thoroughly impressed
upon her, she was regaled with rice; and subsequently repeated the
form of grace established in the castle, in which there was a special
clause thanking Mrs. Pipchin for a good dinner. Mrs. Pipchin's niece,
Berinthia, took cold pork. Mrs. Pipchin, whose constitution required
warm nourishment, made a special repast of mutton chops, which were
brought in hot and hot, between two plates, and smelled very nice.
As it rained after dinner and they couldn't go out walking on the
beach, and Mrs. Pipchin's constitution required rest after chops, they
went away with Berry (otherwise Berinthia) to the dungeon--an empty
room looking out upon a chalk wall and a water butt, and made ghastly
by a ragged fireplace without any stove in it. Enlivened by company,
however, this was the best place after all; for Berry played with them
there, and seemed to enjoy a game at romps as much as they did; until
Mrs. Pipchin knocking angrily at the wall, like the Cock Lane Ghost
revived, they left off, and Berry told them stories in a whisper until
twilight.
For tea there was plenty of milk and water, and bread and butter, with
a little black teapot for Mrs. Pipchin and Berry, and buttered toast
unlimited for Mrs. Pipchin, which was brought in, hot and hot, like
the chops. Though Mrs. Pipchin got very greasy outside over this dish,
it didn't seem to lubricate her internally at all; for she was as
fierce as ever, and the hard gray eye knew no softening.
After tea, Berry brought out a little workbox, with the Royal Pavilion
on the lid, and fell to working busily; while Mrs. Pipchin, having put
on her spectacles and opened a great volume bound in green baize,
began to nod. And whenever Mrs. Pipchin caught herself falling forward
into the fire, and woke up, she filliped Master Bitherstone on the
nose for nodding too.
At last it was the children's bedtime, and after prayers they went to
bed. As little Miss Pankey was afraid of sleeping alone in the dark,
Mrs. Pipchin always made a point of driving her upstairs herself, like
a sheep; and it was cheerful to hear Miss Pankey moaning long
afterward, in the least eligible chamber, and Mrs. Pipchin now and
then going in to shake her. At about half-past nine o'clock the odour
of a warm sweetbread (Mrs. Pipchin's constitution wouldn't go to sleep
without sweetbread) diversified the prevailing fragrance of the house,
which Mrs. Wickam said was "a smell of building," and slumber fell
upon the castle shortly after.
The breakfast next morning was like the tea overnight, except that
Mrs. Pipchin took her roll instead of toast, and seemed a little more
irate when it was over. Master Bitherstone read aloud to the rest a
pedigree from Genesis (judiciously selected by Mrs. Pipchin), getting
over the names with the ease and clearness of a person tumbling up the
treadmill. That done, Miss Pankey was borne away to be shampooed, and
Master Bitherstone to have something else done to him with salt water,
from which he always returned very blue and dejected. Paul and
Florence went out in the meantime on the beach with Wickam--who was
constantly in tears--and at about noon Mrs. Pipchin presided over some
Early Readings. It being a part of Mrs. Pipchin's system not to
encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young
flower, but to open it by force like an oyster, the moral of these
lessons was usually of a violent and stunning character; the hero--a
naughty boy--seldom, in the mildest catastrophe, being finished off by
anything less than a lion or a bear.
Sunday evening was the most melancholy evening in the week; for Mrs.
Pipchin always made a point of being particularly cross on Sunday
nights. Miss Pankey was generally brought back from an aunt's at
Rottingdean, in deep distress; and Master Bitherstone, whose relatives
were all in India, and who was required to sit, between the services,
in an erect position with his head against the parlour wall, neither
moving hand nor foot, suffered so acutely in his young spirits that he
once asked Florence, on a Sunday night, if she could give him any idea
of the way back to Bengal.
But it was generally said that Mrs. Pipchin was a woman of system with
children; and no doubt she was. Certainly the wild ones went home tame
enough, after sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof.
At this exemplary old lady Paul would sit staring in his little
armchair by the fire for any length of time. He never seemed to know
what weariness was when he was looking fixedly at Mrs. Pipchin. He
was not fond of her; he was not afraid of her; but in those old, old
moods of his, she seemed to have a grotesque attraction for him. There
he would sit, looking at her, and warming his hands, and looking at
her, until he sometimes quite confounded Mrs. Pipchin, ogress as she
was. Once she asked him, when they were alone, what he was thinking
about.
"You," said Paul, without the least reserve.
"And what are you thinking about me?" asked Mrs. Pipchin.
"I'm thinking how old you must be," said Paul.
"You mustn't say such things as that, young gentleman," returned the
dame. "That'll never do."
"Why not?" asked Paul.
"Because it's not polite," said Mrs. Pipchin snappishly.
"Not polite?" said Paul.
"No."
"It's not polite," said Paul innocently, "to eat all the mutton chops
and toast, Wickam says."
"Wickam," retorted Mrs. Pipchin, colouring, "is a wicked, impudent,
bold-faced hussy."
"What's that?" inquired Paul.
"Never you mind, sir," retorted Mrs. Pipchin. "Remember the story of
the little boy that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking
questions."
"If the bull was mad," said Paul, "how did he know that the boy had
asked questions? Nobody can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I
don't believe that story."
"You don't believe it, sir?" repeated Mrs. Pipchin, amazed.
"No," said Paul.
"Not if it should happen to have been a tame bull, you little
infidel?" said Mrs. Pipchin.
* * * * *
"Berry's very fond of you, ain't she?" Paul once asked Mrs. Pipchin
when they were sitting by the fire with the cat.
"Yes," said Mrs. Pipchin.
"Why?" asked Paul.
"Why?" returned the disconcerted old lady. "How can you ask such
things, sir? Why are you fond of your sister Florence?"
"Because she's very good," said Paul. "There's nobody like Florence."
"Well!" retorted Mrs. Pipchin shortly, "and there's nobody like me, I
suppose."
"Ain't there really, though?" asked Paul, leaning forward in his
chair, and looking at her very hard.
"No," said the old lady.
"I am glad of that," observed Paul, rubbing his hands thoughtfully.
"That's a very good thing."
To which every one would say "Amen," if they could believe Mrs. Pipchin's
statement to be actually true.
Mrs. Pipchin combined in her "system" many of the evils of child training.
She was not good-looking, and those who train children should be decidedly
good-looking. They need not be handsome; they ought to be winsome. Her
"mottled face like bad marble, and hard grey eye" meant danger to
childhood.
She was gloomy in appearance, in manner, and in dress, all
disqualifications for any position connected with child development.
She was "a bitter old lady," and children should be surrounded with an
atmosphere of sweetness and joyousness.
Her one diabolical rule was "to give children everything they didn't like
and nothing they did like." This rule is the logical limit of the doctrine
of child depravity.
She was generally spoken of as a "great manager," simply because she
compelled children to do her bidding by fear of punishment in the
"dungeon," or of being sent to bed, or robbed of their meals, or by some
other mean form of contemptible coercion. These processes were praised as
excellent till Dickens destroyed their respectability. His title
"child-queller" is admirable, and full of philosophy. Many a man has been
able to form a truer conception regarding child freedom through the
influence of the word "child-queller." Every teacher should ask himself
every day, "Am I a child-queller?" It will be a blessed thing for the
children when there shall be no more Pipchinny teachers.
The environment of the ogress was not attractive. The gardens grew only
marigolds, snails were on the doors, and bad odours in the house. "In the
winter time the air couldn't be got out of the castle, and in the summer
time it couldn't be got in." Dickens knew that the environment of children
has a direct influence on their characters, and that ventilation is
essential to good health. These lessons were needed fifty years ago.
Mrs. Pipchin made children dishonest by putting on collars for parade.
"The farinaceous and vegetable" diet, the "regaled with rice" criticisms
show that Dickens anticipated by half a century the present interest in
the study of nutrition as one of the most important educational subjects.
The combination of coercion and religion is ridiculed in the theological
constraint of Mrs. Pipchin, when she told little Miss Pankey "that nobody
who sniffed before visitors ever went to heaven."
The outrageous selfishness of adulthood was exposed by the description of
Mrs. Pipchin's anger at the play of the children in the back room when it
was raining and they could not go out.
The injustice of the "child-queller" was shown because she filliped Master
Bitherstone on the nose for nodding in the evening, whenever she woke up
from her own nodding.
The sacrilege of having prayers between two processes of cruelty is worthy
of note. Religion should never be associated in the mind of a child with
injustice, cruelty, or any meanness.
The dreadful practice of driving timid children to sleep in the dark was
another of Mrs. Pipchin's accomplishments. The retiring hour of childhood
should be made the happiest and most nerve soothing of the day. Wise and
sympathetic adulthood, especially motherhood, can then reach the central
nature of the child most successfully.
The formal reading of a meaningless selection from the Bible by
Bitherstone tended to prevent the development of a true interest in that
most interesting of all books.
The Early Readings, with the bad boy in the story "being finished off
generally by a lion or a bear," were a fit accompaniment to a system in
which no child's mind was encouraged to expand like a flower naturally,
but to be opened by force like an oyster.
Dickens began with Mrs. Pipchin his revelation of the great blunder of
checking the questions of children. "Remember the story of the little boy
that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking questions," she said to
Paul. The same evil is pointed out in the training of Pip in Great
Expectations.
Another common error is revealed by Mrs. Pipchin, when she called Paul "a
little infidel," because he did not accept her statement about the mad
bull, although she knew it to be false herself. Even when children doubt
the truth they should not be called "infidels," unless, indeed, it is
desired to make them definitely and consciously sceptical.
The Puritan Sabbath was a part of Mrs. Pipchin's quelling system too.
It was little wonder, therefore, that the wild children went home tame
enough after a few months in her awful institution.
Few men who have ever lived have studied the child and his training so
thoroughly as to be able to condense into such brief space so many of the
evils of bad training.
Mrs. Pipchin and Mr. Squeers have been made to do good work for childhood.
Biler was so badly treated at the grinders' school that he played hookey,
but that was not the worst feature of his education. They did not feel any
responsibility for character development in the school of the Charitable
Grinders.
But they never taught honour at the grinders' school, where the system
that prevailed was particularly strong in the engendering of
hypocrisy; insomuch that many of the friends and masters of past
grinders said, if this were what came of education for the common
people, let us have none. Some more rational said, Let us have a
better one; but the governing powers of the grinders' company were
always ready for _them_, by picking out a few boys who had turned out
well in spite of the system, and roundly asserting that they could
have only turned out well because of it. Which settled the business of
those objectors out of hand, and established the glory of the
grinders' institution.
In David Copperfield, Uriah Heep, utterly detestable in character, is the
natural product of the system of training under which both he and his
father were brought up. Uriah said:
"Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys;
and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of
charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness--not
much else that I know of--from morning to night. We was to be umble to
this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to
make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves
before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the
monitor medal by being umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by
being umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being
such a well-behaved man that they were determined to bring him on. 'Be
umble, Uriah,' says father, 'and you'll get on. It was what was always
being dinned into you and me at school; it's what goes down best. Be
umble,' says father, 'and you'll do!' And really it ain't done bad!"
It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that this detestable
cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I
had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed. I had never
doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended
now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful
spirit must have been engendered by this early, and this long,
suppression.
David himself tells how he suffered after the death of his mother from the
cold neglect of Mr. Murdstone and Jane Murdstone. No child can be so
destitute as the child who is neglected through dislike.
And now I fell into a state of neglect, which I can not look back upon
without compassion. I fell at once into a solitary condition--apart
from all friendly notice, apart from the society of all other boys of
my own age, apart from all companionship but my own spiritless
thoughts--which seems to cast its gloom upon this paper as I write.
What would I have given to have been sent to the hardest school that
ever was kept! to have been taught something, anyhow, anywhere! No
such hope dawned upon me. They disliked me, and they sullenly,
sternly, steadily overlooked me. I think Mr. Murdstone's means were
straitened at about this time; but it is little to the purpose. He
could not bear me; and in putting me from him he tried, as I believe,
to put away the notion that I had any claim upon him--and succeeded.
I was not actively ill used. I was not beaten or starved; but the
wrong that was done to me had no intervals of relenting, and was done
in a systematic, passionless manner. Day after day, week after week,
month after month, I was coldly neglected. I wonder sometimes, when I
think of it, what they would have done if I had been taken with an
illness--whether I should have lain down in my lonely room and
languished through it in my usual solitary way, or whether anybody
would have helped me out.
But the greatest lesson in wrong training given in David Copperfield is
the character development of Steerforth. He was ruined by the misdirected
love of his mother, and his life is a fine psychological study.
He was a boy of unusually good ability and great attractiveness. He
possessed by nature every element of power and grace required to make him
a strong, true, and very successful man; but the love of his mother
degenerated to pride and admiration, indulgence was substituted for
guidance, and the strong woman became weak at the vital point of training
her boy. She allowed him to become selfish and vain by yielding to his
caprices. She thought she was making his character strong by allowing no
restraint to be put upon it. She failed to distinguish between license and
liberty. She had conceived the ideal of the need of freedom, but she knew
naught of the true harmony between control and spontaneity. She allowed
the spontaneity, and gloried in his resistance to control. She was blind
to the balancing element in "the perfect law of liberty." She made her boy
a powerful engine without a governor valve. So his selfhood became
selfishness, and his character was wrecked. Among other immoral opinions
that he gained from his mother's training was the idea that he belonged to
a select class superior to common humanity. How Dickens hated this
thought! Rosa Dartle asked Steerforth about
"That sort of people--are they really animals and clods, and beings of
another order? I want to know so much."
"Why, there's a pretty wide separation between them and us," said
Steerforth, with indifference. "They are not to be expected to be as
sensitive as we are. Their delicacy is not to be shocked or hurt very
easily. They are wonderfully virtuous, I dare say--some people contend
for that, at least, and I am sure I don't want to contradict them; but
they have not very fine natures, and they may be thankful that, like
their coarse, rough skins, they are not easily wounded."
He was trained to despise work, which is a good start toward the utter
loss of character. A boy who despises his fellow-beings whom he assumes to
rank below him, and who also despises work, instead of recognising the
duty of every man to be a producer or a distributor of power, may easily
fall into moral degeneracy.
"Help yourself, Copperfield!" said Steerforth. "We'll drink the
daisies of the field, in compliment to you; and the lilies of the
valley that toil not, neither do they spin, in compliment to me--the
more shame for me!"
His character lacked seriousness. He had the fatal levity that led him to
discuss the most sacred subjects in a flippant manner.
His mother knew that Creakle's school was not a proper place for him, but
she wished to make him conscious of his superiority even over his teacher,
and she knew that Creakle, tyrannical bully though he was, would yield to
Steerforth, because his mother was wealthy.
"It was not a fit school generally for my son," said she; "far from
it; but there were particular circumstances to be considered at the
time, of more importance even than that selection. My son's high
spirit made it desirable that he should be placed with some man who
felt its superiority, and would be content to bow himself before it;
and we found such a man there."
What a perversion of the ideal of freedom in the development of character,
to suppose that it could only reach perfection by a consciousness of
superiority; by having some one who should control him bow down before
him! No man in the world is truly free who has a desire to dominate some
one else--another man, a woman, or a child. Yet Mrs. Steerforth sacrificed
her son's education in order that his manly spirit might be cultivated by
the subordination of the man who should have governed him. She showed
better judgment in deciding that a coercive tyrant like Creakle would make
a subservient sycophant.
"My son's great capacity was tempted on there by a feeling of
voluntary emulation and conscious pride," the fond lady went on to
say. "He would have risen against all constraint; but he found himself
the monarch of the place, and he haughtily determined to be worthy of
his station. It was like himself."
As Steerforth began consciously to feel his better nature surrendering to
his sensuality, he experienced the pangs that all strong natures feel at
the loss of moral power, and one time when he and David were visiting Mr.
Peggotty at Yarmouth he seemed to be moody and disposed to sadness. He
said suddenly to David when they were alone one day:
"David, I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last twenty
years!"
"My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?"
"I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!" he exclaimed. "I
wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!"
There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me.
He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.
"It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a
nephew," he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney
piece, with his face toward the fire, "than to be myself, twenty
times richer and twenty times wiser and be the torment to myself that
I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat, within the last half
hour!"
He had already begun to poison the fountains of little Emily's purity.
When Steerforth, after running away with Emily and deserting her, was
drowned and brought home, Rosa Dartle, who had loved him, charged his
mother with his ruin. She had a scar on her lip, made by a hammer thrown
by Steerforth when he was a boy.
"Do you remember when he did this?" she proceeded. "Do you remember
when in his inheritance of your nature, and in your pampering of his
pride and passion, he did this, and disfigured me for life? Look at
me, marked until I die with his high displeasure, and moan and groan
for what you made him!"
"Miss Dartle," I entreated her, "for Heaven's sake----"
"I _will_ speak," she said, turning on me with her lightning eyes. "Be
silent you! Look at me, I say, proud mother of a proud false son! Moan
for your nurture of him, moan for your corruption of him, moan for
your loss of him, moan for mine!"
She clinched her hand, and trembled through her spare, worn figure, as
if her passion were killing her by inches.
"YOU resent his self-will!" she exclaimed. "YOU injured by his haughty
temper! YOU, who opposed to both, when your hair was gray, the
qualities which made both when you gave him birth! YOU, who from his
cradle reared him to be what he was, and stunted what he should have
been! Are you rewarded, _now_, for your years of trouble?"
"Miss Dartle," said I, "if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for
this afflicted mother----"
"Who feels for me?" she sharply retorted. "She has sown this. Let her
moan for the harvest that she reaps to-day!"
To show that the seed for the harvest had been sown by his mother was
Dickens's aim in the delineation of his character. Yet she loved him as a
part of her own life. She said to Mr. Peggotty, when he came to plead with
her for Emily:
"My son, who has been the object of my life, to whom its every thought
has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish,
from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth."
There was a double sadness in David's soliloquy about Steerforth, who had
been his friend:
In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought
more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more toward all that
was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have
made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had
done in the height of my devotion to him.
In Bleak House a great deal of attention is paid to child training.
Esther's sadness because of her neglected birthday touches a tender chord.
It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other birthdays;
none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as I
knew from what I heard the girls relate to one another; there were
none on mine. My birthday was the most melancholy day at home in the
whole year.
There is more than mere sentiment in birthday celebrations both at home
and in school. It develops a pleasant consciousness of individuality and
community--two of the greatest educational ideals.
The cruelty of telling children of any supposed blight of heredity or of
any other shadow that arrogant conventionality dares to throw over them,
is criticised in the hard, gloomy way in which Esther's godmother referred
to her mother.
Even worse than this in the refinement of its cruelty was her parting
injunction. It is a shameful thing to make a child believe that she is
different from other children in any sense of either badness or goodness.
"Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a
life begun with such a shadow on it. You are different from other
children, Esther, because you were not born, like them, in common
sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart."
I went up to my room and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek
against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon my
bosom cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my
sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy, at any time, to
anybody's heart, and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to
me.
Dickens evidently meant to reveal more than her godmother's cruelty in her
closing moralizings. She made the mistake of using self-denial and
diligent work as curses instead of blessings. They were for the time none
the less curses to the child, however.
The gross negligence of parents in regard to the sacredness of the
children's retiring hour is exposed in the management of the Jellyby
children. Indeed, Mrs. Jellyby may be regarded as several volumes of
treatises on how not to train children. Caddy expressed her views of the
training they received by saying: "I wish I was dead. I wish we were all
dead. It would be a great deal better for us." She wisely added: "Oh,
don't talk of duty as a child! where's ma's duty as a parent?" Esther said
wisely:
It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural
duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope
in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against
becoming absurd; but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to
myself.
Esther describes the process of putting the children to bed one evening
she was visiting at the Jellyby home:
Mrs. Jellyby stopped for a moment her conversation with Mr. Quale, on
the Brotherhood of Humanity, long enough to order the children to bed.
As Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs,
where the young woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst
of the little family like a dragon, and overturned them into cribs.
Peepy was the unfortunate child who had fallen downstairs, who now
interrupted the correspondence by presenting himself with a slip of
plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his wounded knees, in which Ada
and I did not know which to pity most, the bruises or the dirt. Mrs.
Jellyby merely added, with the serene composure with which she said
everything, "Go along, you naughty Peepy!" and fixed her fine eyes on
Africa again.
Here Mrs. Jellyby was guilty of two wrongs, one of commission, the other
of omission. She did a positive wrong in unjustly calling the child
"naughty" when he was merely unfortunate. Even if children are so badly
guided that they do wrong, it is a serious mistake to make them feel
consciously "bad" by calling them unpleasant names. It is always wrong to
define in the child's consciousness a passing wave of evil.
Mrs. Jellyby's sin of omission was her neglect of the opportunity of
sympathizing with the suffering boy, and of training him to bear suffering
bravely by the suggestion that he was "a brave little soldier home from
the war."
Mr. Jarndyce, in speaking of Harold Skimpole's children, said, when
Richard Carstone asked if he had any children:
"Yes, Rick! Half a dozen. More! Nearer a dozen, I should think. But he
has never looked after them. How could he? He wanted somebody to look
after _him_. He is a child, you know!" said Mr. Jarndyce.
"And have the children looked after themselves at all, sir?" inquired
Richard.
"Why, just as you may suppose," said Mr. Jarndyce, his countenance
suddenly falling. "It is said that the children of the very poor are
not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole's children have
tumbled up somehow or other----"
Again Dickens was impressing the responsibility of parents for the care
and proper training of their children.
Mr. Jarndyce accounted for the utterly unpractical nature of Mr. Skimpole
by saying:
"Why, he is all sentiment, and--and susceptibility, and--and
sensibility--and--and imagination. And these qualities are not
regulated in him, somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for
them in his youth attached too much importance to them, and too little
to any training that would have balanced and adjusted them; and so he
became what he is."
Mrs. Pardiggle was given as a type of the philanthropic woman who does
_not_ neglect her children, but whose training is worse--much worse than
Mrs. Jellyby's neglect. The Jellyby children had as much motherly sympathy
as the Pardiggles, and they had freedom. There is always this advantage in
neglect. Louisa Gradgrind gave utterance to a philosophical principle when
she said to her father: "Oh! if you had only neglected me, what a much
better and much happier creature I should have been." Dickens did not
teach that neglect is good training, but he did teach that it is a lighter
curse than the Gradgrind or Pardiggle training.
The Jellyby children had a slight chance to turn out moderately well, but
the Pardiggle children were certain to be morose, hypocritical, and
vicious. They were certain to hate all forms of Christian philanthropy.
Mrs. Pardiggle's intentions were undoubtedly good, but she destroyed the
character of her children, nevertheless.
"These, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility,
after the first salutations, "are my five boys. You may have seen
their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in
the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest
(twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket money, to the amount of
five and threepence to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten
and a half), is the child who contributed two and ninepence to the
Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one and
sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the
Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily
enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never
through life to use tobacco in any form."
We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that
they were weazened and shrivelled--though they were certainly that
too--but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the
mention of the Tockahoopo Indians I could really have supposed Egbert
to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave me such a
savage frown. The face of each child as the amount of his contribution
was mentioned darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was
by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the
Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable.
"You have been visiting, I understand," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "at Mrs.
Jellyby's?"
We said yes, we had passed one night there.
"Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society, and deserves a helping hand.
My boys have contributed to the African project--Egbert, one and six,
being the entire allowance of nine weeks; Oswald, one and a penny
halfpenny, being the same; the rest, according to their little means.
Nevertheless, I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in all things. I do not go
with Mrs. Jellyby in her treatment of her young family. It has been
noticed. It has been observed that her young family are excluded from
participation in the objects to which she is devoted. She may be
right, she may be wrong; but, right or wrong, this is not my course
with _my_ young family. I take them everywhere."
I was afterward convinced (and so was Ada) that from the
ill-conditioned eldest child these words extorted a sharp yell. He
turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a yell.
"They attend matins with me (very prettily done) at half past six
o'clock in the morning all the year round, including, of course, the
depth of winter," said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, "and they are with me
during the revolving duties of the day. I am a school lady, I am a
visiting lady, I am a reading lady, I am a distributing lady; I am on
the local linen box committee, and many general committees; and my
canvassing alone is very extensive--perhaps no one's more so. But they
are my companions everywhere; and by these means they acquire that
knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing charitable business
in general--in short, that taste for the sort of thing--which will
render them in after life a service to their neighbours, and a
satisfaction to themselves. My young family are not frivolous; they
expend the entire amount of their allowance in subscriptions, under my
direction; and they have attended as many public meetings, and
listened to as many lectures, orations, and discussions as generally
fall to the lot of few grown people. Alfred (five), who, as I
mentioned, has of his own election joined the Infant Bonds of Joy, was
one of the very few children who manifested consciousness on one
occasion, after a fervid address of two hours from the chairman of
the evening."
Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the
injury of that night.
"You may have observed, Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "in some
of the lists to which I have referred, in the possession of our
esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family are
concluded with the name of O. A. Pardiggle, F. R. S., one pound. That
is their father. We usually observe the same routine. I put down my
mite first; then my young family enrol their contributions, according
to their ages and their little means; and then Mr. Pardiggle brings up
the rear. Mr. Pardiggle is happy to throw in his limited donation,
under my direction; and thus things are made, not only pleasant to
ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others."
Mrs. Pardiggle invited Esther and Ada to go out with her to visit a
"wicked brickmaker" in the neighbourhood. Ada walked ahead with Mrs.
Pardiggle and Esther followed with the five children. She had an
interesting experience.
I am very fond of being confided in by children, and am happy in being
usually favoured in that respect, but on this occasion it gave me
great uneasiness. As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert, with the
manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me, on the ground
that his pocket money was "boned" from him. On my pointing out the
great impropriety of the word, especially in connection with his
parent (for he added sulkily "By her!"), he pinched me and said, "Oh,
then! Now! Who are you? _You_ wouldn't like it, I think! What does she
make a sham for, and pretend to give me money, and take it away again?
Why do you call it _my_ allowance, and never let me spend it?" These
exasperating questions so inflamed his mind, and the minds of Oswald
and Francis, that they all pinched me at once, and in a dreadfully
expert way; screwing up such little pieces of my arms that I could
hardly forbear crying out. Felix at the same time stamped upon my
toes. And the Bond of Joy, who, on account of always having the whole
of his little income anticipated, stood, in fact, pledged to abstain
from cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we
passed a pastry-cook shop, that he terrified me by becoming purple. I
never underwent so much, both in body and mind, in the course of a
walk with young people, as from these unnaturally constrained
children, when they paid me the compliment of being natural.
In the brickmaker's hovel they heard something of how the very poor
brought up children, or failed to bring them up, in Dickens's time. The
brickmaker was lying at full length on the floor, smoking his pipe. He
gave them no welcome.
I wants a end of these liberties took with my place. I wants a end of
being drawed like a badger. Now you are a-going to poll-pry and
question according to custom--I know what you're a-going to be up to.
Well! You haven't got no occasion to be up to it. I'll save you the
trouble. Is my daughter a-washin'? Yes, she is a-washin'. Look at the
water. Smell it! That's wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do
you think of gin, instead? An't my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty--it's
nat'rally dirty, and it's nat'rally onwholesome; and we've had five
dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much
the better for them, and for us besides.
The utter carelessness of some "society gentlemen" in regard to the
education of their children is referred to in the description Caddy
Jellyby gave of her lover, the son of the great Turveydrop.
Caddy told me that her lover's education had been so neglected that it
was not always easy to read his notes. She said if he were not so
anxious about his spelling, and took less pains to make it clear, he
would do better; but he put so many unnecessary letters into short
words that they sometimes quite lost their English appearance. "He
does it with the best intention," observed Caddy, "but it hasn't the
effect he means, poor fellow!" Caddy then went on to reason how could
he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole life in
the dancing school, and had done nothing but teach and fag, fag and
teach, morning, noon, and night! And what did it matter? She could
write letters enough for both, as she knew to her cost, and it was far
better for him to be amiable than learned. "Besides, it's not as if I
was an accomplished girl, who had any right to give herself airs,"
said Caddy. "I know little enough, I am sure, thanks to ma!"
The products of the fashionable education of Dickens's time (there is not
so much of it now, thanks largely to Dickens) were shown in the cousins of
Sir Leicester Dedlock.
The rest of the cousins are ladies and gentlemen of various ages and
capacities; the major part, amiable and sensible, and likely to have
done well enough in life if they could have overcome their cousinship;
as it is, they are almost all a little worsted by it, and lounge in
purposeless and listless paths, and seem to be quite as much at a loss
how to dispose of themselves as anybody else can be how to dispose of
them.
In Little Dorrit Mrs. General is used as a type of two varieties of false
training. Her pupils were never to be allowed to know that there was
anything vulgar or wrong in the world. She believed the good old theory,
that adulthood had two duties in developing purity of character, one to
prevent children knowing that there was any evil, the other to chain them
back or beat them back from evil, if they accidentally found it and wished
to investigate it. She never thought of training a child to do its part in
reducing the evil around him. Seclusion and exclusion took the place of
community in her perverted philosophy.
She believed, too, in educating the surface. She did not work from within
intellectually or spiritually. She varnished the surface that it might
receive the proper society polish, therefore neither heart nor head
required much attention. According to her theory, young ladies should
never be so unladylike as to have great purposes or great ideas.
Unfortunately some of her descendants are still living.
"Fanny," observed Mrs. General, "at present forms too many opinions.
Perfect breeding forms none, and is never demonstrative.
"I have conversed with Amy several times since we have been residing
here on the general subject of the formation of a demeanour. She has
expressed herself to me as wondering exceedingly at Venice. I have
mentioned to her that it is better not to wonder."
Her father sent for Amy to reprove her for her lack of what Mrs. General
regarded as true culture, and Amy said:
"I think, father, I require a little time."
"Papa is a preferable mode of address," observed Mrs. General. "Father
is rather vulgar, my dear. The word papa, besides, gives a pretty form
to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very
good words for the lips; especially prunes and prism. You will find it
serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to
yourself in company--on entering a room, for instance--papa, potatoes,
poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.
"If Miss Amy Dorrit will direct her own attention to, and will accept
of my poor assistance in, the formation of a surface, Mr. Dorrit will
have no further cause of anxiety. May I take this opportunity of
remarking, as an instance in point, that it is scarcely delicate to
look at vagrants with the attention which I have seen bestowed upon
them by a very dear young friend of mine? They should not be looked
at. Nothing disagreeable should ever be looked at. Apart from such a
habit standing in the way of that graceful equanimity of surface which
is so expressive of good breeding, it hardly seems compatible with
refinement of mind. A truly refined mind will seem to be ignorant of
the existence of anything that is not perfectly proper, placid, and
pleasant."
Great Expectations has numerous illustrations of bad training. Mrs.
Gargery had many of the worst characteristics of disrespectful and
coercive adulthood. She abused Pip for asking questions, scolded him,
thimbled him, and sent him to bed in the dark. She told him he was on the
way to commit murder and a great variety of crimes, because criminals
always "begin by asking questions." She kept him in a state of constant
terror. She tried in every possible way to lower his opinion of himself,
which is a crime against childhood. One of the worst features of the old
education was its teaching of a spurious humility, a depreciation of
selfhood. One of the greatest weaknesses of humanity is the general lack
of true faith of men and women in their own powers. He was told that he
was "naterally wicious," and made the butt of all the observations
relating to boys who possessed any vices whatever.
Dickens revealed all these characteristics to condemn them.
Pip discussed a very grave question for students of children when he was
accounting for the fact that he deliberately misstated facts so
systematically in answering the questions of his sister and Mr.
Pumblechook, in regard to Miss Havisham and the peculiarities of her
mysterious home.
When I reached home my sister was very curious to know all about Miss
Havisham's, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found myself
getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the
small of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved against the
kitchen wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient
length.
If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other
young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden
in mine--which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to
suspect myself of having been a monstrosity--it is the key to many
reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham's as
my eyes had seen it I should not be understood.
Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy
perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my
obstinacy was adamantine.
Two thoughts are worthy of note in this part of Pip's training: abuse,
especially of the thumping, bumping, shaking variety, makes a child
obstinate; and many of childhood's difficulties arise from not being
understood, or the fear of being misunderstood.
Pip resented, as all children do, more than they can show, the unpleasant
habit of taking patronizing liberties with them.
And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he
considered it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and
poke it into my eyes. I can not conceive why everybody of his standing
who visited at our house should always have put me through the same
inflammatory process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to
mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our
social family circle, but some large-handed person took some such
ophthalmic steps to patronize me.
And Mr. Pumblechook! What could a boy do but hate him?
Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with
almost insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That ass,
Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose of
discussing my prospects with my sister; and I really do believe (to
this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel) that if these
hands could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise cart, they would
have done it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity
of mind that he could not discuss my prospects without having me
before him--as it were, to operate upon--and he would drag me up from
my stool (usually by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and,
putting me before the fire as if I were going to be cooked, would
begin by saying, "Now, mum, here is this boy! Here is this boy which
you brought up by hand. Hold up your head, boy, and be forever
grateful unto them which so did so. Now, mum, with respections to this
boy!" And then he would rumple my hair the wrong way--which from my
earliest remembrance, as already hinted, I have in my soul denied the
right of any fellow-creature to do--and would hold me before him by
the sleeve: a spectacle of imbecility only to be equalled by himself.
Mrs. Pocket's training was given as an illustration of the folly of giving
girls no practical education.
Her father had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle
as one who, in the nature of things, must marry a title, and who was
to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge.
So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young
lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly
ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless.
Her home proved that she had grown up a credit to her training. There
never was a family more utterly without order, management, or system than
Mrs. Pocket's. Servants and children indulged in unending turmoil and
conflict. Dickens added a grim humour to the picture by saying:
Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for he was a most delightful lecturer on
domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and
servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But
Mrs. Pocket was at home and was in a little difficulty, on account of
the baby's having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him
quiet during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot
Guards) of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be
regarded as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either
to apply externally or to take as a tonic.
Mrs. Pocket continued to read her one book about the dignities of the
titled aristocracy, and prescribed "Bed" as a sovereign remedy for baby.
Dickens believed a mother should find her highest joy and most sacred duty
in training her own children. Mrs. Pocket was a type to be avoided.
The description of the dinner at Mr. Pocket's, after which the six
children were brought in, and Mrs. Pocket attempted to mind the baby, is
one of the raciest bits of Dickens's humour. One observation in connection
with the dinner is worth studying.
After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made
admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs--a sagacious way of
improving their minds.
How few yet clearly understand this profound criticism of bad training!
How many children are still made vain and frivolous by having their
attention directed especially to their physical attributes and their
dress, rather than to the things that would yield them much greater
immediate happiness and a much truer basis for future development!
In his last book, Edwin Drood, Dickens showed that he still hated the
tyranny that dwarfs and distorts the souls of children.
Neville Landless described his own training to his tutor, who had won his
confidence as it had never been won before.
"We lived with a stepfather there. Our mother died there, when we were
little children. We have had a wretched existence. She made him our
guardian, and he was a miserly wretch who grudged us food to eat and
clothes to wear.
"This stepfather of ours was a cruel brute as well as a grinding one.
It was well he died when he did, or I might have killed him."
Mr. Crisparkle stopped short in the moonlight and looked at his
hopeful pupil in consternation.
"I surprise you, sir?" he said, with a quick change to a submissive
manner.
"You shock me; unspeakably shock me."
The pupil hung his head for a little while, as they walked on, and
then said: "You never saw him beat your sister. I have seen him beat
mine, more than once or twice, and I never forgot it.
"I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly
and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful. I have been
always tyrannically held down by the strong hand. This has driven me,
in my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean. I have been
stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of
life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest possessions
of youth. This has caused me to be utterly wanting in I do not know
what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts--I have not even a
name for the thing, you see--that you have had to work upon in other
young men to whom you have been accustomed."
Hatred instead of love; product, a secret and revengeful character.
"Tyrannically held down by a strong hand"; product, falseness and
meanness. "Stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very
necessaries of life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest
possessions of youth"; product, a manhood utterly barren in true emotions,
or pleasant memories, or good instincts.
No other writer has described so many phases of bad training as Dickens.