MISCELLANEOUS EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES.
The need of apperception and correlation are shown in the result of Paul
Dombey's first lessons under Miss Cornelia Blimber, and in the same book
in the description of the learning Briggs carried away with him. It was
like an ill-arranged luggage, so tightly packed that he couldn't get at
anything he wanted. The absolute necessity for fixing apperceptive centres
of emotion and thought in the lives of children by experience is shown in
the case of Neville Landless in Edwin Drood. His early life had been so
barren that, as he told his tutor, "It has caused me to be utterly wanting
in I don't know what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts--I have
not even a name for the thing, you see--that you have had to work upon in
other young men to whom you have been accustomed."
Dickens emphasized the fact that the lack of apperceptive centres of an
improper kind is a great advantage.
That heart where self has found no place and raised no throne is slow
to recognise its ugly presence when it looks upon it. As one possessed
of an evil spirit was held in old time to be alone conscious of the
lurking demon in the breasts of other men, so kindred vices know each
other in their hiding places every day, when virtue is incredulous and
blind.
There is no more suggestive work on the contents of children's minds than
Bleak House. When Poor Jo was summoned to give evidence at the inquest he
was questioned in regard to himself and his theology. The results were
startling.
Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that everybody has
two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don't know that Jo is short
for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for _him_. _He_ don't find no
fault with it. Spell it? No. _He_ can't spell it. No father, no
mother, no friends. Never been to school. What's home? Knows a broom's
a broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect who told
him about the broom, or about the lie, but knows both. Can't exactly
say what'll be done to him after he's dead if he tells a lie to the
gentlemen here, but believes it'll be something wery bad to punish
him, and serve him right--and so he'll tell the truth.
Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any
link there be. He sums up his mental condition, when asked a question,
by replying that he "don't know nothink." He knows that it's hard to
keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to
live by doing it. Nobody taught him, even that much; he found it out.
Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone's, meeting the tardy morning, which is
always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of bread
as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and the houses
not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the doorstep of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and gives
it a brush when he has finished, as an acknowledgment of the
accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice, and wonders what
it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual
destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific, or what it costs to look
up the precious souls among the cocoanuts and breadfruits.
He goes to his crossing, and begins to lay it out for the day. The
town awakes; the great teetotum is set up for its daily spin and
whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been
suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo and the other lower animals
get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is market day. The
blinded oxen, overgoaded, overdriven, never guided, run into wrong
places and are beaten out; and plunge, red-eyed and foaming, at stone
walls; and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt
themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!
A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog--a
drover's dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher's shop, and
evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for some
hours, and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three or
four; can't remember where he left them; looks up and down the street,
as half expecting to see them astray; suddenly pricks up his ears and
remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low
company and public houses; a terrific dog to sheep; ready at a whistle
to scamper over their backs, and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but
an educated, improved, developed dog, who has been taught his duties
and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music,
probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise,
as to awakened association, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or
joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a
par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute!
Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years
they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark--but not
their bite.
When Lady Dedlock met Jo, she asked him:
"Are you the boy I've read of in the papers?"
"I don't know," says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, "nothink about
no papers. I don't know nothink about nothink at all."
When Guster, Mr. Snagsby's servant, got him some food, she said:
"Are you hungry?"
"Jist!" says Jo.
"What's gone of your father and your mother, eh?"
Jo stops in the middle of a bite, and looks petrified. For this orphan
charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting, has patted
him on the shoulder; and it is the first time in his life that any
decent hand had been so laid upon him.
"I never know'd nothink about 'em," says Jo.
"No more didn't I of mine," cries Guster.
When Allan Woodcourt took him to Mr. George's and had his wants attended
to, he told Jo to be sure and tell him the truth always.
"Wishermaydie, if I don't," said Jo. "I never was in no other trouble at
all, sir--'cept knowin' nothink and starvation."
When Allan saw that Jo was nearing the end, he said:
"Jo! Did you ever know a prayer?"
"Never know'd nothink, sir."
"Not so much as one short prayer?"
"No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr. Chadband he was a-prayin' wunst at Mr.
Snagsby's and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-speakin' to
hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but _I_ couldn't make out
nothink on it. Different times, there was other genlmen come down
Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin', but they all mostly sed as the t'other wuns
prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talkin' to theirselves,
or a-passin' blame on the t'others, and not a-talkin' to us. _We_
never know'd nothink. _I_ never know'd what it wos all about."
No? Mr. Chadband, your long sermon about "the Terewth" found no place in
Jo in which to rest; nothing to which it could attach itself. No wonder he
went asleep. He had no apperceptive centres in his experience or his
training to which your kind of religious teaching was related.
Poor Jo! He was the first great illustration, and he is still the best, of
the great pedagogical truth, that we see, and hear, and understand in all
that is around us only what corresponds to what we are within; that our
power to see, and hear, and understand increases as our inner life is
cultured and developed; and that a life as barren as that of the great
class of whom Jo was made the type makes it impossible to comprehend any
teaching of an abstract kind. This revelation is of course most valuable
to primary teachers in cities.
Dickens showed his wonderful insight into the most profound problems of
psychology in his great character sketch of poor Jo. He agreed with
Herbart regarding the philosophy of apperception so far as it related to
intellectual culture, but he painted Jo entirely out of harmony with
Herbart's psychology in relation to soul development. After describing Mr.
Chadband's sermon on "Terewth" Dickens says:
All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, ever
picking his cap, and putting bits of fur in his mouth. He spits them
out with a remorseful air, for he feels that it is in his nature to be
an unimprovable reprobate, and it's no good _his_ trying to keep
awake, for _he_ won't never know nothink. Though it may be, Jo, that
there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near
the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common
men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light,
would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it
unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their
modest aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it
yet!
Jo never heard of any such book. Its compilers, and the Reverend
Chadband, are all one to him--except that he knows the Reverend
Chadband, and would rather run away from him for an hour than hear him
talk for five minutes.
When Jo was eating at Mr. Snagsby's he stopped in the middle of his bite
and looked petrified, because Guster patted him on the shoulder. "It was
the first time in his life that any decent hand had been so laid upon
him."
In The Haunted Man the six-year-old child was described as "a baby savage,
a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might
live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and
perish a mere beast."
Hugh, the splendid young animal who was John Willet's stable boy in
Barnaby Rudge, was as deficient of most intellectual and spiritual
apperceptive centres as poor Jo. When Mr. Chester asked him his name he
replied:
"I'd tell it if I could. I can't. I have always been called Hugh;
nothing more. I never knew nor saw, nor thought about a father; and I
was a boy of six--that's not very old--when they hung my mother up at
Tyburn for a couple of thousand of men to stare at. They might have
let her live. She was poor enough."
Little George Silverman's mind was almost a blank when his mother and
father died. He had been brought up in a cellar at Preston. He hardly knew
what sunlight was. His mother's laugh in her fever scared him, because it
was the first laugh he had ever heard. When discovered alone with the
bodies of his father and mother in the cellar, one of the horrified
bystanders said to him:
"Do you know your father and mother are both dead of fever?" and he
replied:
"I don't know what it is to be dead. I am hungry and thirsty."
After he had been supplied with food and drink he told Mr. Hawkyard that
"he didn't feel cold, or hungry, or thirsty," and in relating the story in
manhood he said:
That was the whole round of human feelings, as far as I knew, except
the pain of being beaten. To that time I had never had the faintest
impression of duty. I had no knowledge whatever that there was
anything lovely in this life. When I had occasionally slunk up the
cellar steps into the street, and glared in at shop windows, I had
done so with no higher feelings than we may suppose to animate a mangy
young dog or wolf cub. It is equally the fact that I had never been
alone, in the sense of holding unselfish converse with myself. I had
been solitary often enough, but nothing better.
Redlaw, in The Haunted Man, said to the poor boy who came to his room:
"What is your name?"
"Got none."
"Where do you live?"
"Live! What's that?"
Such pictures were not drawn to entertain, or to add artistic effect to
his stories. They were written to teach the world of wealth and culture
that all around it were thousands of human souls with as little
opportunity for development as young animals have; with defined
apperceptive centres of cold, hunger, thirst, and pain only.
Dickens makes a strong contrast between the condition of the mental and
spiritual apperceptive centres in the city boy as compared with the
country boy, in a conversation between Phil Squod and Mr. George.
"And so, Phil," says George of the Shooting Gallery, after several
turns in silence, "you were dreaming of the country last night?"
Phil, by the bye, said as much, in a tone of surprise, as he scrambled
out of bed.
"Yes, guv'ner."
"What was it like?"
"I hardly know what it was like, guv'ner," said Phil, considering.
"How did you know it was the country?"
"On account of the grass, I think. And the swans upon it," says Phil,
after further consideration.
"What were the swans doing on the grass?"
"They was a-eating of it, I expect," says Phil.
"The country," says Mr. George, plying his knife and fork; "why, I
suppose you never clapped your eyes on the country, Phil?"
"I see the marshes once," said Phil, contentedly eating his breakfast.
"What marshes?"
"_The_ marshes, commander," returns Phil.
"Where are they?"
"I don't know where they are," says Phil; "but I see 'em, guv'ner.
They was flat. And miste."
Governor and commander are interchangeable terms with Phil, expressive
of the same respect and deference, and applicable to nobody but Mr.
George.
"I was born in the country, Phil."
"Was you, indeed, commander?"
"Yes. And bred there."
Phil elevates his one eyebrow, and after respectfully staring at his
master to express interest, swallows a great gulp of coffee, still
staring at him.
"There's not a bird's note that I don't know," says Mr. George. "Not
many an English leaf or berry that I couldn't name. Not many a tree
that I couldn't climb yet, if I was put to it. I was a real country
boy once. My good mother lived in the country. Do you want to see the
country, Phil?"
"N-no, I don't know as I do, particular."
"The town's enough for you, eh?"
"Why, you see, commander," says Phil, "I ain't acquainted with
anythink else, and I doubt if I ain't a-getting too old to take to
novelties."
"How old are you, Phil?"
Phil's answer is intended to indicate the lack of even mathematical power
in those who, like Phil, never had any training of the imagination, nor
any other training to define their apperceptive centres of number beyond
ten.
"I'm something with a eight in it. It can't be eighty. Nor yet
eighteen. It's betwixt 'em somewheres. I was just eight, agreeable to
the parish calculation, when I went with the tinker. That was April
Fool Day. I was able to count up to ten; and when April Fool Day came
round again I says to myself, 'Now, old chap, you're one and a eight
in it.' April Fool Day after that I says, 'Now, old chap, you're two
and a eight in it.' In course of time I come to ten and a eight in it;
two tens and a eight in it. When it got so high it got the upper hand
of me; but this is how I always know there's a eight in it."
The folly of trying to make a man moral by precept alone; the fact that
character is developed by what we do, by true living, by what goes out in
action, not by what comes in in maxims or theories, is shown in Martin
Chuzzlewit.
It has been remarked that Mr. Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was.
Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff,
especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of
him by a homely admirer that he had a Fortunatus's purse of gold
sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in
the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which
fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste and shone
prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept
than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction post, which
is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there.
The best of architects and land surveyors kept a horse, in whom the
enemies already mentioned more than once in these pages pretended to
detect a fanciful resemblance to his master. Not in his outward
person, for he was a raw-boned, haggard horse, always on a much
shorter allowance of corn than Mr. Pecksniff; but in his moral
character, wherein, said they, he was full of promise, but of no
performance. He was always, in a manner, going to go, and never going.
One of the worst results that can follow a system of training is to make a
man a hypocrite. It is nearly as bad to store a mind with good thoughts
or fill a heart with good feelings without giving the character the
tendency by practical experience to carry into effect so far as possible
its good feelings and high purposes. Mr. Pecksniff was a moral
monstrosity. We should create no more Pecksniffs. A different ideal is
taught in the remark made by Martin Chuzzlewit to Mary, "Endeavouring to
be anything that's good, and being it, is, with you, all one."
Executive training is emphasized in Nicholas Nickleby. Old Ralph Nickleby
said of Nicholas: "The old story--always thinking, and never doing." The
same thought is expressed very clearly in the pregnant sentence written
about Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities: "Sadly, sadly, the sun rose;
it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good
emotions, incapable of their directed exercise." The saddest sight in the
world is a man or woman using power for evil. It is nearly as sad to see a
man or woman with power, but without power to use it wisely.
In A Tale of Two Cities he caricatures admirably the class who cling to
old customs and conventions, and decline even to discuss changes or
improvements, in his description of Tellson's Bank.
Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the
year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very
dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place,
moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the house were
proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness,
proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence
in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if
it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no
passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more
convenient places of business. Tellson's (they said) wanted no
elbowroom, Tellson's wanted no light, Tellson's wanted no
embellishment. Noakes and Co.'s might, or Snooks Brothers' might: but
Tellson's, thank heaven!
Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the
question of rebuilding Tellson's. In this respect the house was much
on a par with the country; which did very often disinherit its sons
for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been
highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.
Every child should get into his consciousness by experience, not by
theory, the idea that he is expected to do his share in the improvement of
his environment. The worst conception he can get is that "whatever is is
right"; that things can not be improved. Every child should be encouraged
to make suggestions for the improvement of his own environment and
conditions in the schoolroom, in the yard, in the details of class
management, or in anything else that he thinks he can improve.
The closing sentence of Our School should ring always in the minds of
teachers, especially the last clause: "And will do far better yet."
Dickens had implicit faith in even weak humanity, and taught the hopeful
truth, that every man and every child may be improved, if the men and
women most directly associated with them are wise and loving. Harriet
Carker said to Mr. Morfin:
"Oh, sir, after what I have seen, let me conjure you, if you are in
any place of power, and are ever wronged, never for any wrong inflict
punishment that can not be recalled; while there is a God above us to
work changes in the hearts he made."
The Goblin of the Bell said to Toby Veck in The Chimes:
"Who turns his back upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind;
abandons them as vile; and does not trace and track with pitying eyes
the unfenced precipice by which they fell from good, grasping in their
fall some tufts and shreds of that lost soil, and clinging to them
still when bruised and dying in the gulf below, does wrong to Heaven
and man, to time and to eternity."
The influence of Nature on the awakening mind of the child was outlined in
A Child's Dream of a Star.
These children used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the
beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of
the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered
at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.
Nature is the great centre of interest to the child, and it may be the
child's first true revealer of God, if adulthood does not impiously come
between the child and God by trying to give him a word God for his
intellect too soon to take the place of the true God of his imagination.
Dickens's best characters loved Nature. Esther, when recovering from her
illness, said:
I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and
leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and everything in
Nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it
yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost,
when the wide world was so full of delight to me!
The deep, spiritual influences of Nature are revealed in the effects of
life in the growing country on Oliver Twist.
Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft
tranquility, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green
hills and rich woods of an inland village! Who can tell how scenes of
peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close
and noisy places, and carry their own freshness deep into their jaded
hearts! Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives
of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has
indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick
and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even
they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at
last for one short glimpse of Nature's face; and, carried from the
scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once
into a new state of being. Crawling forth from day to day, to some
green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within them
by the sight of sky, and hill, and plain, and glistening water, that a
foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they
have sunk into their tombs as peacefully as the sun, whose setting
they watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before,
faded from their dim and feeble sight! The memories which peaceful
country scenes call up are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and
hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands
for the graves of those we love--may purify our thoughts, and bear
down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this there
lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed
consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote
and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to
come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.
It was a lovely spot to which they repaired. Oliver, whose days had
been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and
brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence there.
In the story of The Five Sisters of York Alice said to her sisters:
"Nature's own blessings are the proper goods of life, and we may share
them sinlessly together. To die is our heavy portion, but, oh, let us
die with life about us; when our cold hearts cease to beat, let warm
hearts be beating near; let our last look be upon the bounds which God
has set to his own bright skies, and not on stone walls and bars of
iron! Dear sisters, let us live and die, if you list, in this green
garden's compass."
Dickens had very advanced opinions in regard to the importance of physical
training, especially of play, as an agent not only in physical culture,
but in the development of the mind and character. Doctor Blimber's school
is condemned because the boys were not allowed to play, and Doctor
Strong's school is highly commended because the boys "had noble games out
of doors" there.
What splendid runners and jumpers and divers and swimmers those grand boys
were whom Mr. Marton had the good fortune to teach in his second school in
The Old Curiosity Shop!
Mrs. Crupp recommended David Copperfield to take up some game as an
antidote for his despondency during his early love experience.
"If you was to take to something, sir," said Mrs. Crupp, "if you was to
take to skittles, now, which is healthy, you might find it divert your
mind and do you good."
Mrs. Chick told Mr. Dombey that Paul was delicate. "Our darling is not
altogether as stout as we could wish. The fact is that his mind is too
much for him. His soul is a great deal too large for his frame." Yet his
father paid no attention to the boy's food, and sent him, when but a
little sickly child, to Doctor Blimber's to learn everything--not to play.
"They had nothing so vulgar as play at Doctor Blimber's."
One of the most vicious conventions is that which makes vigorous play
vulgar and unladylike for girls.
He called attention in American notes to the advantages possessed by the
students of Upper Canada College, Toronto, inasmuch as "the town is well
adapted for wholesome exercise at all seasons." In the same book he gives
his opinion that American girls "must go more wisely clad, and take more
healthful exercise."
He praised the free life of the gipsy children in Nicholas Nickleby.
In Martin Chuzzlewit, when Tom Pinch and Martin had to walk to Salisbury
instead of riding in Mr. Pecksniff's gig, Dickens says it was better for
them that they were compelled to walk. What a breezy enthusiasm he throws
into his advocacy of walking as an exercise:
Better! A rare strong, hearty, healthy walk--four statute miles an
hour--preferable to that rumbling, tumbling, jolting, shaking,
scraping, creaking, villainous old gig? Why, the two things will not
admit of comparison. It is an insult to the walk to set them side by
side. Where is an instance of a gig having ever circulated a man's
blood, unless when, putting him in danger of his neck, it awakened in
his veins and in his ears, and all along his spine, a tingling heat
much more peculiar than agreeable? When did a gig ever sharpen
anybody's wits and energies, unless it was when the horse bolted, and,
crashing madly down a steep hill with a stone wall at the bottom, his
desperate circumstances suggested to the only gentleman left inside
some novel and unheard-of mode of dropping out behind? Better than the
gig!
Better than the gig! When were travellers by wheels and hoofs seen
with such red-hot cheeks as those? when were they so good-humouredly
and merrily bloused? when did their laughter ring upon the air, as
they turned them round, what time the stronger gusts came sweeping up;
and, facing round again as they passed by, dashed on, in such a glow
of ruddy health as nothing could keep pace with, but the high spirits
it engendered? Better than the gig! Why here _is_ a man in a gig
coming the same way now. Look at him as he passes his whip into his
left hand, chafes his numbed right fingers on his granite leg, and
beats those marble toes of his upon the footboard. Ha, ha, ha! Who
would exchange this rapid hurry of the blood for yonder stagnant
misery, though its pace were twenty miles for one?
Better than the gig! No man in a gig could have such interest in the
milestones. No man in a gig could see, or feel, or think, like merry
users of their legs.
Dickens taught comparatively little about the subjects of instruction or
the methods of teaching them. He dealt cramming its most stunning blow in
Doctor Blimber's school, and he criticised sharply the methods of teaching
classics and literature in the same school. He advocated the objective
method of teaching number in Jemmy Lirriper's training at home by Major
Jackman.
He took more interest in reading and literature than in any other
department of school study, so far as can be judged from his writings. He
deplored the practice of allowing children to try to read before they
could recognise the words readily, and understand their meaning in the
training of Pip and Charley Hexam. At the great party at Mr. Merdle's,
the Bishop consulted the great Physician on the relaxation of the
throat with which young curates were too frequently afflicted, and on
the means of lessening the great prevalence of that disorder in the
church. Physician, as a general rule, was of opinion that the best way
to avoid it was to know how to read before you made a profession of
reading. Bishop said, dubiously, did he really think so? And Physician
said, decidedly, yes, he did.
He criticised, too, the reading in the school visited in an American city,
because "the girls blundered through three or four dreary passages,
obviously without comprehending ten words," and said "he would have been
much better pleased if they had been asked to read some simpler selections
which they could understand."
Mr. Wegg, when reading for Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, "read on by
rote, and attached as few ideas as possible to the text."
He discusses the advantages of reading suitable books in David
Copperfield, giving to David his own real experience in early boyhood.
After describing the cruel treatment of the Murdstones, he says:
The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose, for some
six months, was to make me sullen, dull, and dogged. I was not made
the less so by my sense of being daily more and more shut out and
alienated from my mother. I believe I should have been almost
stupefied but for one circumstance.
It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a
little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it joined my own) and
which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little
room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones,
The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe,
came out, a glorious host to keep me company. They kept alive my
fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time--they, and
the Arabian Nights, and the tales of the Genii.
His faith in the influence of reading increased as he grew older. In Our
Mutual Friend he says: "No one who can read ever looks at a book, even
unopened on a shelf, like one who can not read."
Dickens taught a useful lesson in Martin Chuzzlewit regarding the way
teachers used to be treated by society. Even yet there is need of a higher
recognition of the teaching profession in its true dignity by a
civilization that reverences wealth more than intellectual and spiritual
character.
Tom Pinch's sister was engaged in the family of a wealthy brass founder.
She was treated contemptuously by him and his wife, yet they complained to
Tom that his sister was unable to command the respect of her pupil. Tom
was naturally indignant, and he spoke his mind very clearly to the brass
founder.
"Sir!" cried Tom, after regarding him in silence for some time. "If
you do not understand what I mean I will tell you. My meaning is that
no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades."
"When you tell me," resumed Tom, who was not the less indignant for
keeping himself quiet, "that my sister has no innate power of
commanding the respect of your children, I must tell you it is not so;
and that she has. She is as well bred, as well taught, as well
qualified by Nature to command respect as any hirer of a governess you
know. But when you place her at a disadvantage in reference to every
servant in your house, how can you suppose, if you have the gift of
common sense, that she is not in a tenfold worse position in reference
to your daughters?"
"Pretty well! Upon my word," exclaimed the gentleman, "that is pretty
well!"
"It is very ill, sir," said Tom. "It is very bad and mean and wrong
and cruel. Respect! I believe young people are quick enough to observe
and imitate; and why or how should they respect whom no one else
respects, and everybody slights? And very partial they must grow--oh,
very partial!--to their studies, when they see to what a pass
proficiency in those same tasks has brought their governess! Respect!
Put anything the most deserving of respect before your daughters in
the light in which you place her, and you will bring it down as low,
no matter what it is!"
"You speak with extreme impertinence, young man," observed the
gentleman.
"I speak without passion, but with extreme indignation and contempt
for such a course of treatment, and for all who practise it," said
Tom. "Why, how can you, as an honest gentleman, profess displeasure or
surprise at your daughter telling my sister she is something beggarly
and humble when you are forever telling her the same thing yourself in
fifty plain, outspeaking ways, though not in words; and when your very
porter and footman make the same delicate announcement to all comers?"
Dickens described a great variety of weak, and mean, and selfish, and
degraded people in order to expose weakness, and meanness, and
selfishness, and baseness, so that humanity might learn to overcome them,
but he reserved his supreme contempt for those who oppose the general
education of "the masses," because it fills their mind with ideas above
their station, or disqualifies them for the work they were intended to do.
This being interpreted, means in plain language that certain human beings
who, because they possess wealth, or belong to what they arrogantly call
the "upper classes," claim the right to dominate those who have not a
sufficient amount of money to be independent of them; to fix what they
selfishly call "the sphere of the lower classes"; and to prescribe the
limits beyond which the children of the poor must not be educated, lest
they be lifted beyond tame subserviency to their natural lords and
masters, and fail to abase themselves dutifully or to be sufficiently
grateful to those above them for the pittance they grudgingly give them
for labouring in the menial occupations assigned them.
Dickens despised all Barnacles, and Dedlocks, and Podsnaps, and Dombeys,
and Merdles; he ridiculed all who violate the sacred bond of human
brotherhood; but the vials of his bitterest wrath were poured upon those
who because a child was born in the home of poor parents would therefore
restrict its education and dwarf its soul.
Mr. Dombey, after the christening of Paul, called Mrs. Toodle before his
guests, and in a very condescending but rigidly majestic manner told her
he had graciously decided to send her son to the school of the Charitable
Grinders. He prefaced his announcement by a brief statement of his views
regarding education:
"I am far from being friendly," pursued Mr. Dombey, "to what is called
by persons of levelling sentiments, general education. But it is
necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be taught to
know their position, and to conduct themselves properly. So far I
approve of schools."
In Mr. Dombey's eyes, as in some others that occasionally see the
light, they only achieved that mighty piece of knowledge, the
understanding of their own position, who showed a fitting reverence
for his. It was not so much their merit that they knew themselves, as
that they knew him, and bowed low before him.
There are thousands of Dombeys still. Two Canadian judges recently said in
speaking of education precisely what Mr. Dombey and his class said in the
time of Dickens. One objected to educating the common people because it
unfitted them for positions as house servants, and made them so
outrageously independent that they would not bow (bend their bodies
properly, bow their heads, and look reverently at the floor) when in the
presence of their mistresses. The other said that the very derivation of
the word "education" meant to lead out, and it was therefore clear that
"education should be used to develop a few, 'lead them out,' beyond the
masses in order that they might be qualified for leadership." The
necessary development to be imposed upon all but the favoured few in his
system of government is willingness to follow leaders, and ignorance is
the only condition that can make this possible. The glory of education is
the awakening of the consciousness of freedom in the soul of the race and
the revelation of the perfect law of liberty--individual right, social
duty. The shackles, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, have fallen
from humanity, as education has done its true work of emancipating the
individual soul and revealing its own value and its responsibility for its
brother souls.
The most brutal of all the characters described by Dickens is Bill Sikes.
The most degraded and despicable of his characters is Dennis the hangman
in Barnaby Rudge. Dickens makes Bill Sikes and Dennis use the very same
arguments, from their standpoint, that the so-called upper classes have
used and still do use against the education of the masses.
Bill Sikes, referring to the need of small boys in the trade of burglary,
said:
"I want a boy, and he mustn't be a big 'un. Lord!" said Mr. Sikes,
reflectively, "if I'd only got that young boy of Ned, the chimbley
sweeper's! He kept him small on purpose, and let him out by the job.
But the father gets lagged; and then the Juvenile Delinquent Society
comes and takes the boy away from a trade where he was arning money,
teaches him to read and write, and in time makes a 'prentice of him.
And so they go on," said Mr. Sikes, his wrath rising with the
recollection of his wrongs, "so they go on; and, if they'd got money
enough (which it's a Providence they haven't), we shouldn't have half
a dozen boys left in the whole trade in a year or two."
And Fagin agreed with Bill Sikes.
When Hugh was formally admitted as a member of Lord Gordon's mob Dennis
the hangman was much delighted at the addition of such a strong young man
to the ranks, and Dickens adds:
If anything could have exceeded Mr. Dennis's joy on the happy
conclusion of this ceremony it would have been the rapture with which
he received the announcement that the new member could neither read
nor write: those two arts being (as Mr. Dennis swore) the greatest
possible curse a civilized community could know, and militating more
against the professional emoluments and usefulness of the great
constitutional office he had the honour to hold than any adverse
circumstances that could present themselves to his imagination.
Bill Sikes objected to education because it spoiled the boys for the trade
for which he required them; Dennis the hangman objected to education
because "it reduced the professional emoluments of his great
constitutional office," or, in other words, reduced the number who had to
be hanged; and their reasons are just as respectable as the reason given
by any man in any position who objects to free education because it unfits
boys for certain trades, or girls for "service," or because "it fills
their minds with ideas above their station," or because they have to pay
their just share of its cost, or for any other narrow and selfish reason.
Selfishness is selfishness, and it is as utterly loathsome in a bishop as
in Bill Sikes, in a judge as in Dennis the hangman.
Dickens never did any more artistic work than when he painted the
aristocratic objectors to popular education in their natural hideousness
with Bill Sikes and Dennis the hangman for a harmonious background.