THE TRAINING OF POOR, NEGLECTED, AND DEFECTIVE CHILDREN.
It is a singular fact that humanity in its highest development so long
neglected the poor, and the weak, and the defective. They were practically
left out of consideration by educators and philanthropists. The fact that
they more than any others needed education and care was not seen clearly
enough to lead to definite plans for the amelioration of their misfortunes
until the nineteenth century. Dickens must always have the honour of being
the great English apostle of the poor--especially of neglected childhood.
He wrote in the Uncommercial Traveller:
I can find--_must_ find, whether I will or no--in the open streets,
shameful instances of neglect of children, intolerable toleration of
the engenderment of paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched and
destructive cripples both in body and mind; a misery to themselves, a
misery to the community, a disgrace to civilization, and an outrage on
Christianity. I know it to be a fact as easy of demonstration as any
sum in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the State
would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would with the
strong hand take those children out of the streets while they are yet
children, and wisely train them, it would make them a part of
England's glory, not its shame--of England's strength, not its
weakness--would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good citizens,
and many great men out of the seeds of its criminal population; it
would clear London streets of the most terrible objects they smite the
sight with--myriads of little children who awfully reverse our
Saviour's words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the
Kingdom of Hell.
He sympathized with childhood on account of every form of coercion and
abuse practised upon it by tyrannical, selfish, or ignorant adulthood,
under the most favourable conditions; but his great heart was especially
tender toward the little ones who, in addition to coercion and abuse, and
bad training by the selfish, the ignorant, and the careless, were
compelled to endure the terrible sufferings and deprivations of poverty.
He was conscious not only of the material and physical evils to which the
children of the very poor were exposed, but of the mental and spiritual
barrenness of their lives, and one of his most manifest educational
purposes was to improve social conditions, to arouse the spirit of truly
sympathetic brotherhood (not merely considerate altruism, but genuine
brotherhood) to place the poorest children in conditions that would
develop by experience the apperceptive centres of intellectual and
spiritual growth, and to direct special attention to the urgent need of
education for the blind, the deaf, and the mentally defective.
No other American touched his heart and won his reverence quite so
thoroughly as Dr. Howe, of Boston, who will undoubtedly be recognised as
one of the greatest men yet produced by American civilization when men are
tested by their purposes, and by their unselfish work for humanity in
hitherto untrodden paths. After describing Dr. Howe's work for the blind,
he reverently says: "There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who,
after reading these passages, can ever hear that name with indifference."
Dickens charged on humanity, on society, the crime of making criminals. He
said with great force and truth in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit:
Nothing is more common in real life than a want of profitable
reflection on the causes of many vices and crimes that awaken general
horror. What is substantially true of families in this respect, is
true of a whole commonwealth. As we sow, we reap. Let the reader go
into the children's side of any prison in England, or, I grieve to
add, of many workhouses, and judge whether those are monsters who
disgrace our streets, people our hulks and penitentiaries, and
overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom we have
deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin.
This thought was the motive that led him throughout his whole life to try
to arouse sympathetic interest of the most active kind in the conditions
and circumstances of the poor.
One of his most striking appeals to thoughtful people is made in Martin
Chuzzlewit. These profound words will always be worthy of careful study by
teachers and reformers:
Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in
every sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in
God's highway, so smooth below your carriage wheels, so rough beneath
the tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift
descent of men who _have_ lived in their own esteem, that there are
scores of thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful
toil, who in that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a
chance of life! Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred bard who
had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never
seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go,
teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the
forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of
man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul
that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!
And, oh! ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of Christian
knowledge, who soundingly appeal to human nature, see that it be human
first. Take heed it has not been transformed, during your slumber and
the sleep of generations, into the nature of the beasts.
Dickens saw clearly the depravity of human nature, but he looked beyond
the depravity to its cause, and he found a natural cause for the
degradation, but not the cause that had been commonly assigned. He taught
that the highest and holiest elements in human nature were the causes of
its swiftest deterioration when misused, perverted, or neglected.
Alice Marwood, in Dombey and Son, was introduced to teach parents and
society in general the duties they owe to childhood, and to show how lives
are wrecked by neglect and by a false use of power. When she returned, an
outcast, to her mother, and her mother upbraided her, the young woman
said:
"I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me
as well as you. Come back harder? Of course I have come back harder.
What else did you expect?"
"Harder to me! To her own dear mother!" cried the old woman.
"I don't know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn't,"
she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and
compressed lips, as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every
softer feeling from her breast. "Listen, mother, to a word or two. If
we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps.
I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful
enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been
very dutiful to me?"
"I!" cried the old woman. "To my own gal! A mother dutiful to her own
child!"
"It sounds unnatural, don't it?" returned the daughter, looking coldly
on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; "but I have
thought of it sometimes, in the course of _my_ lone years, till I have
got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but
it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and
then--to pass away the time--whether no one ever owed any duty to me."
Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but whether
angrily, or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical
infirmity, did not appear.
"There was a child called Alice Marwood," said the daughter with a
laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself,
"born among poverty and neglect, and nurtured in it. Nobody taught
her, nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her."
"Nobody!" echoed the mother, pointing to herself and striking her
breast.
"The only care she knew," returned the daughter, "was to be beaten,
and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better
without that. She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a
crowd of little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks
out of this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have
been hunted and worried to death for ugliness."
"Go on! go on!" exclaimed the mother.
"She'll soon have ended," said the daughter. "There was a criminal
called Alice Marwood--a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And
she was tried, and she was sentenced. And Lord, how the gentlemen in
the court talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty,
and on her having perverted the gifts of Nature--as if he didn't know
better than anybody there that they had been made curses to her!--and
how he preached about the strong arm of the Law--so very strong to
save her, when she was an innocent and helpless little wretch! and how
solemn and religious it all was! I have thought of that many times
since, to be sure!"
She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone that
made the howl of the old woman musical.
"So Alice Marwood was transported, mother," she pursued, "and was sent
to learn her duty where there was twenty times less duty, and more
wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood is
come back a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this. In
good time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more
strong arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her; but the
gentlemen needn't be afraid of being thrown out of work. There's
crowds of little wretches, boy and girl, growing up in any of the
streets they live in, that'll keep them to it till they've made their
fortunes."
Bleak House is one of the greatest of the educational works of Dickens.
One of its chief aims was to arouse a sympathetic interest in the lives of
poor children. The Neckett children, Charlotte, and Tom, and Emma,
revealed a new world to many thousands of good people.
"Charley, Charley!" said my guardian. "How old are you?"
"Over thirteen, sir," replied the child.
"Oh! what a great age," said my guardian. "What a great age, Charley!"
"And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?" said my
guardian.
"Yes, sir," returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect
confidence, "since father died."
"And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley," said my guardian, turning
his face away for a moment, "how do you live?"
"Since my father died, sir, I've gone out to work. I'm out washing
to-day."
"God help you, Charley!" said my guardian. "You're not tall enough to
reach the tub!"
"In pattens I am, sir," she said, quickly. "I've got a high pair as
belonged to mother."
"And when did mother die? Poor mother!"
"Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at
the face upon her bosom. "Then father said I was to be as good a
mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home, and
did cleaning and nursing and washing, for a long time before I began
to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir?"
"And do you often go out?"
"As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes, and smiling,
"because of earning sixpences and shillings!"
"And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?"
"To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see?" said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder
comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps
I can run in sometimes, and they can play, you know, and Tom ain't
afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?"
"No-o!" said Tom stoutly.
"When it comes on dark the lamps are lighted down in the court, and
they show up here quite bright--almost quite bright. Don't they, Tom?"
"Yes, Charley," said Tom; "almost quite bright."
The hearts must be hard that are not moved to a deeper and more practical
interest in the children of the poor by this pathetic story, and others of
a kindred character which Dickens told over and over again for the
Christian world to study. And the study led to feeling and thought and
co-operative action.
The fruits of these wonderful stories are the splendid homes, and
organizations for children, and the laws to protect them from cruelty by
parents or teachers, or employers, and the free public schools to educate
them, and the joy, and happiness, and freedom, that are taking the place
of the sorrow, and tears, and coercion of the time when Dickens began his
noble work.
The tragic story of poor Jo illustrated the poverty, the ignorance, the
destitution, the hopelessness, the barrenness, and the dreadful
environment of a London street boy. The world has done much better since,
as Dickens prophesied it would do, and the good work is going on. Hundreds
of thousands of the poor Joes of London are now in the public schools of
London alone of whom the Christian philanthropy of the world thought
little till Dickens told his stories.
In Nobody's Story Dickens returns to his special purpose of changing the
attitude of civilization toward the education of the poor. The Bigwigs
represent society, and "the man" means the poor man.
But the Bigwig family broke out into violent family quarrels
concerning what it was lawful to teach to this man's children. Some of
the family insisted on such a thing being primary and indispensable
above all other things; and others of the family insisted on such
another thing being primary and indispensable above all other things;
and the Bigwig family, rent into factions, wrote pamphlets, held
convocations, delivered charges, orations, and all varieties of
discourses; impounded one another in courts Lay and courts
Ecclesiastical; threw dirt, exchanged pummellings, and fell together
by the ears in unintelligible animosity. Meanwhile, this man, in his
short evening snatches at his fireside, saw the demon Ignorance arise
there, and take his children to itself. He saw his daughter perverted
into a heavy slatternly drudge; he saw his son go moping down the ways
of low sensuality, to brutality and crime; he saw the dawning light of
intelligence in the eyes of his babies so changing into cunning and
suspicion, that he could have rather wished them idiots.
Dickens objected to a certain kind of sentimentality exhibited in his day
toward criminals, and draws a very suggestive picture full of elements
for psychological study in David Copperfield, in which he makes the brutal
schoolmaster Creakle a very considerate Middlesex magistrate, with an
unfailing system for a quick and effective method of converting the
wickedest scoundrels into the most submissive, Scripture-quoting saints by
solitary confinement. Dickens did not approve of the system, and he did
not approve either of the plan of the spending of so much money by the
state in erecting splendid buildings for criminals, while the honest poor
were in hovels, and especially while the state allowed the boys and girls,
through neglect, to be transformed into criminals by thousands every year.
Dickens would have made criminals earn their own living, and he urged the
establishment of industrial schools for the boys and girls of the streets,
so that they might become respectable, intelligent, self-reliant,
law-abiding citizens instead of criminals.
David said:
Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was powerful.
It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I
could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar
would have been made in the country if any deluded man had proposed to
spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial
school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.
As usual with great reformers, the philanthropists of his own day refused
to accept the theories of Dickens, but succeeding generations adopted
them. The reforms for which he pleaded began to be practised so soon
because he winged his thought with living appeals to the deepest, truest
feelings of the human heart.
Dickens said truly of Barnaby Rudge:
"The absence of the soul is far more terrible in a living man than in
a dead one; and in this unfortunate being its noblest powers were
wanting."
He pleaded again for those who are weak-minded in Mr. Dick's case in David
Copperfield. Mr. Dick was evidently introduced into the story to show the
effect of kind treatment on those who are defective in intellect. The
insane were flogged and put in strait-jackets in the time of Dickens. His
teaching is now the practice of the civilized world. The insane are kindly
treated, and weak-minded children are taught in good schools by the best
teachers that can be obtained for them.
Betsy Trotwood, David's aunt, was an embodiment of a good heart united
with an eminently practical head. She did not talk about religion, as did
the Murdstones, but she showed her religious life in good, reasonable,
self-sacrificing, helpful living. David asked her for an explanation of
Mr. Dick's case.
"He has been _called_ mad," said my aunt. "I have a selfish pleasure
in saying he has been called mad, or I should not have had the benefit
of his society and advice for these last ten years and upward--in
fact, ever since your sister, Betsy Trotwood, disappointed me."
"So long as that?" I said.
"And nice people they were, who had the audacity to call him mad,"
pursued my aunt. "Mr. Dick is a sort of distant connection of mine--it
doesn't matter how; I needn't enter into that. If it hadn't been for
me, his own brother would have shut him up for life. That's all."
I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my aunt felt
strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt strongly too.
"A proud fool!" said my aunt. "Because his brother was a little
eccentric--though he is not half so eccentric as a good many
people--he didn't like to have him visible about the house, and sent
him away to some private asylum place; though he had been left to his
particular care by their deceased father, who thought him almost a
natural. And a wise man _he_ must have been to think so! Mad himself,
no doubt."
Again, as my aunt looked quite convinced, I endeavoured to look quite
convinced also.
"So I stepped in," said my aunt, "and made him an offer. I said, 'Your
brother's sane--a great deal more sane than you are, or ever will be,
it is to be hoped. Let him have his little income, and come and live
with me. _I_ am not afraid of him; _I_ am not proud; _I_ am ready to
take care of him, and shall not ill treat him as some people (besides
the asylum folks) have done.' After a good deal of squabbling," said
my aunt, "I got him; and he has been here ever since. He is the most
friendly and amenable creature in existence; and as for advice!--but
nobody knows what that man's mind is, except myself."
Dickens was greatly delighted with the asylums of the United States, and
he strongly advocated the adoption in England of American methods of
treating the insane. He says, in American Notes:
At South Boston, as it is called, in a situation excellently adapted
for the purpose, several charitable institutions are clustered
together. One of these is the State Hospital for the Insane; admirably
conducted on those enlightened principles of conciliation and
kindness, which twenty years ago would have been worse than heretical,
and which have been acted upon with so much success in our own pauper
asylum at Hanwell. "Evince a desire to show some confidence, and
repose some trust, even in mad people," said the resident physician,
as we walked along the galleries, his patients flocking round us
unrestrained. Of those who deny or doubt the wisdom of this maxim
after witnessing its effects, if there be such people still alive, I
can only say that I hope I may never be summoned as a juryman on a
commission of lunacy whereof they are the subjects; for I should
certainly find them out of their senses, on such evidence alone.
Each ward in this institution is shaped like a long gallery or hall,
with the dormitories of the patients opening from it on either hand.
Here they work, read, play at skittles, and other games; and, when the
weather does not admit of their taking exercise out of doors, pass the
day together. In one of these rooms, seated, calmly, and quite as a
matter of course, among a throng of mad women, black and white, were
the physician's wife and another lady, with a couple of children.
These ladies were graceful and handsome; and it was not difficult to
perceive at a glance that even their presence there had a highly
beneficial influence on the patients who were grouped about them.
Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a
knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman whose
manner of dealing with his charges I have just described. At every
meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among them from
cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that influence is
reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even as a means of
restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a hundred times
more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, fetters, and
handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have manufactured
since the creation of the world.
How much those benighted teachers who so tragically ask "What _can_ you do
with bad boys, if you do _not_ use corporal punishment?" might learn from
the last sentence!
Blinded by old ideals, these teachers whip away, admitting that they fail
to reform many of the best boys, and quieting their consciences with the
horrible thought that the evil course was the natural one for the boys,
and that they are not responsible for their blighted lives. They comfort
themselves with the thought that it is God's business, and if he made a
boy so bad that flogging would not reform him, they at any rate are free
from blame, because they "have beaten, and beaten, and beaten him, and it
did him no good." Having beaten him, and beaten him, and beaten him, they
rest contented with the sure conviction that they have faithfully done
their duty; and when, perchance, the poor boy becomes a criminal, they
solemnly say without a blush or a pang: "I knew he would come to a bad
end, but I am so thankful that I did my duty to him."
Ignominious failure to save the brave boys who are not cowardly enough to
be deterred from doing wrong by beating has taught nothing to some
teachers. Even yet they placidly beat on, and get angry if they are
requested to try freedom as a substitute for coercion in the training of
beings created in God's image. They even question the sanity and the
theology of those who dare to doubt the efficiency of the sacred rod. They
do not deem it possible that by studying the child and their own higher
powers they could find easier, pleasanter, and infinitely more successful
methods of guiding a boy to a true, strong life than by beating, and
beating, and beating him.
The keepers of asylums in the time of Dickens were equally severe on the
wise friends of the insane. They honestly believed that terrible evils
would necessarily result from giving greater freedom to the afflicted
patients in asylums. Dickens took the side of freedom and common sense,
and the strait-jackets, and handcuffs, and fetters have been taken off,
and, _even as a means of restraint_, kindness and freedom have done better
work than all the coercive fetters that "ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty
have manufactured since the creation of the world."
So all teachers who have grown wise enough have found that kindness and
freedom are much better even as restraining agents, and infinitely better
in the development of true, independent, positive, progressive characters
than all the coercive terrors of rod, rule, strap, rawhide, or any form of
cruelty ever practised on helpless childhood by ignorance, prejudice, and
perverted theology since the creation of the world.
In American Notes Dickens gave a long description of Laura Bridgman
written by Dr. Howe, and showed his intense interest in what was then a
new movement in favour of the education of the blind.
Speaking of Laura Bridgman, Dickens himself wrote:
The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room before a
girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell, and nearly so of
taste; before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and
hope, and power of goodness and affection inclosed within her delicate
frame, and but one outward sense--the sense of touch. There she was
before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any
ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping
through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that
an immortal soul might be awakened.
Long before I looked upon her the help had come. Her face was radiant
with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands,
was bound about her head, whose intellectual capacity and development
were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open
brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and
simplicity; the work she had knitted lay beside her; her writing book
was on the desk she leaned upon. From the mournful ruin of such
bereavement there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless,
grateful-hearted being.
The touching story of Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter was intended to
arouse interest in blind children.
Doctor Marigold should be one of the best beloved of all the beautiful
characters of Dickens. If any kind of language could awaken an intense
interest in the education of deaf-mutes, the story of the dear old Cheap
Jack must surely do it.
The sad picture of the cruel treatment of his own little Sophy by her
mother; of her dying on his shoulder while he was selling his wares to the
crowd, whispering fondly to her between his jokes; and the suicide of the
mother, when she afterward saw another woman beating her child, and heard
the child cry piteously, "Don't beat me! Oh, mother, mother,
mother!"--these prepare the heart for full appreciation of the tender,
considerate, and intelligent treatment of the deaf-mute child adopted by
Doctor Marigold in Sophy's place.
I went to that Fair as a mere civilian, leaving the cart outside the
town, and I looked about the back of the Vans while the performing was
going on, and at last, sitting dozing against a muddy cart wheel, I
come upon the poor girl who was deaf and dumb. At the first look I
might almost have judged that she had escaped from the Wild Beast
Show; but at the second I thought better of her, and thought that if
she was more cared for and more kindly used she would be like my
child. She was just the same age that my own daughter would have been,
if her pretty head had not fell down upon my shoulder that unfortunate
night.
It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel in
the cart. I at once gave her the name of Sophy, to put her ever toward
me in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to begin to
understand one another, through the goodness of the Heavens, when she
knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a very little time she
was wonderful fond of me. You have no idea what it is to have anybody
wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon
by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the
better of me.
You'd have laughed--or the rewerse--it's according to your
disposition--if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At first
I was helped--you'd never guess by what--milestones. I got some large
alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of bone, and say
we was going to WINDSOR; I gave her those letters in that order, and
then at every milestone I showed her those same letters in that same
order again, and pointed toward the abode of royalty. Another time I
give her CART, and then chalked the same upon the cart. Another time I
give her DOCTOR MARIGOLD, and hung a corresponding inscription outside
my waistcoat. People that met us might stare a bit and laugh, but what
did _I_ care if she caught the idea? She caught it after long patience
and trouble, and then we did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe
you! At first she was a little given to consider me the cart, and the
cart the abode of royalty, but that soon wore off.
The way she learned to understand any look of mine was truly
surprising. When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart, unseen
by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes when I
looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or articles
I wanted. And then she would clap her hands, and laugh for joy. And as
for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she was when I
first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged, leaning asleep
against the muddy cart wheel, it give me such heart that I gained a
greater height of reputation than ever.
This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen years old. By
which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole duty
by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching than I
could give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I commenced
explaining my views to her; but what's right is right, and you can't
neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character.
So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf
and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to speak
to us, I says to him: "Now, I'll tell you what I'll do with you, sir.
I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have laid by for a
rainy day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter (adopted), and you
can't produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her the most that can be
taught her in the shortest separation that can be named--state the
figure for it--and I am game to put the money down. I won't bate you
single farthing, sir, but I'll put down the money here and now, and
I'll thankfully throw you in a pound to take it. There!" The gentleman
smiled, and then, "Well, well," says he, "I must first know what she
has learned already. How do you communicate with her?" Then I showed
him, and she wrote in printed writing many names of things and so
forth; and we held some sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a
little story in a book which the gentleman showed her, and which she
was able to read. "This is most extraordinary," says the gentleman;
"is it possible that you have been her only teacher?" "I have been her
only teacher, sir," I says, "besides herself." "Then," says the
gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, "you're a
clever fellow, and a good fellow." This he makes known to Sophy, who
kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it.
"Now, Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter to
know?"
"I want her, sir, to be cut off from the world as little as can be,
considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read
whatever is wrote with perfect ease and pleasure."
No one ever read this story and its delightful closing without being more
deeply interested in deaf-mutes and their education.
All the children, especially poor and defective children, should be taught
how much they owe to Dickens, that they might reverently love his memory.
One of the most awful pictures shown to Scrooge by the Phantom was the
picture of the two "wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable
children."
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish;
but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should
have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest
tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and
twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have
sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no
degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the
mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and
dread.
"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they
cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This
girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of
all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,
unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching
out its hand toward the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it
for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!"
Dickens bravely fought the battle against the enemies of the children, and
helped to win the grandest victories of Christian civilization.
THE END.
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