Dickens As an Educator :: CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DOCTRINE OF CHILD DEPRAVITY.

Dickens heartily accepted Froebel’s view of the doctrine of child depravity. They did not teach that the child is totally divine, but neither did they believe that a being created in God’s image is entirely depraved.

They recognised very clearly that the doctrine of child depravity was the logical (or illogical) basis of the theory of corporal punishment and all forms of coercion. What more natural or more logical than the practice of checking the outflow of a child’s inner life if we believe his inner life to be depraved? The firm belief in the doctrine of child depravity compelled conscientious men to be repressive and coercive in their discipline. Dickens understood this fully, and therefore he gave the doctrine no place in his philosophy.

Mrs. Pipchin’s training was based squarely on the doctrine of child depravity, for “the secret of her management of children was to give them everything that they didn’t like, and nothing that they did.” If the training of children under the “good old rÉgime,” for which some reactionary philosophers are still pleading, is carefully analyzed, it will be found that Mrs. Pipchin’s plan was the commonly approved plan, and it was the perfectly logical outcome of the doctrine that the child, being wholly depraved, desired everything it should not have and objected to everything it should have.

That was a touching question addressed by a little boy to his father: “Say, papa, did mamma stop you from doing everything you wished to do when you were a little boy?”

How Dickens despised the awful theology of the Murdstones, who would not let David play with other children, because they believed “all children to be a swarm of little vipers [though there was a child once set in the midst of the Disciples], and held that they contaminated one another”!

How he laughed at Mrs. Varden and Miggs, her maid!

“If you hadn’t the sweetness of an angel in you, mim, I don’t think you could abear it, I raly don’t.”

“Miggs,” said Mrs. Varden, “you’re profane.”

“Begging your pardon, mim,” returned Miggs with shrill rapidity, “such was not my intentions, and such I hope is not my character, though I am but a servant.”

“Answering me, Miggs, and providing yourself,” retorted her mistress, looking round with dignity, “is one and the same thing. How dare you speak of angels in connection with your sinful fellow-beings—mere”—said Mrs. Varden, glancing at herself in a neighbouring mirror, and arranging the ribbon of her cap in a more becoming fashion—“mere worms and grovellers as we are!”

“I do not intend, mim, if you please, to give offence,” said Miggs, confident in the strength of her compliment, and developing strongly in the throat as usual, “and I did not expect it would be took as such. I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate and despise myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable Christian should.”

Oliver Twist was described by the philanthropists who cared for him as “under the exclusive patronage and protection of the powers of wickedness, and an article direct from the manufactory of the very devil himself.”

Mr. Grimwig had no faith in boys, and he tried hard to shake Mr. Brownlow’s faith in Oliver.

“He is a nice-looking boy, is he not?” inquired Mr. Brownlow.

“I don’t know,” replied Mr. Grimwig pettishly.

“Don’t know?”

“No. I don’t know. I never see any difference in boys. I only know two sorts of boys: mealy boys and beef-faced boys.”

“And which is Oliver?”“Mealy. I know a friend who has a beef-faced boy—a fine boy, they call him; with a round head, and red cheeks, and glaring eyes; a horrid boy; with a body and limbs that appear to be swelling out of the seams of his blue clothes; with the voice of a pilot, and the appetite of a wolf. I know him! The wretch!”

“Come,” said Mr. Brownlow, “these are not the characteristics of young Oliver Twist; so he needn’t excite your wrath.”

“They are not,” replied Mr. Grimwig. “He may have worse. He is deceiving you, my good friend.”

“I’ll swear he is not,” replied Mr. Brownlow warmly.

“If he is not,” said Mr. Grimwig, “I’ll——” and down went the stick.

“I’ll answer for that boy’s truth with my life!” said Mr. Brownlow, knocking the table.

“And I for his falsehood with my head!” rejoined Mr. Grimwig, knocking the table also.

“We shall see,” said Mr. Brownlow, checking his rising anger.

“We will,” replied Mr. Grimwig, with a provoking smile; “we will.”

Dickens always pleaded for more faith in children.

In Great Expectations poor Pip was continually reminded of the fact that he was “naterally wicious,” and at the great Christmas dinner party Mr. Pumblechook took him as the illustration of his theological discourse on “swine” and Mrs. Hubble commiserated Mrs. Gargery about the trouble he had caused her by all his waywardness.

“Trouble?” echoed my sister, “trouble?” And then entered on a fearful catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries I had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go there.

Again, when Pip was just beginning his life away from home his guardian, Mr. Jaggers, said to him at their first interview: “I shall by this means be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you outrunning the constable. Of course you’ll go wrong somehow, but that’s no fault of mine.”

“Of course you’ll go wrong somehow,” was an inspiring start in life for a young gentleman.

Abel Magwitch, Pip’s friend, told him near the close of his career how he came to lead such a dissipated and criminal life. He evidently had ability and possessed a deep sense of gratitude, and might have developed the other virtues if he had been treated properly. Dickens used him as an illustration of the fact that society fails often to do the best for a boy and make the most out of him through sheer lack of faith in childhood, and that this lack of faith results from the belief that a boy is so depraved that he would rather do wrong than right, and that when he starts to do wrong there is no hope of his reform.

“Dear boy and Pip’s comrade. I am not a-going fur to tell you my life, like a song or a story-book. But to give it you short and handy, I’ll put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you’ve got it. That’s my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend.

“I’ve been done everything to, pretty well—except hanged. I’ve been locked up, as much as a silver teakittle. I’ve been carted here and carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that town, and stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I’ve no more notion where I was born, than you have—if so much. I first become aware of myself, down in Essex, a-thieving turnips for my living. Summun had run away from me—a man—a tinker—and he’d took the fire with him, and left me wery cold.

“I know’d my name to be Magwitch, chrisen’d Abel. How did I know it? Much as I know’d the birds’ names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies altogether, only as the birds’ names come out true, I supposed mine did.

“So fur as I could find, there warn’t a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him, and either drove him off or took him up. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg’larly grow’d up took up.

“This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for there warn’t many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the name being hardened. ‘This is a terrible hardened one,’ they says to prison wisitors, picking out me. ‘May be said to live in jails, this boy.’ Then they looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured my head, some on ’em—they had better a-measured my stomach—and others on ’em giv’ me tracts what I couldn’t read, and made me speeches what I couldn’t understand. They always went on agen me about the devil.”

Poor old Toby Veck, in The Chimes, reflected the theories that Dickens wished to overthrow.

“It seems as if we can’t go right, or do right, or be righted,” said Toby. “I hadn’t much schooling, myself, when I was young; and I can’t make out whether we have any business on the face of the earth, or not. Sometimes I think we must have—a little; and sometimes I think we must be intruding. I get so puzzled sometimes that I am not even able to make up my mind whether there is any good at all in us, or whether we are born bad. We seem to be dreadful things; we seem to give a deal of trouble; we are always being complained of and guarded against.”

The most realistic picture of the influence of the child-depravity ideal on the training of childhood is given in Mrs. Clennam, in Little Dorrit. She was a hard, malignant, dishonest, unsympathetic woman, who had deliberately driven Arthur’s mother to madness and blighted his father’s life in the name of her false religion, and blasphemously claimed that she was doing it in God’s stead, as his devoted servant. Yet she was sure she was truly religious, and had a pious vanity in the fact that she was “filled with an abhorrence of evil doers.” She was filled with gladness, too, at the prospect of marrying a man of like training with herself. Speaking of the training of herself and her husband she said:

“You do not know what it is to be brought up strictly and straitly. I was so brought up. Mine was no light youth of sinful gaiety and pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment, and fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse that is upon us, the terrors that surround us—these were the themes of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me with an abhorrence of evil doers. When old Mr. Gilbert Clennam proposed his orphan nephew to my father for my husband, my father impressed upon me that his bringing-up had been, like mine, one of severe restraint. He told me, that besides the discipline his spirit had undergone, he had lived in a starved house, where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last. He told me that he had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged him as one; and that from his school days to that hour, his uncle’s roof had been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious and dissolute.”

Speaking of her training of Arthur, she said:

“I devoted myself to reclaim the otherwise predestined and lost boy; to bring him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of practical contrition for the sins that were heavy on his head before his entrance into this condemned world.”

Dickens describes her religious character as such as might naturally be expected to develop in a woman whose childhood revealed to her only the self-abnegation and terrors of religion and the utter contempt for humanity shrouded in the doctrine of child depravity. She had seen God as an awful character of sleepless watchfulness to see her evil doing and record it, of wrathfulness, and of vengeance, but never of loving sympathy and forgiveness. So she fitted her religion to the character that such training had formed in her.

Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion, veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her. Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she built up to scale heaven.

The old discipline and the old training were based on the belief that children like to do wrong better than to do right. There could be no greater error, or one more certain to lead to false principles of training, and prevent the recognition of the true methods of developing character in childhood.

Children do not like to do wrong better than to do right. They like to do. They like to do the things they themselves plan to do. They like to do the things that are interesting to themselves. Their lack of wisdom leaves them at the mercy of their interests, and without guidance their constructiveness may turn to destructiveness. When it does so, it is because of the neglect of their adult guides to surround them with plenty of suitable material for construction or transformation adapted to their stage of development. With a sufficient variety of material for constructive plays the child will rarely exhibit destructive tendencies, and when he does so, the wisdom of his adult guide should find little trouble in changing his interest centre from the wrong to the right. The skilful trainer changes the interest centre without making the child conscious of adult interference.

It costs little to supply the child with sand and blocks, and soft clay, and colors, and colored paper, and blunt scissors and gum, and other similar materials—much less than is usually spent for toys; yet such materials would save parents from much worry, and help them to get rid of the wrong ideals, and they would preserve the natural tendency of children to constructiveness, and afford them an opportunity for the comfort and the development of real self-activity.

The child’s most dominant tendency is activity in using the material things of his environment to transform them into new forms or relationships in harmony with his own plans. This tendency is intended to accomplish four great purposes in the child’s development. It reveals the child’s own powers to himself, it develops his originality, it trains him to use his constructive powers, and it gives him the habit of transforming his environment to suit his own plans. If he is not supplied with suitable material to play with he will appropriate the material he finds most available. In this way, through the absolute neglect of his adult guides, he has acquired a bad reputation.

The instinct that leads the child to transform his material environment should lead to the conscious desire and determination to improve the physical, intellectual, and spiritual conditions around him at maturity. It is therefore a very essential element in his training, and to check or neglect it may weaken and warp his character as much as it was intended to strengthen and direct it.

Thus the children have been coerced because men believed them to be depraved, and the coercion has developed the apparent depravity.

The darkest clouds have been lifted from the vision of adults and from the lives of the little ones by the breaking of the power of the doctrine of child depravity. The teacher especially has a more hopeful field opened to him. His great work of training is no longer restricted to putting blinders on the eyes of children to prevent their seeing evil, and bits in their mouths to keep them from going wrong. He believes that every child has an element of divinity, however small and enfeebled by heredity or encrusted by evil environment, and that his chief duty is to arouse this divinity (his selfhood or individuality) to consciousness and start it on its conscious growth toward the divine. The revelation of this new and grander ideal has led to all intelligent child study for the purpose of discovering what adulthood can do, and especially what childhood itself can do, in accomplishing its most perfect training for its highest destiny.

Dickens expressed his general faith in childhood in Mrs. Lirriper’s remark to the Major about Jemmy:

“Ah, Major,” I says, drying my eyes, “we needn’t have been afraid. We might have known it. Treachery don’t come natural to beaming youth; but trust and pity, love and constancy—they do, thank God!”

He taught his philosophy of the origin of many of the evils that are attributed to child depravity in Nobody’s Story. “Nobody” means the workingman. He says to the Master:

“The evil consequences of imperfect instruction, the evil consequences of pernicious neglect, the evil consequences of unnatural restraint and the denial of humanizing enjoyments, will all come from us, and none of them will stop with us. They will spread far and wide. They always do; they always have done—just like the pestilence. I understand so much, I think, at last.”

There is profoundness in these doctrines.

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