  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. “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 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 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: 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 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 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, 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 “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.” “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 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 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 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 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 “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 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 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: 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.” 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 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.” 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 “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, 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 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 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.” “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 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 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 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 “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. |
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