Dickens As an Educator Part 12

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.

d.i.c.kens 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 G.o.d!"

He taught his philosophy of the origin of many of the evils that are attributed to child depravity in n.o.body's Story. "n.o.body" 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.

CHAPTER V.

CRAMMING.

Although d.i.c.kens paid much more attention in his writings to the methods of training than to the methods of teaching, he studied the methods of teaching sufficiently to recognise some of their gravest defects. Dombey and Son is unquestionably the greatest book ever written to expose the evils of cramming. Doctor Blimber, Cornelia, and Mr. Feeder, when closely studied, represent in the varied phases of their work all the worst forms of cramming.

Whenever a young gentleman was taken in hand by Doctor Blimber, he might consider himself sure of a pretty tight squeeze. The doctor only undertook the charge of ten young gentlemen, but he had always ready a supply of learning for a hundred, on the lowest estimate; it was at once the business and delight of his life to gorge the unhappy ten with it.

In fact, Doctor Blimber's establishment was a great hothouse, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys blew before their time. Mental green peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber's cultivation. Every description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the dryest twigs of boys, under the frostiest circ.u.mstances. Nature was of no consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern, somehow or other. This was all very pleasant and ingenious, but the system of forcing was attended with its usual disadvantages. There was not the right taste about the premature productions, and they didn't keep well. Moreover, one young gentleman, with a swollen nose and an excessively large head (the oldest of the ten who had "gone through" everything) suddenly left off blowing one day, and remained in the establishment a mere stalk. And people did say that the doctor had rather overdone it with young Toots, and that when he began to have whiskers he left off having brains.

The doctor was a portly gentleman in a suit of black, with strings at his knees, and stockings below them. He had a bald head, highly polished; a deep voice, and a chin so very double that it was a wonder how he ever managed to shave into the creases. He had likewise a pair of little eyes that were always half shut up and a mouth that was always half expanded into a grin, as if he had, that moment, posed a boy, and were waiting to convict him from his own lips. Insomuch that when the doctor put his right hand into the breast of his coat, and, with his other hand behind him and a scarcely perceptible wag of his head, made the commonest observation to a nervous stranger, it was like a sentiment from the sphinx, and settled his business.

Miss Blimber, too, although a slim and graceful maid, did no soft violence to the gravity of the house. There was no light nonsense about Miss Blimber. She kept her hair short and crisp, and wore spectacles. She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead--stone dead--and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a ghoul.

As to Mr. Feeder, B. A., Dr. Blimber's a.s.sistant, he was a kind of human barrel organ, with a little list of tunes at which he was continually working, over and over again, without any variation. He might have been fitted up with a change of barrels, perhaps, in early life, if his destiny had been favourable; but it had not been; and he had only one, with which, in a monotonous round, it was his occupation to bewilder the young ideas of Dr. Blimber's young gentlemen. The young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic pa.s.sages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in three weeks. He had all the care of the world on his head in three months.

He conceived bitter sentiments against his parents or guardians in four; he was an old misanthrope in five; envied Curtius that blessed refuge in the earth in six; and at the end of the first twelvemonth had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterward departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the world.

But he went on blow, blow, blowing, in the doctor's hothouse all the time; and the doctor's glory and reputation were great when he took his wintry growth home to his relations and friends.

Upon the doctor's doorsteps one day, Paul stood with a fluttering heart, and with his small right hand in his father's. His other hand was locked in that of Florence. How tight the tiny pressure of that one; and how loose and cool the other!

The doctor was sitting in his portentous study, with a globe at each knee, books all round him, Homer over the door, and Minerva on the mantelshelf. "And how do you do, sir?" he said to Mr. Dombey; "and how is my little friend?"

"Very well I thank you, sir," returned Paul, answering the clock quite as much as the doctor.

"Ha!" said Dr. Blimber. "Shall we make a man of him?"

"Do you hear, Paul?" added Mr. Dombey; Paul being silent.

"Shall we make a man of him?" repeated the doctor.

"I had rather be a child," replied Paul.

Paul's reply is one of the most touchingly beautiful of even d.i.c.kens's wonderful expressions--wonderful in their exquisite simplicity and their profound philosophy. When this book was written d.i.c.kens was beginning to get the conception of the great truth, which he ill.u.s.trated at length in Hard Times and other works, that it is a crime against a child to rob it of its childhood.

When Doctor Blimber in his cold, formal manner asked Paul "why he preferred to be a child," the little fellow was unable to answer, and as they stared at him, he at length put his hand on the neck of Florence and burst into tears.

"Mrs. Pipchin," said his father in a querulous manner, "I am really very sorry to see this."

"Never mind," said the doctor blandly, nodding his head to keep Mrs.

Pipchin back. "Nev-er mind; we shall subst.i.tute new cares and new impressions, Mr. Dombey, very shortly. You would still wish my little friend to acquire----"

"Everything, if you please, doctor," returned Mr. Dombey firmly.

"Yes," said the doctor, who, with his half-shut eyes and his usual smile, seemed to survey Paul with the sort of interest that might attach to some choice little animal he was going to stuff. "Yes, exactly. Ha! We shall impart a great variety of information to our little friend, and bring him quickly forward, I dare say. I dare say.

Quite a virgin soil, I believe you said, Mr. Dombey?"

On leaving, Mr. Dombey said to Paul:

"You'll try and learn a great deal here, and be a clever man, won't you?"

"I'll try," returned the child wearily.

"And you'll soon be grown up now?" said Mr. Dombey.

"Oh! very soon!" replied the child. Once more the old, old look pa.s.sed rapidly across his features like a strange light.

After his father and Florence had left him the doctor said to Cornelia:

"Cornelia, Dombey will be your charge at first. Bring him on, Cornelia, bring him on. Take him round the house, Cornelia, and familiarize him with his new sphere. Go with that young lady, Dombey."

Cornelia took him first to the schoolroom. Here there were eight young gentlemen in various stages of mental prostration, all very hard at work, and very grave indeed.

Mr. Feeder, B. A., had his Virgil stop on, and was slowly grinding that tune to four young gentlemen. Of the remaining four, two, who grasped their foreheads convulsively, were engaged in solving mathematical problems; one, with his face like a dirty window from much crying, was endeavouring to flounder through a hopeless number of lines before dinner; and one sat looking at his task in stony stupefaction and despair--which, it seemed, had been his condition ever since breakfast time.

After being shown through the dormitories, Cornelia told him dinner would be ready in fifteen minutes, and that in the meantime he had better go into the schoolroom among his "friends."

His friends were all dispersed about the room except the stony friend, who remained immovable. Mr. Feeder was stretching himself in his gray gown, as if, regardless of expense, he were resolved to pull the sleeves off.

"Heigh-ho-hum!" cried Mr. Feeder, shaking himself like a cart horse "oh dear me, dear me! Ya-a-a-ah!"

"You sleep in my room, don't you?" asked a solemn young gentleman, whose shirt collar curled up the lobes of his ears.

"Master Briggs?" inquired Paul.

"Tozer," said the young gentleman.

Paul answered yes; and Tozer, pointing out the stony pupil, said that it was Briggs. Paul had already felt certain that it must be either Briggs or Tozer, though he didn't know why.

"Is yours a strong const.i.tution?" inquired Tozer.

Paul said he thought not. Tozer replied that _he_ thought not also, judging from Paul's looks, and that it was a pity, for it need be. He then asked Paul if he were going to begin with Cornelia; and on Paul saying "Yes," all the young gentlemen (Briggs excepted) gave a low groan.