Dickens As an Educator Part 27

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 people that could possibly be laid hold of, to act as instructors of youth.

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 mark; and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what's expected of him, has any business to live longer."

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 coa.r.s.e 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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:

It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater part of it may be summed up in one word: Dollars. All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and a.s.sociations seemed to be melted down into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that worthless ballast, honour and fair dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his good name and good intent, the more ample stowage room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars! What is a flag to _them_!

This was a solemn warning against the training of a race with such low ideals.

In the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit d.i.c.kens shows that he deliberately planned Jonas Chuzzlewit as a psychological study. He says:

I conceive that the sordid coa.r.s.eness 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.

d.i.c.kens 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 sacred of all duties was the fact that they had lost their money, and were therefore likely to be bad tempered and severe. He had already introduced Squeers to the world, but he knew that many people who shuddered at Squeers would send their own children to such as Mrs. Pipchin, because she was respectable and poor. He wished to alarm such people; hence Mrs. Pipchin.

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 l.u.s.treless, 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 shampooed every morning, and seemed in danger of being rubbed away altogether) was led in from captivity by the ogress herself, and instructed that n.o.body who sniffed before visitors ever went to heaven. When this great truth had been thoroughly impressed upon her, she was regaled with rice; and subsequently repeated the form of grace established in the castle, in which there was a special clause thanking Mrs. Pipchin for a good dinner. Mrs. Pipchin's niece, Berinthia, took cold pork. Mrs. Pipchin, whose const.i.tution required warm nourishment, made a special repast of mutton chops, which were brought in hot and hot, between two plates, and smelled very nice.

As it rained after dinner and they couldn't go out walking on the beach, and Mrs. Pipchin's const.i.tution 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 b.u.t.t, 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 c.o.c.k 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 b.u.t.ter, with a little black teapot for Mrs. Pipchin and Berry, and b.u.t.tered 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, in the least eligible chamber, and Mrs. Pipchin now and then going in to shake her. At about half-past nine o'clock the odour of a warm sweetbread (Mrs. Pipchin's const.i.tution wouldn't go to sleep without sweetbread) diversified the prevailing fragrance of the house, which Mrs. Wickam said was "a smell of building," and slumber fell upon the castle shortly after.

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 looking fixedly at Mrs. Pipchin. He was not fond of her; he was not afraid of her; but in those old, old moods of his, she seemed to have a grotesque attraction for him. There he would sit, looking at her, and warming his hands, and looking at her, until he sometimes quite confounded Mrs. Pipchin, ogress as she was. Once she asked him, when they were alone, what he was thinking about.

"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? n.o.body 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.