Dickens As an Educator

by James L. Hughes

  CHAPTER III.

  THE OVERTHROW OF COERCION.

  Dickens, in the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, states that, as PickwickPapers had given him an audience, he determined to carry out along-cherished plan and write for the purpose of driving out of existencea class of bad private schools, of which certain schools in Yorkshire werethe worst types. He drew a picture of low cunning, avarice, ignorance,imposture, and brutality in Squeers that astounded his audience, and ledto the closing of most of the Yorkshire private schools and to theoverthrow of tyranny in schools throughout the civilized world. Tyrannyand corporal punishment still exist, but not in the best schools. Not onechild weeps now on account of corporal punishment for every hundred whowailed bitterly for the same reason when Froebel and Dickens began theirloving work. Year by year the good work goes on. Men are learning thebetter ways of guiding and governing childhood. We can not yet say whenmen and women in the homes and schools everywhere shall understand thechild and their own powers so thoroughly that there shall be no morecorporal punishment inflicted, but we do know that the abatement of theterrible brutality began with the revelations of Froebel and Dickens.Froebel taught the new philosophy, Dickens sent it quivering through thehearts and consciences of mankind.

  Members of the highest classes in England have been imprisoned near theclose of the nineteenth century for improper methods of punishing childrenthat would have excited no comment when Dickens described Squeers a littlemore than half a century earlier. In the report to the BritishGovernment, at the close of his remarkable half-century of honourable andvery able educational work, Sir Joshua Fitch said: "In watching thegradual development of the training colleges for women from year to year,nothing is more striking than the increased attention which is being paidin those institutions to the true principles of infant teaching anddiscipline. The circular which has recently been issued by your lordships,and which is designed to enforce and explain these principles, would, ifput forth a few years ago, have fallen on unprepared soil, and wouldindeed have seemed to many teachers both in and out of training collegesto be scarcely intelligible. Now its counsels will be welcomed withsympathy and full appreciation."

  Dickens describes Squeers as a man "whose appearance was notprepossessing."

  He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two. The eye he had was unquestionably useful, but decidedly not ornamental: being of a greenish gray, and in shape resembling the fanlight of a street door. The blank side of his face was much wrinkled and puckered up, which gave him a very sinister appearance, especially when he smiled, at which times his expression bordered closely on the villainous. His hair was very flat and shiny, save at the ends, where it was brushed stiffly up from a low protruding forehead, which assorted well with his harsh voice and coarse manner.

  He then proceeds to reveal the character of Squeers by a series ofincidents:

  Mr. Squeers was standing in a box by one of the coffee-room fireplaces. In a corner of the seat was a very small deal trunk, tied round with a scanty piece of cord; and on the trunk was perched--his lace-up half-boots and corduroy trousers dangling in the air--a diminutive boy, with his shoulders drawn up to his ears, and his hands planted on his knees, who glanced timidly at the schoolmaster, from time to time, with evident dread and apprehension.

  "Half-past three," muttered Mr. Squeers, turning from the window, and looking sulkily at the coffee-room clock. "There will be nobody here to-day."

  Much vexed by this reflection, Mr. Squeers looked at the little boy to see whether he was doing anything he could beat him for. As he happened not to be doing anything at all, he merely boxed his ears, and told him not to do it again.

  "At midsummer," muttered Mr. Squeers, resuming his complaint, "I took down ten boys; ten twentys is two hundred pound. I go back at eight o'clock to-morrow morning, and have got only three--three oughts is an ought--three twos is six--sixty pound. What's come of all the boys? what's parents got in their heads? what does it all mean?"

  Here the little boy on the top of the trunk gave a violent sneeze.

  "Halloa, sir!" growled the schoolmaster, turning round. "What's that, sir?"

  "Nothing, please, sir," said the little boy.

  "Nothing, sir?" exclaimed Mr. Squeers.

  "Please, sir, I sneezed," rejoined the boy, trembling till the little trunk shook under him.

  "Oh! sneezed, did you?" retorted Mr. Squeers. "Then what did you say 'nothing' for, sir?"

  In default of a better answer to this question, the little boy screwed a couple of knuckles into each of his eyes and began to cry, wherefore Mr. Squeers knocked him off the trunk with a blow on one side of his face, and knocked him on again with a blow on the other.

  "Wait till I get you down into Yorkshire, my young gentleman," said Mr. Squeers, "and then I'll give you the rest. Will you hold that noise, sir?"

  "Ye--ye--yes," sobbed the little boy, rubbing his face very hard with the Beggar's Petition in printed calico.

  "Then do so at once, sir," said Squeers. "Do you hear?"

  The waiter at this juncture announced a gentleman who wished to interviewMr. Squeers, and the schoolmaster, in an undertone, said to the poor boy:"Put your handkerchief in your pocket, you little scoundrel, or I'llmurder you when the gentleman goes."

  Affecting not to see the gentleman when he entered, Mr. Squeers feigned tobe mending a pen and trying to comfort the boy he had so grossly abused.

  "My dear child," said Squeers, "all people have their trials. This earlytrial of yours, that is fit to make your little heart burst and your veryeyes come out of your head with crying, what is it? Nothing--less thannothing. You are leaving your friends, but you will have a father in me,my dear, and a mother in Mrs. Squeers."

  Our indignation is still further aroused when we hear the conversationbetween Mr. Squeers and his visitor, who is named Snawley, and who was "asleek, flat-nosed man, bearing in his countenance an expression of muchmortification and sanctity."

  He had brought with him two little boys, whose stepfather he was. Theirmother had a little money in her own right and he was afraid she mightsquander it on her boys, so he wished to dispose of them. Our blood runscold as we hear the two scoundrels plotting against the unfortunate boys.They are to be kept by Squeers till grown up. No questions are to be asked"so long as the payments are regular." "They are to be supplied withrazors when grown up, and never allowed home for holidays, and notpermitted to write home, except a circular at Christmas to say they neverwere so happy and hope they may never be sent for, and no questions are tobe asked in case anything happens to them."

  We learn the unutterable selfishness of Squeers as he sits eating asumptuous breakfast, while the five wretched and hungry little boys, whoare to accompany him to Yorkshire to Dotheboys Hall, look at him. He hadordered bread and butter for three, which he cut into five portions, and"two-penn'orth of milk" for the five boys. While waiting for the bread tocome he said, as he took a large mouthful of beef and toast, "Conquer yourpassions, boys, and don't be eager after vittles. Subdue your appetites,my dears, and you've conquered human natur."

  Nicholas Nickleby had been engaged to teach under Squeers in DotheboysHall. He was shocked at many things he heard and saw the night he arrivedin Yorkshire.

  But the school itself and the appearance of the wretched pupils completedhis discomfiture.

  The pupils--the young noblemen! How the last faint traces of hope, the remotest glimmering of any good to be derived from his efforts in this den, faded from the mind of Nicholas as he looked in dismay around! Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the harelip, the crooked f
oot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient hell was breeding here!

  It was Mr. Squeers's custom on the first afternoon after his return fromLondon to call the school together to make announcements, and read letterswritten by himself, which he pretended had been written by the relativesof the boys. Accordingly, the first afternoon after the arrival ofNicholas, Squeers entered the schoolroom "with a small bundle of papers inhis hand, and Mrs. S. followed with a pair of canes."

  "Let any boy speak a word without leave," said Mr. Squeers, "and I'll takethe skin off his back."

  Two letters will serve as samples of the rest:

  "Graymarsh. Stand up, Graymarsh."

  Graymarsh stood up, while Squeers read his letter:

  "Graymarsh's maternal aunt is very glad to hear he's so well and happy, and sends her respectful compliments to Mrs. Squeers, and thinks she must be an angel. She likewise thinks Mr. Squeers is too good for this world; but hopes he may long be spared to carry on the business. Would have sent the two pair of stockings as desired, but is short of money, so forwards a tract instead, and hopes Graymarsh will put his trust in Providence. Hopes, above all, that he will study in every thing to please Mr. and Mrs. Squeers, and look upon them as his only friends; and that he will love Master Squeers; and not object to sleeping five in a bed, which no Christian should. Ah!" said Squeers, folding it up, "a delightful letter. Very affecting indeed."

  "Mobbs" was next called, and his letter was read to him:

  "Mobbs's stepmother," said Squeers, "took to her bed on hearing that he wouldn't eat fat, and has been very ill ever since. She wishes to know, by an early post, where he expects to go to, if he quarrels with his vittles; and with what feelings he could turn up his nose at the cow's-liver broth, after his good master had asked a blessing on it. This was told her in the London newspapers--not by Mr. Squeers, for he is too kind and too good to set anybody against anybody--and it has vexed her so much, Mobbs can't think. She is sorry to find he is discontented, which is sinful and horrid, and hopes Mr. Squeers will flog him into a happier state of mind; with this view, she has also stopped his halfpenny a week pocket-money, and given a double-bladed knife with a corkscrew in it to the missionaries, which she had bought on purpose for him."

  "A sulky state of feeling," said Squeers, after a terrible pause, during which he had moistened the palm of his right hand again, "won't do. Cheerfulness and contentment must be kept up. Mobbs, come to me!"

  Mobbs moved slowly toward the desk, rubbing his eyes in anticipation of good cause for doing so; and he soon afterward retired by the side door, with as good a cause as a boy need have.

  There are still school tyrants who talk with philosophic air of floggingchildren to make them happier, and others who say with hard tones andclenched hands that "the one thing they will not allow in their schools isa sulky boy or girl," and they mean, when they say so, that if a boy issulky they take no steps to find out the cause of his disease or thenatural remedy for it, but they apply the universal remedy of theold-fashioned quack trainer and whip the poor boy, who is alreadysuffering from some physical or nervous derangement. Squeers and suchteachers are brother tyrants. They practise the Squeers's doctrine--"Asulky state of feeling won't do. Cheerfulness and contentment must be keptup. Mobbs, come to me"--to make children cheerful and contented.

  One of the most heart-stirring cases in Dotheboys Hall was that of poorSmike. He had been sent to Squeers when an infant. He was a young man now,but he had been starved so that he wore still around his long neck thefrill of the collar that loving hands had placed there when he was alittle child. Ill treatment and lack of proper food had made him almost animbecile, and he was the drudge of the institution. Nicholas was attractedby the anxious, longing looks of the boy, as his eyes followed Squeersfrom place to place on their arrival from London.

  He was lame; and as he feigned to be busy in arranging the table, glanced at the letters with a look so keen, and yet so dispirited and hopeless, that Nicholas could hardly bear to watch him.

  "What are you bothering about there, Smike?" cried Mrs. Squeers; "let the things alone, can't you."

  "Eh!" said Squeers, looking up. "Oh! it's you, is it?"

  "Yes, sir," replied the youth, pressing his hands together, as though to control, by force, the nervous wandering of his fingers; "is there----"

  "Well!" said Squeers.

  "Have you--did anybody--has nothing been heard--about me?"

  "Devil a bit," replied Squeers testily.

  The lad withdrew his eyes, and, putting his hand to his face, moved toward the door.

  "Not a word," resumed Squeers, "and never will be."

  This is one of the pathetic pictures that awoke the heart of humanity.Nicholas was the first person who had ever sympathized with Smike, so thepoor fellow naturally gave to Nicholas the pent-up love of his dwarfednature, and kept near him whenever it was possible to do so.

  Dickens made Smike the centre of the terrible interest in Dotheboys Hall.

  Poor Smike was so badly treated that he ran away, but, after a long chase,he was brought home in triumph by Mrs. Squeers, bound like an animal.Squeers, of course, determined to flog him before all the boys as anexample, and this led to the first great step toward the overthrow of thepower of Squeers in Dotheboys Hall.

  The news that Smike had been caught and brought back in triumph, ran like wildfire through the hungry community, and expectation was on tiptoe all the morning. On tiptoe it was destined to remain, however, until afternoon; when Squeers, having refreshed himself with his dinner, and further strengthened himself by an extra libation or so, made his appearance (accompanied by his amiable partner) with a countenance of portentous import, and a fearful instrument of flagellation, strong, supple, wax-ended, and new--in short, purchased that morning, expressly for the occasion.

  "Is every boy here?" asked Squeers, in a tremendous voice.

  Every boy was there, but every boy was afraid to speak; so Squeers glared along the lines to assure himself; and every eye drooped, and every head cowered down, as he did so.

  "Each boy keep his place," said Squeers, administering his favourite blow to the desk, and regarding with gloomy satisfaction the universal start which it never failed to occasion. "Nickleby! to your desk, sir."

  It was remarked by more than one small observer that there was a very curious and unusual expression in the usher's face; but he took his seat, without opening his lips in reply. Squeers, casting a triumphant glance at his assistant, and a look of most comprehensive despotism on the boys, left the room, and shortly afterward returned, dragging Smike by the collar--or rather by that fragment of his jacket which was nearest the place where his collar would have been had he boasted such a decoration.

  In any other place the appearance of the wretched, jaded, spiritless object would have occasioned a murmur of compassion and remonstrance. It had some effect, even there; for the lookers-on moved uneasily in their
seats, and a few of the boldest ventured to steal looks at each other, expressive of indignation and pity.

  They were lost on Squeers, however, whose gaze was fastened on the luckless Smike, as he inquired, according to custom in such cases, whether he had anything to say for himself.

  "Nothing, I suppose?" said Squeers, with a diabolical grin.

  Smike glanced round, and his eye rested for an instant on Nicholas, as if he had expected him to intercede; but his look was riveted on his desk.

  "Have you anything to say?" demanded Squeers again; giving his right arm two or three flourishes to try its power and suppleness. "Stand a little out of the way, Mrs. Squeers, my dear; I've hardly got room enough."

  "Spare me, sir!" cried Smike.

  "Oh! that's all, is it?" said Squeers. "Yes, I'll flog you within an inch of your life, and spare you that."

  "Ha, ha, ha," laughed Mrs. Squeers, "that's a good 'un!"

  "I was driven to do it," said Smike faintly, and casting another imploring look on him.

  "Driven to do it, were you?" said Squeers. "Oh! it wasn't your fault; it was mine, I suppose--eh?"

  "A nasty, ungrateful, pig-headed, brutish, obstinate, sneaking dog," exclaimed Mrs. Squeers, taking Smike's head under her arm, and administering a cuff at every epithet; "what does he mean by that?"

  "Stand aside, my dear," replied Squeers. "We'll try and find out."

  Mrs. Squeers, being out of breath with her exertions, complied. Squeers caught the boy firmly in his grip; one desperate cut had fallen on his body--he was wincing from the lash, and uttering a scream of pain--it was raised again, and again about to fall--when Nicholas Nickleby suddenly starting up, cried: "Stop!" in a voice that made the rafters ring.

  "Who cried stop?" said Squeers, turning savagely round.

  "I," said Nicholas, stepping forward. "This must not go on."

  "Must not go on!" cried Squeers, almost in a shriek.

  "No!" thundered Nicholas.

  Aghast and stupefied by the boldness of the interference, Squeers released his hold of Smike, and, falling back a pace or two, gazed upon Nicholas with looks that were positively frightful.

  "I say must not," repeated Nicholas, nothing daunted; "shall not. I will prevent it."

  Squeers continued to gaze upon him, with his eyes starting out of his head; but astonishment had actually, for the moment, bereft him of speech.

  "You have disregarded all my quiet interference in the miserable lad's behalf," said Nicholas; "you have returned no answer to the letter in which I begged forgiveness for him, and offered to be responsible that he would remain quietly here. Don't blame me for this public interference. You have brought it upon yourself, not I."

  "Sit down, beggar!" screamed Squeers, almost beside himself with rage, and seizing Smike as he spoke.

  "Wretch!" rejoined Nicholas fiercely, "touch him at your peril! I will not stand by and see it done. My blood is up, and I have the strength of ten such men as you. Look to yourself, for, by Heaven, I will not spare you, if you drive me on!"

  "Stand back!" cried Squeers, brandishing his weapon.

  "I have a long series of insults to avenge," said Nicholas, flushed with passion; "and my indignation is aggravated by the dastardly cruelties practised on helpless infancy in this foul den. Have a care; for, if you do raise the devil within me, the consequences shall fall heavily upon your own head!"

  He had scarcely spoken, when Squeers, in a violent outbreak of wrath, and with a cry like the howl of a wild beast, spit upon him, and struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture, which raised up a bar of livid flesh as it was inflicted. Smarting with the agony of the blow, and concentrating into that one moment all his feelings of rage, scorn, and indignation, Nicholas sprang upon him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat, beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.

  The boys--with the exception of Master Squeers, who, coming to his father's assistance, harassed the enemy in the rear--moved not hand or foot; but Mrs. Squeers, with many shrieks for aid, hung on to the tail of her partner's coat, and endeavoured to drag him from his infuriated adversary; while Miss Squeers, who had been peeping through the keyhole in expectation of a very different scene, darted in at the very beginning of the attack, and after launching a shower of inkstands at the usher's head, beat Nicholas to her heart's content: animating herself at every blow with the recollection of his having refused her proffered love, and thus imparting additional strength to an arm which (as she took after her mother in this respect) was, at no time, one of the weakest.

  Nicholas, in the full torrent of his violence, felt the blows no more than if they had been dealt with feathers; but, becoming tired of the noise and uproar, and feeling that his arm grew weak besides, he threw all his remaining strength into half a dozen finishing cuts and flung Squeers from him, with all the force he could muster. The violence of his fall precipitated Mrs. Squeers completely over an adjacent form; and Squeers, striking his head against it in his descent, lay at his full length on the ground, stunned and motionless.

  Having brought affairs to this happy termination, and ascertained, to his thorough satisfaction, that Squeers was only stunned, and not dead (upon which point he had had some unpleasant doubts at first), Nicholas left his family to restore him and retired to consider what course he had better adopt. He looked anxiously round for Smike, as he left the room, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  After a brief consideration, he packed up a few clothes in a small leathern valise, and, finding that nobody offered to oppose his progress, marched boldly out by the front door and started to walk to London.

  Near the school he met John Browdie, the honest corn factor.

  John saw that Nicholas had received a severe blow, and asked the reason.

  "The fact is," said Nicholas, not very well knowing how to make the avowal, "the fact is, that I have been ill-treated."

  "Noa!" interposed John Browdie, in a tone of compassion; for he was a giant in strength and stature, and Nicholas, very likely, in his eyes, seemed a mere dwarf; "dean't say thot."

  "Yes, I have," replied Nicholas, "by that man Squeers, and I have beaten him soundly, and am leaving this place in consequence."

  "What!" cried John Browdie, with such an ecstatic shout, that the horse quite shied at it. "Beatten the schoolmeasther! Ho! ho! ho! Beatten the schoolmeasther! who ever heard o' the loike o' that noo! Giv' us thee hond agean, yongster. Beatten the schoolmeasther! Dang it, I loove thee for't."

  And the world agreed, and still agrees, with John Browdie.

  Squeers and Smike began the real movement against cruelty and corporalpunishment not only in schools, but in homes. Dickens described bothcharacters so admirably that the world hated Squeers and pitied Smike tothe limit of its power to hate and pity, and unconsciously the worldassociated cruelty and corporal punishment with Squeers. This was exactlywhat Dickens desired. The hatred of Squeers led to a strong disapproval ofhis practices. Corporal punishment was associated with an unpopular man,and it lost its respectable character and never regained it. The dislikefor Squeers was accentuated by the long-continued sympathy and hopefulnessfelt for Smike as he gradually succumbed to the terrible disease,consumption, induced by poor food, neglect, and cruelty.

  Squeers and Smike are doing their good work still, and doing it well. Theycould do it much better if men and women when they have become acquaintedwith Squeers would candidly ask themselves the question, "In what respectsam I like Squeers?" instead of yielding to the feeling ofself-satisfaction that they are so very unlike him.

  Just before writing about the coercive tyranny of Squeers in his school,Dickens had writ
ten Oliver Twist, in which he had made a most vigorousattack upon two classes of characters for their tyrannical treatment ofchildren, and especially on account of their frequent use of corporalpunishment. Bumble represented the officials in institutions for children,and "the gentleman in the white waistcoat" was given as a type of theadvanced Christian philanthropy of his time. He meant well, gave his timefreely to attend the meetings of the board, and supposed he was doingright; but Dickens wished to let philanthropists see that they wereterribly cruel to the helpless children, and that their good intentionscould not condone their harshness, even though it resulted from ignoranceand lack of reverence for childhood, and not from deliberate evilintentions.

  Poor, friendless little Oliver! His beautiful face and gentle spirit mighthave touched the hardest heart, but the institutional heart becomes hardeasily, even two generations after the time of Bumble and "the gentlemanin the immaculate white waistcoat."

  Dickens says:

  It must not be supposed that Oliver was denied the benefit of exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages of religious consolation in the workhouse. As for exercise, it was nice cold weather, and he was allowed to perform his ablutions every morning under the pump, in a stone yard, in the presence of Mr. Bumble, who prevented his catching cold, and caused a tingling sensation to pervade his frame, by repeated applications of the cane. As for society, he was carried every other day into the hall, where the boys dined, and there sociably flogged as a public warning and example. And so far from being denied the advantage of religious consolation, he was kicked into the same apartment every evening at prayer time, and there permitted to listen to, and console his mind with, a general supplication of the boys, containing a special clause, therein inserted by authority of the board, in which they entreated to be made good, virtuous, contented, and obedient, and to be guarded from the sins and vices of Oliver Twist.

  After Oliver had been sent to work for Mr. Sowerberry he was goaded todesperation one evening by the disrespectful remarks of Noah Claypoleabout his mother, and bravely gave the mean bully the personalchastisement he so richly deserved. Noah was sent to complain to theparish board, and the gentleman in the white waistcoat said:

  "Bumble, just step up to Sowerberry's with your cane, and see what's best to be done. Don't spare him, Bumble."

  "No, I will not, sir," replied the beadle, adjusting the wax end which was twisted round the bottom of his cane, for purposes of parochial flagellation.

  "Tell Sowerberry not to spare him either. They'll never do anything with him without stripes and bruises," said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

  The innocent, manly child was beaten unmercifully and abused cruelly bySowerberry and Bumble, yet he bore all their taunts and floggings withouta tear until he was alone. Then, "when there was none to see or hear him,he fell upon his knees on the floor, and, hiding his face in his hands,wept such tears as, God send for the credit of our nature, few so youngmay ever have cause to pour out before him!"

  There are not many "gentlemen in white waistcoats" of the type describedby Dickens now on charitable boards, and the enlightened sentiment ofcivilized countries turns the legal processes of nations upon officialswho dare to treat children unkindly. Dickens made humane people everywheresympathize with Mr. Meagles, who said: "Whenever I see a beadle in fullfig coming down a street on a Sunday at the head of a charity school, I amobliged to turn and run away, or I should hit him."

  Ten years after Squeers began his good work Dickens produced Squeers'sassociate, Mr. Creakle, the master of Salem House.

  David Copperfield was sent to Salem House by his stepfather, Mr.Murdstone, because he bit his hand when he was punishing him unjustly. Forthis offence he was compelled to wear a placard on his back on which waswritten: "Take care of him. He bites." This dastardly practice oflabelling youthful offenders persisted until very recent times. Childrenin schools are even yet in some places degraded by inconsiderate teachersby being compelled to wear some indication of their misconduct. Dickensvigorously condemned this outrage in 1849.

  David was sent to school during the holidays, and was soon brought beforeMr. Creakle by Tungay, his servant with the wooden leg.

  "So," said Mr. Creakle, "this is the young gentleman whose teeth are to be filed! Turn him round."

  Mr. Creakle's face was fiery, and his eyes were small and deep in his head; he had thick veins in his forehead, a little nose, and a large chin. He was bald on the top of his head; and had some thin, wet-looking hair that was just turning gray brushed across each temple, so that the two sides interlaced on his forehead.

  "Now," said Mr. Creakle. "What's the report of this boy?"

  "There's nothing against him yet," returned the man with the wooden leg. "There has been no opportunity."

  I thought Mr. Creakle was disappointed. I thought Mrs. and Miss Creakle (at whom I now glanced for the first time, and who were, both, thin and quiet) were not disappointed.

  "Come here, sir!" said Mr. Creakle, beckoning to me.

  "Come here!" said the man with the wooden leg, repeating the gesture.

  "I have the happiness of knowing your stepfather," whispered Mr. Creakle, taking me by the ear; "and a worthy man he is, and a man of strong character. He knows me, and I know him. Do _you_ know me! Hey?" said Mr. Creakle, pinching my ear with ferocious playfulness.

  "Not yet, sir," I said, flinching with the pain.

  "Not yet! Hey?" repeated Mr. Creakle. "But you will soon. Hey?"

  "You will soon. Hey?" repeated the man with the wooden leg. I afterward found that he generally acted, with his strong voice, as Mr. Creakle's interpreter to the boys.

  I was very much frightened, and said, I hoped so, if he pleased. I felt all this while as if my ear were blazing; he pinched it so hard.

  "I'll tell you what I am," whispered Mr. Creakle, letting it go at last, with a screw at parting that brought the water to my eyes, "I'm a Tartar."

  Mr. Creakle proved to be as good as his word. He was a Tartar.

  On the first day of school he revealed himself. His opening address wasvery brief and to the point.

  "Now, boys, this is a new half. Take care what you're about in this new half. Come fresh up to the lessons, I advise you, for I come fresh up to the punishment. I won't flinch. It will be of no use your rubbing yourselves; you won't rub the marks out that I shall give you. Now get to work, every boy!"

  When this dreadful exordium was over, Mr. Creakle came to where I sat, and told me that if I were famous for biting, he was famous for biting, too. He then showed me the cane, and asked me what I thought of _that_, for a tooth? Was it a sharp tooth, hey? Was it a double tooth, hey? Had it a deep prong, hey? Did it bite, hey? Did it bite? At every question he gave me a fleshy cut with it that made me writhe.

  Not that I mean to say these were special marks of distinction, which only I received. On the contrary, a large majority of the boys (especially the smaller ones) were visited with similar instances of notice, as Mr. Creakle made the round of the schoolroom. Half the establishment was writhing and crying before the day's work began; and how much of it had writhed and cried before the day's work was over I am really afraid to recollect, lest I should seem to exaggerate.

  I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed his profession more than Mr. Creakle did. He had a delight in cutting at the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite. I am confident that he couldn't resist a chubby boy especially; that there was a fascination in such a subject which made him restless in his mind until he had scored and marked him for the day. I was chubby myself, and ought to know. I am sure when I think of the fellow now, my blood rises against him with the disinterested indignation I should feel if I could have known all about him without havin
g ever been in his power; but it rises hotly, because I know him to have been an incapable brute, who had no more right to be possessed of the great trust he held than to be Lord High Admiral or Commander-in-chief: in either of which capacities it is probable that he would have done infinitely less mischief.

  Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless idol, how abject we were to him! what a launch in life I think it now, on looking-back, to be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!

  Twenty years after Dickens described Creakle a new teacher stood before aclass in a large American city, and, holding a long rattan cane above hishead, said in a fierce, threatening tone: "Do you see that cane? Would youlike to feel it? Hey? Well, break any one of my forty-eight rules and youwill feel it all right." The tyrant in adulthood dies hard. No wonder.Tyranny has been wrought into our natures by centuries of blind faith incorporal punishment as the supreme agency in saving the race from moralwreck and anarchy in childhood and youth. Men sought no agency for thedevelopment of the good in young lives. As they conceived it, their dutywas done if they prevented their children from doing wrong, and thequickest, easiest, most effective way they knew to secure coercion was bycorporal punishment. The most successful tyrant, he who could mostthoroughly terrorize children and keep them down most completely, wasregarded as the best disciplinarian. Squeers and Creakle were fairexponents of the almost universally recognised theory of their day, andthey had many successors in the real schools of the generation thatfollowed them. No man could remain a week in a school now if he began onthe opening day in the way Creakle did.

  Dickens was right in revealing the position of the teacher as one of"great trust," and he was right, too, in insisting that Creakle was nomore fitted to be a teacher "than to be Lord High Admiral orCommander-in-chief, in either of which capacities it is probable he wouldhave done infinitely less mischief." This was another plea for good normalschools and for state supervision.

  Dickens makes a good point in his remark about the degradation of abjectsubmission to a man of such parts and pretensions as Creakle.Subordination always dwarfs the human soul, but when the child is forcedto a position of abject subordination to a coarse tyrant the degradationis more complete and more humiliating. It does not mend matters for thechild when the tyrant is his father. The tyranny of parenthood is usuallythe hardest to escape from.

  In the same book in which Creakle is described--David Copperfield--Dickensdeals with the tyranny of the home. David's widowed mother married Mr.Murdstone, a hard, severe, austere, religious man, with an equallydreadful sister--Jane Murdstone.

  Firmness was the grand quality on which both Mr. and Miss Murdstone took their stand. However I might have expressed my comprehension of it at that time, if I had been called upon, I nevertheless did clearly comprehend in my own way that it was another name for tyranny, and for a certain gloomy, arrogant, devil's humour, that was in them both. The creed, as I should state it now, was this: Mr. Murdstone was firm; nobody in his world was to be so firm as Mr. Murdstone; nobody else in his world was to be firm at all, for everybody was to be bent to his firmness.

  There was no more depressing tyranny in the time of Dickens than thetyranny exercised in the name of a rigid and repressive religion.

  The gloomy taint that was in the Murdstone blood darkened the Murdstone religion, which was austere and wrathful. I have thought, since, that its assuming that character was a necessary consequence of Mr. Murdstone's firmness, which wouldn't allow him to let anybody off from the utmost weight of the severest penalties he could find any excuse for. Be this as it may, I well remember the tremendous visages with which we used to go to church, and the changed air of the place. Again, the dreaded Sunday comes round, and I file into the old pew first, like a guarded captive brought to a condemned service. Again, Miss Murdstone, in a black-velvet gown, that looks as if it had been made out of a pall, follows close upon me; then my mother; then her husband. Again, I listen to Miss Murdstone mumbling the responses, and emphasizing all the dread words with a cruel relish. Again, I see her dark eyes roll round the church when she says "miserable sinners," as if she were calling all the congregation names. Again, I catch rare glimpses of my mother, moving her lips timidly between the two, with one of them muttering at each ear like low thunder. Again, I wonder with a sudden fear whether it is likely that our good old clergyman can be wrong, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone right, and that all the angels in heaven can be destroying angels. Again, if I move a finger or relax a muscle of my face, Miss Murdstone pokes me with her prayer book, and makes my side ache.

  Mrs. Chillip said: "Mr. Murdstone sets up an image of himself and calls itthe Divine Nature," and "what such people as the Murdstones call theirreligion is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance." Mild and cautiousMr. Chillip observed, "I don't find authority for Mr. and Miss Murdstonein the New Testament," and his good wife added, "The darker tyrant Mr.Murdstone becomes, the more ferocious is his religious doctrine."

  When David first learned that Mr. Murdstone had married his mother herelieved the swelling in his little heart by crying in his bedroom. Hismother naturally felt a sympathy for her boy. Mr. Murdstone reproved herfor her lack of "firmness," ordered her out of the room, and gave Davidhis first lesson in "obedience."

  "David," he said, making his lips thin, by pressing them together, "if I have an obstinate horse or dog to deal with, what do you think I do?"

  "I don't know."

  "I beat him."

  I had answered in a kind of breathless whisper, but I felt, in my silence, that my breath was shorter now.

  "I make him wince, and smart. I say to myself, 'I'll conquer that fellow;' and if it were to cost him all the blood he had, I should do it."

  There are still a few schoolmaster tyrants who boast of their ability "tosubdue children." They are barbarians, who understand neither the neweducation nor the new theology, who have not learned to recognise andreverence the individual selfhood of each child, who themselves fear God'spower more than they feel his love.

  When David was at home for the holidays he remained in his own room aconsiderable part of the time reading. This aroused the anger of Mr.Murdstone, and he charged David with being sullen.

  "I was sorry, David," said Mr. Murdstone, turning his head and his eyes stiffly toward me, "to observe that you are of a sullen disposition. This is not a character that I can suffer to develop itself beneath my eyes without an effort at improvement. You must endeavour, sir, to change it. We must endeavour to change it for you."

  "I beg your pardon, sir," I faltered. "I have never meant to be sullen since I came back."

  "Don't take refuge in a lie, sir!" he returned so fiercely, that I saw my mother involuntarily put out her trembling hand as if to interpose between us. "You have withdrawn yourself in your sullenness to your own room. You have kept your room when you ought to have been here. You know now, once for all, that I require you to be here, and not there. Further, that I require you to bring obedience here. You know me, David. I will have it done."

  Miss Murdstone gave a hoarse chuckle.

  "I will have a respectful, prompt, and ready bearing toward myself," he continued, "and toward Jane Murdstone, and toward your mother. I will not have this room shunned as if it were infected, at the pleasure of a child. Sit down."

  He ordered me like a dog, and I obeyed like a dog.

  David's lessons, which had been "along a path of roses" when his motherwas alone with him, became a path of thorns after the Murdstones came.

  The lessons were a grievous daily drudgery and misery. They were very long, very numerous, very hard--perfectly unintelligible.

  Let me remember how it used to be. I come into the parlour after breakfast with my books, an exercise book and a slate. My mother is ready for me
, but not half so ready as Mr. Murdstone, or as Miss Murdstone, sitting near my mother stringing steel beads. The very sight of these two has such an influence over me, that I begin to feel the words I have been at infinite pains to get into my head all sliding away, and going I don't know where. I wonder where they _do_ go, by the bye?

  I hand the first book to my mother. I take a last drowning look at the page as I give it into her hand, and start off aloud at a racing pace while I have got it fresh. I trip over a word. Mr. Murdstone looks up. I trip over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden, tumble over half a dozen words, and stop. I think my mother would show me the book if she dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly:

  "Oh, Davy, Davy!"

  "Now, Clara," says Mr. Murdstone, "be firm with the boy. Don't say 'Oh, Davy, Davy!' That's childish. He knows his lesson, or he does not know it."

  "He does _not_ know it," Miss Murdstone interposed awfully.

  "I am really afraid he does not," says my mother.

  "Then you see, Clara," returns Miss Murdstone, "you should just give him the book back, and make him know it."

  "Yes, certainly," says my mother; "that's what I intended to do, my dear Jane. Now, Davy, try once more, and don't be stupid."

  I obey the first clause of the injunction by trying once more, but am not so successful with the second, for I am very stupid. I tumble down before I get to the old place, at a point where I was all right before, and stop to think. But I can't think about the lesson. I think of the number of yards of net in Miss Murdstone's cap, or of the price of Mr. Murdstone's dressing-gown, or any such ridiculous problem that I have no business with, and don't want to have anything at all to do with. Mr. Murdstone makes a movement of impatience which I have been expecting for a long time. Miss Murdstone does the same. My mother glances submissively at them, shuts the book, and lays it by as an arrear to be worked out when my other tasks are done.

  There is a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a rolling snowball. The bigger it gets the more stupid I get. The case is so hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such a bog of nonsense, that I give up all idea of getting out, and abandon myself to my fate. The despairing way in which my mother and I look at each other, as I blunder on, is truly melancholy. But the greatest effect in these miserable lessons is when my mother (thinking nobody is observing her) tries to give me the cue by the motion of her lips. At that instant, Miss Murdstone, who has been lying in wait for nothing else all along, says in a deep warning voice:

  "Clara!"

  My mother starts, colours, and smiles faintly. Mr. Murdstone comes out of his chair, takes the book, throws it at me or boxes my ears with it, and turns me out of the room by the shoulders.

  It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if my unfortunate studies generally took this course. I could have done very well if I had been without the Murdstones; but the influence of the Murdstones upon me was like the fascination of two snakes on a wretched young bird. Even when I did get through the morning with tolerable credit, there was not much gained but dinner; for Miss Murdstone never could endure to see me untasked, and if I rashly made any show of being unemployed, called her brother's attention to me by saying, "Clara, my dear, there's nothing like work--give your boy an exercise."

  One morning when I went into the parlour with my books, I found my mother looking anxious, Miss Murdstone looking firm, and Mr. Murdstone binding something round the bottom of a cane--a lithe and limber cane, which he left off binding when I came in, and poised and switched in the air.

  "I tell you, Clara," said Mr. Murdstone, "I have been often flogged myself."

  "To be sure; of course," said Miss Murdstone.

  "Certainly, my dear Jane," faltered my mother meekly. "But--but do you think it did Edward good?"

  "Do you think it did Edward harm, Clara?" asked Mr. Murdstone, gravely.

  "That's the point!" said his sister.

  To this my mother returned "Certainly, my dear Jane," and said no more.

  I felt apprehensive that I was personally interested in this dialogue, and sought Mr. Murdstone's eye as it lighted on mine.

  "Now, David," he said--and I saw that cast again, as he said it--"you must be far more careful to-day than usual." He gave the cane another poise, and another switch; and having finished his preparation of it, laid it down beside him, with an expressive look, and took up his book.

  This was a good freshener to my presence of mind, as a beginning. I felt the words of my lesson slipping off, not one by one, or line by line, but by the entire page. I tried to lay hold of them; but they seemed, if I may so express it, to have put skates on, and to skim away from me with a smoothness there was no checking.

  We began badly, and went on worse. I had come in, with an idea of distinguishing myself rather, conceiving that I was very well prepared; but it turned out to be quite a mistake. Book after book was added to the heap of failures, Miss Murdstone being firmly watchful of us all the time. And when we came at last to the five thousand cheeses (canes he made it that day, I remember), my mother burst out crying.

  "Clara!" said Miss Murdstone, in her warning voice.

  "I am not quite well, my dear Jane, I think," said my mother.

  I saw him wink, solemnly, at his sister, as he rose and said, taking up the cane.

  "Why, Jane, we can hardly expect Clara to bear, with perfect firmness, the worry and torment that David has occasioned her to-day. That would be stoical. Clara is greatly strengthened and improved, but we can hardly expect so much from her. David, you and I will go upstairs, boy."

  They went upstairs. David was beaten unmercifully, notwithstanding hispiteous cries, and in his desperation he bit the hand of Murdstone. Forthis it seemed as if Murdstone would have beaten him to death but for theinterference of the women. "Then he was gone, and the door locked outside;and I was lying, fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, and raging in mypuny way, upon the floor."

  Oh! Blind, self-satisfied "child-quellers," who so ignorantly boast ofyour ability to conquer children! Dickens described Murdstone for you.Think of that awful picture of the beautiful boy, created in the image ofGod, lying on the floor, "fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, andraging," with every element of sweetness and strength in his life turnedto darkness and fury, and next time you propose to "conquer a child" whohas been rendered partially insane, possibly by your treatment, and withwhom you have unnecessarily forced a crisis, remember the Murdstonetragedy--a real tragedy, notwithstanding the fact that the boy's life wasspared.

  Remember, too, that your very presence and manner may blight the younglives that you are supposed to develop.

  When Mr. Murdstone was sending David away to work he gave him hisphilosophy of coercion as his parting advice:

  "David," said Mr. Murdstone, "to the young, this is a world for action; not for moping and droning in."

  --"As you do," added his sister.

  "Jane Murdstone, leave it to me, if you please. I say, David, to the young, this is a world for action, and not for moping and droning in. It is especially so for a young boy of your disposition, which requires a great deal of correcting; and to which no greater service can be done than to force it to conform to the ways of the working world, and to bend it and break it."

  "For stubbornness won't do here," said his sister. "What it wants is to be crushed. And crushed it must be. Shall be, too!"

  First he fills the boy as full as possible of self-depreciation, and thentrains him to expect that his leading experiences in life will consist ofbeing forced into submission, conforming to the plans of others, bendingto authority, the breaking of his will, and the crushing of his interestsand pu
rposes. What a depressing outlook to give a child!

  John Willet, in Barnaby Rudge, is used as a means of convincing parentsthat they should respect the feelings and opinions of children. No twomaxims relating to child training are more utterly wrong in principle,more devoid of the simplest elements of child sympathy and childreverence, than the time-honoured nonsense that "children should be seenand not heard," and "children should speak only when they are spoken to."

  Dickens exposes these maxims to deserved ridicule in John Willet'streatment of his son Joe. John kept the Maypole Inn. Joe was a fine,sturdy young man, but his father still ruled him with an unbendingstubbornness that he believed to be a necessary exercise of authority.John was encouraged in his tyranny over his son by some of his oldcronies, who were in the habit of sitting in the Maypole in the eveningsand praising John for his firmness in training his son. One evening astranger made a remark about a gentleman, to which Joe replied.

  "Silence, sir!" cried his father.

  "What a chap you are, Joe!" said Long Parkes.

  "Such a inconsiderate lad!" murmured Tom Cobb.

  "Putting himself forward and wringing the very nose off his own father's face!" exclaimed the parish clerk metaphorically.

  "What _have_ I done?" reasoned poor Joe.

  "Silence, sir!" returned his father; "what do you mean by talking, when you see people that are more than two or three times your age sitting still and silent and not dreaming of saying a word?"

  "Why that's the proper time for me to talk, isn't it?" said Joe rebelliously.

  "The proper time, sir!" retorted his father, "the proper time's no time."

  "Ah, to be sure!" muttered Parkes, nodding gravely to the other two who nodded likewise, observing under their breaths that that was the point.

  "The proper time's no time, sir," repeated John Willet; "when I was your age I never talked, I never wanted to talk. I listened and improved myself, that's what I did."

  "It's all very fine talking," muttered Joe, who had been fidgeting in his chair with divers uneasy gestures. "But if you mean to tell me that I'm never to open my lips----"

  "Silence, sir!" roared his father. "No, you never are. When your opinion's wanted, you give it. When you're spoke to you speak. When your opinion's not wanted and you're not spoke to, don't give an opinion and don't you speak. The world's undergone a nice alteration since my time, certainly. My belief is that there an't any boys left--that there isn't such a thing as a boy--that there's nothing now between a male baby and a man--and that all the boys went out with his blessed majesty King George the Second."

  On another occasion Joe had been hit with a whip by a stranger, and heexpressed his opinion to Mr. Varden about the character of the man who hithim.

  "Hold your tongue, sir," said his father.

  "I won't, father. It's all along of you that he ventured to do what he did. Seeing me treated like a child, and put down like a fool, _he_ plucks up a heart and has a fling at a fellow that he thinks--and may well think, too--hasn't a grain of spirit. But he's mistaken, as I'll show him, and as I'll show all of you before long."

  "Does the boy know what he's saying of!" cried the astonished John Willet.

  "Father," returned Joe, "I know what I say and mean, well--better than you do when you hear me. I can bear with you, but I can not bear the contempt that your treating me in the way you do brings upon me from others every day. Look at other young men of my age. Have they no liberty, no will, no right to speak? Are they obliged to sit mumchance, and to be ordered about till they are the laughingstock of young and old? I am a byword all over Chigwell, and I say--and it's fairer my saying so now, than waiting till you are dead, and I have got your money--I say, that before long I shall be driven to break such bounds, and that when I do, it won't be me that you'll have to blame, but your own self, and no other."

  John never trusted his son, never entered into his plans, and treated eventhe most sacred things of Joe's life with contempt.

  Joe was about to start to London on business for his father, and he was toride a mare that was so slow that a young man could not enjoy the prospectof riding her.

  "Don't you ride hard," said his father.

  "I should be puzzled to do that, I think, father," Joe replied, casting a disconsolate look at the animal.

  "None of your impudence, sir, if you please," retorted old John. "What would you ride, sir? A wild ass or zebra would be too tame for you, wouldn't he, eh, sir? You'd like to ride a roaring lion, wouldn't you, sir, eh, sir? Hold your tongue, sir." When Mr. Willet, in his differences with his son, had exhausted all the questions that occurred to him, and Joe had said nothing at all in answer, he generally wound up by bidding him hold his tongue.

  "And what does the boy mean," added Mr. Willet, after he had stared at him for a little time, in a species of stupefaction, "by cocking his hat, to such an extent! Are you going to kill the wintner, sir?"

  "No," said Joe tartly; "I'm not. Now your mind's at ease, father."

  "With a military air, too!" said Mr. Willet, surveying him from top to toe; "with a swaggering, fire-eating, biling-water drinking sort of way with him! And what do you mean by pulling up the crocuses and snowdrops, eh, sir?"

  "It's only a little nosegay," said Joe, reddening. "There's no harm in that, I hope?"

  "You're a boy of business, you are, sir!" said Mr. Willet disdainfully, "to go supposing that wintners care for nosegays."

  "I don't suppose anything of the kind," returned Joe. "Let them keep their red noses for bottles and tankards. These are going to Mr. Varden's house."

  "And do you suppose _he_ minds such things as crocuses?" demanded John.

  "I don't know, and to say the truth, I don't care," said Joe. "Come, father, give me the money, and in the name of patience let me go."

  "There it is, sir," replied John; "and take care of it; and mind you don't make too much haste back, but give the mare a long rest. Do you mind?"

  "Ay, I mind," returned Joe. "She'll need it, Heaven knows."

  "And don't you score up too much at the Black Lion," said John. "Mind that too."

  "Then why don't you let me have some money of my own?" retorted Joe sorrowfully; "why don't you, father? What do you send me into London for, giving me only the right to call for my dinner at the Black Lion, which you're to pay for next time you go, as if I was not to be trusted with a few shillings? Why do you use me like this? It's not right of you. You can't expect me to be quiet under it."

  Dickens in this interview condemns several mistakes often made by parentsin restraining instead of sympathizing with their children in the naturalunfolding of their young manhood or womanhood. It was wrong for JohnWillet to ridicule Joe's desire to ride a smart horse. It was wrong to bidhim "hold his tongue." It was wrong to criticise his method of dressing tolook his very best. It was wrong to sneer at him because his consciousnessof unfolding manhood and his hope of Dolly Varden's love made him carryhimself with a "military air." What a difference it would make in thecharacters of young men if they all carried themselves with a militaryair, and walked with a consciousness of power and hope!

  It was especially wrong to make fun of the nosegay Joe had pulled forDolly Varden. What a pity it is that so few fathers or mothers can trulysympathize with their boys and girls during the period of courtship! Whyshould the most sacred feelings that ever stir the soul be made thesubject of jest and levity by those whose hearts should most truly beat inunison with the young hearts that are aflame? If there is a time in thelife of young men or women when father or mother may enter the hearts oftheir children as benedictions and form a blessed unity that can never bebroken or undone it is surely when young hearts are hallowed by love. Yetthere are few parents to whom t
heir children can speak freely about themysteries and the deep experiences of love that come into their lives.

  It was wrong to treat Joe as if he was unworthy to be trusted with money.

  Every wrong revealed by Dickens in this interview had its root in John'sfeeling that it was his duty to keep Joe down, to prevent the outflow ofhis inner life.

  Old John having long encroached a good standard inch, full measure, on the liberty of Joe, and having snipped off a Flemish ell in the matter of the parole, grew so despotic and so great, that his thirst for conquest knew no bounds. The more young Joe submitted, the more absolute old John became. The ell soon faded into nothing. Yards, furlongs, miles arose; and on went old John in the pleasantest manner possible, trimming off an exuberance in this place, shearing away some liberty of speech or action in that, and conducting himself in this small way with as much high mightiness and majesty as the most glorious tyrant that ever had his statue reared in the public ways, of ancient or of modern times.

  As great men are urged on to the abuse of power (when they need urging, which is not often) by their flatterers and dependents, so old John was impelled to these exercises of authority by the applause and admiration of his Maypole cronies, who, in the intervals of their nightly pipes and pots, would shake their heads and say that Mr. Willet was a father of the good old English sort; that there were no newfangled notions or modern ways in him; that he put them in mind of what their fathers were when they were boys; that there was no mistake about him; that it would be well for the country if there were more like him, and more was the pity that there were not; with many other original remarks of that nature. Then they would condescendingly give Joe to understand that it was all for his good, and he would be thankful for it one day; and in particular, Mr. Cobb would acquaint him, that when he was his age, his father thought no more of giving him a parental kick, or a box on the ears, or a cuff on the head, or some little admonition of that sort, than he did of any other ordinary duty of life; and he would further remark, with looks of great significance, that but for this judicious bringing up, he might have never been the man he was at that present speaking; which was probable enough, as he was, beyond all question, the dullest dog of the party. In short, between old John and old John's friends, there never was an unfortunate young fellow so bullied, badgered, worried, fretted, and browbeaten; so constantly beset, or made so tired of his life, as poor Joe Willet.

  The end came at last. One evening Mr. Cobb was more aggravating thanusual, and Joe's patience could hold out no longer. He knocked theoffending Cobb into a corner among the spittoons, and ran away from theunbearable tyranny of home.

  What a moral catastrophe occurs when a young man leaves home with afeeling of relief! Dickens develops this thought in the case of TomGradgrind. With the best of intentions, with a single desire of traininghis son in the best possible way, Mr. Gradgrind had repressed his naturaltendencies and robbed him of the joys of childhood and youth to such anextent that when he was about to go to live with Mr. Bounderby, and hissister, Louisa, asked him "if he was pleased with his prospect?" hereplied, "Well, it will be getting away from home." The boy is never toblame for such a catastrophe.

  Dickens attacked another phase of the flogging mania in Barnaby Rudge, ina brief but suggestive scene. Barnaby and his mother were travelling, andwere resting at the gate of a gentleman's grounds, when the proprietorhimself came along and demanded to know who they were.

  "Vagrants," said the gentleman, "vagrants and vagabonds. Thee wish to be made acquainted with the cage, dost thee--the cage, the stocks, and the whipping post? Where dost come from?"

  Learning that Barnaby was weak-minded, he asked how long he had beenidiotic.

  "From his birth," said the widow.

  "I don't believe it," cried the gentleman, "not a bit of it. It's an excuse not to work. There's nothing like flogging to cure that disorder. I'd make a difference in him in ten minutes, I'll be bound."

  "Heaven has made none in more than twice ten years, sir," said the widow mildly.

  "Then why don't you shut him up? We pay enough for county institutions, damn 'em. But thou'd rather drag him about to excite charity--of course. Ay, I know thee."

  Now, this gentleman had various endearing appellations among his intimate friends. By some he was called "a country gentleman of the true school," by some "a fine old country gentleman," by some "a sporting gentleman," by some "a thoroughbred Englishman," by some "a genuine John Bull"; but they all agreed in one respect, and that was, that it was a pity that there were not more like him, and that because there were not, the country was going to rack and ruin every day.

  Dickens always enjoyed ridiculing the people who long for the good oldtimes and approve of the good old customs. There are some who even yetdeplore the fact that children are not repressed and coerced as they usedto be, and who prophesy untold evils unless the good old customs arere-established. They long for the recurrence of the days when "lickin' andlarnin' went hand in hand," when "Wallop the boy, develop the man" was thepopular motto, expressive of the general faith. Dickens pictured them inJohn Willet and this "country gentleman of the true school." He alsocriticised them severely in the Chimes.

  The depressing influence of another form of coercion is shown in OurMutual Friend by the effect of Mr. Podsnap's character on his daughterGeorgiana. Mr. Podsnap was one of the absolutely positive people who knoweverything about everything, who never allow other people to expressopinions without contradicting them, and who take every possibleopportunity of expressing their own opinions in a loud, emphatic, dogmaticmanner. Of course, no woman should hold opinions, according to Mr.Podsnap's way of thinking, although Mrs. Podsnap, in her own way, didcredit to her more Podsnappery master. It was therefore not to be dreamtof for a moment that a "young person" like their daughter Georgiana couldhave any views of her own regarding life or any of its conditions, past,present, or future. She was a "young person" to be protected, and kept inthe background, and guarded from evil, and sheltered, so that she shouldnot even hear of anything improper, and shielded from temptation to dowrong, or to do anything, indeed, right or wrong. Her father was rich; whyshould she wish to do anything but listen to him, and go away when he toldher to do so, if he wished to speak of subjects that he deemed it unwiseto let a "young person" hear discussed?

  There was a Miss Podsnap. And this young rocking-horse was being trained in her mother's art of prancing in a stately manner without ever getting on. But the high parental action was not yet imparted to her, and in truth she was but an undersized damsel, with high shoulders, low spirits, chilled elbows, and a rasped surface of nose, who seemed to take occasional frosty peeps out of childhood into womanhood, and to shrink back again, overcome by her mother's headdress and her father from head to foot--crushed by the mere dead weight of Podsnappery.

  Georgiana explained the reason of her shyness to Mrs. Lammle, for, strangeas it may seem, considering her heredity, Georgiana was shy. Podsnapperyas environment is always much stronger than Podsnappery as heredity.

  "What I mean is," pursued Georgiana, "that ma being so endowed with awfulness, and pa being so endowed with awfulness, and there being so much awfulness everywhere--I mean, at least, everywhere where I am--perhaps it makes me who am so deficient in awfulness, and frightened at it--I say it very badly--I don't know whether you can understand what I mean?"

  Thoughtful people need no explanation regarding the influence ofPodsnappery on children.

  The time will come when in normal schools character analysis will be thesupreme qualification of those who are to decide who may and who may notteach. When that time comes, as come it must, no Podsnaps will be allowedto teach.

  It was no wonder that--

  Whenever Georgiana could escape from the thraldom of Podsnappery; coul
d throw off the bedclothes of the custard-coloured phaeton, and get up; could shrink out of the range of her mother's rocking, and (so to speak) rescue her poor little frosty toes from being rocked over; she repaired to her friend, Mrs. Alfred Lammle.

  Dickens fired another thunderbolt, in Our Mutual Friend, to set the worldthinking about its method of teaching children, by his brief descriptionof Pleasant Riderhood, the daughter of Rogue Riderhood.

  Show her a christening, and she saw a little heathen personage having a quite superfluous name bestowed upon it, inasmuch as it would be commonly addressed by some abusive epithet; which little personage was not in the least wanted by anybody, and would be shoved and banged out of everybody's way, until it should grow big enough to shove and bang. Show her a live father, and she saw but a duplicate of her own father, who from her infancy had been taken with fits and starts of discharging his duty to her, which duty was always incorporated in the form of a fist or a leather strap, and being discharged hurt her.

  In Little Dorrit Dickens gives one of his most striking verbaldescriptions of the effects of coercion in Arthur Clennam's account of hisown early training. He said to Mr. Meagles, when the kind old gentlemanspoke of working with a will:

  "I have no will. That is to say," he coloured a little, "next to none that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent; heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I was of age, and exiled there until my father's death there, a year ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected from me in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were extinguished before I could sound the words."

  "Light 'em up again!" said Mr. Meagles.

  "Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr. Meagles, of a hard father and mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced had no existence. Strict people, as the phrase is, professors of a stern religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part of a bargain for the security of their possessions. Austere faces, inexorable discipline, penance in this world and terror in the next--nothing graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed heart everywhere--this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word as to apply it to such a beginning of life."

  When he returned to the presence of his mother, after an absence of manyyears in China, "the old influence of her presence, and her stern, strongvoice, so gathered about her son that he felt conscious of a renewal ofthe timid chill and reserve of his childhood."

  It was a terrible indictment of all coercive, child-quelling,will-breaking training that Arthur made when he said to his stern mother:

  "I can not say that I have been able to conform myself, in heart and spirit, to your rules; I can not say that I believe my forty years have been profitable or pleasant to myself, or any one; but I have habitually submitted, and I only ask you to remember it."

  Speaking of her own training, Mrs. Clennam said: "Mine were days ofwholesome repression, punishment, and fear," and she frankly avowed herdeliberate purpose of "bringing Arthur up in fear and trembling."

  Those were the dreadful ideals that Dickens aimed to destroy. Repression,punishment, fear, and trembling are no longer the dominant ideals of theChristian world regarding child training. They are rapidly giving way tothe new and true gospel of stimulation, happiness, freedom, and creativeself-activity.

  Great Expectations was a valuable contribution to the literature of childtraining. Mrs. Gargery was a type of repressive, coercive, unsympatheticwomen, who regard children as necessarily nuisances, and who arecontinually thankful for the fact that by the free use of "the tickler"they may be subdued and kept in a state of bearable subjection.

  Mrs. Gargery had no children of her own, but she had a little brother,Pip, whom she "brought up by hand." Her husband, Joe Gargery, was anhonest, affectionate, sympathetic man, who pitied poor Pip and tried tocomfort him when his wife was not present. The dear old fellow said to Pipone evening, as they sat by the fire and he beat time to his kindlythoughts with the poker:

  "Your sister is given to government."

  "Given to government, Joe?" I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea (and I am afraid I must add hope) that Joe had divorced her in favour of the lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.

  "Given to government," said Joe. "Which I meantersay the government of you and myself."

  "Oh!"

  "And she ain't over partial to having scholars on the premises," Joe continued, "and in particular would not be over partial to my being a scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don't you see?"

  I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as "Why----" when Joe stopped me.

  "Stay a bit. I know what you're a-going to say, Pip? stay a bit! I don't deny that your sister comes the mo-gul over us, now and again. I don't deny that she do throw us back-falls, and that she do drop down upon us heavy. At such times as when your sister is on the ram-page, Pip," Joe sunk his voice to a whisper and glanced at the door, "candour compels fur to admit that she is a buster....

  "I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I wish there warn't no tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all on myself; but this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you'll overlook shortcomings."

  Poor Joe! His father had been a blacksmith, but he took to drink, and, asJoe said, "Hammered at me with a wigour only to be equalled by the wigourwith which he didn't hammer at his anwil."

  Dickens gives an illustration of Mrs. Gargery's training which reveals notonly her coercive and unsympathetic tendencies, but points to other errorsin training children that are yet too common. Pip was warming himselfbefore going to bed one night, when a cannon sounded from the Hulks, orprison ships, near the Gargery home.

  "Ah!" said Joe; "there's another conwict off."

  "What does that mean?" said I.

  Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said snappishly: "Escaped. Escaped." Administering the definition like medicine.

  "There was a conwict off last night," said Joe, aloud, "after sunset gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it appears they're firing warning of another."

  "Who's firing?" said I.

  "Drat that boy," interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work; "what a questioner he is! Ask no questions and you'll be told no lies."

  It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should be told lies by her, even if I did ask questions. But she never was polite, unless there was company.

  "Mrs. Joe," said I, as a last resort, "I should like to know--if you wouldn't much mind--where the firing comes from?"

  "Lord bless the boy!" exclaimed my sister, as if she didn't quite mean that, but rather the contrary. "From the hulks!"

  "And please, what's hulks?" said I.

  "That's the way with this boy!" exclaimed my sister, pointing me out with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. "Answer him one question, and he'll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison ships, right 'cross th' country."

  "I wonder who's put into prison ships, and why they're put there?" said I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.

  It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. "I tell you what, young fellow," said she, "I didn't bring you up by hand to badger people's lives out. It would be blame to me, and not praise, if I had. People are put in the hulks because they murder, and because they rob, and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking questions. Now, you get along to bed!"

  I was never allowed a candl
e to light me to bed, and, as I went upstairs in the dark, with my head tingling--from Mrs. Joe's thimble having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words--I felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were handy for me. I was clearly on my way there.

  Pip said later: "I suppose myself to be better acquainted than any living authority with the ridgy effect of a wedding ring passing unsympathetically over the human countenance."

  My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by the hand gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive.

  Mrs. Gargery's training was bad because she refused to answer the boy'squestions, or abused him for asking them; and when she did condescend toanswer she answered in a snappy, unsympathetic way. The cruelty of firstscolding a child, then trying to terrify him from asking questions bytelling him that "robbers, murderers, and all kinds of criminals begantheir downward career by asking questions," then rapping him on the head,and finally sending him to bed without a light, is admirably described.All these practices are terribly unjust to children. Parents and teachers,in the picture of Mrs. Gargery, are warned against scolding, againstthreatening, against falsehood and misrepresentation in order to reducechildren to submission, against corporal punishment with "the tickler,"against the more dastardly and more exasperating corporal punishment bysnapping and rapping the head, and against sending children to bed in thedark. He was especially careful to make the retiring hour in his own homea period of joyousness and freedom from all fear. He made the crime ofsending children to bed without light and without sympathy one of thepractices of that model of bad training--Mrs. Pipchin; and one of the mostdreaded of little Oliver Twist's experiences was to be sent to sleep amongthe coffins in the dark at Sowerberry's.

  The hour of retiring is the special time when children most need theaffectionate spirit of motherhood, and wise mothers try to use this sacredhour to form their closest unity with the hearts of the little ones, andto sow in their young lives the apperceptive seeds of sweetness, and joy,and faith.

  The wrong of making children sensitive, and then blaming them for beingsensitive, is admirably shown in Pip's training.

  The revelation of the child's consciousness of the sense of injustice inthe treatment of those who train it is worthy of most careful study andthought by parents and teachers. There can be no doubt that infants have aclear sense of wrongs inflicted on them, even before they can speak.

  The comparison of the child's rocking-horse with the big-boned Irishhunter reveals one of the most essential lessons for adulthood: that whatmay appear trifling to an adult may mean much to a child. Kind butthoughtless adulthood is often most grievously unjust to childhood,because it fails to consider how things appear to the child. However kindand good such adults are, they are utterly unsympathetic with the child.Many people are very considerate for childhood who are very unsympatheticwith children. Consideration can never take the place of sympathy. Anounce of true sympathy is worth a ton of consideration to a child.Adulthood has measured a child's corn in the bushel of adulthood. Mr.Gradgrind, for instance, was a good man, and he meant to be kind andhelpful to his children. He was most considerate for them, and spared nomoney to promote their welfare and happiness. But he did it in accordancewith the tastes and opinions of adulthood, and totally ignored the factthat children have opinions and tastes, and he ruined the children whom hemost loved. "The rocking-horse and the big-boned Irish hunter" suggestrich mines of child psychology.

  The pernicious habit of so many adults who fill the imaginations ofchildren with bogies and terrors of an abnormal kind in order to keep themin the path of rectitude by falsehood, is exposed in Mrs. Gargery's methodof stopping Pip's questions by telling him that asking questions was thefirst step in a career of crime. This habit leads parents insensibly intoa most dishonest attitude toward their children. It leads, too, in duetime, to a lack of reverence for adulthood. Falseness is certain to leadto the disrespect it deserves. Parents who make untruthfulness a basisfor terror should not be surprised at the irreverence or the scepticism oftheir children.

  In The Schoolboy's Story, old Cheeseman was brought to school by a womanwho was always taking snuff and shaking him.

  There is a great deal of pedagogical thought in Dombey and Son. At theperiod of its issue (1846-48) Dickens appears to have devoted moreattention to the study of wrong methods of teaching than at any othertime, so in Dr. Blimber, Cornelia Blimber, and Mr. Feeder he gave his bestillustrations of what in his opinion should be condemned in the popularmethods of teaching. But while this was evidently his chief educationalpurpose in writing the book, he gave a good deal of attention to wrongmethods of training, especially to the most awful doctrine of theages--that children must be coerced, and repressed, and checked, andsubdued. He evidently accepted as his supreme duty the responsibility forsecuring a free childhood for children. Mrs. Pipchin is an admirabledelineation of the worst features of what was regarded as respectablechild training. Her training is treated at length in Chapter XI. It issufficient here to deal with her coerciveness, and recall the epithet"child-queller" which Dickens applied to her. No more expressive term wasever used to describe the wickedness of the coercionists. It means morethan most volumes. It has new meaning every day as our reverence for thedivinity in the child grows stronger, and the absolute need of thedevelopment of his selfhood by his own self-activity becomes clearer. Itreveals a perfect charnel house full of dwarfed souls and blightedselfhood, and weak characters that should have been strong, and falsecharacters that should have been true, and wailings that should have beenmusic, and tears that should have been laughter, and darkness that shouldhave been light, and wickedness that should have been a blessing. The oneawful word "child-queller" means all of evil that can result from daringto stand between the child and God in our self-satisfied ignorance tocheck the free, natural output of its selfhood which God meant to bewrought out with increasing power throughout its life. Our work is tochange the direction of the outflowing selfhood when it is wrong, todirect it to new and better interest centres, but never to stop it or turnit back upon itself.

  There are thousands of child-quellers teaching still. Would that theycould see truly the dwarfed souls they have blighted, and the ghosts ofthe selfhood they have sacrificed on the altar of what they calldiscipline!

  The term child-queller was the creation of genius.

  Mrs. Pipchin disdained the idea of reasoning with children. "Hoity-toity!"exclaimed Mrs. Pipchin, shaking out her black bombazine skirts, andplucking up all the ogress within her. "If she don't like it, Mr. Dombey,she must be taught to lump it." She would "shake her head and frown down alegion of children," and "the wild ones went home tame enough aftersojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof." She tamed themby robbing them of their power, as Froebel's boy tamed flies by tearingoff their wings and legs, and then saying, "See how tame they are."

  Teachers used to boast about their ability to tame children, when theirability really meant the power to destroy the tendency to put fortheffort, to substitute negativeness for positiveness.

  Susan Nipper, in her usual graphic style, expressed her vi
ews regardingthe coercive practices of Mrs. Pipchin and the Blimbers.

  "Goodness knows," exclaimed Miss Nipper, "there's a-many we could spare instead, if numbers is a object; Mrs. Pipchin as a overseer would come cheap at her weight in gold, and if a knowledge of black slavery should be required, them Blimbers is the very people for the sitiwation."

  One of Mrs. Pipchin's favourite methods of coercing, or taming, orchild-quelling was to send children to bed.

  "The best thing you can do is to take off your things and go to bed this minute." This was the sagacious woman's remedy for all complaints, particularly lowness of spirits and inability to sleep; for which offence many young victims in the days of the Brighton Castle had been committed to bed at ten o'clock in the morning.

  Another assault on coercion was made in Dombey and Son in the briefdescription of the Grinders' school.

  Biler's life had been rendered weary by the costume of the Charitable Grinders. The youth of the streets could not endure it. No young vagabond could be brought to bear its contemplation for a moment without throwing himself upon the unoffending wearer and doing him a mischief. His social existence had been more like that of an early Christian than an innocent child of the nineteenth century. He had been stoned in the streets. He had been overthrown into gutters; bespattered with mud; violently flattened against posts. Entire strangers to his person had lifted his yellow cap off his head and cast it to the winds. His legs had not only undergone verbal criticism and revilings, but had been handled and pinched. That very morning he had received a perfectly unsolicited black eye on his way to the Grinders' establishment, and had been punished for it by the master: a superannuated old Grinder of savage disposition, who had been appointed schoolmaster because he didn't know anything and wasn't fit for anything, and for whose cruel cane all chubby little boys had a perfect fascination.

  Poor Biler went wrong, and when he was taken to task for it by Mr. Carkerhe gave his theory to account for the fact that he had not done better atschool.

  "You're a nice young gentleman!" said Mr. Carker, shaking his head at him. "There's hemp-seed sown for _you_, my fine fellow!"

  "I'm sure, sir," returned the wretched Biler, blubbering again, and again having recourse to his coat cuff: "I shouldn't care, sometimes, if it was growed too. My misfortunes all began in wagging, sir, but what could I do, exceptin' wag?"

  "Excepting what?" said Mr. Carker.

  "Wag, sir. Wagging from school."

  "Do you mean pretending to go there, and not going?" said Mr. Carker.

  "Yes, sir, that's wagging, sir," returned the quondam Grinder, much affected. "I was chivied through the streets, sir, when I went there, and pounded when I got there. So I wagged and hid myself, and that began it."

  When Mr. Dombey, by whose act of superior grace Biler had been sent to theCharitable Grinders' school, upbraided the boy's father for his failure toturn out well,

  the simple father said that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan.

  Sagacious teachers and parents often blame and punish children for beingwhat they made them.

  Still another illustration of the cruel coercion practised on children isfound in Dombey and Son, in the training of Alice Marwood.

  "There was a child called Alice Marwood," said the daughter, with a laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself, "born among poverty and neglect, and nursed in it. Nobody taught her, nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her."

  "Nobody!" echoed the mother, pointing to herself, and striking her breast.

  "The only care she knew," returned the daughter, "was to be beaten, and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better without that."

  The picture of George Silverman's early life is one of the most touchingof all the appeals of Dickens on behalf of childhood. He lived in acellar, and when he was removed at length he knew only the sensations of"cold, hunger, thirst, and the pain of being beaten." The poor child usedto speculate on his mother's feet having a good or ill temper as shedescended the stairs to their cellar home, and he watched her knees, herwaist, her face, as they came into view, to learn whether he was likely tobe abused or not. Many mothers realized their own cruelty by reading suchdescriptions of cruelty toward little children.

  The whole system of training of Mr. Gradgrind and his teacher, Mr.M'Choakumchild (the latter name contains volumes of coercion) was ascientific system of coerciveness and restraint, planned and carried outby a good man misguided by false ideas about child training and characterbuilding. Coercion was only one of several bad elements in his system, buthe was terribly coercive. His children were lavishly supplied with almosteverything they did not care for, and robbed of everything they shouldnaturally be interested in.

  The results were, as might be expected, disastrous. His son Tom became amonster of selfishness, sensuality, and criminality. Dickens uses the name"whelp" to describe him, and, in a satirical manner, accounts for hismeanness and weaknesses in the following summary:

  It was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been brought up under one continuous system of unnatural restraint should be a hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom. It was very strange that a young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for five consecutive minutes should be incapable at last of governing himself; but so it was with Tom. It was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.

  When Mr. Gradgrind became convinced that he had been altogether wrong inhis educational ideals and was endeavouring to explain the matter to Mr.Bounderby, that gentleman gave expression to the views of many people ofhis time. Fortunately there are few Bounderbys now, but there are someeven yet.

  "Well, well!" returned Mr. Gradgrind, with a patient, even a submissive air. And he sat for a little while pondering. "Bounderby, I see reason to doubt whether we have ever quite understood Louisa."

  "What do you mean by we?"

  "Let me say, I, then," he returned, in answer to the coarsely blurted question; "I doubt whether I have understood Louisa. I doubt whether I have been quite right in the manner of her education."

  "There you hit it," returned Bounderby. "There I agree with you. You have found it out at last, have you? Education! I'll tell you what education is--to be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon the shortest allowance of everything except blows. That's what _I_ call education."

  In his last book--Edwin Drood--Dickens pictured Mr. Honeythunder as a typeof coercive philanthropists, whom he regarded as intolerable as well asintolerant nuisances--people who would use force to compel everybody tothink and act as they are told to think and act by the Honeythunders.

  In speaking of Mr. Honeythunder and his class of philanthropists, Rev.Canon Crisparkle said:

  It is a most extraordinary thing that these philanthropists are so given to seizing their fellow-creatures by the scruff of the neck, and (as one may say) bumping them into the paths of peace.

  Neville Landless described his training to Canon Crisparkle in tellingwords:

  "And to finish with, sir: I have been brought up among abject and servile dependents of an inferior race, and I may easily have contracted some affinity with them. Sometimes I don't know but that it may be a drop of what is tigerish in their blood."

  There is a profound philosophy of one phase of the evils of coercion inthis statement. Coercion does not always destroy power by blighting it.Often t
he power that was intended to bless turns to poison when it isrepressed, and makes men hypocritical and tigerish. It is true, too, thata child who is brought up with the idea of dominating a servile class, oreven servile individuals, can never have a true conception of his ownfreedom.

  Dickens was not satisfied with his numerous and sustained attacks on themore violent forms of coercion and repression. He began in Edwin Drood todraw a picture of Mrs. Crisparkle, the mother of the Canon, to show thatthe placid firmness of her strong will had a baleful influence oncharacter. Her character was not completed, but the outlines given aremost suggestive. What could surpass the absolute indifference she showedto the slightest consideration for the individuality or opinions of otherpeople when she spoke of her wards, who were grown up, it should beremembered, to young manhood and womanhood.

  "I have spoken with my two wards, Neville and Helena Landless, on the subject of their defective education, and they give in to the plan proposed; as I should have taken good care they did, whether they liked it or not."

  How exquisitely he reveals the character of the eminently dogmatic, thoughquiet, Christian lady by her remarking so definitely to her son, theCanon:

  "I have no objection to discuss it, Sept. I trust, my dear, I am always open to discussion." There was a vibration in the old lady's cap, as though she internally added, "And I should like to see the discussion that would change _my_ mind!"

  Dickens meant to show that whether the coercion partook of the nature ofthat exercised by Squeers or Mrs. Crisparkle, it resulted in forcing thosecompelled to submit to it to "give in," and that all children who areregularly made to "give in" acquire the habit of "giving in," andeventually become "give-iners" and hypocrites until circumstances makethem rebels and anarchists. So he condemned every form of coercion, andtaught the doctrine of true freedom for the child as a necessary elementin his best development. When this doctrine is fully understood men willsoon become truly free. All true education has been a movement towardfreedom. All true national advancement has been toward more perfectfreedom. The ideal of national, constitutional liberty has changed inharmony with the educational revelations of the broadening conception offreedom; and more progressive conceptions of national liberty haverendered it necessary for the educators to reveal truer, freer methods oftraining children in harmony with the higher national organization.

  When the ideal of national organization was the divine right of kings torule their subjects by absolute authority, the system of nationalorganization required passive obedience on the part of the subject. Tosecure this coercive discipline the prompt submission of the child to theimmediate authority over him was the ideal process. Passive submission wasrequired as the full duty of the citizen, and passive obedience was thedesired product of the school. But the new ideal of government is rule bythe people through their representatives, and national citizenship meansthe intelligent co-operation of independent individuals; so the trueeducational ideal is a free selfhood, and a free selfhood in maturitydemands a free selfhood in childhood. To secure this it is essential thatschools shall become "free republics of childhood."

  "But a free selfhood in childhood must lead to anarchy," say those whocling to the coercive ideal. Anarchy never springs from freedom. Anarchyis the foul son of coercion. True freedom does not include liberty to dowrong. The "perfect law of liberty" is the only basis for perfecthappiness, because it is not freedom beyond law, but freedom within law,freedom because of law. Law should never be coercive to the child. When itbecomes so the law is wrong and it makes the child wrong, and produces theapperceptive centres of anarchy in feeling and thought out of the veryelements that should have produced joyous co-operation. Law should givethe child consciousness of power, and not of restraint. Undirectedselfhood, uncontrolled selfhood, is not true freedom. The exercise ofpower without limitations leads to confusion, indecision, and anarchy ineverything except its spirit of rebellion. The guidance and control ofadulthood and the limitations of law are necessary to the accomplishmentof the best results in the immediate product of effort put forth by thechild, in the effect on his character, and in the development of a trueconsciousness of freedom in his life.

  The terrible blunder of the past in child training has been to make lawcoercive instead of directive. Law has been prohibitive, not stimulative.Law has defined barriers to prevent effort, instead of outlining thedirection effort should take. The limitations of law have been used todefine the course the child should not take; they should have defined thecourse he ought to take, and within the range of which course he shoulduse his selfhood in the freest possible way. Law has said "thou shalt not"when it should have said "thou shalt"; it has said "don't" when it shouldhave said "do"; it has said "quit" when it should have said "go on"; ithas said "be still" when it should have said "work"; it has stood in theway to check when it should have moved on to lead to victory and progressalong the most direct lines; it has given a consciousness of weaknessinstead of a consciousness of power; it has developed moroseness insteadof joyousness, self-depreciation instead of self-reverence; and childrenfor these reasons have been led to dislike law, and the apperceptivecentres of anarchy have been laid by a coercive instead of a stimulativeuse of law.

  By false ideals of coercive law adulthood has been made repressive insteadof suggestive, depressive instead of helpful, dogmatic instead ofreasonable, tyrannical instead of free, "child-quellers" instead ofsympathetic friends of childhood, executors of penalties instead of wiseguides, agents to keep children under instead of helping them up; and sochildren have learned to dislike school, and work, and teachers, and oftenhome and parents. And the children have not been to blame for theirdislike of law and their distrust of adulthood.

  And the children themselves by coercion have been made don'ters instead ofdoers, quitters instead of workers, give-iners instead of perseveringwinners, yielders to opposition instead of achievers of victory, negativeinstead of positive, apathetic instead of energetic, passive instead ofactive, imitative instead of original, followers instead of leaders,dependent instead of independent, servile instead of free, conscious ofweakness instead of power, defect shunners instead of triumphant creativerepresentatives of the God in whose image man was created.

  Every agency that robs a child of his originality and freedom and preventsthe spontaneous output of his creative self-activity destroys the image ofGod in him. Man is most like God when he is freely working out the plansof his own creative selfhood for good purposes. Coercion has been thegreatest destroyer of the image of God in the child, and anarchy is theproduct of the perversion of the very powers that should have made manhopefully constructive. The seeds of anarchy are sown in the child's life,when his selfhood is blighted and checked. The fountain that finds freeoutlet for its waters forms a pure stream that remains always a blessing,but the fountain that is obstructed forms a noisome marsh, wasting thegood land it should have watered and destroying the plant life it shouldhave nourished.

  The great salt seas and lakes and marshes of the world have been formed bythe checking of beautiful fresh-water streams and rivers and theprevention of their outflow to the ocean they should have reached. So whenthe outflow of the soul of the child is checked the powers that shouldhave ennobled his own life and enriched the lives of others turn to evilinstead of good, and make a dangerous instead of a helpful character. Sofar as coercion can influence selfhood it destroys its power for good andmakes it a menace to civilization, instead of a beneficent agency in theaccomplishment of high purposes. The reason that coercion does not moreeffectively blight and dwarf the child is that childhood is not under thedirect influence of adulthood all the time. The blessed hours of freedomin play and work have saved the race.

  The absurd idea that "anarchy will result from giving true freedom to thechild" persists in the minds of so many people, partly through thestrength of the race conception of the need of coercion, from which wehave not yet been able fully to free ourselves; partly from a terriblemisconcepti
on regarding the true function of law; partly through grossignorance of the child and lack of reverence for him; and partly fromfailure to understand our own higher powers for guiding the childproperly, or the vital relationships of adulthood to childhood.

  The child should recognise law as a beneficent guide in the accomplishmentof his own plans. In Froebel's wonderful kindergarten system the child isalways guided by law, but he is always perfectly free to work out his owndesigns, and in doing so he is aided by law, not kept back or down by law.Law is, to the truly trained child, a revealer of right outlets for power,and the supreme duties of adulthood in training childhood are to changethe centre of its interest when from lack of wisdom its interest centre iswrong, and to reveal to it in logical sequence the laws of nature, ofbeauty, of harmony, and of life. With such training life and law willalways be in harmony, and the seeds of anarchy will find no soil in humanhearts or minds in which to take root.

  Dickens uses the French Revolution, in A Tale of Two Cities, to show thatanarchy results from coercion, from the unreasoning subordination of alower to a higher or ruling class. Against the reasoning of wisdom theMarquis said: "Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The darkdeference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient tothe whip as long as this roof shuts out the sky." The roof came off onewild night--burned off by an infuriated mob of the dogs who had beenrepressed and whipped into anarchy. Yet the aristocracy of France claimed,as coercionist educators claim, that the anarchy was the result ofinsufficient coercion, instead of the natural harvest of the seed they hadsown.

  It was too much the way of monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible revolution as if it were the one only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown--as if nothing had ever been done that had led to it--as if the observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw.

  When the Revolution was at its fearful height, and the repressed dogs werehaving their wild carnival of revenge, Dickens says:

  Along the Paris streets the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the day's wine to la guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realization, guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

  Six tumbrels roll along the streets. Change these back again to what they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilets of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not My Father's house but dens of thieves, and huts of millions of starving peasants!

  This is the most profound and most ably written exposition of thephilosophy of anarchy.

  "But by coercion I can make the child do right, and in this way I can formhabits of doing right that will control the child when he grows up."

  The habit that is really formed by coercion is the habit of submission, ofpassive yielding to authority, of subordination, and, in the lastanalysis, this means the degradation and enslavement of the soul. Twohabits are thus wrought into the child's nature by coercion: the habit ofdoing things because ordered to do them, which is slavery; and the habitof doing things he does not like or wish to do, which is the basis ofhypocrisy. The meanest products that can be made from beings created inGod's image are slaves and hypocrites. One of the remarkable factsregarding coercionists is that they blame God for creating themonstrosities they have themselves produced by false methods of training.

  "We should break the child's will, if it is wrong, to set it right, justas we should break a crooked leg to make it straight."

  This is a statement that betrays a lack of modern surgical knowledge, anda carelessness of psychological thought. Modern treatment for the cure ofdeformity of body avoids harsh treatment whenever it is possible to do so.It has been found that many deformities of body may be cured by properexercise of the undeveloped part or parts, and with wider knowledge ofNature's laws will come a wiser use of the law of self-transformation, anda smaller and smaller use of the severer methods of treatment. But no goodchild psychologist now doubts that a child's will possesses the power ofself-development and self-adjustment under proper guidance, nor should anyone be ignorant of the fact that all true will development comes fromwithin outward.

  It is only necessary that man should study the child more thoroughly, andlearn how to change his interest centres from wrong to right, and how tosurround him with an environment suitable to his progressive stages ofdevelopment, in order to keep his own will in operation along productivelines of self-reformation and self-regulation by creative self-activity.Thus the will can be set to work truly with undiminished power. When awill is broken, however, it can never regain its full power; the breakingprocess blights it forever. More rational processes retain its tendency toact and its energy of action while changing the purpose and direction ofits action.

  One of the interesting anomalies of our language is the marvellous factthat the term "self-willed" should ever have been considered a term ofreproach or a description of a defect in character. The child withstrongest self-will may become the greatest champion for righteousness ifproperly trained. He needs a wise and sympathetic trainer, who will bereverently grateful for his strong self-will, and whose reverence willprevent him from doing anything that would weaken the strength or selfhoodof the will. The attempt to break his will may make him a destroying forceinstead of a leader for truth and progress. If a strangled will everregains vitality it rarely acts truly. There is perhaps no other relic ofthe theories of barbaric ignorance concerning child training still leftthat is so baneful and so illogical as the theory that justifies willbreaking.

  "But God punishes the child. The child who touches the fire gets burned,and therefore it is right that coercive punishment should be used byadulthood in dealing with the child."

  The punishments referred to are the revelation of natural laws. There isno personal element of the punishing agency manifest to the child. Goddoes not appear to the child as a punisher, and it is an astounding errorin training to reveal such a consciousness of God to the child.Responsibility for the consequences of their acts is a law of which allchildren approve. This appeals to their sense of justice, and there is noother sense to which we can appeal with success so universally in childrenas the sense of justice. "Squareness" is the highest quality named in thelexicon of childhood. A boy would rather be deemed "square" than receivepraise for any other characteristic or accomplishment. So he recognisesthe justice of being held accountable for the directly resultingconsequences of his acts quite as readily as he accepts the fact, withoutblaming any one else, that he will be burned if he touches fire. There isno element of coercion in the law of consequences. It is a just anduniversal law in harmony with his moral responsibility; therefore he willrespect it. Coercion is directly contrary to the fundamental laws of hishappiness and his true growth, and therefore he naturally and properlydislikes and disapproves of it, and of the individual who outrages justiceby using it.

  The wonderful stories of Dickens set the world thinking by first arousingthe strongest feelings of sympathy for the child and then developingsentiment and thought against every form of coercion, more especiallycoercion by corporal punishment. The awakening has been most satisfactoryin its results. When Dickens began his writing against corporal punishmentthe rod
was the almost universal remedy for all defects in animals orhuman beings. Whatever the defect, the superior in the eyes of the lawused the one agency to overcome it. Mothers used the rod to subdue theirchildren. Husbands used the rod to keep their children and wives in order.Men whipped their horses with impunity, as they did their children orwives. They owned them, and their right to punish them as they chose wasunquestioned. Men trained animals to perform tricks in menageries bybeating them, and they trained dancing, or performing, or learning girlsand boys quite as inhumanly. Ownership or subordination justifiedunspeakable cruelty. The weakness of the child, the helplessness of theanimal, appealed to the hardness of human nature, and not to its chivalryor sympathy. Even the poor feeble-minded and idiotic, who were confined inasylums, were terribly flogged by the most advanced philanthropists of thehighest Christian civilization. They were weak. It was the duty of theauthorities to control them, and "stripes and bruises" were regarded asthe only true agencies for securing obedience. The rod was the highestcontrolling and directing force in the world.

  What a change has been wrought! Horses and children and wives areprotected from brutal treatment now by law. The insane are not flogged tomake them sane in any well-conducted institutions. More than half thechildren in the schools of the civilized world are free from the terrorand degradation of corporal punishment by law, or by the higherconsciousness of more intelligent teachers. Parenthood everywhere isstudying the child and trying to become conscious of its own higher powersof guiding character so that it may be able to train the children in truerand more productive and less dangerous ways than formerly. And CharlesDickens was the great apostle of these grand reforms.

  We shudder now as we read of the outrages practised on helpless childrenand on the insane half a century ago not by the heathen, but by earnest,conscientious Christians. The men who live half a century hence willshudder when they read that in some schools at the close of the nineteenthcentury children who were partially or temporarily insane from hereditarytaint, or imperfect nutrition, or cruel treatment, or anger, or from someother removable or remediable cause were whipped, and that men, some ofwhom occupied respectable positions, advocated the breaking of children'swills! If these "will-breaking" educators were in charge of asylums theywould resurrect the straitjacket and the whipping post for the insane.

  The few who advocate corporal punishment openly claim that they have theauthority of the Bible for their faith in the rod. They should rememberthat good men have stood with Bibles in their hands misrepresenting Godand attempting to stop the progress of every great movement toward freedomand reform. Galileo was imprisoned by the Church because he taught thatthe earth turns round. Men had no difficulty in showing that the Bibleapproved of slavery, or that it prohibited woman from the exercise of theright or the performance of the duties of responsible individuality. Somen still quote Solomon to show that corporal punishment is approved byGod, though such a conclusion would be rejected by the highestinterpreters.

  "Whipping makes strong characters." No, it makes hard characters, andhardness is but one element of strength, and not the best element ofstrength. The strength of the English character has not been developed, asis claimed by some, by the whipping done in English schools and homes. Itcomes partly by race heredity from the sturdiness of the Saxon and Normanfounders of the race, partly from the general practice of working hardfrom youth up, and largely from the fact that the English playgrounds areso universally used, and are the scenes of the severest struggles forsupremacy in skill and power that are witnessed in any part of the world.The winning half inch or half length, the valorous struggle forleadership on track or river--these are the things that have preserved anddeveloped English force and bravery, in spite of the fact that England inher schools and homes has done fully her share of whipping. A boy or girlwho spends as much time in free strong play as the English boy, works outthe effects of a great many evils from his or her life. When men see thefutility of dependence on flogging for developing energetic strength ofcharacter they will study the influence of play to the great advantage ofracial vigour, and courage, and moral energy.

  Corporal punishment, like all other forms of coercion, robs the child ofjoyousness, and joyousness is one of the most essential elements in thetrue growth of a child. Corporal punishment affects the nervous systems ofchildren injuriously, and when applied to certain parts of the body itstimulates prematurely the action of the sexual nature, and leads to oneof the worst forms of depravity.

  Corporal punishment is ineffective as a disciplinary agency. In oneAmerican city during the generation after Dickens began his great crusadeagainst corporal punishment it was the practice to whip with a rawhide allchildren who came late, but the lateness steadily increased in defiance ofthe rawhide. It was reduced to less than one one-hundredth part of itsformer proportion when whipping for lateness was entirely abolished andmore rational means adopted.

  The order and co-operation of pupils is best in those schools in which nocorporal punishment is used. If in any school only one teacher relies onthe rod as a stimulator to work and a restrainer of evil, her class issure to be the most disorderly, the least co-operative, and the mostdefective in original power in the school. As the children throughout theschool come from the same homes, play with the same companions, attend thesame churches, and are subject to the same general influences, it isperfectly clear that the whipping is the distinctive feature of charactertraining that deforms the children. They will become normal, reasonablechildren when they reach the next room. This illustration assumes thatall the teachers are possessed of good natural ability to direct the childproperly. The one who uses corporal punishment fails because she has beendwarfed by her faith in corporal punishment. She has believed in it sofully that she has not sought to understand higher and better means. Shehas studied neither the child nor her own powers of child guidance.

  Dickens taught the inefficiency of coercion to accomplish what men hopedto accomplish by it in his criticism of the revolting use of capitalpunishment in former times. In A Tale of Two Cities he says:

  Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the holder of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of three fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of crime were put to Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention--it might always have been worth remarking that the fact was _exactly the reverse_.

  The great prophets of modern education--Pestalozzi, Froebel, Barnard, andMann--strongly condemned corporal punishment. These were men of clearinsight and correct judgment. The opinion of one such man is worth morethan the views of ten thousand ordinary men in regard to the subject oftheir special study. They were prophet souls who saw the higher truthtoward which the race had been slowly growing, and revealed it.

  Their revelations have been appreciated and adopted more and more fully asthey have been understood more and more clearly. In the case of corporalpunishment and all forms of coercion Dickens has been the John the Baptistand the Paul of the revelation of the gospel of sympathy for the child.

  Not one blow in a thousand is given to a child now as compared with thetime of Dickens's childhood. Corporal punishment is prohibited in theschools of France, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, Brazil, New Jersey, andin the following cities: New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Albany, Syracuse,Toledo, and Savannah. In Washington and Philadelphia teachers voluntarilygave up the practice of whipping. This is true of the majority ofindividual teachers in the cities of America, and the number of those whodo without all forms of coercive discipline is rapidly increasing.

  The whipping of girls is prohibited in Saxony, Hessen, Oldenburg, and inmany cities. Few girls are now whipped in schools anywhere. Corporalpunishment has been abolished for the higher grades in Norway and in thelower grades
in Saxony, Hessen, Bremen, and Hamburg. In the last-namedcity the cane is kept under lock and key. In some places the consent ofparents must be obtained before children may be whipped, in some placesthe number of strokes is limited; in other places a record is kept ofevery case of corporal punishment and reports made monthly to the schoolboards. Everywhere action has been taken to prohibit or restrict the useof the once universally respected and universally dominant rod.

  All wise trainers of children recognise the value of obedience, but trulywise trainers no longer aim to make children merely submissively obedient,nor even willingly responsive in their obedience. They try to make themindependently, co-operatively, and reverently obedient; independent infree development of will, co-operative in unity of effort with theirfellows and their adult guides, and reverent in their attitude to law. Thesubstitution of independence for subserviency, of co-operation for formal,responsive obedience, and of reverence for law for fear of law are themost important development in child training.

  In Dickens's ideal school, Doctor Strong's, there was "plenty of liberty."

  Gladstone's criticism, when over seventy, of his own teachers was thatthey were afraid of freedom. He said: "I did not learn to set a due valueon the imperishable and inestimable principles of human liberty. Thetemper which I think prevailed among them was that liberty was regardedwith jealousy, and fear could not be wholly dispensed with." The trueteacher is not afraid of freedom, but makes it the dominant element in histraining and in his educational theory.

  May the profounder truth in regard to child training spread to the ends ofthe earth! May the time soon come when there shall be no disciples ofSusan Nipper's doctrine, "that childhood, like money, must be shaken andrattled and jostled about a good deal to keep it bright"! May Christiancivilization soon be free from such memories as the remembrance of Mr.Obenreizer, in No Thoroughfare, had of his parents: "I was a famishednaked little wretch of two or three years when they were men and womenwith hard hands to beat me"! May Christ's teaching soon be so fullyunderstood that there will be no child anywhere like the shivering littleboy in The Haunted Man, who was "used already to be worried and huntedlike a beast, who crouched down as he was looked at, and looked backagain, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow, andthreatened to bite if he was hit"! May teachers and all trainers ofchildren learn the underlying philosophy of the statement made by Dickens,in connection with the schools of the Stepney Union, in The UncommercialTraveller: "In the moral health of these schools--where corporalpunishment is unknown--truthfulness stands high"!