Chapter III: The Overthrow of Coercion (2)

"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 he expressed his opinion to Mr. Varden about the character of the man who hit him.

"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 even the most sacred things of Joe's life with contempt.

Joe was about to start to London on business for his father, and he was to ride a mare that was so slow that a young man could not enjoy the prospect of 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 parents in restraining instead of sympathizing with their children in the natural unfolding of their young manhood or womanhood. It was wrong for John Willet to ridicule Joe's desire to ride a smart horse. It was wrong to bid him "hold his tongue." It was wrong to criticise his method of dressing to look his very best. It was wrong to sneer at him because his consciousness of unfolding manhood and his hope of Dolly Varden's love made him carry himself with a "military air." What a difference it would make in the characters of young men if they all carried themselves with a military air, and walked with a consciousness of power and hope!

It was especially wrong to make fun of the nosegay Joe had pulled for Dolly Varden. What a pity it is that so few fathers or mothers can truly sympathize with their boys and girls during the period of courtship! Why should the most sacred feelings that ever stir the soul be made the subject of jest and levity by those whose hearts should most truly beat in unison with the young hearts that are aflame? If there is a time in the life of young men or women when father or mother may enter the hearts of their children as benedictions and form a blessed unity that can never be broken or undone it is surely when young hearts are hallowed by love. Yet there are few parents to whom their children can speak freely about the mysteries 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's feeling that it was his duty to keep Joe down, to prevent the outflow of his 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 than usual, and Joe's patience could hold out no longer. He knocked the offending Cobb into a corner among the spittoons, and ran away from the unbearable tyranny of home.

What a moral catastrophe occurs when a young man leaves home with a feeling of relief! Dickens develops this thought in the case of Tom Gradgrind. With the best of intentions, with a single desire of training his son in the best possible way, Mr. Gradgrind had repressed his natural tendencies and robbed him of the joys of childhood and youth to such an extent that when he was about to go to live with Mr. Bounderby, and his sister, Louisa, asked him "if he was pleased with his prospect?" he replied, "Well, it will be getting away from home." The boy is never to blame for such a catastrophe.

Dickens attacked another phase of the flogging mania in Barnaby Rudge, in a brief but suggestive scene. Barnaby and his mother were travelling, and were resting at the gate of a gentleman's grounds, when the proprietor himself 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 been idiotic.

"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 old times and approve of the good old customs. There are some who even yet deplore the fact that children are not repressed and coerced as they used to be, and who prophesy untold evils unless the good old customs are re-established. They long for the recurrence of the days when "lickin' and larnin' went hand in hand," when "Wallop the boy, develop the man" was the popular motto, expressive of the general faith. Dickens pictured them in John Willet and this "country gentleman of the true school." He also criticised them severely in the Chimes.

The depressing influence of another form of coercion is shown in Our Mutual Friend by the effect of Mr. Podsnap's character on his daughter Georgiana. Mr. Podsnap was one of the absolutely positive people who know everything about everything, who never allow other people to express opinions without contradicting them, and who take every possible opportunity of expressing their own opinions in a loud, emphatic, dogmatic manner. Of course, no woman should hold opinions, according to Mr. Podsnap's way of thinking, although Mrs. Podsnap, in her own way, did credit to her more Podsnappery master. It was therefore not to be dreamt of for a moment that a "young person" like their daughter Georgiana could have 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 in the background, and guarded from evil, and sheltered, so that she should not even hear of anything improper, and shielded from temptation to do wrong, or to do anything, indeed, right or wrong. Her father was rich; why should she wish to do anything but listen to him, and go away when he told her to do so, if he wished to speak of subjects that he deemed it unwise to 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, strange as it may seem, considering her heredity, Georgiana was shy. Podsnappery as 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 of Podsnappery on children.

The time will come when in normal schools character analysis will be the supreme qualification of those who are to decide who may and who may not teach. When that time comes, as come it must, no Podsnaps will be allowed to teach.

It was no wonder that--

Whenever Georgiana could escape from the thraldom of Podsnappery;
could 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 world thinking about its method of teaching children, by his brief description of 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 verbal descriptions of the effects of coercion in Arthur Clennam's account of his own early training. He said to Mr. Meagles, when the kind old gentleman spoke 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 many years in China, "the old influence of her presence, and her stern, strong voice, so gathered about her son that he felt conscious of a renewal of the 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 of wholesome repression, punishment, and fear," and she frankly avowed her deliberate 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 the Christian world regarding child training. They are rapidly giving way to the new and true gospel of stimulation, happiness, freedom, and creative self-activity.

Great Expectations was a valuable contribution to the literature of child training. Mrs. Gargery was a type of repressive, coercive, unsympathetic women, who regard children as necessarily nuisances, and who are continually 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 an honest, affectionate, sympathetic man, who pitied poor Pip and tried to comfort him when his wife was not present. The dear old fellow said to Pip one evening, as they sat by the fire and he beat time to his kindly thoughts 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, as Joe said, "Hammered at me with a wigour only to be equalled by the wigour with which he didn't hammer at his anwil."

Dickens gives an illustration of Mrs. Gargery's training which reveals not only her coercive and unsympathetic tendencies, but points to other errors in training children that are yet too common. Pip was warming himself before going to bed one night, when a cannon sounded from the Hulks, or prison 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 candle 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's questions, or abused him for asking them; and when she did condescend to answer she answered in a snappy, unsympathetic way. The cruelty of first scolding a child, then trying to terrify him from asking questions by telling him that "robbers, murderers, and all kinds of criminals began their 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, against threatening, against falsehood and misrepresentation in order to reduce children to submission, against corporal punishment with "the tickler," against the more dastardly and more exasperating corporal punishment by snapping and rapping the head, and against sending children to bed in the dark. He was especially careful to make the retiring hour in his own home a period of joyousness and freedom from all fear. He made the crime of sending children to bed without light and without sympathy one of the practices of that model of bad training--Mrs. Pipchin; and one of the most dreaded of little Oliver Twist's experiences was to be sent to sleep among the coffins in the dark at Sowerberry's.

The hour of retiring is the special time when children most need the affectionate spirit of motherhood, and wise mothers try to use this sacred hour to form their closest unity with the hearts of the little ones, and to 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 being sensitive, is admirably shown in Pip's training.

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

The comparison of the child's rocking-horse with the big-boned Irish hunter reveals one of the most essential lessons for adulthood: that what may appear trifling to an adult may mean much to a child. Kind but thoughtless adulthood is often most grievously unjust to childhood, because it fails to consider how things appear to the child. However kind and good such adults are, they are utterly unsympathetic with the child. Many people are very considerate for childhood who are very unsympathetic with children. Consideration can never take the place of sympathy. An ounce 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 and helpful to his children. He was most considerate for them, and spared no money to promote their welfare and happiness. But he did it in accordance with the tastes and opinions of adulthood, and totally ignored the fact that children have opinions and tastes, and he ruined the children whom he most loved. "The rocking-horse and the big-boned Irish hunter" suggest rich mines of child psychology.

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

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

There is a great deal of pedagogical thought in Dombey and Son. At the period of its issue (1846-48) Dickens appears to have devoted more attention to the study of wrong methods of teaching than at any other time, so in Dr. Blimber, Cornelia Blimber, and Mr. Feeder he gave his best illustrations of what in his opinion should be condemned in the popular methods of teaching. But while this was evidently his chief educational purpose in writing the book, he gave a good deal of attention to wrong methods of training, especially to the most awful doctrine of the ages--that children must be coerced, and repressed, and checked, and subdued. He evidently accepted as his supreme duty the responsibility for securing a free childhood for children. Mrs. Pipchin is an admirable delineation of the worst features of what was regarded as respectable child training. Her training is treated at length in Chapter XI. It is sufficient here to deal with her coerciveness, and recall the epithet "child-queller" which Dickens applied to her. No more expressive term was ever used to describe the wickedness of the coercionists. It means more than most volumes. It has new meaning every day as our reverence for the divinity in the child grows stronger, and the absolute need of the development of his selfhood by his own self-activity becomes clearer. It reveals a perfect charnel house full of dwarfed souls and blighted selfhood, and weak characters that should have been strong, and false characters that should have been true, and wailings that should have been music, and tears that should have been laughter, and darkness that should have been light, and wickedness that should have been a blessing. The one awful word "child-queller" means all of evil that can result from daring to stand between the child and God in our self-satisfied ignorance to check the free, natural output of its selfhood which God meant to be wrought out with increasing power throughout its life. Our work is to change the direction of the outflowing selfhood when it is wrong, to direct it to new and better interest centres, but never to stop it or turn it back upon itself.

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

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, and plucking 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 a legion of children," and "the wild ones went home tame enough after sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof." She tamed them by robbing them of their power, as Froebel's boy tamed flies by tearing off their wings and legs, and then saying, "See how tame they are."

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

Susan Nipper, in her usual graphic style, expressed her views regarding the 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, or child-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 brief description 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. Carker he gave his theory to account for the fact that he had not done better at school.

"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 the Charitable Grinders' school, upbraided the boy's father for his failure to turn 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 being what they made them.

Still another illustration of the cruel coercion practised on children is found 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 touching of all the appeals of Dickens on behalf of childhood. He lived in a cellar, 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 used to speculate on his mother's feet having a good or ill temper as she descended the stairs to their cellar home, and he watched her knees, her waist, her face, as they came into view, to learn whether he was likely to be abused or not. Many mothers realized their own cruelty by reading such descriptions 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 a scientific system of coerciveness and restraint, planned and carried out by a good man misguided by false ideas about child training and character building. Coercion was only one of several bad elements in his system, but he was terribly coercive. His children were lavishly supplied with almost everything they did not care for, and robbed of everything they should naturally be interested in.

The results were, as might be expected, disastrous. His son Tom became a monster of selfishness, sensuality, and criminality. Dickens uses the name "whelp" to describe him, and, in a satirical manner, accounts for his meanness 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 in his educational ideals and was endeavouring to explain the matter to Mr. Bounderby, that gentleman gave expression to the views of many people of his time. Fortunately there are few Bounderbys now, but there are some even 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 type of coercive philanthropists, whom he regarded as intolerable as well as intolerant nuisances--people who would use force to compel everybody to think 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 telling words:

"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 in this statement. Coercion does not always destroy power by blighting it. Often the power that was intended to bless turns to poison when it is repressed, and makes men hypocritical and tigerish. It is true, too, that a child who is brought up with the idea of dominating a servile class, or even servile individuals, can never have a true conception of his own freedom.

Dickens was not satisfied with his numerous and sustained attacks on the more violent forms of coercion and repression. He began in Edwin Drood to draw a picture of Mrs. Crisparkle, the mother of the Canon, to show that the placid firmness of her strong will had a baleful influence on character. Her character was not completed, but the outlines given are most suggestive. What could surpass the absolute indifference she showed to the slightest consideration for the individuality or opinions of other people when she spoke of her wards, who were grown up, it should be remembered, 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, though quiet, Christian lady by her remarking so definitely to her son, the Canon:

"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 of that exercised by Squeers or Mrs. Crisparkle, it resulted in forcing those compelled to submit to it to "give in," and that all children who are regularly made to "give in" acquire the habit of "giving in," and eventually become "give-iners" and hypocrites until circumstances make them rebels and anarchists. So he condemned every form of coercion, and taught the doctrine of true freedom for the child as a necessary element in his best development. When this doctrine is fully understood men will soon become truly free. All true education has been a movement toward freedom. All true national advancement has been toward more perfect freedom. The ideal of national, constitutional liberty has changed in harmony with the educational revelations of the broadening conception of freedom; and more progressive conceptions of national liberty have rendered it necessary for the educators to reveal truer, freer methods of training children in harmony with the higher national organization.

When the ideal of national organization was the divine right of kings to rule their subjects by absolute authority, the system of national organization required passive obedience on the part of the subject. To secure this coercive discipline the prompt submission of the child to the immediate authority over him was the ideal process. Passive submission was required as the full duty of the citizen, and passive obedience was the desired product of the school. But the new ideal of government is rule by the people through their representatives, and national citizenship means the intelligent co-operation of independent individuals; so the true educational ideal is a free selfhood, and a free selfhood in maturity demands a free selfhood in childhood. To secure this it is essential that schools shall become "free republics of childhood."

"But a free selfhood in childhood must lead to anarchy," say those who cling to the coercive ideal. Anarchy never springs from freedom. Anarchy is the foul son of coercion. True freedom does not include liberty to do wrong. The "perfect law of liberty" is the only basis for perfect happiness, because it is not freedom beyond law, but freedom within law, freedom because of law. Law should never be coercive to the child. When it becomes so the law is wrong and it makes the child wrong, and produces the apperceptive centres of anarchy in feeling and thought out of the very elements that should have produced joyous co-operation. Law should give the child consciousness of power, and not of restraint. Undirected selfhood, uncontrolled selfhood, is not true freedom. The exercise of power without limitations leads to confusion, indecision, and anarchy in everything except its spirit of rebellion. The guidance and control of adulthood and the limitations of law are necessary to the accomplishment of the best results in the immediate product of effort put forth by the child, in the effect on his character, and in the development of a true consciousness of freedom in his life.

The terrible blunder of the past in child training has been to make law coercive instead of directive. Law has been prohibitive, not stimulative. Law has defined barriers to prevent effort, instead of outlining the direction effort should take. The limitations of law have been used to define the course the child should not take; they should have defined the course he ought to take, and within the range of which course he should use 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 should have said "do"; it has said "quit" when it should have said "go on"; it has said "be still" when it should have said "work"; it has stood in the way to check when it should have moved on to lead to victory and progress along the most direct lines; it has given a consciousness of weakness instead of a consciousness of power; it has developed moroseness instead of joyousness, self-depreciation instead of self-reverence; and children for these reasons have been led to dislike law, and the apperceptive centres of anarchy have been laid by a coercive instead of a stimulative use of law.

By false ideals of coercive law adulthood has been made repressive instead of suggestive, depressive instead of helpful, dogmatic instead of reasonable, tyrannical instead of free, "child-quellers" instead of sympathetic friends of childhood, executors of penalties instead of wise guides, agents to keep children under instead of helping them up; and so children have learned to dislike school, and work, and teachers, and often home and parents. And the children have not been to blame for their dislike of law and their distrust of adulthood.

And the children themselves by coercion have been made don'ters instead of doers, quitters instead of workers, give-iners instead of persevering winners, yielders to opposition instead of achievers of victory, negative instead of positive, apathetic instead of energetic, passive instead of active, imitative instead of original, followers instead of leaders, dependent instead of independent, servile instead of free, conscious of weakness instead of power, defect shunners instead of triumphant creative representatives of the God in whose image man was created.

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

The great salt seas and lakes and marshes of the world have been formed by the checking of beautiful fresh-water streams and rivers and the prevention of their outflow to the ocean they should have reached. So when the outflow of the soul of the child is checked the powers that should have ennobled his own life and enriched the lives of others turn to evil instead of good, and make a dangerous instead of a helpful character. So far as coercion can influence selfhood it destroys its power for good and makes it a menace to civilization, instead of a beneficent agency in the accomplishment of high purposes. The reason that coercion does not more effectively blight and dwarf the child is that childhood is not under the direct influence of adulthood all the time. The blessed hours of freedom in play and work have saved the race.

The absurd idea that "anarchy will result from giving true freedom to the child" persists in the minds of so many people, partly through the strength of the race conception of the need of coercion, from which we have not yet been able fully to free ourselves; partly from a terrible misconception regarding the true function of law; partly through gross ignorance of the child and lack of reverence for him; and partly from failure to understand our own higher powers for guiding the child properly, or the vital relationships of adulthood to childhood.

The child should recognise law as a beneficent guide in the accomplishment of his own plans. In Froebel's wonderful kindergarten system the child is always guided by law, but he is always perfectly free to work out his own designs, 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 change the centre of its interest when from lack of wisdom its interest centre is wrong, and to reveal to it in logical sequence the laws of nature, of beauty, of harmony, and of life. With such training life and law will always be in harmony, and the seeds of anarchy will find no soil in human hearts or minds in which to take root.

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

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 were having 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.