Chapter VI: Free Childhood

Adulthood can never be truly free till childhood is free. Perfect freedom can not be developed in a soul filled with the apperceptive experiences of tyranny. No man is fully free in the freest country in the world who wishes to dominate even his child. The practice of tyranny develops the tyrant. Guiding control is entirely different from domination.

Dickens taught the doctrine of a rich, full, free childhood from the time he wrote Nicholas Nickleby in 1839.

Even the sunburned faces of gipsy children, half naked though they be,
suggest a drop of comfort. It is a pleasant thing to see that the sun
has been there; to know that the air and light are on them every day;
to feel that they _are_ children, and lead children's lives; that if
their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of heaven, and not with
tears; that the limbs of their girls are free, and that they are not
crippled by distortions, imposing an unnatural and horrible penance
upon their sex; that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least
among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which
make young children old before they know what childhood is, and give
them the exhaustion and infirmity of age, without, like age, the
privilege to die. God send that old nursery tales were true, and that
gipsies stole such children by the score!

If he had written nothing but this exquisite quotation from Nicholas Nickleby he would have deserved recognition as an educator. It shows a clear insight into the great principles of physical freedom, intellectual freedom, and spiritual freedom.

In The Old Curiosity Shop he made the world sympathize with a child who lived with an old man. He gives the keynote to this fundamental thought of the book in the opening chapter:

It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into
the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks
their confidence and simplicity--two of the best qualities that Heaven
gives them--and demands that they share our sorrows before they are
capable of entering into our enjoyments.

Little Nell had the sadness of a lonely childhood, though her grandfather lived with but the one aim of making her happy.

In Martin Chuzzlewit--

Tom Pinch's sister was governess in a family, a lofty family; perhaps
the wealthiest brass and copper founder's family known to mankind.
They lived at Camberwell; in a house so big and fierce that its mere
outside, like the outside of a giant's castle, struck terror into
vulgar minds and made bold persons quail.

When Mr. Pecksniff and his daughters went to visit Miss Pinch she

was at that moment instructing her eldest pupil; to wit, a premature
little woman of thirteen years old, who had already arrived at such a
pitch of whalebone and education that she had nothing girlish about
her, which was a source of great rejoicing to all her relations and
friends.

One of the unsolved mysteries is the fact that such a large proportion of parents are so anxious to have their children grow up. The desire may be understood when poverty longs for the time when the little hands may help to win bread, but that wealthy parents should hasten the premature state of adulthood in their children is incomprehensible.

A great deal of attention is paid to the blunder of robbing children of real childhood in Dombey and Son, which is so rich in several departments of educational philosophy. Doctor Blimber regarded the young gentlemen "as if they were born grown up."

Paul's life and death were intended as warnings to ambitious parents. Florence was robbed of a true childhood by her mother's death and her father's lack of sympathy. Briggs and Tozer had no childhood; they were persecuted by the ingenious and ignorantly learned adults at home during vacations, as well as by Doctor Blimber during school time; so that "Tozer said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he would rather stay at school than go home."

Poor Bitherstone had no childhood. He was shipped away from his parents in India to the respectable hell conducted by that widely known and highly reputed child trainer Mrs. Pipchin.

Poor little Miss Pankey spent a great deal of her time in Mrs. Pipchin's "correctional dungeon." What a mercy it would be if all such unfortunate children could be stolen by the gipsies!

Mrs. Pipchin's theory taught "that it was wrong to encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster."

When Doctor Blimber asked Paul, six-year-old Paul, "if he would like them to make a man of him," the child replied:

"I had rather be a child."

One of Dickens's most successful hits at the common philosophy, that the desired adult characteristics must be developed in childhood in their adult forms, was made in describing Mrs. Tozer's effort to qualify Tozer for the position of a clergyman by making him wear a stiff, starched necktie while he was a boy.

When Edith upbraided her mother for practically compelling her to marry Mr. Dombey, her mother asked angrily:

"What do you mean? Haven't you from a child----"

"A child!" said Edith, looking at her; "when was I a child? What
childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman--artful, designing,
mercenary, laying snares for men--before I knew myself or you, or even
understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learned.
You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride
to-night."

"You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own mother."

"It seems so to me; stranger to me than to you," said Edith. "But my
education was completed long ago. I am too old now and have fallen too
low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to help
myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman's breast, and makes it
true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else to
sustain me when I despise myself."

Later, on the night before she was to marry Mr. Dombey, she said:

"Oh, mother, mother, if you had but left me to my natural heart when I
too was a girl--a younger girl than Florence--how different I might
have been!"

Bleak House gives Dickens's most striking picture of the deterioration resulting from giving no real childhood to children for a series of generations.

During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree,
the house of Smallweed, always early to go to business and late to
marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has
discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales,
fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the
gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it, and that the
complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed
to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their
minds.

There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several
generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child,
until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak in her
intellect, and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With
such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory,
understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall asleep
over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother has undoubtedly
brightened the family.

There could be no more awful picture than that of a family in which for a series of generations the children had been, through heredity and training, made "little old men and women," who were never permitted to indulge in any childish plays, or to enjoy any stories, or in any way have a genuine childhood, so that they not only came to look like monkeys, but "like monkeys with something depressing on their minds"; and in which the only child for several generations had been Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, when she became weak in intellect and "fell (for the first time) into a childish state."

In The Haunted House the wretched child who came to Mr. Redlaw's room is described as "a baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child."

Dickens made his greatest plea for a free childhood in Hard Times. The whole of the educational part of the book condemns the training of Mr. Gradgrind, although he was an earnest, high-minded gentleman, whose supreme purpose was to train his family in the best possible way. Indeed Mr. Gradgrind was so sure he was right in his views regarding child training that he founded a school to teach the children of Coketown in accordance with what he believed to be correct principles.

Mr. Gradgrind is described as

a kind cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow
children clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He
seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical
substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed
away.

There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They
had been lectured at from their tenderest years; coursed, like little
hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone they had been made to
run to the lecture room. The first object with which they had an
association or of which they had a remembrance was a large blackboard
with a dry ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.

Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an ogre. Fact
forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing
castle, with heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking
childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the
hair.

No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the
moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever
learned the silly jingle, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder
what you are"; it had never known wonder on the subject, having at
five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen and
driven Charles's Wain like a locomotive engine driver. No little
Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow
with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who
killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who
swallowed Tom Thumb; it had never heard of those celebrities, and had
only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped
with several stomachs.

The effect of preventing all kinds of enjoyment for his children in their own home was that they naturally sought for enjoyment surreptitiously in a way of which their father disapproved. But when a man disapproves of legitimate amusements in his family his condemnation of what is improper will have little weight with his children.

When Mr. Gradgrind was going home from the school examination he had to pass near the circus, and he was amazed to find his daughter Louisa and his son Thomas stealing a view of the performance.

Phenomenon almost incredible though distinctly seen, what did he then
behold but his own metallurgical Louisa peeping with all her might
through a hole in a deal board, and his own mathematical Thomas
abasing himself on the ground to catch but a hoof of the graceful
equestrian Tyrolean flower act!

Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where his
family was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring child, and
said:

"Louisa! Thomas!"

Both rose, red and disconcerted. But Louisa looked at her father with
more boldness than Thomas did. Indeed, Thomas did not look at him, but
gave himself up to be taken home like a machine.

"In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!" said Mr. Gradgrind,
leading each away by a hand; "what do you do here?"

"Wanted to see what it was like," returned Louisa shortly.

"What it was like?"

"Yes, father."

There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in
the girl; yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face,
there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to
burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which
brightened its expression. Not with the brightness natural to cheerful
youth, but with uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had
something painful in them, analogous to the changes on a blind face
groping its way.

"You! Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the sciences is open,
Thomas and you, who may be said to be replete with facts, Thomas and
you, who have been trained to mathematical exactness, Thomas and you,
here!" cried Mr. Gradgrind. "In this degraded position! I am amazed."

"I was tired, father. I have been tired a long time," said Louisa.

"Tired? Of what?" asked the astonished father.

"I don't know of what--of everything, I think."

When they reached home, Mr. Gradgrind in an injured tone said to Mrs. Gradgrind, after telling her where he had found the children:

"I should as soon have expected to find my children reading poetry."

"Dear me," whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind. "How can you, Louisa and Thomas!
I wonder at you. As if, with my head in its present throbbing state,
you couldn't go and look at the shells and minerals and things
provided for you, instead of circuses!" said Mrs. Gradgrind. "You know
as well as I do, no young people have circus masters, or keep circuses
in cabinets, or attend lectures about circuses. What can you possibly
want to know of circuses then? I am sure you have enough to do, if
that's what you want. With my head in its present state, I couldn't
remember the mere names of half the facts you have got to attend to."

"That's the reason!" pouted Louisa.

"Don't tell me that's the reason, because it can be nothing of the
sort," said Mrs. Gradgrind. "Go and be something-ological directly."

After Louisa had married Mr. Bounderby, Tom and Mr. Harthouse were discussing her one evening, and Tom said she thought a great deal when she was alone:

"Ay, ay? Has resources of her own," said Harthouse.

"Not so much of that as you may suppose," returned Tom; "for our
governor had her crammed with all sorts of dry bones and sawdust. It's
his system."

"Formed his daughter on his own model?" suggested Harthouse.

"His daughter? Ah! and everybody else. Why, he formed me that way,"
said Tom.

"Impossible!"

"He did though," said Tom, shaking his head. "I mean to say, Mr.
Harthouse, that when I first left home and went to old Bounderby's, I
was as flat as a warming-pan, and knew no more about life than any
oyster does."

Dickens describes a visit Louisa made to her father's house, and shows how little of the true home feeling was stirred in her heart, as she approached the place, where she should have had a happy childhood.

Neither, as she approached her old home now, did any of the best
influences of old home descend upon her. Her remembrances of home and
childhood were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and
fountain in her young heart as it gushed out. The golden waters were
not there. They were flowing for the fertilization of the land where
grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.

When her father proposed to Louisa that she should marry Mr. Bounderby, she said:

"The baby preference that even I have heard of as common among
children has never had its innocent resting place in my breast. You
have been so careful of me, that I never had a child's heart. You have
trained me so well, that I never dreamed a child's dream. You have
dealt so wisely with me, father, from my cradle to this hour, that I
never had a child's belief or a child's fear."

Mr. Gradgrind was delighted at his apparent success. He could not see, he was so practical and so self-opinionated, that her heart was breaking while she was yielding with external calmness.

But the reaping time came soon. Mr. Harthouse, young, attractive, and unscrupulous, made love to Louisa, and finally persuaded her to run away with him. Unable to resist the temptation in her own strength, she fled to her father's house through an awful storm.

The thunder was rolling into distance, and the rain was pouring down
like a deluge, when the door of his room opened. He looked round the
lamp upon his table, and saw with amazement his eldest daughter.

"Louisa!"

"Father, I want to speak to you."

"What is the matter? What is it? I conjure you, Louisa, tell me what
is the matter."

She dropped into a chair before him, and put her cold hand on his arm.

"Father, you have trained me from my cradle."

"Yes, Louisa."

"I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny."

He looked at her in doubt and dread, vacantly repeating, "Curse the
hour! Curse the hour!"

"How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable
things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the
graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you
done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have
bloomed once, in this great wilderness here?"

She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.

"If it had ever been here, its ashes alone would save me from the void
in which my whole life sinks."

He tightened his hold in time to prevent her sinking on the floor, but
she cried out in a terrible voice, "I shall die if you hold me! Let me
fall upon the ground!" And he laid her down there, and saw the pride
of his heart and the triumph of his system lying, an insensible heap,
at his feet.

In the Schoolboy's Story, the boy who was to have no holiday at home was invited to spend his holidays with "Old Cheeseman" and Mrs. Cheeseman.

So I went to their delightful house, and was as happy as I could
possibly be. They understand how to conduct themselves toward boys,
_they_ do. When they take a boy to the play, for instance, they _do_
take him. They don't go in after it's begun, or come out before it's
over. They know how to bring a boy up, too. Look at their own! Though
he is very little as yet, what a capital boy he is! Why, my next
favourite to Mrs. Cheeseman and Old Cheeseman is young Cheeseman.

When Dickens came to his last book his heart was still full of sympathy with the child.

Edwin Drood said to Mr. Jasper: "Life for you is a plum with the natural bloom on. It hasn't been over-carefully wiped off for _you_."

In the same book Mr. Grewgious is described:

He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding
mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried
snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency
like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it
must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of
anybody's voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature
that his face presented was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves
that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his
forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them
into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away
the chisel, and said, "I really can not be worried to finish off this
man; let him go as he is."

He tried to explain the reason for his peculiarities to Rosa:

"I mean," he explained, "that young ways were never my ways. I was the
only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I half believe I
was born advanced in life myself. No personality is intended toward
the name you will so soon change, when I remark that while the general
growth of people seem to have come into existence buds, I seem to have
come into existence a chip. I was a chip--and a very dry one--when I
first became aware of myself."

Dickens takes a front rank among the educators who have tried to save the child from "child-quellers," and preserve for them the right to a free, rich, real childhood. The saddest sight in the world to him was a child such as he pictured in A Tale of Two Cities: "The children of St. Antoine had ancient faces and grave voices."

In Barbox Brothers Mr. Jackson said of himself: "I am, to myself, an unintelligible book, with the earlier chapters all torn out and thrown away. My childhood had no grace of childhood, my youth had no charm of youth, and what can be expected from such a lost beginning?"

Dickens tried to save all children from such a beginning.