Dickens's England (13 page)

Five little urchins who had played truant were imprisoned without food or drink till night – a punishment that is found more efficacious than the rod. Spare food which is left by the employés of a firm close by, is distributed to the hungry children twice a week.

Edwin Utley, ‘
Old Jonathan
' (1860)

A DAME SCHOOL

To every class we have a school assigned,

Rules for all ranks and food for every mind;

Yet one there is, that small regard to rule

Or study pays, and still is deemed a school:

That, where a deaf, poor, patient widow sits,

And awes some thirty infants as she knits;

Infants of humble, busy wives, who pay

Some trifling price for freedom through the day.

Her room is small, they cannot widely stray –

Her threshold high, they cannot run away;

Though deaf, she sees the rebel-heroes shout; –

Though lame, her white rod nimbly walks about;

With band of yarn she keeps offenders in,

And to her gown the sturdiest rogue can pin.

Aided by these, and spells, and tell-tale birds,

Her power they dread and reverence her words.

George Crabbe, ‘Letter XXIV',
The Borough
(1810)

UTILITARIAN EDUCATION

‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!' . . .

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim. . . .

‘Girl number twenty,' said Mr Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don't know that girl. Who is that girl?'

‘Sissy Jupe, Sir,' explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.

‘Sissy is not a name,' said Mr Gradgrind. ‘Don't call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia. . . . Give me your definition of a horse.'

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!' said Mr Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.' . . .

‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy country, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

‘Now, girl number twenty,' said Mr Gradgrind, ‘you know what a horse is.' . . .

‘Very well,' said [the third] gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. ‘That's a horse. Now, let me ask you, girls and boys, would you paper a room with representations of horses?'

After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, Sir!' Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman's face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, Sir!' – as the custom is, in these examinations.

‘Of course, No. Why wouldn't you?'

A pause. One corpulent boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he wouldn't paper a room at all, but would paint it.

‘You
must
paper it,' said the gentleman, rather warmly.

‘You must paper it,' said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not. Don't tell
us
you wouldn't paper it. What do you mean, boy?'

‘I'll explain to you, then,' said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality – in fact? Do you?'

‘Yes, Sir!' from one half. ‘No, Sir!' from the other.

‘Of course, no,' said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. ‘Why then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don't see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don't have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.'

Charles Dickens,
Hard Times
(1854)

PRACTICAL EDUCATION: YOUNG FARM-WORKERS

Scarcely any of these got any education before the establishment of Sunday schools – how few of them do yet, compared with the working population of towns. The girls help their mothers – the labourers' wives – in their cottages, as soon almost as they can waddle about. . . . As they get bigger they are found useful in the house – they mop and brush, and feed the pig, and run to the town for things; and as soon as they get to ten or twelve, out they go to nurse at the farm-houses; a little older, they ‘go to service'; there they soon aspire to be dairymaids, or housemaids, if their ambition does not prompt them to seek places in the towns – and so they go on scrubbing and scouring, and lending a hand in the harvest field, till they are married to some young fellow, who takes a cottage and sets up day-labourer. This is their life; and the men's is just similar.

As soon as they can run about, they are set to watch a gate that stands at the end of the lane . . . They are sent to scare birds from corn just sown, or just ripening, where ‘They stroll, the lonely Crusoes of the fields' – as Bloomfield has beautifully described them from his own experience. They help to glean, to gather potatoes, to pop beans into holes in dibbling time, to pick hops, to gather up apples for the cider-mill, to gather mushrooms and blackberries for market, to herd flocks of geese, or young turkeys, or lambs at weaning-time; they even help to drive sheep to market, or to the wash at shearing-time; they can go to the town with a huge pair of clouted ankle-boots to be mended, as you may see them trudging along over the moors, or along the footpath of the fields, with the strings of the boots tied together, and slung over the shoulder – one boot behind and the other before; and then they are very useful to lift and carry about the farmyard, to shred turnips, or beetroot – to hold a sack open – to bring in wood for the fire, or to rear turfs for drying on the moors, as the man cuts them with his paring shovel, or to rear peat-bricks for drying. They are mighty useful animals in their day and generation, and as they get bigger, they successively learn to drive plough, and then to hold it; to drive the team, and finally to do all the labours of a man. That is the growing-up of a farm-servant. All this time he is learning his business, but he is learning nothing else – he is growing up into a tall, long, smock-frocked, straw-hatted, ankle-booted fellow, with a gait as graceful as one of his own plough-bullocks. He has grown up, and gone to service; and there he is, as simple, as ignorant, and as laborious a creature as one of the wagon-horses he drives. The mechanic sees his weekly newspaper over his pipe and pot; but the clodhopper, the chopstick, the hawbuck, the hind, the Johnny-raw, or by whatever name, in whatever district, he may be called, is everywhere the same; he sees no newspaper, and if he did, he could not read it . . . He is as much of an animal as air and exercise, strong living and sound sleeping, can make him, and he is nothing more.

William Howitt,
The Rural Life of England
(1840)

ACADEMIC EDUCATION

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

In fact, Doctor Blimber's establishment was a great hot-house, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys blew before their time. Mental green peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere sprouts of bushes, under Dr Blimber's cultivation. Every description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the driest twigs of boys under the frostiest circumstances. Nature was of no consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern, somehow or other. . . .

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

As to Mr Feeder, B.A., Doctor Blimber's assistant, he was a kind of human barrel-organ, with a little list of tunes at which he was continually working, over and over again, without any variation. He might have been fitted up with a change of barrels, perhaps, in early life, if his destiny had been favourable; but it had not been; and he had only one, with which, in a monotonous round, it was his occupation to bewilder the young ideas of Doctor Blimber's young gentlemen. The young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew no rest from the pursuit of stonyhearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in three weeks. He had all the cares of the world on his head in three months. He conceived bitter sentiments against his parents or guardians, in four; he was an old misanthrope, in five; envied Quintus Curtius that blessed refuge in the earth, in six; and at the end of the first twelvemonth had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterwards departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the world.

Charles Dickens,
Dombey and Son
(1848)

A PRIVATE SCHOOL CURRICULUM (WITH EXTRAS)

‘When we were little,' the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, ‘we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle – we used to call him Tortoise –'

‘Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?' Alice asked.

‘We called him Tortoise because he taught us,' said the Mock Turtle angrily, ‘really you are very dull!'

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,' added the Gryphon . . .

The Mock Turtle went on.

‘We had the best of educations – in fact we went to school every day–'

‘I've
been to a day-school, too,' said Alice; ‘you needn't be so proud as all that.'

‘With extras?' asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously.

‘Yes,' said Alice, ‘we learned French and music.'

‘And washing?' said the Mock Turtle.

‘Certainly not!' said Alice indignantly.

‘Ah! then yours wasn't a really good school,' said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief. ‘Now at
ours
they had at the end of the bill, “French, music,
and washing
extra.”'

‘You couldn't have wanted it much,' said Alice; ‘living at the bottom of the sea.'

‘I couldn't afford to learn it,' said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. ‘I only took the regular course.'

‘What was that?' inquired Alice.

‘Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied; ‘and then the different branches of Arithmetic – Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.'

‘I never heard of “Uglification”,' Alice ventured to say. ‘What is it?'

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. ‘What! Never heard of uglifying!' it exclaimed. ‘You know what to beautify is, I suppose?'

‘Yes,' said Alice doubtfully; ‘it means – to – make – anything – prettier.'

‘Well, then,' the Gryphon went on, ‘if you don't know what to uglify is, you
are
a simpleton.'

Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said, ‘What else had you to learn?'

‘Well, there was Mystery,' the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers, ‘ – Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography; then Drawling – the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week:
he
taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.'

‘What was
that
like?' said Alice.

‘Well, I can't show it you myself,' the Mock Turtle said. ‘I'm too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.'

‘Hadn't time,' said the Gryphon. ‘I went to the Classical master, though. He was an old crab,
he
was.'

‘I never went to him,' the Mock Turtle said with a sigh; ‘he taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.'

‘So he did, so he did,' said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both creatures hid their faces in their paws.

‘And how many hours a day did you do lessons?' said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.

‘Ten hours the first day,' said the Mock Turtle, ‘nine the next, and so on.'

‘What a curious plan!' exclaimed Alice.

‘That's the reason they're called lessons,' the Gryphon remarked, ‘because they lessen from day to day.'

Lewis Carroll,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(1865)

SCHOOLGIRLS AND THE GENIUS TUTELARY

Cousin Sophy is, I should perhaps remark, about seventeen, but looks nearly two years older . . . She has even entrusted me (in the strictest confidence) with a copy of the regulations of the seminary, Acacia Lodge, in which her education is still being imparted; and I have extracted a few of them for the purpose of publication. Sophy, who is charmingly natural, and indeed forcible, in her language, says her schoolmistress, Miss Maigre, is a ‘disgusting creature', and a ‘nasty thing'. Upon the whole, that lady appears to be a screw [mean person]. Witness the following extracts from the Code Maigre: