It was not until the year 1870 that a Bill was passed in Parliament to create an adequate number of public elementary schools for every district in the kingdom. To show the increase in the number of schools built, there were in the year 1854, 3825, and in the year 1885, 21,976.
But the children of England owe almost as much to Charles Dickens as they do to Lord Shaftesbury. He was almost the first, and certainly the greatest, writer who, with a heart overflowing with sympathy for little children, has left us in his books a gallery of portraits which no one can ever forget.
He himself, "a very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of boy," passed through a time of bitter poverty, and his stay at school, short as it was, was not a period of his life upon which he looked back with any pleasure.
The material for his books was drawn from life—from his own and from the lives of those around him—and for this reason all that he wrote will always be of great value, as it gives us a good idea of the Early and Mid Victorian days.
His ambition was to strike a blow for the poor, "to leave one's hand upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people."
Who can ever forget in the Christmas Carol the crippled Tiny Tim, "who behaved as good as gold and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see."
Other pictures of suffering childhood are 'Little Nell' and 'The Marchioness' in The Old Curiosity Shop, 'Jo' and 'Charley' in Bleak House, and 'Smike,' the victim of the inhuman schoolmaster 'Squeers.'
The cruelty of the times is shown in the case of an unfortunate sempstress who tried to earn a living by making shirts for three-halfpence each. Once, when she had been robbed of her earnings, she tried to drown herself. The inhuman magistrate before whom she was brought told her that she had "no hope of mercy in this world."
It was after hearing of this from Charles Dickens that Thomas Hood wrote the well-known "Song of the Shirt":
Work—work—work!
From weary chime to chime,
Work—work—work
As prisoners work for crime!
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Till the heart is sick, and the brain benumbed,
As well as the weary hand.