We do not, in our day (unless we happen to belong to the Salvation Army) talk much about “saving souls” in the old Evangelical sense; and I, at least, hold very strongly, and have even preached to the purpose, that every human soul is “Doomed to be Saved,” destined by irrevocable Divine love and mercy to be sooner or later, in this world or far off worlds to come, brought like the Prodigal to the Father’s feet. But there is a very real sense in which a true philanthropist “saves” his fellow-men from moral evil—the sense in which Plutarch uses the word, and which every theology must accept, and in this sense I unhesitatingly affirm, that Mary Carpenter SAVED four hundred human souls.
It must be borne in mind also that it was not only in her own special Reformatory that her work was carried on. By advocating in her books and by her active public pleading the modification of the laws touching juvenile crime, she practically originated—in concert with Recorder Hill—the immense improvement which has taken place in the whole treatment of young criminals who, before her time, were simply sent to jail, and there too often stamped with the hallmark of crime for life.
As regards the other part of Miss Carpenter’s work which she permitted me to share,—the Ragged Schools and Streetboys’ Sunday School in St. James’s Back,—I laboured, of course, under the same disadvantage as in the Red Lodge of never clearly foreseeing how much would be understood of my words or ideas; and what would be most decidedly “caviar to the general.” A ludicrous example of this occurred on one occasion. I always anxiously desired to instil into the minds of the children admiration for brave and noble deeds, and therefore told them stories of heroism whenever my subject afforded an opening for one. Having to give a lesson on France, and some boy asking a question about the Guillotine, I narrated, as vivaciously and dramatically as I knew how, the beautiful tale of the Nuns who chanted the Te Deum on the scaffold, till one voice after another was silenced for ever, and the brave Abbess still continued to sing the grand old hymn of Ambrose, till her turn came for death. I fondly hoped that some of my own feelings in describing the scene were communicated to my audience. But such hopes were dashed when, a day or two later, Miss Carpenter came home from her lesson at the school, and said: “My dear friend, what in the name of heaven can you have been teaching those boys? They were all excited about some lesson you had given them. They said you described cutting off a lot of heads; and it was ‘chop! and a head fell into the basket; and chop! another head in the basket! They said it was such a nice lesson!’ But whose heads were cut off, or why, none of them remembered,—only chop! and a head fell in the basket!”
I consoled myself, however, for this and many another defeat by the belief that if my lessons did not much instruct their wild pates, their hearts were benefitted in some small measure by being brought under my friendly influence. Miss Carpenter always made the schoolmaster of the Day School attend at our Sunday Night-School, fearing some wild outbreak of the 100 and odd boys and hobbledehoys who formed our congregation. The first Sunday, however, on which the school was given into my charge, I told the schoolmaster he might leave me and go home; and I then stopped alone (we had no assistants) with the little herd. My lessons, I am quite sure, were all the more impressive; and though Miss Carpenter was quite alarmed when she heard what I had done, she consented to my following my own system of confidence, and I never had reason to repent the adoption of it.
In my humble judgment (and I know it was also that of one much better able to judge, Lord Shaftesbury) these elastic and irregular Ragged Schools were far better institutions for the class for whom they were designed than the cast-iron Board Schools of our time. They were specially designed to civilize the children: to tame them enough to induce them, for example, to sit reasonably still on a bench for half-an-hour at a time; to wash their hands and faces; to comb their hair; to forbear from shouting, singing, “turning wheels,” throwing marbles, making faces, or similarly disporting themselves, while in school; after which preliminaries they began to acquire the art of learning lessons. It was not exactly Education in the literary sense, but it was a Training, without which as a substructure the “Three R’s” are of little avail,—if we may believe in William of Wykeham’s axiom that “Manners makyth Manne.”
Another, and, as I think, great merit of the Ragged School system was, that decent and self-respecting parents who strove to keep their children from the contamination of the gutter and were willing to pay their penny a week to send them to school, were not obliged, as now, to suffer their boys and girls to associate in the Board Schools with the very lowest and roughest of children fresh from the streets. Nothing has made me more indignant than a report I read some time ago in one of the newspapers of a poor widow who had “seen better days,” being summoned and fined for engaging a non-certified poor governess to teach her little girl, rather than allow the child to attend the Board School and associate with the girls she would meet there. As if all the learning of a person, if he could pour it into a child’s brain, would counterbalance in a young girl’s mind the foul words and ideas familiar to the hapless children of the “perishing and dangerous classes!”
People talk seriously of the physical infection which may be conveyed where many young children are gathered in close contiguity. They would, if they knew more, much more anxiously deprecate the moral contagion which may be introduced into a school by a single girl who has been initiated into the mysteries of a vicious home. On two separate occasions Miss Carpenter and I were startled by what I can only describe as a portentous wave of evil which passed over the entire community of 50 girls in the Red Lodge. In each case it was undeniably traceable to the arrival of new comers who had been sent by mistake of magistrates to our Reformatory when they ought to have gone to a Penitentiary. It was impossible for us to guess how, with all the watchful guardianship of the teachers, these unhappy girls had any opportunity for corrupting their companions, but that they did so (temporarily only, as they were immediately discovered and banished) I saw with my own eyes beyond possibility of mistake.
It came to me as part of my work with Miss Carpenter to visit the homes of all the children who attended our Ragged Schools—either Day Schools or Night Schools; nominally to see whether they belonged to the class which should properly benefit by gratuitous education, but also to find out whether I could do anything to amend their condition. Many were the lessons I learned respecting the “short” but by no means “simple” annals of the poor, when I made those visits all over the slums of Bristol.
The shoemakers were a very numerous and a very miserable class among the parents of our pupils. When anything interfered with trade they were at once thrown into complete idleness and destitution. Over and over again I tried to get the poor fellows, when they sat listless and lamenting, to turn to any other kind of labour in their own line; to endeavour, e.g., to make slippers for me, no matter how roughly, or to mend my boots; promising similar orders from friends. Not one would, or could, do anything but sew upper or under leathers, as the case might be! The men sat all day long when there was work, sewing in their stuffy rooms with their wives busy washing or attending to the children, and the whole place in a muddle; but they would converse eagerly and intelligently with me about politics or about other towns and countries, whereas the poor over-worked women would never join in our talk. When I addressed them they at once called my attention to Jenny’s torn frock and Tom’s want of a new cap. One of these shoemakers, in whom I felt rather special interest, turned to me one day, looked me straight in the face, and said: “I want to ask you a question. Why does a lady like you come and sit and talk to me?” I thought it a true token of confidence, and was glad I could answer honestly that I had come first to see about his children, but now came because I liked him.
Other cases which came to my knowledge in these rounds were dreadfully sad. In one poor room I found a woman who had been confined only a few days, sitting up in bed doing shopwork, her three or four little children all endeavouring to work likewise for the miserable pay. Her husband was out looking vainly for work. She showed me a sheaf of pawntickets for a large quantity of table and house linen and plated goods. Her husband and she had formerly kept a flourishing inn, but the railway had ruined it, and they had been obliged to give it up and come to live in Bristol, and get such work as they could do—at starvation wages. She was a gentle, delicate, fair woman, who had been lady’s maid in a wealthy family known to me by name. I asked her did she not go out and bring the children to the Downs on a Sunday? “Ah! we tried it once or twice,” she said, “but it was too terrible coming back to this room; we never go now.”