It is frequently asserted that Dickens portrayed wrong training more than right, that he was destructive rather than constructive. In a sense, this is correct. His mission was to startle men, so that they would be made conscious of the awful crimes that were being committed by teachers and parents in the name of duty, as conceived by the highest Christian civilization of his time. He knew that a basis of strong feeling must be aroused against a wrong before it can be overthrown and right practices substituted for it. The only sure foundation for any reform is an energetic feeling of dislike for present conditions. The chief work of Dickens was to lay bare the injustice, the meanness, and the blighting coercion practised on helpless children not only by “ignorant, sordid, brutal men called schoolmasters,” but in a less degree by the best teachers and parents of his time. His was a noble work, and it was well done.
The grandest movement of the nineteenth century was the development of a profound reverence for the child, so deep and wide that his rights are beginning to be clearly recognised by individuals and by national laws, and that intelligent adulthood is studying him as the central element of power in the representation of God in the accomplishment of the progressive evolution of the race. Christ put “the child in the midst of his disciples”; men are learning to follow his example, and study the child as the surest way to secure industrial, social, and moral reforms. Froebel and Dickens were the men who revealed the child. They were the true apostles of childhood. It must not be supposed that Dickens was not conscious of the positive good while describing the evils. The expressions “child queller,” “gospel of monotony,” “bear to pattern,” “taught as parrots are,” etc., and the name “McChoakumchild,” reveal the possession of the highest consciousness of child freedom, of individuality, and of child reverence yet given to humanity. So in all his wonderful pictures it would have been impossible for him to have so vividly described the wrong if he had not clearly understood the right. He had perfect sympathy with childhood, he was a great student of the child and of the existing methods of training and educating him, and his insights and judgment were so clear and true that, as Ruskin says, “in the last analysis he was always right.”
If he had never written anything but his article on the kindergarten, published July, 1855, he would have proved himself to be an educational philosopher.
CHAPTER II.
INFANT GARDENS.
Dickens wrote the following article for Household Words in 1855. It reveals a surprising mastery of the vital principles of “the new education.” He wrote the article to direct attention to the work of the Baroness Von Bülow, who had come to England to introduce the kindergarten system. Dickens’s works show that he had long been a close student of Froebel’s philosophy. The article must always take a front rank as a strikingly clear, comprehensive, and sympathetic exposition of the principles and processes of the kindergarten. Kindergartens were called “infant gardens” when first introduced into England.
Seventy or eighty years ago there was a son born to the Pastor Froebel, who exercised his calling in the village of Oberweissbach, in the principality of Schwartzburg-Rudolstadt. The son, who was called Frederick, proved to be a child of unusually quick sensibilities, keenly alive to all impressions, hurt by discords of all kinds; by quarrelling of men, women, and children, by ill-assorted colours, inharmonious sounds. He was, to a morbid extent, capable of receiving delight from the beauties of Nature, and, as a very little boy, would spend much of his time in studying and enjoying, for their own sake, the lines and angles in the Gothic architecture of his father’s church. Who does not know what must be the central point of all the happiness of such a child? The voice of its mother is the sweetest of sweet sounds, the face of its mother is the fairest of fair sights, the loving touch of her lip is the symbol to it of all pleasures of the sense and of the soul. Against the thousand shocks and terrors that are ready to afflict a child too exquisitely sensitive, the mother is the sole protectress, and her help is all-sufficient. Frederick Froebel lost his mother in the first years of his childhood, and his youth was tortured with incessant craving for a sympathy that was not to be found.
The Pastor Froebel was too busy to attend to all the little fancies of his son. It was his good practice to be the peaceful arbiter of the disputes occurring in the village, and, as he took his boy with him when he went out, he made the child familiar with all the quarrels of the parish. Thus were suggested, week after week, comparisons between the harmony of Nature and the spite and scandal current among men. A dreamy, fervent love of God, a fanciful boy’s wish that he could make men quiet and affectionate, took strong possession of young Frederick, and grew with his advancing years. He studied a good deal. Following out his love of Nature, he sought to become acquainted with the sciences by which her ways and aspects are explained; his contemplation of the architecture of the village church ripened into a thorough taste for mathematics, and he enjoyed agricultural life practically, as a worker on his father’s land. At last he went to Pestalozzi’s school in Switzerland.