And the educational Gradgrinds of the present time sneer at Dickens because he puts the early training of a circus above the early training of a Christian home like Mr. Gradgrind’s. “The logical consequence of such reasoning,” they say, “would be that all children should be trained in circuses.”
Oh, no! Dickens did not recommend a circus as a good place to train children. But he did believe that even a circus is a thousand times better than a so-called Christian home for the true and complete development of a child, if in the circus the child is free and happy, and is allowed full play for her imagination, and is not arrested in her development by rote storing of facts and too early drill in arithmetic, and has the rich productive love of even one parent, and has blessed opportunities for loving service for her pets and her friends; and if in the so-called Christian home she is robbed of these privileges even in the name of religion.
Sissy had a blessed, free childhood. She lived in her own imaginary world most of the time; she had the deep love of her kind-hearted father and of Merrylegs, the dog; she read poetry and fairy tales; she attended to her father’s needs; she had many opportunities to show her love in loving service for Merrylegs and her father; and she was not dwarfed by fact cramming and formal drill. Her chances of reaching a true womanhood were excellent, and when she got the opportunity for the revelation of character, she had character to reveal, and her character developed in its revelation for the benefit and happiness of others. Hers was the true Christian training after all. Homes and schools with such training are centres of great power.
One of the strongest pleas ever made for the cultivation of the imagination, “the fancies and affections,” and for the teaching of literature, art, and music in the schools was given in Hard Times, which is an industrial as well as an educational story. Indeed, Dickens saw that the true solution of industrial questions was the proper training of the race. No attack on the meanness of utilitarianism and no exposition of its terrible dangers could be more incisive and philosophical than the following wonderful sentences:
Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, commissioners of fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the moment of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you!
Altogether Hard Times is one of the most remarkable educational books ever written.
Dickens made a plea for mental refreshment and recreation for the working classes in Nobody’s Story, similar to that made in Hard Times:
The workingman appealed to the Bigwig family, and said: “We are a labouring people, and I have a glimmering suspicion in me that labouring people of whatever condition were made—by a higher intelligence than yours, as I poorly understand it—to be in need of mental refreshment and recreation. See what we fall into, when we rest without it. Come! Amuse me harmlessly, show me something, give me an escape!”
Beautiful Lizzie Hexam, one of the latest and highest creations of Dickens, longed to read, but she did not learn to do so because her father objected so bitterly, and she wished to avoid everything that would weaken the bond of love between them, lest she might lose her influence for good over him.
Her brother Charley said to her: