Dickens As an Educator

by James L. Hughes

But Jemmy’s make believe was not ruthlessly cut short with his early childhood. He continued his imaginative operations, or it might make it clearer to say his operative imaginations, after he went to school; and those beautiful old people, Mrs. Lirriper and Major Jackman, continued their interest, their real, perfectly sympathetic interest in his plans.

Neither should I tell you any news, my dear, in telling you that the Major is still a fixture in the Parlours quite as much so as the roof of the house, and that Jemmy is of boys the best and brightest, and has ever had kept from him the cruel story of his poor pretty young mother, Mrs. Edson, being deserted in the second floor and dying in my arms, fully believing that I am his born Gran and him an orphan; though what with engineering since he took a taste for it, and him and the Major making Locomotives out of parasols, broken iron pots, and cotton reels, and them absolutely a-getting off the line and falling over the table and injuring the passengers almost equal to the originals, it really is quite wonderful. And when I says to the Major, “Major, can’t you by any means give us a communication with the guard?” the Major says, quite huffy, “No, madam, it’s not to be done”; and when I says, “Why not?” the Major says, “That is between us who are in the Railway Interest, madam, and our friend, the Right Honourable Vice-President of the Board of Trade”; and if you’ll believe me, my dear, the Major wrote to Jemmy at School to consult him on the answer I should have before I could get even that amount of unsatisfactoriness out of the man, the reason being that when we first began with the little model and the working signals beautiful and perfect (being in general as wrong as the real), and when I says, laughing, “What appointment am I to hold in this undertaking, gentlemen?” Jemmy hugs me round the neck and tells me, dancing, “You shall be the Public, Gran,” and consequently they put upon me just as much as ever they like, and I sit a-growling in my easy-chair.

My dear, whether it is that a grown man as clever as the Major can not give half his heart and mind to anything—even a plaything—but must get into right down earnest with it, whether it is so or whether it is not so, I do not undertake to say; but Jemmy is far outdone by the serious and believing ways of the Major in the management of the United Grand Junction Lirriper and Jackman Great Norfolk Parlour Line, “for,” says my Jemmy with the sparkling eyes when it was christened, “we must have a whole mouthful of name, Gran, or our dear old Public”—and there the young rogue kissed me—“won’t stump up.” So the Public took the shares—ten at ninepence, and immediately when that was spent twelve Preference at one and sixpence—and they were all signed by Jemmy and countersigned by the Major, and between ourselves much better worth the money than some shares I have paid for in my time. In the same holidays the line was made and worked and opened and ran excursions and collisions and had burst its boilers and all sorts of accidents and offences all most regular, correct, and pretty. The sense of responsibility entertained by the Major as a military style of station master, my dear, starting the down train behind time and ringing one of those little bells that you buy with the little coal scuttles off the tray round the man’s neck in the street, did him honour; but noticing the Major of a night when he is writing out his monthly report to Jemmy at school of the state of the Rolling Stock and the Permanent Way, and all the rest of it (the whole kept upon the Major’s sideboard and dusted with his own hands every morning before varnishing his boots), I notice him as full of thought and care, as full can be, and frowning in a fearful manner; but, indeed, the Major does nothing by halves, as witness his great delight in going out surveying with Jemmy when he has Jemmy to go with, carrying a chain and a measuring tape, and driving I don’t know what improvements right through Westminster Abbey, and fully believed in the streets to be knocking everything upside down by Act of Parliament. As please Heaven will come to pass when Jemmy takes to that as a profession!

The Major’s participation in the plans of Jemmy is a good illustration of the sympathy that Froebel and Dickens felt for childhood, a sympathy with, not for, the child. It meant more than approval—it meant co-operation, partnership.

Some educators would criticise Dickens for allowing the Major to make the locomotives with parasols, broken pots, and cotton reels. They teach that Jemmy should have made these himself. Dickens was away beyond such a narrow view as this. The child at first has much more power to plan than to execute. To leave him to himself means the failure of his plans and the irritation of his temper. It is a terrible experience for a child to get the habit of failure. The wise adult will enter into partnership with the child to aid in carrying out the child’s plans. He will not even make suggestions of changes in plans when he sees how they might be improved. The plans and the leadership should be absolutely the child’s own. The adult should be an assistant, and that only, when skill is required beyond that possessed by the child—either when the mechanical work is too difficult for the child or when more than one person is needed to execute his plan.

The adult may sometimes lead the child indirectly to a change of plan, but he should not do it by direct suggestion. The joy is lost for the child when he becomes conscious of the adult as interfering even sympathetically with his own personality. There is a great deal of well-intentioned dwarfing of childhood.

The consciousness of partnership, of unity, of sympathetic co-operation, is the best result of such blessed work as the Major did with Jemmy in carrying out Jemmy’s plans. He is the child’s best friend who most wisely and most thoroughly develops his imagination as a basis for all intellectual strength and clearness, and for the highest spiritual growth. He is the wealthiest man who sees diamonds in the dewdrops and unsullied gold in the sunset tints.

David Copperfield tells the names of the wonderful books he found in his father’s blessed little room, and describes their influence upon his life.

They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something beyond that place and time—they and the Arabian Nights and the Tales of the Genii. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me) by impersonating my favourite characters in them, as I did, and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones, which I did, too. I have been Tom Jones—a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature—for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe.

“Let us end with the Boy’s story,” said Mrs. Lirriper, “for the Boy’s story is the best that is ever told.”