There are no other stories so enchanting, or so stimulating, as the stories that fill the imaginations of childhood.
CHAPTER IX.
SYMPATHY WITH CHILDHOOD.
The dominant element in Dickens’s character was sympathy with childhood, not merely for it. He had the productive sympathy that feels and thinks from the child’s standpoint.
The illustration just given of Major Jackman’s co-operative sympathy with Jemmy Lirriper in the perfect carrying out of what to most people would have been only “the foolish ideas” of a child, as sincerely as if he had been executing commissions from the prime minister, is an excellent exemplification of the true ideal of sympathy in practice. The Major was not working for Jemmy’s amusement merely; he was a very active and genuinely interested partner with Jemmy. “Jemmy was far outdone by the serious and believing ways of the Major” in the imaginative plays which were the most real life of Jemmy. Such was the sympathy of Dickens with his own children; such sympathy he believed to be the most productive power in the teacher or child trainer for beneficent influence on the character of the child.
There is no other characteristic of his writings so marked as his broad sympathy with childhood. Sympathy was the origin of all he wrote against coercion in all its dread forms, of all he wrote about robbing children of a real childhood, about the dwarfing of individuality, about the strangling of the imagination, about improper nutrition, about all forms of neglect, and cruelty, and bad training. The more fully his nature is known the more deeply he is loved, because of his great love for the child.
From the beginning of his educational work his overflowing, practical sympathy is revealed.
He tells us in the preface to Nickleby that his study of the Yorkshire schools and his delineation of the character of Squeers resulted from a resolution formed in childhood, which he was led to form by seeing a boy “with a suppurated abscess caused by its being ripped open by his Yorkshire guide, philosopher, and friend with an inky penknife.”