“My dear love,” said the elder lady, as she folded the weeping girl to her bosom, “do you think I would harm a hair of his head?”
“Oh, no,” replied Rose eagerly.
“No, surely,” said the old lady; “my days are drawing to their close, and may mercy be shown to me as I show it to others. What can I do to save him, sir?”
Dickens used the doctor to rebuke the large class of people who are ever ready to believe the worst about a boy, and who are always looking for his depravity instead of searching for the divinity in him.
Rose’s plea for kind treatment for the boy, “even if he has been wicked,” was a new doctrine propounded by Dickens. The worst boys at home or in school need most sympathy. Mrs. Maylie’s attitude was in harmony with Christ’s teaching, but quite out of harmony with much that was called Christian practice at the time Dickens wrote Oliver Twist. He taught the doctrine that children were turned into evil ways and confirmed in them through lack of sympathy. Poor Nancy said to Rose Maylie:
“Lady,” cried the girl, sinking on her knees, “dear, sweet, angel lady, you are the first that ever blessed me with such words as these; and if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me from a life of sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!”
In The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens gave a beautiful picture of a sympathetic teacher in Mr. Marton. His school was not well lighted or properly ventilated, the furniture was poor, there was no apparatus except a dunce’s cap, a cane, and a ruler, his methods were old-fashioned, but he possessed the greatest qualification of a good teacher, deep sympathy with childhood. This was shown by the erasure of the blot from the sick boy’s writing; by his asking Nell to pray for the boy; by his appreciation of the boy’s love; by his hoping for his recovery against the unfavourable reports; by his favourable interpretation of the worst signs; by his absent-mindedness in school; by his giving the boys a half holiday because he could not teach; by his asking them to go away quietly so as not to disturb the sick scholar; by his saying “I’m glad they didn’t mind me” when the jolly boys went shouting away; by his telling the sick boy that the flowers missed him and were less gay on account of his absence; by his hanging the boy’s handkerchief out of the window at his request, as a token of his remembrance of the boys playing on the green; by the loving way in which he embraced the dying boy, and held his cold hand in his after he was dead, chafing it, as if he could bring back the life into it.
Dombey and Son is full of appeals for the tender sympathy of adulthood for childhood. The story of Florence Dombey longing for the one look of tenderness, the one word of kindly interest, the one sympathetic caress from her father, which never came to her during her childhood, is one of the most touching stories ever written. It was written to show that children in the most wealthy homes need sympathy as much as any other children, and that they are often most cruelly neglected by their parents.
Floy pleaded to be allowed to lay her face beside her baby brother’s because “she thought he loved her.”
The love that is given back in exchange for loving interest is shown by Paul’s loving gratitude to Floy for her interest in him, which led her to spend her pocket money in books, so that she might help him with his studies that confused him so.