Many Jane Murdstones still claim that it is not necessary to study so common a thing as a boy. Yet a child is the most wonderful thing in the world, and, whether the Jane Murdstones in the schools and homes like it or not, the wise people are studying the child with a view to finding out what he should be guided to do in the accomplishment of his own training.
Richard Carstone had been eight years at school, and he was a miserable failure in life, although a man of good ability.
“It had never been anybody’s business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him.” Esther wisely said: “I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying Latin verses so much.”
Dickens studied every subject about which he wrote with great care and discrimination. As an instance of this careful study it may be stated that medical authorities say that the description of Smike’s sickness and death is the best description of consumption ever written. Dickens had a wonderful imagination, but he never relied on his imagination for his facts or his philosophy. It is therefore reasonable to believe that as he wrote more about children than any other man or woman, he was the greatest and most reverent student of childhood that England has produced.
In addition to the revelations of his conclusions given in the evolution of his child characters, and in the many illustrations of good and of bad training, he continually makes direct statements in regard to child nature and how to deal with it in its varied manifestations.
His central motive was expressed by the old gentleman who found Little Nell astray in London: “I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.”
His ideal of unperverted child nature was entirely different from that which had been taught by theology and psychology. He believed the child to be pure and good, and that even when heredity was bad, its baneful influences need not blight the divinity in his life, if he was wisely trained and had a free life of self-activity, a suitable environment, and truly sympathetic friends.
“It would be a curious speculation,” said I, after some restless turns across and across the room, “to imagine her in her future life, holding her solitary way among a crowd of wild, grotesque companions, the only pure, fresh, youthful object in the throng.”
To keep children pure and fresh was the chief aim of his life work. He had no respect for those who treated children as if they were grown-up, reasonable beings; who judged children as they would judge adults, and therefore misjudged them. He always remembered that a child was a little stranger in a new world, and that his complex nature had to adjust itself to its environment. He had a perfect, reverent, considerate sympathy for the timid young soul venturing to look out upon its new conditions. One of the most pathetic things in the world to him was the fact that children are nearly universally misunderstood and misinterpreted. How he longed to tear down the barriers of formalism, and conventionality, and indifference, and misconception from the lives of parents and teachers, so that timid children might be true to their better natures in their presence.
When little Florence timidly presented herself, Mr. Dombey stopped in his pacing up and down and looked toward her. Had he looked with greater interest and with a father’s eye, he might have read in her keen glance the impulses and fears that made her waver; the passionate desire to run clinging to him, crying, as she hid her face in his embrace, “Oh, father, try to love me! there’s no one else!” the dread of a repulse; the fear of being too bold, and of offending him; the pitiable need in which she stood of some assurance and encouragement; and how her overcharged young heart was wandering to find some natural resting place for its sorrow and affection.