“What are you crying for?” inquired the gentleman in the white waistcoat. And, to be sure, it was very extraordinary. What could the boy be crying for?
“I hope you say your prayers every night,” said another gentleman in a gruff voice, “and pray for the people who feed and take care of you—like a Christian.”
“Yes, sir,” stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was unconsciously right. It would have been very like a Christian, and a marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people who fed and took care of him.
The dreadful practices of first making children self-conscious and apparently dull by abuse and formalism, and then calling them “fools,” or “stupid,” or “dunces,” are happily not so common now.
In Barnaby Rudge he makes Edward Chester complain to his father about the way he had been educated.
From my childhood I have been accustomed to luxury and idleness, and have been bred as though my fortune were large and my expectations almost without a limit. The idea of wealth has been familiarized to me from my cradle. I have been taught to look upon those means by which men raise themselves to riches and distinction as being beyond my breeding and beneath my care. I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for nothing.
Dickens was in terrible earnest to kill all the giants that preyed on the lifeblood of the joy, the hope, the freedom, the selfhood, and the imagination of childhood. He waged unceasing warfare against the system which he described as
The excellent and thoughtful old system, hallowed by long prescription, which has usually picked out from the rest of mankind the most dreary and uncomfortable people that could possibly be laid hold of, to act as instructors of youth.
The selfish and mercenary ideal and its consequences are dealt with in the training of Jonas Chuzzlewit:
The education of Mr. Jonas had been conducted from his cradle on the strictest principles of the main chance. The very first word he learned to spell was “gain,” and the second one (when he got into two syllables) “money.” But for two results, which were not clearly foreseen perhaps by his watchful parent in the beginning, his training may be said to have been unexceptionable. One of these flaws was, that having been long taught by his father to overreach everybody, he had imperceptibly acquired a love of overreaching that venerable monitor himself. The other, that from his early habits of considering everything as a question of property, he had gradually come to look with impatience on his parent as a certain amount of personal estate which had no right whatever to be going at large, but ought to be secured in that particular description of iron safe which is commonly called a coffin, and banked in the grave.