Dickens As an Educator

by James L. Hughes

Speaking of the conversation heard by Martin Chuzzlewit at the boarding house in New York, he said:

It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater part of it may be summed up in one word: Dollars. All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations seemed to be melted down into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that worthless ballast, honour and fair dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his good name and good intent, the more ample stowage room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars! What is a flag to them!

This was a solemn warning against the training of a race with such low ideals.

In the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens shows that he deliberately planned Jonas Chuzzlewit as a psychological study. He says:

I conceive that the sordid coarseness and brutality of Jonas would be unnatural, if there had been nothing in his early education, and in the precept and example always before him, to engender and develop the vices that make him odious. But, so born and so bred—admired for that which made him hateful, and justified from his cradle in cunning, treachery, and avarice—I claim him as the legitimate issue of the father upon whom those vices are seen to recoil. And I submit that their recoil upon that old man, in his unhonoured age, is not a mere piece of poetical justice, but is the extreme exposition of a direct truth.

Mrs. Pipchin was described as a child trainer of great respectability. She adopted the business of child training because her husband lost his money. Dickens did great service to the world by ridiculing the outrageous practice of sending children to be trained by women or taught by men whose only qualification for the most sacred of all duties was the fact that they had lost their money, and were therefore likely to be bad tempered and severe. He had already introduced Squeers to the world, but he knew that many people who shuddered at Squeers would send their own children to such as Mrs. Pipchin, because she was respectable and poor. He wished to alarm such people; hence Mrs. Pipchin.

Mrs. Chick, Mr. Dombey’s sister, and Miss Tox called Mr. Dombey’s attention to Mrs. Pipchin’s establishment.

“Mrs. Pipchin, my dear Paul,” returned his sister, “is an elderly lady—Miss Tox knows her whole history—who has for some time devoted all the energies of her mind, with the greatest success, to the study and treatment of infancy, and who has been extremely well connected.”

This celebrated Mrs. Pipchin was a marvellous, ill-favoured, ill-conditioned old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard gray eye that looked as if it might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any injury. Forty years at least had elapsed since the Peruvian mines had been the death of Mr. Pipchin; but his relict still wore black bombazine, of such a lustreless, deep, dead, sombre shade that gas itself couldn’t light her up after dark, and her presence was a quencher to any number of candles. She was generally spoken of as “a great manager” of children; and the secret of her management was, to give them everything that they didn’t like and nothing that they did—which was found to sweeten their dispositions very much.

When Paul and Florence were taken to Mrs. Pipchin’s establishment, Mrs. Pipchin gave them an opportunity to study her disciplinary system as soon as Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox went away. “Master Bitherstone was divested of his collar at once, which he had worn on parade,” and Miss Pankey, the only other little boarder at present, was walked off to the castle dungeon (an empty apartment at the back, devoted to correctional purposes), for having sniffed thrice in the presence of visitors.