“You resent his self-will!” she exclaimed. “You injured by his haughty temper! You, who opposed to both, when your hair was gray, the qualities which made both when you gave him birth! You, who from his cradle reared him to be what he was, and stunted what he should have been! Are you rewarded, now, for your years of trouble?”
“Miss Dartle,” said I, “if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for this afflicted mother——”
“Who feels for me?” she sharply retorted. “She has sown this. Let her moan for the harvest that she reaps to-day!”
To show that the seed for the harvest had been sown by his mother was Dickens’s aim in the delineation of his character. Yet she loved him as a part of her own life. She said to Mr. Peggotty, when he came to plead with her for Emily:
“My son, who has been the object of my life, to whom its every thought has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish, from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth.”
There was a double sadness in David’s soliloquy about Steerforth, who had been his friend:
In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more toward all that was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had done in the height of my devotion to him.
In Bleak House a great deal of attention is paid to child training.
Esther’s sadness because of her neglected birthday touches a tender chord.
It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other birthdays; none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as I knew from what I heard the girls relate to one another; there were none on mine. My birthday was the most melancholy day at home in the whole year.