There is more than mere sentiment in birthday celebrations both at home and in school. It develops a pleasant consciousness of individuality and community—two of the greatest educational ideals.
The cruelty of telling children of any supposed blight of heredity or of any other shadow that arrogant conventionality dares to throw over them, is criticised in the hard, gloomy way in which Esther’s godmother referred to her mother.
Even worse than this in the refinement of its cruelty was her parting injunction. It is a shameful thing to make a child believe that she is different from other children in any sense of either badness or goodness.
“Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a life begun with such a shadow on it. You are different from other children, Esther, because you were not born, like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart.”
I went up to my room and crept to bed, and laid my doll’s cheek against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon my bosom cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy, at any time, to anybody’s heart, and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to me.
Dickens evidently meant to reveal more than her godmother’s cruelty in her closing moralizings. She made the mistake of using self-denial and diligent work as curses instead of blessings. They were for the time none the less curses to the child, however.
The gross negligence of parents in regard to the sacredness of the children’s retiring hour is exposed in the management of the Jellyby children. Indeed, Mrs. Jellyby may be regarded as several volumes of treatises on how not to train children. Caddy expressed her views of the training they received by saying: “I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead. It would be a great deal better for us.” She wisely added: “Oh, don’t talk of duty as a child! where’s ma’s duty as a parent?” Esther said wisely:
It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against becoming absurd; but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to myself.
Esther describes the process of putting the children to bed one evening she was visiting at the Jellyby home:
Mrs. Jellyby stopped for a moment her conversation with Mr. Quale, on the Brotherhood of Humanity, long enough to order the children to bed.