However, beef and Old Cheeseman are two different things. So is beer. It was Old Cheeseman I meant to tell about; not the manner in which our fellows get their constitutions destroyed for the sake of profit.
Why, look at the pie crust alone. There’s no flakiness in it. It’s solid—like damp lead. Then our fellows get nightmares, and are bolstered for calling out and waking other fellows. Who can wonder!
Old Cheeseman one night walked in his sleep, put his hat on over his nightcap, got hold of a fishing rod and a cricket bat, and went down into the parlour, where they naturally thought from his appearance he was a Ghost. Why, he never would have done that if his meals had been wholesome. When we all begin to walk in our sleeps, I suppose they’ll be sorry for it.
At Doctor Blimber’s school they used “to crib the boys’ dinners.” There is no more outrageous practice than that of depriving a child of food as a means of punishment.
Dickens ended his sketch entitled A Walk in a Workhouse with a plea on behalf of the inmates for “a little more liberty—and a little more bread,” and even in his last book, Edwin Drood, he was still directing attention to the poor food supplied in boarding schools.
Mrs. Billickin was very plain in her hints about the poor board supplied to Rosa at Miss Twinkleton’s when she received the schoolmistress in her own home. Referring to Rosa, who was now residing with Mrs. Billickin, she said:
“I did think it well to mention to my cook, which I ’ope you will agree with, Miss Twinkleton, was a right precaution, that the young lady being used to what we should consider here but poor diet, had better be brought forward by degrees. For a rush from scanty feeding to generous feeding, and from what you may call messing to what you may call method, do require a power of constitution, which is not often found in youth, particularly when undermined by boarding school! I was put in youth to a very genteel boarding school, the mistress being no less a lady than yourself, of about your own age, or, it may be some years younger, and a poorness of blood flowed from the table which has run through my life.”