One of the very best of the stories of Dickens to show his perfect sympathy with boyhood is the story told by Jemmy Jackman Lirriper about “the boy who went to school in Rutlandshire.”
It reveals the feelings of boys to the “Tartars” who teach school, as the boys, when they got control, put the Tartar into confinement and “forced him to eat the boys’ dinners and drink half a cask of their beer every day.”
It reveals, too, the psychological condition of a healthy boy just entering the adolescent period, if he has been fortunate enough to have had a life of love and freedom at home; with his heart filled with love for the schoolmaster’s daughter Seraphina, and his mind filled with hopeful dreams of success, and triumph, and fortune, and happiness ever afterward, not excluding those who had nurtured him, but sharing all with them, and finding his greatest joy in their affectionate pride at his success. Blessed is the boy who has such glorious experiences and such hopeful dreams in his later boyhood and onward, and thrice blessed is he who finds in parenthood hearts so reverently sympathetic that it is natural for the young heart to overflow into them.
“But such dreams can never come true.” They are true. Nothing is ever more true for the stage of evolution in which they naturally fill the life of the child. To stop them is a crime; to shut them up in the heart of the boy or girl makes them a source of great danger instead of an essential element in the ennoblement of character.
Let the boy dream on, and help him to dream by sympathetically sharing his visions with him. His own visions and the most wonderful visions of heroism and adventure dreamed by the best authors should fill his life during the most important stage of his growth, adolescence, when the elements of his manhood are rushing into his life and require an outlet in the ideal life as a preparation for the real life of later days.
Dickens recognises, too, in this story the great truth so little used by educators, that the child’s imagination is not restricted by any conditions of impossibility or by any laws of Nature or of man. The ideal transcends the real, the desired is accomplished. Development is rapid under such conditions.
“And was there no quarrelling,” asked Mrs. Lirriper, “after the boy and his boy friend had gained high renown, and unlimited stores of gold, and had married Seraphina and her sister, and had come to live with Gran and Godfather forever, and the story was ended?”
“No! Nobody ever quarrelled.”
“And did the money never melt away?”
“No! Nobody could ever spend it all.”