“The world has done better since, and will do far better yet” in the choice of reading matter for children.
The school recalled by memory in connection with the other ghosts of his childhood in The Haunted House was described briefly, but the description is full of suggestiveness.
Then I was sent to a great cold, bare school of big boys; where everything to eat and wear was thick and clumpy, without being enough; where everybody, large and small, was cruel; where the boys knew all about the sale before I got there [his father’s furniture had been sold for debt], and asked me what I had fetched, and who had bought me, and hooted at me, “Going, going, gone.”
The inartistic bareness of the school, the tasteless clothing, the unattractive, unsatisfying food, the pervading atmosphere of cruelty, and the heartlessness of the boys in tearing open the wounds of the sensitive new boy—are all condemned.
CHAPTER XVI.
MISCELLANEOUS EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES.
The need of apperception and correlation are shown in the result of Paul Dombey’s first lessons under Miss Cornelia Blimber, and in the same book in the description of the learning Briggs carried away with him. It was like an ill-arranged luggage, so tightly packed that he couldn’t get at anything he wanted. The absolute necessity for fixing apperceptive centres of emotion and thought in the lives of children by experience is shown in the case of Neville Landless in Edwin Drood. His early life had been so barren that, as he told his tutor, “It has caused me to be utterly wanting in I don’t know what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts—I have not even a name for the thing, you see—that you have had to work upon in other young men to whom you have been accustomed.”
Dickens emphasized the fact that the lack of apperceptive centres of an improper kind is a great advantage.