Dickens’s best characters loved Nature. Esther, when recovering from her illness, said:
I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and everything in Nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight to me!
The deep, spiritual influences of Nature are revealed in the effects of life in the growing country on Oliver Twist.
Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft tranquility, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green hills and rich woods of an inland village! Who can tell how scenes of peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close and noisy places, and carry their own freshness deep into their jaded hearts! Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at last for one short glimpse of Nature’s face; and, carried from the scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once into a new state of being. Crawling forth from day to day, to some green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within them by the sight of sky, and hill, and plain, and glistening water, that a foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they have sunk into their tombs as peacefully as the sun, whose setting they watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before, faded from their dim and feeble sight! The memories which peaceful country scenes call up are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the graves of those we love—may purify our thoughts, and bear down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this there lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.
It was a lovely spot to which they repaired. Oliver, whose days had been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence there.
In the story of The Five Sisters of York Alice said to her sisters:
“Nature’s own blessings are the proper goods of life, and we may share them sinlessly together. To die is our heavy portion, but, oh, let us die with life about us; when our cold hearts cease to beat, let warm hearts be beating near; let our last look be upon the bounds which God has set to his own bright skies, and not on stone walls and bars of iron! Dear sisters, let us live and die, if you list, in this green garden’s compass.”
Dickens had very advanced opinions in regard to the importance of physical training, especially of play, as an agent not only in physical culture, but in the development of the mind and character. Doctor Blimber’s school is condemned because the boys were not allowed to play, and Doctor Strong’s school is highly commended because the boys “had noble games out of doors” there.
What splendid runners and jumpers and divers and swimmers those grand boys were whom Mr. Marton had the good fortune to teach in his second school in The Old Curiosity Shop!
Mrs. Crupp recommended David Copperfield to take up some game as an antidote for his despondency during his early love experience.