“If you was to take to something, sir,” said Mrs. Crupp, “if you was to take to skittles, now, which is healthy, you might find it divert your mind and do you good.”
Mrs. Chick told Mr. Dombey that Paul was delicate. “Our darling is not altogether as stout as we could wish. The fact is that his mind is too much for him. His soul is a great deal too large for his frame.” Yet his father paid no attention to the boy’s food, and sent him, when but a little sickly child, to Doctor Blimber’s to learn everything—not to play. “They had nothing so vulgar as play at Doctor Blimber’s.”
One of the most vicious conventions is that which makes vigorous play vulgar and unladylike for girls.
He called attention in American notes to the advantages possessed by the students of Upper Canada College, Toronto, inasmuch as “the town is well adapted for wholesome exercise at all seasons.” In the same book he gives his opinion that American girls “must go more wisely clad, and take more healthful exercise.”
He praised the free life of the gipsy children in Nicholas Nickleby.
In Martin Chuzzlewit, when Tom Pinch and Martin had to walk to Salisbury instead of riding in Mr. Pecksniff’s gig, Dickens says it was better for them that they were compelled to walk. What a breezy enthusiasm he throws into his advocacy of walking as an exercise:
Better! A rare strong, hearty, healthy walk—four statute miles an hour—preferable to that rumbling, tumbling, jolting, shaking, scraping, creaking, villainous old gig? Why, the two things will not admit of comparison. It is an insult to the walk to set them side by side. Where is an instance of a gig having ever circulated a man’s blood, unless when, putting him in danger of his neck, it awakened in his veins and in his ears, and all along his spine, a tingling heat much more peculiar than agreeable? When did a gig ever sharpen anybody’s wits and energies, unless it was when the horse bolted, and, crashing madly down a steep hill with a stone wall at the bottom, his desperate circumstances suggested to the only gentleman left inside some novel and unheard-of mode of dropping out behind? Better than the gig!
Better than the gig! When were travellers by wheels and hoofs seen with such red-hot cheeks as those? when were they so good-humouredly and merrily bloused? when did their laughter ring upon the air, as they turned them round, what time the stronger gusts came sweeping up; and, facing round again as they passed by, dashed on, in such a glow of ruddy health as nothing could keep pace with, but the high spirits it engendered? Better than the gig! Why here is a man in a gig coming the same way now. Look at him as he passes his whip into his left hand, chafes his numbed right fingers on his granite leg, and beats those marble toes of his upon the footboard. Ha, ha, ha! Who would exchange this rapid hurry of the blood for yonder stagnant misery, though its pace were twenty miles for one?
Better than the gig! No man in a gig could have such interest in the milestones. No man in a gig could see, or feel, or think, like merry users of their legs.
Dickens taught comparatively little about the subjects of instruction or the methods of teaching them. He dealt cramming its most stunning blow in Doctor Blimber’s school, and he criticised sharply the methods of teaching classics and literature in the same school. He advocated the objective method of teaching number in Jemmy Lirriper’s training at home by Major Jackman.