He took more interest in reading and literature than in any other department of school study, so far as can be judged from his writings. He deplored the practice of allowing children to try to read before they could recognise the words readily, and understand their meaning in the training of Pip and Charley Hexam. At the great party at Mr. Merdle’s,
the Bishop consulted the great Physician on the relaxation of the throat with which young curates were too frequently afflicted, and on the means of lessening the great prevalence of that disorder in the church. Physician, as a general rule, was of opinion that the best way to avoid it was to know how to read before you made a profession of reading. Bishop said, dubiously, did he really think so? And Physician said, decidedly, yes, he did.
He criticised, too, the reading in the school visited in an American city, because “the girls blundered through three or four dreary passages, obviously without comprehending ten words,” and said “he would have been much better pleased if they had been asked to read some simpler selections which they could understand.”
Mr. Wegg, when reading for Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, “read on by rote, and attached as few ideas as possible to the text.”
He discusses the advantages of reading suitable books in David Copperfield, giving to David his own real experience in early boyhood. After describing the cruel treatment of the Murdstones, he says:
The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose, for some six months, was to make me sullen, dull, and dogged. I was not made the less so by my sense of being daily more and more shut out and alienated from my mother. I believe I should have been almost stupefied but for one circumstance.
It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it joined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the tales of the Genii.
His faith in the influence of reading increased as he grew older. In Our Mutual Friend he says: “No one who can read ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who can not read.”
Dickens taught a useful lesson in Martin Chuzzlewit regarding the way teachers used to be treated by society. Even yet there is need of a higher recognition of the teaching profession in its true dignity by a civilization that reverences wealth more than intellectual and spiritual character.
Tom Pinch’s sister was engaged in the family of a wealthy brass founder. She was treated contemptuously by him and his wife, yet they complained to Tom that his sister was unable to command the respect of her pupil. Tom was naturally indignant, and he spoke his mind very clearly to the brass founder.