“Sir!” cried Tom, after regarding him in silence for some time. “If you do not understand what I mean I will tell you. My meaning is that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.”
“When you tell me,” resumed Tom, who was not the less indignant for keeping himself quiet, “that my sister has no innate power of commanding the respect of your children, I must tell you it is not so; and that she has. She is as well bred, as well taught, as well qualified by Nature to command respect as any hirer of a governess you know. But when you place her at a disadvantage in reference to every servant in your house, how can you suppose, if you have the gift of common sense, that she is not in a tenfold worse position in reference to your daughters?”
“Pretty well! Upon my word,” exclaimed the gentleman, “that is pretty well!”
“It is very ill, sir,” said Tom. “It is very bad and mean and wrong and cruel. Respect! I believe young people are quick enough to observe and imitate; and why or how should they respect whom no one else respects, and everybody slights? And very partial they must grow—oh, very partial!—to their studies, when they see to what a pass proficiency in those same tasks has brought their governess! Respect! Put anything the most deserving of respect before your daughters in the light in which you place her, and you will bring it down as low, no matter what it is!”
“You speak with extreme impertinence, young man,” observed the gentleman.
“I speak without passion, but with extreme indignation and contempt for such a course of treatment, and for all who practise it,” said Tom. “Why, how can you, as an honest gentleman, profess displeasure or surprise at your daughter telling my sister she is something beggarly and humble when you are forever telling her the same thing yourself in fifty plain, outspeaking ways, though not in words; and when your very porter and footman make the same delicate announcement to all comers?”
Dickens described a great variety of weak, and mean, and selfish, and degraded people in order to expose weakness, and meanness, and selfishness, and baseness, so that humanity might learn to overcome them, but he reserved his supreme contempt for those who oppose the general education of “the masses,” because it fills their mind with ideas above their station, or disqualifies them for the work they were intended to do. This being interpreted, means in plain language that certain human beings who, because they possess wealth, or belong to what they arrogantly call the “upper classes,” claim the right to dominate those who have not a sufficient amount of money to be independent of them; to fix what they selfishly call “the sphere of the lower classes”; and to prescribe the limits beyond which the children of the poor must not be educated, lest they be lifted beyond tame subserviency to their natural lords and masters, and fail to abase themselves dutifully or to be sufficiently grateful to those above them for the pittance they grudgingly give them for labouring in the menial occupations assigned them.
Dickens despised all Barnacles, and Dedlocks, and Podsnaps, and Dombeys, and Merdles; he ridiculed all who violate the sacred bond of human brotherhood; but the vials of his bitterest wrath were poured upon those who because a child was born in the home of poor parents would therefore restrict its education and dwarf its soul.
Mr. Dombey, after the christening of Paul, called Mrs. Toodle before his guests, and in a very condescending but rigidly majestic manner told her he had graciously decided to send her son to the school of the Charitable Grinders. He prefaced his announcement by a brief statement of his views regarding education:
“I am far from being friendly,” pursued Mr. Dombey, “to what is called by persons of levelling sentiments, general education. But it is necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be taught to know their position, and to conduct themselves properly. So far I approve of schools.”