Nothing is more common in real life than a want of profitable reflection on the causes of many vices and crimes that awaken general horror. What is substantially true of families in this respect, is true of a whole commonwealth. As we sow, we reap. Let the reader go into the children’s side of any prison in England, or, I grieve to add, of many workhouses, and judge whether those are monsters who disgrace our streets, people our hulks and penitentiaries, and overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom we have deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin.
This thought was the motive that led him throughout his whole life to try to arouse sympathetic interest of the most active kind in the conditions and circumstances of the poor.
One of his most striking appeals to thoughtful people is made in Martin Chuzzlewit. These profound words will always be worthy of careful study by teachers and reformers:
Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in every sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in God’s highway, so smooth below your carriage wheels, so rough beneath the tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift descent of men who have lived in their own esteem, that there are scores of thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful toil, who in that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a chance of life! Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man’s neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul’s bright torch as fast as it is kindled! And, oh! ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of Christian knowledge, who soundingly appeal to human nature, see that it be human first. Take heed it has not been transformed, during your slumber and the sleep of generations, into the nature of the beasts.
Dickens saw clearly the depravity of human nature, but he looked beyond the depravity to its cause, and he found a natural cause for the degradation, but not the cause that had been commonly assigned. He taught that the highest and holiest elements in human nature were the causes of its swiftest deterioration when misused, perverted, or neglected.
Alice Marwood, in Dombey and Son, was introduced to teach parents and society in general the duties they owe to childhood, and to show how lives are wrecked by neglect and by a false use of power. When she returned, an outcast, to her mother, and her mother upbraided her, the young woman said:
“I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me as well as you. Come back harder? Of course I have come back harder. What else did you expect?”
“Harder to me! To her own dear mother!” cried the old woman.
“I don’t know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn’t,” she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and compressed lips, as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer feeling from her breast. “Listen, mother, to a word or two. If we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps. I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been very dutiful to me?”
“I!” cried the old woman. “To my own gal! A mother dutiful to her own child!”