Dickens As an Educator

by James L. Hughes

Each ward in this institution is shaped like a long gallery or hall, with the dormitories of the patients opening from it on either hand. Here they work, read, play at skittles, and other games; and, when the weather does not admit of their taking exercise out of doors, pass the day together. In one of these rooms, seated, calmly, and quite as a matter of course, among a throng of mad women, black and white, were the physician’s wife and another lady, with a couple of children. These ladies were graceful and handsome; and it was not difficult to perceive at a glance that even their presence there had a highly beneficial influence on the patients who were grouped about them.

Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman whose manner of dealing with his charges I have just described. At every meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among them from cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that influence is reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even as a means of restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a hundred times more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, fetters, and handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have manufactured since the creation of the world.

How much those benighted teachers who so tragically ask “What can you do with bad boys, if you do not use corporal punishment?” might learn from the last sentence!

Blinded by old ideals, these teachers whip away, admitting that they fail to reform many of the best boys, and quieting their consciences with the horrible thought that the evil course was the natural one for the boys, and that they are not responsible for their blighted lives. They comfort themselves with the thought that it is God’s business, and if he made a boy so bad that flogging would not reform him, they at any rate are free from blame, because they “have beaten, and beaten, and beaten him, and it did him no good.” Having beaten him, and beaten him, and beaten him, they rest contented with the sure conviction that they have faithfully done their duty; and when, perchance, the poor boy becomes a criminal, they solemnly say without a blush or a pang: “I knew he would come to a bad end, but I am so thankful that I did my duty to him.”

Ignominious failure to save the brave boys who are not cowardly enough to be deterred from doing wrong by beating has taught nothing to some teachers. Even yet they placidly beat on, and get angry if they are requested to try freedom as a substitute for coercion in the training of beings created in God’s image. They even question the sanity and the theology of those who dare to doubt the efficiency of the sacred rod. They do not deem it possible that by studying the child and their own higher powers they could find easier, pleasanter, and infinitely more successful methods of guiding a boy to a true, strong life than by beating, and beating, and beating him.

The keepers of asylums in the time of Dickens were equally severe on the wise friends of the insane. They honestly believed that terrible evils would necessarily result from giving greater freedom to the afflicted patients in asylums. Dickens took the side of freedom and common sense, and the strait-jackets, and handcuffs, and fetters have been taken off, and, even as a means of restraint, kindness and freedom have done better work than all the coercive fetters that “ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have manufactured since the creation of the world.”

So all teachers who have grown wise enough have found that kindness and freedom are much better even as restraining agents, and infinitely better in the development of true, independent, positive, progressive characters than all the coercive terrors of rod, rule, strap, rawhide, or any form of cruelty ever practised on helpless childhood by ignorance, prejudice, and perverted theology since the creation of the world.

In American Notes Dickens gave a long description of Laura Bridgman written by Dr. Howe, and showed his intense interest in what was then a new movement in favour of the education of the blind.

Speaking of Laura Bridgman, Dickens himself wrote:

The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room before a girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell, and nearly so of taste; before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and hope, and power of goodness and affection inclosed within her delicate frame, and but one outward sense—the sense of touch. There she was before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an immortal soul might be awakened.