CHAPTER IV.
THE DOCTRINE OF CHILD DEPRAVITY.
Dickens heartily accepted Froebel’s view of the doctrine of child depravity. They did not teach that the child is totally divine, but neither did they believe that a being created in God’s image is entirely depraved.
They recognised very clearly that the doctrine of child depravity was the logical (or illogical) basis of the theory of corporal punishment and all forms of coercion. What more natural or more logical than the practice of checking the outflow of a child’s inner life if we believe his inner life to be depraved? The firm belief in the doctrine of child depravity compelled conscientious men to be repressive and coercive in their discipline. Dickens understood this fully, and therefore he gave the doctrine no place in his philosophy.
Mrs. Pipchin’s training was based squarely on the doctrine of child depravity, for “the secret of her management of children was to give them everything that they didn’t like, and nothing that they did.” If the training of children under the “good old régime,” for which some reactionary philosophers are still pleading, is carefully analyzed, it will be found that Mrs. Pipchin’s plan was the commonly approved plan, and it was the perfectly logical outcome of the doctrine that the child, being wholly depraved, desired everything it should not have and objected to everything it should have.
That was a touching question addressed by a little boy to his father: “Say, papa, did mamma stop you from doing everything you wished to do when you were a little boy?”
How Dickens despised the awful theology of the Murdstones, who would not let David play with other children, because they believed “all children to be a swarm of little vipers [though there was a child once set in the midst of the Disciples], and held that they contaminated one another”!
How he laughed at Mrs. Varden and Miggs, her maid!
“If you hadn’t the sweetness of an angel in you, mim, I don’t think you could abear it, I raly don’t.”