Dickens taught that loving sympathy is the highest qualification of a true teacher. He showed this to be true by both positive and negative illustrations. Mr. Marton, the old schoolmaster in Old Curiosity Shop, was a perfect type of a sympathetic teacher. Dr. Strong was “the ideal of the whole school, for he was the kindest of men.” Phœbe’s school was such a good place for the little ones, because she loved them. Like Mr. Marton, she had not studied the new systems of teaching, but loving sympathy gave her power and made her school a place in which the good in human hearts grew and blossomed naturally.
“You are fond of children and learned in the new systems of teaching them,” said Mr. Jackson.
“Very fond of them,” replied Phœbe, “but I know nothing of teaching beyond the pleasure I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars sing some of their lessons has led you so far astray as to think me a good teacher? Ah, I thought so! No, I have only read and been told about that system. It seems so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way.”
She had heard of the kindergarten and had caught some of its spirit of sympathy with the child, but she did not understand its methods. Jemmy Lirriper received perfectly sympathetic treatment from Mrs. Lirriper and the Major; Agnes loved her little scholars; Esther, who sympathized with everybody, loved her pupils, and was beloved by them; and the Bachelor, who introduced Mr. Marton to his second school, was a genuine boy in his comprehensive sympathy with real, boyish boyhood.
So throughout all his books Dickens pleads for kindly treatment for the child, and for complete sympathy with him in his childish feelings and interests. He gave the child the place of honour in literature for the first time, and he aroused the heart of the Christian world to the fact that it was treating the child in a very un-Christlike way. He pleaded for a better education for the child, for a free childhood, for greater liberty in the home and in the school, for fuller sympathy especially at the time when childhood merges into youth and when the mysteries of life have begun to make themselves conscious to the young mind and heart. The poorer the child the greater the need he revealed.
Canon Crisparkle, Esther Summerson, Mr. Jarndyce, Joe Gargery, Rose Maylie, Allan Woodcourt, Betty Higden, Mr. Sangsby, the Old Schoolmaster, the Bachelor, Mrs. Lirriper, Major Jackmann, Doctor Marigold, Agnes Wickfield, Mr. George, and Mr. Brownlow are types of the people with whom Dickens would fill the world—men and women whose hearts were overflowing with true sympathy. Esther Summerson is the best type of perfect sympathy to be met with in literature. She expressed the central principle of Dickens’s philosophy regarding sympathy when she said: “When I love a person very tenderly indeed my understanding seems to brighten; my comprehension is quickened when my affection is.”
The need of sympathy with childhood was revealed by Dickens most strongly by the cruelty, the coercion, and the harshness of such characters as Squeers, Creakle, Bumble, the Murdstones, Mrs. Gargery, John Willet, Mrs. Pipchin, Mrs. Clennam, and the teachers in The Grinders’ school.
Dickens’s description of Dr. Blimber’s school is the most profound criticism of the cramming system of teaching that was ever written. He treats the same subject also in Hard Times, Christmas Stories, and A Holiday Romance.
The vital importance of a free, rich childhood, the value of the imagination as the basis of intellectual and spiritual development, the folly of the Herbartian psychology relating to the soul, the error of regarding fact-storing as the chief aim of education, and the terrible evils resulting from the tyranny of adulthood in dealing with childhood are all treated very ably in Hard Times, the most advanced and most profound of Dickens’s works from the standpoint of the educator.
The need of a real childhood, so well expressed in Froebel’s maxim, “Let childhood ripen in childhood,” is shown also in Nicholas Nickleby, Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son, Great Expectations, and Edwin Drood.