FREE CHILDHOOD.
Adulthood can never be truly free till childhood is free. Perfect freedom can not be developed in a soul filled with the apperceptive experiences of tyranny. No man is fully free in the freest country in the world who wishes to dominate even his child. The practice of tyranny develops the tyrant. Guiding control is entirely different from domination.
Dickens taught the doctrine of a rich, full, free childhood from the time he wrote Nicholas Nickleby in 1839.
Even the sunburned faces of gipsy children, half naked though they be, suggest a drop of comfort. It is a pleasant thing to see that the sun has been there; to know that the air and light are on them every day; to feel that they are children, and lead children’s lives; that if their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of heaven, and not with tears; that the limbs of their girls are free, and that they are not crippled by distortions, imposing an unnatural and horrible penance upon their sex; that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which make young children old before they know what childhood is, and give them the exhaustion and infirmity of age, without, like age, the privilege to die. God send that old nursery tales were true, and that gipsies stole such children by the score!
If he had written nothing but this exquisite quotation from Nicholas Nickleby he would have deserved recognition as an educator. It shows a clear insight into the great principles of physical freedom, intellectual freedom, and spiritual freedom.
In The Old Curiosity Shop he made the world sympathize with a child who lived with an old man. He gives the keynote to this fundamental thought of the book in the opening chapter:
It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity—two of the best qualities that Heaven gives them—and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.
Little Nell had the sadness of a lonely childhood, though her grandfather lived with but the one aim of making her happy.
In Martin Chuzzlewit—
Tom Pinch’s sister was governess in a family, a lofty family; perhaps the wealthiest brass and copper founder’s family known to mankind. They lived at Camberwell; in a house so big and fierce that its mere outside, like the outside of a giant’s castle, struck terror into vulgar minds and made bold persons quail.