When Mr. Pecksniff and his daughters went to visit Miss Pinch she
was at that moment instructing her eldest pupil; to wit, a premature little woman of thirteen years old, who had already arrived at such a pitch of whalebone and education that she had nothing girlish about her, which was a source of great rejoicing to all her relations and friends.
One of the unsolved mysteries is the fact that such a large proportion of parents are so anxious to have their children grow up. The desire may be understood when poverty longs for the time when the little hands may help to win bread, but that wealthy parents should hasten the premature state of adulthood in their children is incomprehensible.
A great deal of attention is paid to the blunder of robbing children of real childhood in Dombey and Son, which is so rich in several departments of educational philosophy. Doctor Blimber regarded the young gentlemen “as if they were born grown up.”
Paul’s life and death were intended as warnings to ambitious parents. Florence was robbed of a true childhood by her mother’s death and her father’s lack of sympathy. Briggs and Tozer had no childhood; they were persecuted by the ingenious and ignorantly learned adults at home during vacations, as well as by Doctor Blimber during school time; so that “Tozer said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he would rather stay at school than go home.”
Poor Bitherstone had no childhood. He was shipped away from his parents in India to the respectable hell conducted by that widely known and highly reputed child trainer Mrs. Pipchin.
Poor little Miss Pankey spent a great deal of her time in Mrs. Pipchin’s “correctional dungeon.” What a mercy it would be if all such unfortunate children could be stolen by the gipsies!
Mrs. Pipchin’s theory taught “that it was wrong to encourage a child’s mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster.”
When Doctor Blimber asked Paul, six-year-old Paul, “if he would like them to make a man of him,” the child replied:
“I had rather be a child.”