One of Dickens’s most successful hits at the common philosophy, that the desired adult characteristics must be developed in childhood in their adult forms, was made in describing Mrs. Tozer’s effort to qualify Tozer for the position of a clergyman by making him wear a stiff, starched necktie while he was a boy.
When Edith upbraided her mother for practically compelling her to marry Mr. Dombey, her mother asked angrily:
“What do you mean? Haven’t you from a child——”
“A child!” said Edith, looking at her; “when was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman—artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men—before I knew myself or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learned. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride to-night.”
“You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own mother.”
“It seems so to me; stranger to me than to you,” said Edith. “But my education was completed long ago. I am too old now and have fallen too low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to help myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman’s breast, and makes it true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else to sustain me when I despise myself.”
Later, on the night before she was to marry Mr. Dombey, she said:
“Oh, mother, mother, if you had but left me to my natural heart when I too was a girl—a younger girl than Florence—how different I might have been!”
Bleak House gives Dickens’s most striking picture of the deterioration resulting from giving no real childhood to children for a series of generations.
During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go to business and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.