There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child, until Mr. Smallweed’s grandmother, now living, became weak in her intellect, and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory, understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall asleep over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed’s grandmother has undoubtedly brightened the family.
There could be no more awful picture than that of a family in which for a series of generations the children had been, through heredity and training, made “little old men and women,” who were never permitted to indulge in any childish plays, or to enjoy any stories, or in any way have a genuine childhood, so that they not only came to look like monkeys, but “like monkeys with something depressing on their minds”; and in which the only child for several generations had been Mr. Smallweed’s grandmother, when she became weak in intellect and “fell (for the first time) into a childish state.”
In The Haunted House the wretched child who came to Mr. Redlaw’s room is described as “a baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child.”
Dickens made his greatest plea for a free childhood in Hard Times. The whole of the educational part of the book condemns the training of Mr. Gradgrind, although he was an earnest, high-minded gentleman, whose supreme purpose was to train his family in the best possible way. Indeed Mr. Gradgrind was so sure he was right in his views regarding child training that he founded a school to teach the children of Coketown in accordance with what he believed to be correct principles.
Mr. Gradgrind is described as
a kind cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow children clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.
There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They had been lectured at from their tenderest years; coursed, like little hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone they had been made to run to the lecture room. The first object with which they had an association or of which they had a remembrance was a large blackboard with a dry ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.
Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an ogre. Fact forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing castle, with heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair.
No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learned the silly jingle, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are”; it had never known wonder on the subject, having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen and driven Charles’s Wain like a locomotive engine driver. No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb; it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.
The effect of preventing all kinds of enjoyment for his children in their own home was that they naturally sought for enjoyment surreptitiously in a way of which their father disapproved. But when a man disapproves of legitimate amusements in his family his condemnation of what is improper will have little weight with his children.