It was therefore out of a full heart and an enriched mind that Dickens wrought the wonderful plots into which he wove the most advanced educational ideals of his time and of our time relating to the blighting influence of coercion, the divinity in the child, the recognition of freedom as the truest process and highest aim of education, the value of real sympathy, the importance of self-activity, the true reverence for the child leading to faith in it, the need of child study, the effect of joyousness on the child’s development, the benefits of play, the influence of nutrition, the ideal of community, the importance of the imagination as a basis for the best intellectual growth, the narrowness of utilitarianism, the absolute need of apperceptive centres to which shall be related the progressive enlargement and enrichment of feeling and thought throughout the life of the individual, the arrest of development and the sacrifice of power and life due to cramming, and the weakness of all educational systems and methods that regard fact-storing as the highest work of the teacher.
It has been said by critics of Dickens that he exaggerated the defects and errors in the characters of those whom he described. Two things should be kept in mind, however. Dickens usually described the worst, not the best types, and he was justified in revealing a wrong principle or practice in the strongest possible light, in order to make it more easily recognisable and more completely repugnant to the aroused feeling and startled thought of humanity. He was writing with the definite purpose of making the world so thoroughly hate the wrong in education and child training as to lead to definite practical reforms.
Dickens himself did not admit the justness of the charge of exaggeration. His coarsest, most ignorant, and most brutal teacher is Squeers, yet he says “Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be deemed impossible. There are upon record trials at law in which damages have been sought as a poor recompense for lasting agonies and disfigurements inflicted upon children by the treatment of the master in these places, involving such offensive and foul details of neglect, cruelty, and disease as no writer of fiction would have the boldness to imagine. Since the author has been engaged upon these Adventures he has received, from private quarters far beyond the reach of suspicion or distrust, accounts of atrocities, in the perpetration of which upon neglected or repudiated children these schools have been the main instruments, very far exceeding any that appear in these pages.”
Dickens discusses the charge of exaggeration in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit. He says:
What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to another. That which is commonly called a long-sight, perceives in a prospect innumerable features and bearings nonexistent to a shortsighted person. I sometimes ask myself whether there may occasionally be a difference of this kind between some writers and some readers; whether it is always the writer who colours highly, or whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for colour is a little dull?
On this head of exaggeration I have a positive experience more curious than the speculation I have just set down. It is this: I have never touched a character precisely from the life, but some counterpart of that character has incredulously asked me: “Now really, did I ever really see one like it?”
All the Pecksniff family upon earth are quite agreed, I believe, that Mr. Pecksniff is an exaggeration, and that no such character ever existed.
It is worth remembering, too, that it is impossible to exaggerate the description of the effects of the evils Dickens attacked. Coercion in any form blights and dwarfs the true selfhood of the child. The coercion of Mrs. Crisparkle’s placid but unbending will, which she kept rigid from a deep conviction of Christian duty, is as clearly at variance with the elemental laws of individual freedom and growth by self-activity as the more dreadful forms of coercion practised by Squeers, Creakle, Bumble, or Murdstone.
Doctor Blimber’s cramming is not exaggerated. It would be quite possible to find in England or the United States or Canada not only private but public institutions in which similar processes of illogical cramming are still practised. Words are still given before the thought, and as a substitute for thought. “Mathematical gooseberries” are yet produced “from mere sprouts of bushes,” the “words and grammar” of literature are still given instead of the life and glory of the author’s revelations, children yet are “made to bear to pattern somehow or other.”
Whether Dickens exaggerated or not in regard to other spheres of work or of existence without work, he certainly did not exaggerate in regard to school conditions. He studied them faithfully, and described them truly. He saw wrongs more clearly than other men, and he made them stand out in their natural hideousness.