James L. Hughes

“ To die is our heavy portion, but, oh, let us die with life about us; when our cold hearts cease to beat, let warm hearts be beating near; let our last look be upon the bounds which God has set to his own bright skies, and not on stone walls and bars of iron! Dear sisters, let us live and die, if you list, in this green garden’s compass.”
Dickens had very advanced opinions in regard to the importance of physical training, especially of play, as an agent not only in physical culture, but in the development of the mind and character. ”

“ Dickens did not wish to teach that such relationships should exist between parents and children in the homes of the labouring classes only. He used Toodle and his family as representing one extreme of society, as at present constituted, in sharp contrast with Mr. Dombey’s family at the other extreme. How happy the one home with barely enough to secure the necessaries of life! how miserable the other with unlimited wealth! And the best things in the Toodle home were the children, and the love and unconventional freedom between them and their parents. ”

“ Lizzie’s self-sacrifice for her father and Charley was a true revelation of the divinity in her nature. Though she had not read books, she had read a great deal by her imagination from “the hollow down by the flare.”
As Dickens grew older he saw more clearly the value of the dreaming of childhood while awake, of the deep reveries into which young people often fall, and ought to fall, so that they become oblivious to their environment, and sweep through the universe in strange imaginings, that after all are very real. ”

“ The memories which peaceful country scenes call up are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the graves of those we love—may purify our thoughts, and bear down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this there lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it. ”

“ Strict people, as the phrase is, professors of a stern religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part of a bargain for the security of their possessions. Austere faces, inexorable discipline, penance in this world and terror in the next—nothing graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed heart everywhere—this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word as to apply it to such a beginning of life. ”

“ The necessary development to be imposed upon all but the favoured few in his system of government is willingness to follow leaders, and ignorance is the only condition that can make this possible. The glory of education is the awakening of the consciousness of freedom in the soul of the race and the revelation of the perfect law of liberty—individual right, social duty. The shackles, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, have fallen from humanity, as education has done its true work of emancipating the individual soul and revealing its own value and its responsibility for its brother souls. ”

“ These profound words will always be worthy of careful study by teachers and reformers:
Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in every sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in God’s highway, so smooth below your carriage wheels, so rough beneath the tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift descent of men who have lived in their own esteem, that there are scores of thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful toil, who in that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a chance of life! ”

“ Not the less bright and blessed would that day be for rousing some who never have looked out upon the world of human life around them to a knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted with a perversion of Nature in their own contracted sympathies and estimates; as great and yet as natural in its development when once begun as the lowest degradation known. ”

“ What a perversion of the ideal of freedom in the development of character, to suppose that it could only reach perfection by a consciousness of superiority; by having some one who should control him bow down before him! No man in the world is truly free who has a desire to dominate some one else—another man, a woman, or a child. Yet Mrs. Steerforth sacrificed her son’s education in order that his manly spirit might be cultivated by the subordination of the man who should have governed him. ”

“ Unnatural humanity! When we shall gather grapes from thorns, and figs from thistles; when fields of grain shall spring up from the offal in the byways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom in the fat churchyards that they cherish; then we may look for natural humanity and find it growing from such seed.
Oh, for a good spirit who would take the housetops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue of the destroying angel as he moves forth among them! ”

“ The tyrant in adulthood dies hard. No wonder. Tyranny has been wrought into our natures by centuries of blind faith in corporal punishment as the supreme agency in saving the race from moral wreck and anarchy in childhood and youth. Men sought no agency for the development of the good in young lives. As they conceived it, their duty was done if they prevented their children from doing wrong, and the quickest, easiest, most effective way they knew to secure coercion was by corporal punishment. ”

“ Every agency that robs a child of his originality and freedom and prevents the spontaneous output of his creative self-activity destroys the image of God in him. Man is most like God when he is freely working out the plans of his own creative selfhood for good purposes. Coercion has been the greatest destroyer of the image of God in the child, and anarchy is the product of the perversion of the very powers that should have made man hopefully constructive. The seeds of anarchy are sown in the child’s life, when his selfhood is blighted and checked. ”

“ Hear the magistrate or judge admonish the unnatural outcast of society; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at every breath he draws, goes down into their dens, lying within the echoes of our carriage wheels and daily tread upon the pavement stones. ”

“ My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Look at other young men of my age. Have they no liberty, no will, no right to speak? Are they obliged to sit mumchance, and to be ordered about till they are the laughingstock of young and old? I am a byword all over Chigwell, and I say—and it’s fairer my saying so now, than waiting till you are dead, and I have got your money—I say, that before long I shall be driven to break such bounds, and that when I do, it won’t be me that you’ll have to blame, but your own self, and no other. ”

“ Dickens did not recommend a circus as a good place to train children. But he did believe that even a circus is a thousand times better than a so-called Christian home for the true and complete development of a child, if in the circus the child is free and happy, and is allowed full play for her imagination, and is not arrested in her development by rote storing of facts and too early drill in arithmetic, and has the rich productive love of even one parent, and has blessed opportunities for loving service for her pets and her friends ”

“ The child, in her grief and neglect, was so gentle, so quiet and uncomplaining, was possessed of so much affection that no one seemed to care to have, and so much sorrowful intelligence that no one seemed to mind or think about the wounding of, that Polly’s heart was sore when she was left alone again.
The same lesson was given to parents and teachers in Murdstone’s treatment of Davy. The sensitive, shy boy was regarded as sullen, and treated “like a dog” in consequence. Oh, what bitterness it puts into a child’s life to be misunderstood by its dearest friends! ”

“ How few yet clearly understand this profound criticism of bad training! How many children are still made vain and frivolous by having their attention directed especially to their physical attributes and their dress, rather than to the things that would yield them much greater immediate happiness and a much truer basis for future development!
In his last book, Edwin Drood, Dickens showed that he still hated the tyranny that dwarfs and distorts the souls of children. ”

“ Descriptions of ideal conditions can not make as deep impressions as descriptions of utterly bad conditions in the present stage of human evolution.
His revelation of cruel tyranny, of will breaking, of cramming, of dwarfing of individuality, of distorting of imagination, of harshness, of lack of sympathy, of evil in a hundred hideous forms, made men more conscious of their corresponding opposites than attempts to reveal these opposites by direct effort could have done; and in addition it stirred in human hearts everywhere the determination to remove or remedy the wrong. ”

“ Law is, to the truly trained child, a revealer of right outlets for power, and the supreme duties of adulthood in training childhood are to change the centre of its interest when from lack of wisdom its interest centre is wrong, and to reveal to it in logical sequence the laws of nature, of beauty, of harmony, and of life. With such training life and law will always be in harmony, and the seeds of anarchy will find no soil in human hearts or minds in which to take root. ”

“ Phœbe, the happy young woman, who had never been able to sit up since she had been dropped by her mother when she was in a fit, is one of the sweetest of the characters of Dickens. She lay on a couch as high as the window and enjoyed the view as she made lace. She taught a little school part of the day, and when Barbox Brothers was at Mugby Junction he heard the children singing in the school, and watched them trooping home happily till he became so interested in what was going on in the little cottage that he went in to investigate. ”

“ To improve society—to make men and women better—it is requisite to begin quite at the beginning, and to secure for them a wholesome education during infancy and childhood. Strongly possessed with this idea, and feeling that the usual methods of education, by restraint and penalty, aim at the accomplishment of far too little, and by checking natural development even do positive mischief, Froebel determined upon the devotion of his entire energy, throughout his life, to a strong effort for the establishment of schools that should do justice and honour to the nature of a child. ”