the ignorance of their parents is one of your rocks ahead, and the like. In short, I think I can turn any result of your experience and observation of these unfortunate creatures to the account you would desire.
" Pray mention to me the discouraging as well as the encouraging circumstances, for they are equally a part of the sad case, and without a knowledge of them it is impossible to state it forcibly.
" You are at perfect liberty to mention this to the masters in the School. But beyond this, or such other limits as you may consider necessary, I could wish our correspondence to be confidential.
" Faithfully yours,
" Charles Dickens."
" Mr. R. Storey."
But Dickens's work went far beyond the Ragged School Union, far beyond even the blessed jail delivery that he effected for the children of his country. There is no doubt that, not only was Dickens the first great fictionist who accustomed us to meet children in his pages, but he broke down once and for all that gloomy and dreadful doctrine of child depravity, which, like an evil inheritance, pressed so hardly on many an English home at the beginning of the last century.
The doctrine has so utterly disappeared from our consciousness that it may be questioned whether we realize how enormous is our obligation to the great champion of childhood in this respect. Our views have changed fundamentally. We no longer look on childhood as something to be sternly repressed, kept in incessant check, made to feel the conviction of sin. We none of us dare to question the right of a child to be joyous. We realize that its unrestrained mirth is a holy and a beautiful thing; that to repress it would be a crime against that child's nature. Far otherwise was it in that early Victorian period which somebody has said were the real dark ages, when children were suspect always, suspect most when they were most like children. Who doesn't remember when Mr. Bumble breathlessly exclaimed:
"'Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more! '
" There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance.
" ' For more," said Mr. Limbkins. ' Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary? '
" ' He did, sir,' replied Bumble.
" ' That boy will be hung,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. ' I know that boy will be hung.' "
And that night five pounds and Oliver Twist was offered to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade, business, or calling."
Today Bumble's indignation would be laughed at even by a Board of Guardians, and the white-waist-coated gentleman would have been regarded as an eccentric. To-day nearly everybody likes, if they do not love, children. To-day the man who grudges them a service is looked at askance. To-day we all feel the happier when we see children happy and that is the supreme triumph of the genius of Charles Dickens.
Someone (I think it must have been Mr. G. K. Chesterton) says somewhere that, from the frequency with which Dickens attempted the portrait, he must have known in the dark days of his own upbringing some child, prematurely grave and careworn, putting out its little strength against the world and charged with tasks far beyond its powers. It has always seemed to me that that child was Dickens himself — Dickens taking round the circulars of his mother's school, bargaining with the pawnbrokers for the small sum on the remnant of the house, and helping to eke out for his family his miserable earnings of six shillings a week, until at length " nothing remained but a few bits of furniture, mother and children encamping in the two parlours of the empty house; the boy's own little bed (with the brass coalscuttle, a roasting jack, and a birdcage ' to make a lot of it ') went for a song — ' so I heard mentioned, and I wondered what song and thought what a dismal song it must have been to sing.' " Perhaps it is for this very reason that this particular portrait of childhood never proves quite so convincing, so arresting and vibrant as the blither pictures of his boys and girls, laughing at the troubles that seem to overwhelm them. After all, such sadness and depression was but a part of Dickens's great nature, which refused, not only to be soured, but even permanently saddened by the grey and dreadful morning of his days — a morning that did not rob him of his spirits, his gaiety, his quick eye for contrast and his immense appreciation of the colour side of life. So, perhaps, it comes about that Dickens succeeds more with these presentations of children who show us these qualities also, rather than with those who are so crushed that it is difficult for us to remember that there is anything of childhood about them — more with " the Marchioness " than with Little Nell, more with " The Artful Dodger " than with Oliver Twist. Both appeal with the pathos of those who are overmatched and cruelly weighted down, but somehow then* appeal becomes irresistible when allied with the freshness, the good spirits, the abandon of youth, rather than when it is borne with the resignation of premature old age. If Kipling's drummer boys of the Fore and Aft had crept back with the discreet and wary steps of veterans, there would have been no story to write about them. It is when they strike up the British Grenadiers and swagger along as oblivious of their own danger as though in the barrack yard, that they capture our hearts. And singular to say, Dickens's own grown-up characters seem to find this potency of youthful fearlessness, for it is just to these wayward irresponsible types of true childhood that even the very worst of them succumb. I say the worst, excluding deliberately those of his characters whom we feel instinctively are fundamentally bad — Rudge the outcast, Jonas with blood upon his hands, Jasper the brooding murderer — these are men from whom one realizes children would shrink as they in their turn would from childhood. But others there are, distinctly to be classified as bad, between whom and the children of his creation, strange bonds of unspoken sympathy and understanding grow up naturally and without any formal expression, but are yet binding upon both parties — unto death. There is a striking, as it always seemed to me, a wonderful illustration of this in Martin Chuzzlewit. It occurs during that last awful journey of Montague Tigg, from which he knows that Jonas does not mean that he should return alive, the journey on which he will not enter without that " monkey of a boy," whom Mr. Jonas — it is midnight when they set out — tries to send to bed. Alas poor little Bailey who has " climbed into the rumble is thrown out of the carriage in an accident sheer over a five-barred gate."
" ' When I said to-night that I wish I had never started on this journey,' cried his master, ' I knew it was an ill-fated one. Look at this boy! '
" ' Is that all,' growled Jonas. ' If you call that a sign of it '
" ' Why, what should I call it a sign of? ' asked Montague hurriedly. ' What do you mean? '
" ' I mean,' said Jonas, stooping down over the body, ' that I never heard you were his father or had any particular reason to care much about him.' "
Then, later, when the surgeon " gives it for his opinion that Mr. Bailey's mortal course is run ":
" ' I would rather have lost,' he said, ' a thousand pounds than lost the boy just now. But I'll return home alone. I am resolved upon that. Chuzzlewit shall go forward first and I will follow in my own time. I'll have no more of this,' he added, wiping his damp forehead, ' twenty-four hours of this would turn my hair grey.' "
" For some unexpressed reason," says Dickens, " he attached a strange value to the company and presence of this mere child." There is surely something infinitely pathetic in this dilemma of poor Tigg, scoundrel as he was. The one human creature on whose devotion he could count was " this mere child." The men he had dined and wined in the flat in Pall Mall, who had toasted him as their friend, who had battened on him, as men do on a popular and successful swindler, whom he had helped with small favours or encouraged with liberal promises — he would have laughed at the thought of relying upon these.
