were not only taboo, but anathema, in literature, the typical view of any attempt to depict their condition being that of the Quarterly Review, which objected, it will be remembered, in toto to Oliver Twist, with " its representations of the haunts, deeds, language and characters of the very dregs of the community; " an objection that gives us a tolerably good insight into the England that Dickens scourged and shamed, and lashed and laughed away, until it is no more. Dickens, in fact, re-discovered childhood for England, and as an interpreter of its thousand and one varying moods, its extraordinary intuitions, its swift and solemn confidences, its elusive reticences, its joys, and its sorrows, he stands, not merely supreme but almost alone, without a rival or a competitor, with only his pupils and his imitators in the whole of English Literature. While other novelists write of children as of exotics, and with an obvious strain and effort, catching only a few of their moods and presenting these to us as a triumph, Dickens's pages are crowded with all sorts and conditions of children, jostling each other and their elders, ranging from poor little Paul Dombey, with the premonition of death lying heavy upon his tender spirit, to the robustious Master Jack Dawson, alias " The Artful Dodger," facing the Bow Street magistrate — and the hulks and transportation — with unruffled impudence and unbroken front; from Little Nell, with ashen face lined by cares beyond her years, to the beautifully nonchalant Marchioness, playing " crib " in the damp kitchen. The veriest glimpse of a child through his magic spectacles is worth more than half a dozen completed studies from other pens. Only Meredith approaches him in his almost uncanny intuition into the strange world of boyhood, through which we have all travelled and which opens again to us only at a magician's touch. But Meredith's excursions into boyland are few and far between. Generally his juvenile leads are given a scene or two all to themselves. Dickens's boys and girls, on the other hand, come on and off the stage with the other characters and one is conscious that the master writes of them with no more effort than he does of the adults, whom they alternately dismay and delight. Dickens realized that every man is at heart a boy, or at least, that boyhood is latent to him, and it was his appreciation of this fact that led him to some of his most superb triumphs in characterization — to the immortal Micawber, to Sam Weller, and to that Swiveller who played " Away with melancholy" all night on the flute, what time his landlady waited outside his door to give him notice — surely the most unconscionable boy in all fiction!
But, there was another reason for that instinctive grip of boyhood that never left Dickens all his days. As I have already shown, the facts of life had been beaten into his young soul when he was of an age at which most men of letters are leading careless, happy, untroubled lives at school. There is a passage in Copperfield, where David at the age of seven goes to call on Captain Hopkins in the Marshalsea prison, and " found him with a very dirty lady in his little room and two wan little girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought it was better to borrow Captain Hopkins's knife and fork, than Captain Hopkins's comb. The Captain himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness, with large whiskers, and an old, old brown great coat with no other coat below it. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner; and what plates and dishes and pots he had, on a shelf; and I divined (God knows how) that though the two girls with the shock heads of hair were Captain Hopkins's children, the dirty lady was not married to Captain Hopkins. My timid station on his threshold was not occupied more than a couple of minutes at most; but I came down again with all this in my knowledge, as surely as the knife and fork were in my hand."
The mind that wrote these lines had been hurt into feeling, shocked into consciousness, forced to realize the facts, years and years before most children have ceased to play. He became a man, while he was yet a boy, but — as we shall see — he never lost his boyhood, and the result was, that as has been finely said, Dickens grew up, not to feel for children but with them. It was this fact that enabled him to achieve what no other English man of letters had then attempted, and to interpret the childhood that till then, had been unrepresented, in the whole realm of literature.
And if we accept for a moment the definition of a reformer given in a previous chapter: that the real pioneer is not he who frames Acts of Parliament and by-laws, but rather the man whose compelling genius creates such an atmosphere as renders them inevitable, then indeed we shall see in this achievement of Dickens the greatest service he has rendered to social reform. We have only to let our minds dwell for a moment on the horrors of child-life when Dickens first wrote, to contrast the extraordinary apathy and unconcern with which England viewed its appalling and ghastly waste, with the temper of mind that prevails to-day upon the subject, to realize how tremendous an obligation we are under to Dickens in this respect. The England into which he was born had practically forgotten childhood, or at least had ceased to think of it, as something precious and beautiful, to be cherished and protected whenever possible. The cry of the little ones was drowned in the ceaseless rattle of the cotton mills, whose wheels they pushed with tired, puny hands. They were " seeking death in life, as best to have." Almost alone in England, William Blake continually raised his voice — that of one crying in the wilderness — against the abomination of forcing their stunted frames up narrow chimneys to clear away the soot. There was no one to denounce the horror of their little naked bodies trembling beneath the cruel weight of a coal truck, in the bowels of the earth. No longer in Mrs. Browning's words do we " stand to move the world on a child's heart," or " stifle down with mailed heel its palpitation."
Today we have changed all that — the child is paramount! A hundred Acts of Parliament protect its rights, philanthropists, whose name is legion, cry aloud its needs. Class distinctions, political obsessions, even religious differences, all are forgotten in its service, whose welfare is now the supreme law.
And the credit of effecting this great and bloodless revolution must be given to Dickens.
Should proof be required let the reader ponder over his observations of child-life as is revealed in Great Expectations; remark his descriptions of the little Necketts and of Charley; or re-enact mentally the scene between the Constable and Jo; or weep in pity at the story of Jo's death and the author's compassionate moralizings on waifs — all in Bleak House. In no tenderer note could we have heard the pathetic story of the hunger of a child than in Oliver Twist, and no more resentful voice could have thundered forth its remonstrance against child-labour than that which arises from Nicholas Nickleby. Verily, Dickens was chief among the early liberators of the Innocent Young.
True, there have been others at work in the child's cause. There has been the constant activity of legislators, backed up by newspaper campaigns, popular agitations, and above all by the ceaseless pressure of public opinion. But who was it that first created that opinion if not Charles Dickens? What was the reason — to go a little deeper into the matter — -that cruelties such as those I have described were ever tolerated by a people so naturally kind-hearted as our own? Surely it was because England had forgotten; it had lost the charm of childhood. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has said very finely of Dickens in another connection, that to really reform a thing, you must first love it. And the great and crowning glory of Dickens is that he re-taught us so to love little children that the thought of their suffering thus became intolerable, until to-day, as I have said, the child's cause is everywhere supreme.
It was characteristic of the courage and insight with which Dickens essayed the task of bringing the nation to some sense of its responsibilities in regard to the coming generation, that his most touching and powerful examples were drawn from emphatically the worst class of children, and that these examples were themselves conspicuous for daring and for evil even among bad companions. It was the child thief, the boy criminal, the juvenile robber that Dickens was most successful in portraying, and the boy thief and criminals he chose were like the Artful Dodger, preeminent for intellectual keenness, as well as for moral obliquity, with the result that the English people were stirred to a degree that no mere narrative of suffering innocence and ill-used but honourable juvenility, could perhaps have effected. They saw in the Artful Dodger, with his thorough-going villainy, his daring, his very callousness, qualities that had he been given instruction, proper training and a fair opportunity, would have made a strong resolute man, an asset to the nation; they realized, as they read the pages of Oliver Twisty that the very virtues of the " Dodger," his ingenuity, his sangfroid, his fearlessness, had been
