Dickens As an Educator. James L. Hughes
less mischief.” This was another plea for good normal schools and for state supervision.
Dickens makes a good point in his remark about the degradation of abject submission to a man of such parts and pretensions as Creakle. Subordination always dwarfs the human soul, but when the child is forced to a position of abject subordination to a coarse tyrant the degradation is more complete and more humiliating. It does not mend matters for the child when the tyrant is his father. The tyranny of parenthood is usually the hardest to escape from.
In the same book in which Creakle is described—David Copperfield—Dickens deals with the tyranny of the home. David’s widowed mother married Mr. Murdstone, a hard, severe, austere, religious man, with an equally dreadful sister—Jane Murdstone.
Firmness was the grand quality on which both Mr. and Miss Murdstone took their stand. However I might have expressed my comprehension of it at that time, if I had been called upon, I nevertheless did clearly comprehend in my own way that it was another name for tyranny, and for a certain gloomy, arrogant, devil’s humour, that was in them both. The creed, as I should state it now, was this: Mr. Murdstone was firm; nobody in his world was to be so firm as Mr. Murdstone; nobody else in his world was to be firm at all, for everybody was to be bent to his firmness.
There was no more depressing tyranny in the time of Dickens than the tyranny exercised in the name of a rigid and repressive religion.
The gloomy taint that was in the Murdstone blood darkened the Murdstone religion, which was austere and wrathful. I have thought, since, that its assuming that character was a necessary consequence of Mr. Murdstone’s firmness, which wouldn’t allow him to let anybody off from the utmost weight of the severest penalties he could find any excuse for. Be this as it may, I well remember the tremendous visages with which we used to go to church, and the changed air of the place. Again, the dreaded Sunday comes round, and I file into the old pew first, like a guarded captive brought to a condemned service. Again, Miss Murdstone, in a black-velvet gown, that looks as if it had been made out of a pall, follows close upon me; then my mother; then her husband. Again, I listen to Miss Murdstone mumbling the responses, and emphasizing all the dread words with a cruel relish. Again, I see her dark eyes roll round the church when she says “miserable sinners,” as if she were calling all the congregation names. Again, I catch rare glimpses of my mother, moving her lips timidly between the two, with one of them muttering at each ear like low thunder. Again, I wonder with a sudden fear whether it is likely that our good old clergyman can be wrong, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone right, and that all the angels in heaven can be destroying angels. Again, if I move a finger or relax a muscle of my face, Miss Murdstone pokes me with her prayer book, and makes my side ache.
Mrs. Chillip said: “Mr. Murdstone sets up an image of himself and calls it the Divine Nature,” and “what such people as the Murdstones call their religion is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.” Mild and cautious Mr. Chillip observed, “I don’t find authority for Mr. and Miss Murdstone in the New Testament,” and his good wife added, “The darker tyrant Mr. Murdstone becomes, the more ferocious is his religious doctrine.”
When David first learned that Mr. Murdstone had married his mother he relieved the swelling in his little heart by crying in his bedroom. His mother naturally felt a sympathy for her boy. Mr. Murdstone reproved her for her lack of “firmness,” ordered her out of the room, and gave David his first lesson in “obedience.”
“David,” he said, making his lips thin, by pressing them together, “if I have an obstinate horse or dog to deal with, what do you think I do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I beat him.”
I had answered in a kind of breathless whisper, but I felt, in my silence, that my breath was shorter now.
“I make him wince, and smart. I say to myself, ‘I’ll conquer that fellow;’ and if it were to cost him all the blood he had, I should do it.”
There are still a few schoolmaster tyrants who boast of their ability “to subdue children.” They are barbarians, who understand neither the new education nor the new theology, who have not learned to recognise and reverence the individual selfhood of each child, who themselves fear God’s power more than they feel his love.
When David was at home for the holidays he remained in his own room a considerable part of the time reading. This aroused the anger of Mr. Murdstone, and he charged David with being sullen.
“I was sorry, David,” said Mr. Murdstone, turning his head and his eyes stiffly toward me, “to observe that you are of a sullen disposition. This is not a character that I can suffer to develop itself beneath my eyes without an effort at improvement. You must endeavour, sir, to change it. We must endeavour to change it for you.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” I faltered. “I have never meant to be sullen since I came back.”
“Don’t take refuge in a lie, sir!” he returned so fiercely, that I saw my mother involuntarily put out her trembling hand as if to interpose between us. “You have withdrawn yourself in your sullenness to your own room. You have kept your room when you ought to have been here. You know now, once for all, that I require you to be here, and not there. Further, that I require you to bring obedience here. You know me, David. I will have it done.”
Miss Murdstone gave a hoarse chuckle.
“I will have a respectful, prompt, and ready bearing toward myself,” he continued, “and toward Jane Murdstone, and toward your mother. I will not have this room shunned as if it were infected, at the pleasure of a child. Sit down.”
He ordered me like a dog, and I obeyed like a dog.
David’s lessons, which had been “along a path of roses” when his mother was alone with him, became a path of thorns after the Murdstones came.
The lessons were a grievous daily drudgery and misery. They were very long, very numerous, very hard—perfectly unintelligible.
Let me remember how it used to be. I come into the parlour after breakfast with my books, an exercise book and a slate. My mother is ready for me, but not half so ready as Mr. Murdstone, or as Miss Murdstone, sitting near my mother stringing steel beads. The very sight of these two has such an influence over me, that I begin to feel the words I have been at infinite pains to get into my head all sliding away, and going I don’t know where. I wonder where they do go, by the bye?
I hand the first book to my mother. I take a last drowning look at the page as I give it into her hand, and start off aloud at a racing pace while I have got it fresh. I trip over a word. Mr. Murdstone looks up. I trip over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden, tumble over half a dozen words, and stop. I think my mother would show me the book if she dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly:
“Oh, Davy, Davy!”
“Now, Clara,” says Mr. Murdstone, “be firm with the boy. Don’t say ‘Oh, Davy, Davy!’ That’s childish. He knows his lesson, or he does not know it.”
“He does not know it,” Miss Murdstone interposed awfully.
“I am really afraid he does not,” says my mother.
“Then you see, Clara,” returns Miss Murdstone, “you should just give him the book back, and make him know it.”
“Yes, certainly,” says my mother; “that’s what I intended to do, my dear Jane. Now, Davy, try once more, and don’t be stupid.”
I obey the first clause of the injunction by trying once more, but am not so successful with the second, for I am very stupid. I tumble down before I get to the old place, at a point where I was all right before, and stop to think. But I can’t think about the lesson. I think of the number of yards of net in Miss Murdstone’s cap, or of the price of Mr. Murdstone’s dressing-gown, or any such ridiculous problem that I have no business with, and don’t want to have anything at all to do with. Mr. Murdstone makes a movement of impatience which I have been expecting for a long time. Miss Murdstone does the same. My mother glances submissively at them,