Charles Dickens - Social Reformer. William Walter Crotch
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 distorted to his own undoing, and they asked themselves, remembering that the " greater the sinner, the greater the saint," whether it was not time that they did something to give a helping hand to the neglected of the gutter, to the child criminal and the boy thief, who, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, England had passed over for the unconverted of the heathen, for the remote Chinese and the elusive Esquimaux. From the moment that Dickens published Oliver Twist, the reaction against this brutality and neglect set in. The handful of devoted workers, who, under Lord Shaftesbury and Leone Levi had been pleading for the street arabs — and pleading largely in vain — suddenly found themselves caught up and borne forward by a great flood of sympathy and support that the pictures of Fagin's school for boy-thieves had evoked among all classes. To realize even faintly, the immense service that Dickens rendered our race, in thus liberating their frozen sympathies and revivifying their lost confidence in childhood, we have but to turn to the fearful records of juvenile crime and the more fearful records of juvenile punishment, in which his time abounds. " I know of one infant," said Dickens himself, " six years old, who has been twice as many times in the hands of the police as years have passed over him." This alas! was no unusual case. A little fellow eight years of age was tried in August, 1845, at Clerkenwell for stealing boxes. He was sentenced to a month and a whipping. In January, 1846, he was again tried for robbing a till. After that he was twice summarily convicted and then again tried at the Central Criminal Court later in the same year — to be sentenced to seven years' transportation when only nine years of age! This sentence was commuted. " But," says Mr. Montague, in his Sixty Years of Waifdom, " in 1852, when he was only thirteen years of age, and but four feet, two inches high, he was a hardened jailbird, with whom the law was powerless to deal."
Worse even than this is the fact that in England children were regularly and systematically trained in the arts of theft. According to Mr. Montague, " a little fellow whose father and mother were dead, who was alone and uncared for, told his teacher one Sunday that he and twenty more boys were kept by a man and a woman in Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, and taught to pick pockets. The training took six months. Daily the woman dressed herself,