Victorian education in the novels of Dickens

205 Pages·011.13 MB·English

by  Jensen, Marie

VICTORIAN EDUCATION IN THE NOVELS OP DICKENS
A Thesis
Presented to
the Faculty of the Department of English
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
by
Marie Jensen
August 1950
UMI Number: EP44277
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This thesis, written by
MARIE JENSEN
under the guidance of h.^...Faculty Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been
presented to and accepted by the Council on
Graduate Study and Research in partial fulfill­
ment of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Faculty Committee
Chairman
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTERS PAGES
-S- I. SCOPE AND PURPOSE OF THE THESIS................. 1
- II. THE PERSONAL EDUCATION OF DICKENS............... 7
III. THE YORKSHIRE SCHOOLS AND NICHOLAS NICKLEBY 23
IV. SALEM HOUSE AND THE CANTERBURY SCHOOL. ...... 38
V. THE FORCING SCHOOLS OF DOCTOR BLIMBER.......... 52
VI. DAME SCHOOLS AND DAY SCHOOLS.................... 62
VII. GRADGRIND’S SCHOOL OF HARD FACTS: THE NEW SCHOOLS
OF LONDON.......................... 78
VIII. APPRENTICESHIPS: OLIVER TWIST: THE SCHOOL OF
MR. PECKSNIFF.................................. 90
^ IX. THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN.......................... 113
—' X. TEACHERS, GOVERNESSES, AND TUTORS............... 129
XI. THE LAW CLERK AND THE NURSE..................... 152
XII. DICKENS AND EDUCATIONAL REFORM: SUMMATIONS..... 168
BIBLIOGRAPHY...................... 194
APPENDIX A.
Passages from Vanity Fair........ 196
APPENDIX B.
Passages from Jane Eyre............................... 198
CHAPTER I
THE SCOPE ; AND PURPOSE , OP f THE THESIS
Charles Dickens had a lifelong interest in the
education of the common people. In his mind, only a liter­
ate and informed population could make use of the franchise
which had been extended to them in the earlier part of the
nineteenth century. Through an Intelligent representation
in Parliament, there could be brought about the passage of
such laws as would make of England’s submerged millions real
citizens of the realm. Therefore In mass education Dickens
saw the true hope for the forgotten multitudes. His age was
one of savage competition, ruthless Individualism, unrestric­
ted capitalism In which the theory of laissez falre prevailed,
a theory, which as in all ages, has masqueraded as personal
freedom, but which in practice has always meant freedom for
the priviliged few and Industrial and social submergence of
the many. In the Ignorance of the masses, he saw the perpet­
ual enemy of progress and a real social democracy.
This study is called ^Victorian Education in the Novels
of Dickens” because it attempts to delineate and to discuss
the school scenes found in the major novels of Dickens. The
term education as used in the title includes such a variety
of Victorian institutions as the so-called dame school, the
elementary village schools, which might be private in
2
character or of the charity or "voluntary” type, and private
boarding schools for boys and seminaries for girls. The
term also includes such specialized kinds of training as
those of trade apprenticeships and of legal instruction. In
the novels of Dickens scenes are drawn from all of these in­
stitutions and, therefore, they appear in this study. Like­
wise, in his fiction, there are depicted the Victorian school­
master and schoolmistress, the governess, and the tut.o:r i
There are such oddities as the fraudulent school of architec­
ture of the unforgettable Pecksniff, and the Victorian nurse,
immortalized in Sairey Gamp. The nurse appears by courtesy
and without benefit of training a& that term is understood
in our age. Yet the reader may see in her very distinctly
the training which she did not have and may also behold her
in action and receiving the only kind of elementary instruc­
tion which appears to have been given the women posing as
nurses in Victorian times. These instructions were those
given by physicians while the nurse undertook the care of
the unfortunates who had fallen into her hands. 'ickens
avoided in his fiction two types of schools, the universi­
ties and the so-called public schools, which were in reality
endowed private schools for the children of the upper class­
es and the wealthy middle class industrialists In his own
meager formal education, he had nothing to do with them and
consequently they do not appear in his books.
In this thesis the passages concerning school scenes
in the novels of Dickens are of varying length and importance,
and are generally followed by brief comments. These comments
frequently deal with actual life-prototypes of the fictional
representations in the novels. It has not been found possible
to make this procedure constant and consistent; it is the
privilege of the novelist to gather his or her material from
various sources and then to select and discard as may seem
best to the writer. Dickens follows this procedure, and it
is, therefore, not possible to follow each fictional portrait
or scene with exact counterparts of factual material. This
series of fictional school scenes and situations together
with the intervening comments on them are intended to form
the main body of this thesis. The study is preceded by a
chapter on the personal education of Dickens, and is succeed­
ed by a final chapter which deals with educational reforms
in England during the late nineteenth and the earlytwentieth
centuries, limiting the discussion generally to those reforms
influenced by Dickens.
It is the purpose of this thesis to make a survey of
the school situations, scenes, pupils, teachers, etc., as
these appear in the most important novels of Dickens.
Included in the purpose, also, are studies of: the authenti­
city of these fictional representations of school life; of
their relationship to the whole Victorian social and economic
scene; of the probable influence of Dickens upon such pro­
gress in English education as was made in his lifetime, and
on the far more sweeping reforms which followed his death.
That the purpose may be clarified, the following six ques­
tions are propounded: (1) What was the actual educational
situation in England during the time of Dickens? (2) How
had this situation arisen? (3) To what extent do schools
and other educational agencies appear in his novels? (4)
Judging from the actual history of Victorian education, to
what degree are his fictional representations authentic?
(5) How were the abuses in the area of education which
Dickens pictured in his books related to the entire Victor­
ian political and social scene? (6) What educational re­
forms in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth cen­
turies were influenced by Dickens?
The importance of the survey of Victorian education
here attempted and as seen through the novels of Dickens
lies, first of all, in the importance of education itself
in all times and in all countries. In the second place,
5
as will become evident, as this study progresses, it Is im­
portant that sober statistics so often do confirm and give
the note of reality to the fictional scenes through which
Dickens denounced the educational abuses of his age. It is
well that educators and students of our own period recall
that these abuses existed but yesterday In Victorian England,
not in some remote and barbarous country during the Middle
Ages. It Is important that educators and students alike ask
themselves why they existed. Educational systems do not
develop in isolation; they are sectors of the social, politi­
cal, and economic patterns of their times. What kind of
theories and practices taking shape in these patterns ^pro-
duced the horrors of the private schools, the workhouses
and their adjuncts, the baby-farms, which were supposed to
educate, as well as care for otherwise, the pauper children
of Victorian England? Have these same theories vanished
from the earth or even entirely from the English-speaking
world or do they extend into our time? In these questions
and in their answers lie the importance of this study.
This study is timely because in both the fictional
and factual material with which it deals^one may see the
results of England’s era of unrestricted industrial com­
petitiveness . Not all the proponents of laissez-faire are
dead. Indeed, one may hear them over the radio or see them
in the press where they voice their nostalgia for the days
when there was freedom for big business and no government in­
terference. Loud were their voices in the day of Charles
Dickens, but the thunders of his denunciations roared over
them and through them. He, the champion of the helpless and
the oppressed, never ceased to excorciate in his books the
abuses of the economic system which produced them. The
thieves' den of Pagin, the workhouse of Oliver Twist, the
debtors’ prison of Little Dorrit, the Courts of Chancery,
the hovels of the poor in London, Salem House, Dotheboys’
Hall, and every other murky den of ignorance, starvation,
and despair, masquerading as schools, were but fragments of
one who.le picture, the picture of an age when laissez-faire
was triumphant, not in distant and barbarous place and time,
but in nineteenth century England.