Smith, the toilsome ascent of Miss Mary and the eruption
(cutaneous) of Master Alexander. We know what it is when those
children won’t go to bed; we know how they prop their eyelids open
with their forefingers when they will sit up; how, when they become
fractious, they say aloud that they don’t like us, and our nose is
too long, and why don’t we go? And we are perfectly acquainted
with those kicking bundles which are carried off at last
protesting. An eminent eye-witness told me that he was one of a
company of learned pundits who assembled at the house of a very
distinguished philosopher of the last generation to hear him
expound his stringent views concerning infant education and early
mental development, and he told me that while the philosopher did
this in very beautiful and lucid language, the philosopher’s little
boy, for his part, edified the assembled sages by dabbling up to
the elbows in an apple pie which had been provided for their
entertainment, having previously anointed his hair with the syrup,
combed it with his fork, and brushed it with his spoon. It is
probable that we also have our similar experiences sometimes, of
principles that are not quite practice, and that we know people
claiming to be very wise and profound about nations of men who show
themselves to be rather weak and shallow about units of babies.
But, ladies and gentlemen, the spoilt children whom I have to
present to you after this dinner of to-day are not of this class.
I have glanced at these for the easier and lighter introduction of
another, a very different, a far more numerous, and a far more
serious class. The spoilt children whom I must show you are the
spoilt children of the poor in this great city, the children who
are, every year, for ever and ever irrevocably spoilt out of this
breathing life of ours by tens of thousands, but who may in vast
numbers be preserved if you, assisting and not contravening the
ways of Providence, will help to save them. The two grim nurses,
Poverty and Sickness, who bring these children before you, preside
over their births, rock their wretched cradles, nail down their
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
little coffins, pile up the earth above their graves. Of the
annual deaths in this great town, their unnatural deaths form more
than one-third. I shall not ask you, according to the custom as to
the other class – I shall not ask you on behalf of these children
to observe how good they are, how pretty they are, how clever they
are, how promising they are, whose beauty they most resemble – I
shall only ask you to observe how weak they are, and how like death
they are! And I shall ask you, by the remembrance of everything
that lies between your own infancy and that so miscalled second
childhood when the child’s graces are gone and nothing but its
helplessness remains; I shall ask you to turn your thoughts to
THESE spoilt children in the sacred names of Pity and Compassion.
Some years ago, being in Scotland, I went with one of the most
humane members of the humane medical profession, on a morning tour
among some of the worst lodged inhabitants of the old town of
Edinburgh. In the closes and wynds of that picturesque place – I
am sorry to remind you what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus
often are – we saw more poverty and sickness in an hour than many
people would believe in a life. Our way lay from one to another of
the most wretched dwellings, reeking with horrible odours; shut out
from the sky, shut out from the air, mere pits and dens. In a room
in one of these places, where there was an empty porridge-pot on
the cold hearth, with a ragged woman and some ragged children
crouching on the bare ground near it – where, I remember as I
speak, that the very light, refracted from a high damp-stained and
time-stained house-wall, came trembling in, as if the fever which
had shaken everything else there had shaken even it – there lay, in