This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all
of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow
I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.'"[8]
[Footnote 8: Charles Dickens, _A Christmas Carol_.]
In surveying the long reign of Queen Victoria nothing strikes one
more than the gradual growth of interest in children, and the many
changes in the nation's ideas of their upbringing and education. At
the beginning of her reign the little children of the poor were for
the most part slaves, and were often punished more cruelly by their
taskmasters than the slaves one reads of in _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.
When Disraeli, afterward Lord Beaconsfield and Prime Minister, wrote
_Sybil_, he drew, in that book, a terrible picture of the life of
children in the manufacturing districts and in the country villages.
The following extract speaks for itself:
"There are many in this town who are ignorant of their very names;
very few who can spell them. It is rare that you meet with a young
person who knows his own age; rarer to find the boy who has seen a
book, or the girl who has seen a flower. Ask them the name of their
sovereign and they will laugh; who rules them on earth or who can
save them in heaven are alike mysteries to them."
In such a town as Disraeli describes there were no schools of any
kind, and the masters treated their apprentices "as the Mamelouks
treated the Egyptians.
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