To show the increase in the number of schools
built, there were in the year 1854, 3825, and in the year 1885,
21,976.
But the children of England owe almost as much to Charles Dickens
as they do to Lord Shaftesbury. He was almost the first, and certainly
the greatest, writer who, with a heart overflowing with sympathy for
little children, has left us in his books a gallery of portraits which
no one can ever forget.
He himself, "a very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of
boy," passed through a time of bitter poverty, and his stay at school,
short as it was, was not a period of his life upon which he looked
back with any pleasure.
The material for his books was drawn from life--from his own and from
the lives of those around him--and for this reason all that he wrote
will always be of great value, as it gives us a good idea of the Early
and Mid Victorian days.
His ambition was to strike a blow for the poor, "to leave one's hand
upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for
the mass of toiling people."
Who can ever forget in the _Christmas Carol_ the crippled Tiny Tim,
"who behaved as good as gold and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful,
sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever
heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in
the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to
them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk, and
blind men see.
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