Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/239

 results of the prevailing system is more unanimous than is the case with other subjects. On the main indictments, inefficiency and cruelty in the lower schools, and inefficiency and carelessness in the higher, there is no minority report. On the whole, the Victorians were innocent of the partisanship that arose later over the great question of Culture versus Efficiency as an educational ideal. The primary stages might be allowed a modicum of the practical, though Gradgrind's "facts" are failures, and Squeers stands in solitary glory as an advocate of applied arts and manual training. Mr. Tulliver is in line with his Zeitgeist in fondly supposing the best thing he can do for Tom is to send him to an expensive private school, to learn Latin along with the son of Lawyer Wakem. An education was tacitly defined as that which makes a gentleman of you. And though no one would dissent from Thackeray's dictum that "all the world is improving except the gentlemen," neither would any one suppose that the definition might be modified or expanded.

A number realize that education begins at home. The close father and son relationship satirized in the case of Sir Austin and Richard because it was too close and inflexible, is presented as a beautiful ideal in those of Pisistratus and Mr. Caxton, Kenelm and Squire Chillingly, Clive and Colonel Newcome, and the Duke of Omnium and his sons.

In David Copperfield's recollections of the metallic Murdstone, Arthur Clennam's of his childhood's Sabbath and Alton Locke's of his mother's fearful bigotry, we get glimpses into the pathos of the old Puritan disci-*