64 KNOWING DICKENS
specters of the children Dickens encountered in his visit to a Ragged School
in September 1843, who make money or steal it on the streets, resisting edu-
cation and civilization. In his support of Ragged Schools he appeals to fear:
these children are savages who need basic teaching about the most essential
differences between right and wrong. During his actual school visit, how-
ever, Dickens warmed to the Ragged School children, loved their laughter
at his brightly polished boots, and found among them a very bright boy
whose age he estimated in relation to his son Charley’s (Dent 2.359–69).
They were children of the London streets—his world, his companions of
old. When he came among them, he was, in an odd way, at home. Too much
at home for comfort, clearly: when he turned them into fearful specters in
his public writing he made sure to dissociate himself from such children in
every possible way.
The “Sledge hammer blow,” with all its implicit rage and violence, never
did land on behalf of working children. Instead it fell, first, on the head of a
certain Lord Londonderry who opposed factory legislation in the House of
Lords, a father figure it cost Dickens nothing to revile. What he could write
about the Factory Movement appeared in a letter and a review published
in The Morning Chronicle, the newspaper he had worked for in his report-
ing days. On 25 July 1842 Dickens intervened anonymously in the debate
about Ashley’s Bill on Mines and Collieries, which excluded women and
girls from mines and set minimum ages for the employment of boys. His
letter follows a single rhetorical strategy: not to support the bill as such, but
to dismantle and undermine the self-serving arguments raised against it by
members of the House of Lords. Later that year he reviewed Londonderry’s
Letter to Lord Ashley, MP, on the Mines and Colliery Bill (20 October 1842).
In both pieces, the bill itself becomes the abused child, while the resisting
Lords play the role of its cruel masters. As Dickens writes in July, the bill
“will arrive tonight at that stage in which the tender mercies of the Col-
liery Lords will so distort and maim it, that its relations and friends else-
where will be sorely puzzled to know it again when it is returned to them”
(3.278–79). The October review, a deeply facetious ad hominem attack on
Lord Londonderry, opines that measures for improving the public condi-
tion “are very troublesome children to their fathers in the House of Lords.
They cost a world of trouble in the bringing up; and are, for the most part,
strangled by the Herods of the Peerage, in their cradles” (Dent 2.47). The
pain and rage that fuel these metaphors of maimed and strangled chil-
dren may be our only clues to the actual nature of Dickens’s unarticulated
responses to a public controversy that touched his private memory in intense
but incalculable ways.