Dickens and David Copperfield

In David Copperfield Dickens describes the effect of requiring a boy to learn material that he does not understand.

"These solemn lessons I remember as the deathblow to my peace and a grievous daily drudgery and misery," says David Copperfield. "They were very long, very numerous and very hard - perfectly unintelligible, some of them, to me - and I was generally as much bewildered by them as I believe my poor mother was herself."

"Let me remember how it used to be and bring one morning back again."

The lessons, supposedly learnt by heart, were given reluctantly by Copperfield's mother, under the hostile eyes of the Murdstones.

"The very sight of these two has such an influence over me," wrote Dickens, "that I begin to feel the words I have been at infinite pains to get into my head,all sliding away, and going I don't know where. I hand the first book to my mother. Perhaps it is a grammar, perhaps a history, or geography. I take a last drowning look at the page as I give it into her hand, and start off aloud at a racing pace while I have got it fresh. I trip over a word. Mr Murdstonelooks up. I trip over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden, tumble over half-a-dozen words, and stop."

Dickens wrote this in 1846, but children are still often required to try to learn material they do not understand today. Like David Copperfield, they stop.

Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham, http://www.victorianweb.org