In the brickmaker's hovel they heard something of how the very poor brought up children, or failed to bring them up, in Dickens's time. The brickmaker was lying at full length on the floor, smoking his pipe. He gave them no welcome.
I wants a end of these liberties took with my place. I wants a end of being drawed like a badger. Now you are a-going to poll-pry and question according to custom--I know what you're a-going to be up to. Well! You haven't got no occasion to be up to it. I'll save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washin'? Yes, she is a-washin'. Look at the water. Smell it! That's wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do you think of gin, instead? An't my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty--it's nat'rally dirty, and it's nat'rally onwholesome; and we've had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides.
The utter carelessness of some "society gentlemen" in regard to the education of their children is referred to in the description Caddy Jellyby gave of her lover, the son of the great Turveydrop.
Caddy told me that her lover's education had been so neglected that it was not always easy to read his notes. She said if he were not so anxious about his spelling, and took less pains to make it clear, he would do better; but he put so many unnecessary letters into short words that they sometimes quite lost their English appearance. "He does it with the best intention," observed Caddy, "but it hasn't the effect he means, poor fellow!" Caddy then went on to reason how could he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole life in the dancing school, and had done nothing but teach and fag, fag and teach, morning, noon, and night! And what did it matter? She could write letters enough for both, as she knew to her cost, and it was far better for him to be amiable than learned. "Besides, it's not as if I was an accomplished girl, who had any right to give herself airs," said Caddy. "I know little enough, I am sure, thanks to ma!"
The products of the fashionable education of Dickens's time (there is not so much of it now, thanks largely to Dickens) were shown in the cousins of Sir Leicester Dedlock.