Speeches: Literary and Social

LONDON, FEBRUARY 9, 1858

[At the Anniversary Festival of the Hospital for Sick Children, on
Tuesday, February the 9th, 1858, about one hundred and fifty
gentlemen sat down to dinner, in the Freemasons' Hall. Later in
the evening all the seats in the gallery were filled with ladies
interested in the success of the Hospital. After the usual loyal
and other toasts, the Chairman, Mr. Dickens, proposed "Prosperity
to the Hospital for Sick Children," and said:-]

Ladies and gentlemen,--It is one of my rules in life not to believe
a man who may happen to tell me that he feels no interest in
children. I hold myself bound to this principle by all kind
consideration, because I know, as we all must, that any heart which
could really toughen its affections and sympathies against those
dear little people must be wanting in so many humanising
experiences of innocence and tenderness, as to be quite an unsafe
monstrosity among men. Therefore I set the assertion down,
whenever I happen to meet with it--which is sometimes, though not
often--as an idle word, originating possibly in the genteel languor
of the hour, and meaning about as much as that knowing social
lassitude, which has used up the cardinal virtues and quite found
out things in general, usually does mean. I suppose it may be
taken for granted that we, who come together in the name of
children and for the sake of children, acknowledge that we have an
interest in them; indeed, I have observed since I sit down here
that we are quite in a childlike state altogether, representing an
infant institution, and not even yet a grown-up company. A few
years are necessary to the increase of our strength and the
expansion of our figure; and then these tables, which now have a
few tucks in them, will be let out, and then this hall, which now
sits so easily upon us, will be too tight and small for us.
Nevertheless, it is likely that even we are not without our
experience now and then of spoilt children. I do not mean of our
own spoilt children, because nobody's own children ever were
spoilt, but I mean the disagreeable children of our particular
friends. We know by experience what it is to have them down after
dinner, and, across the rich perspective of a miscellaneous dessert
to see, as in a black dose darkly, the family doctor looming in the
distance. We know, I have no doubt we all know, what it is to
assist at those little maternal anecdotes and table entertainments
illustrated with imitations and descriptive dialogue which might
not be inaptly called, after the manner of my friend Mr. Albert
Smith, the toilsome ascent of Miss Mary and the eruption
(cutaneous) of Master Alexander. We know what it is when those
children won't go to bed; we know how they prop their eyelids open
with their forefingers when they will sit up; how, when they become
fractious, they say aloud that they don't like us, and our nose is
too long, and why don't we go? And we are perfectly acquainted
with those kicking bundles which are carried off at last
protesting. An eminent eye-witness told me that he was one of a
company of learned pundits who assembled at the house of a very
distinguished philosopher of the last generation to hear him
expound his stringent views concerning infant education and early
mental development, and he told me that while the philosopher did
this in very beautiful and lucid language, the philosopher's little
boy, for his part, edified the assembled sages by dabbling up to
the elbows in an apple pie which had been provided for their
entertainment, having previously anointed his hair with the syrup,
combed it with his fork, and brushed it with his spoon. It is
probable that we also have our similar experiences sometimes, of
principles that are not quite practice, and that we know people
claiming to be very wise and profound about nations of men who show
themselves to be rather weak and shallow about units of babies.

But, ladies and gentlemen, the spoilt children whom I have to
present to you after this dinner of to-day are not of this class.
I have glanced at these for the easier and lighter introduction of
another, a very different, a far more numerous, and a far more
serious class. The spoilt children whom I must show you are the
spoilt children of the poor in this great city, the children who
are, every year, for ever and ever irrevocably spoilt out of this
breathing life of ours by tens of thousands, but who may in vast
numbers be preserved if you, assisting and not contravening the
ways of Providence, will help to save them. The two grim nurses,
Poverty and Sickness, who bring these children before you, preside
over their births, rock their wretched cradles, nail down their
little coffins, pile up the earth above their graves. Of the
annual deaths in this great town, their unnatural deaths form more
than one-third. I shall not ask you, according to the custom as to
the other class--I shall not ask you on behalf of these children to
observe how good they are, how pretty they are, how clever they
are, how promising they are, whose beauty they most resemble--I
shall only ask you to observe how weak they are, and how like death
they are! And I shall ask you, by the remembrance of everything
that lies between your own infancy and that so miscalled second
childhood when the child's graces are gone and nothing but its
helplessness remains; I shall ask you to turn your thoughts to
THESE spoilt children in the sacred names of Pity and Compassion.

Some years ago, being in Scotland, I went with one of the most
humane members of the humane medical profession, on a morning tour
among some of the worst lodged inhabitants of the old town of
Edinburgh. In the closes and wynds of that picturesque place--I am
sorry to remind you what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus
often are--we saw more poverty and sickness in an hour than many
people would believe in a life. Our way lay from one to another of
the most wretched dwellings, reeking with horrible odours; shut out
from the sky, shut out from the air, mere pits and dens. In a room
in one of these places, where there was an empty porridge-pot on
the cold hearth, with a ragged woman and some ragged children
crouching on the bare ground near it--where, I remember as I speak,
that the very light, refracted from a high damp-stained and time-
stained house-wall, came trembling in, as if the fever which had
shaken everything else there had shaken even it--there lay, in an
old egg-box which the mother had begged from a shop, a little
feeble, wasted, wan, sick child. With his little wasted face, and
his little hot, worn hands folded over his breast, and his little
bright, attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for
several years, look in steadily at us. There he lay in his little
frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the little body
from which he was slowly parting--there he lay, quite quiet, quite
patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said; he
seldom complained; "he lay there, seemin' to woonder what it was a'
aboot." God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had
his reasons for wondering--reasons for wondering how it could
possibly come to be that he lay there, left alone, feeble and full
of pain, when he ought to have been as bright and as brisk as the
birds that never got near him--reasons for wondering how he came to
be left there, a little decrepid old man pining to death, quite a
thing of course, as if there were no crowds of healthy and happy
children playing on the grass under the summer's sun within a
stone's throw of him, as if there were no bright, moving sea on the
other side of the great hill overhanging the city; as if there were
no great clouds rushing over it; as if there were no life, and
movement, and vigour anywhere in the world--nothing but stoppage
and decay. There he lay looking at us, saying, in his silence,
more pathetically than I have ever heard anything said by any
orator in my life, "Will you please to tell me what this means,
strange man? and if you can give me any good reason why I should be
so soon, so far advanced on my way to Him who said that children
were to come into His presence and were not to be forbidden, but
who scarcely meant, I think, that they should come by this hard
road by which I am travelling; pray give that reason to me, for I
seek it very earnestly and wonder about it very much;" and to my
mind he has been wondering about it ever since. Many a poor child,
sick and neglected, I have seen since that time in this London;
many a poor sick child I have seen most affectionately and kindly
tended by poor people, in an unwholesome house and under untoward
circumstances, wherein its recovery was quite impossible; but at
all such times I have seen my poor little drooping friend in his
egg-box, and he has always addressed his dumb speech to me, and I
have always found him wondering what it meant, and why, in the name
of a gracious God, such things should be!

Now, ladies and gentlemen, such things need not be, and will not
be, if this company, which is a drop of the life-blood of the great
compassionate public heart, will only accept the means of rescue
and prevention which it is mine to offer. Within a quarter of a
mile of this place where I speak, stands a courtly old house, where
once, no doubt, blooming children were born, and grew up to be men
and women, and married, and brought their own blooming children
back to patter up the old oak staircase which stood but the other
day, and to wonder at the old oak carvings on the chimney-pieces.
In the airy wards into which the old state drawing-rooms and family
bedchambers of that house are now converted are such little
patients that the attendant nurses look like reclaimed giantesses,
and the kind medical practitioner like an amiable Christian ogre.
Grouped about the little low tables in the centre of the rooms are
such tiny convalescents that they seem to be playing at having been
ill. On the doll's beds are such diminutive creatures that each
poor sufferer is supplied with its tray of toys; and, looking
round, you may see how the little tired, flushed cheek has toppled
over half the brute creation on its way into the ark; or how one
little dimpled arm has mowed down (as I saw myself) the whole tin
soldiery of Europe. On the walls of these rooms are graceful,
pleasant, bright, childish pictures. At the bed's heads, are
pictures of the figure which is the universal embodiment of all
mercy and compassion, the figure of Him who was once a child
himself, and a poor one. Besides these little creatures on the
beds, you may learn in that place that the number of small Out-
patients brought to that house for relief is no fewer than ten
thousand in the compass of one single year. In the room in which
these are received, you may see against the wall a box, on which it
is written, that it has been calculated, that if every grateful
mother who brings a child there will drop a penny into it, the
Hospital funds may possibly be increased in a year by so large a
sum as forty pounds. And you may read in the Hospital Report, with
a glow of pleasure, that these poor women are so respondent as to
have made, even in a toiling year of difficulty and high prices,
this estimated forty, fifty pounds. In the printed papers of this
same Hospital, you may read with what a generous earnestness the
highest and wisest members of the medical profession testify to the
great need of it; to the immense difficulty of treating children in
the same hospitals with grown-up people, by reason of their
different ailments and requirements, to the vast amount of pain
that will be assuaged, and of life that will be saved, through this
Hospital; not only among the poor, observe, but among the
prosperous too, by reason of the increased knowledge of children's
illnesses, which cannot fail to arise from a more systematic mode
of studying them. Lastly, gentlemen, and I am sorry to say, worst
of all--(for I must present no rose-coloured picture of this place
to you--I must not deceive you;) lastly, the visitor to this
Children's Hospital, reckoning up the number of its beds, will find
himself perforce obliged to stop at very little over thirty; and
will learn, with sorrow and surprise, that even that small number,
so forlornly, so miserably diminutive, compared with this vast
London, cannot possibly be maintained, unless the Hospital be made
better known; I limit myself to saying better known, because I will
not believe that in a Christian community of fathers and mothers,
and brothers and sisters, it can fail, being better known, to be
well and richly endowed.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this, without a word of adornment--which
I resolved when I got up not to allow myself--this is the simple
case. This is the pathetic case which I have to put to you; not
only on behalf of the thousands of children who annually die in
this great city, but also on behalf of the thousands of children
who live half developed, racked with preventible pain, shorn of
their natural capacity for health and enjoyment. If these innocent
creatures cannot move you for themselves, how can I possibly hope
to move you in their name? The most delightful paper, the most
charming essay, which the tender imagination of Charles Lamb
conceived, represents him as sitting by his fireside on a winter
night telling stories to his own dear children, and delighting in
their society, until he suddenly comes to his old, solitary,
bachelor self, and finds that they were but dream-children who
might have been, but never were. "We are nothing," they say to
him; "less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have
been, and we must wait upon the tedious shore of Lethe, millions of
ages, before we have existence and a name." "And immediately
awaking," he says, "I found myself in my arm chair." The dream-
children whom I would now raise, if I could, before every one of
you, according to your various circumstances, should be the dear
child you love, the dearer child you have lost, the child you might
have had, the child you certainly have been. Each of these dream-
children should hold in its powerful hand one of the little
children now lying in the Child's Hospital, or now shut out of it
to perish. Each of these dream-children should say to you, "O,
help this little suppliant in my name; O, help it for my sake!"
Well!--And immediately awaking, you should find yourselves in the
Freemasons' Hall, happily arrived at the end of a rather long
speech, drinking "Prosperity to the Hospital for Sick Children,"
and thoroughly resolved that it shall flourish.