Speeches: Literary and Social

LEEDS, DECEMBER 1, 1847

[On the above evening a Soiree of the Leeds Mechanics' Institution
took place, at which about 1200 persons were present. The chair
was taken by Mr. Dickens, who thus addressed the meeting:]

Ladies and gentlemen,--Believe me, speaking to you with a most
disastrous cold, which makes my own voice sound very strangely in
my ears--that if I were not gratified and honoured beyond
expression by your cordial welcome, I should have considered the
invitation to occupy my present position in this brilliant
assemblage in itself a distinction not easy to be surpassed. The
cause in which we are assembled and the objects we are met to
promote, I take, and always have taken to be, THE cause and THE
objects involving almost all others that are essential to the
welfare and happiness of mankind. And in a celebration like the
present, commemorating the birth and progress of a great
educational establishment, I recognise a something, not limited to
the spectacle of the moment, beautiful and radiant though it be--
not limited even to the success of the particular establishment in
which we are more immediately interested--but extending from this
place and through swarms of toiling men elsewhere, cheering and
stimulating them in the onward, upward path that lies before us
all. Wherever hammers beat, or wherever factory chimneys smoke,
wherever hands are busy, or the clanking of machinery resounds--
wherever, in a word, there are masses of industrious human beings
whom their wise Creator did not see fit to constitute all body, but
into each and every one of whom He breathed a mind--there, I would
fain believe, some touch of sympathy and encouragement is felt from
our collective pulse now beating in this Hall.

Ladies and gentlemen, glancing with such feelings at the report of
your Institution for the present year sent to me by your respected
President--whom I cannot help feeling it, by-the-bye, a kind of
crime to depose, even thus peacefully, and for so short a time--I
say, glancing over this report, I found one statement of fact in
the very opening which gave me an uncommon satisfaction. It is,
that a great number of the members and subscribers are among that
class of persons for whose advantage Mechanics' Institutions were
originated, namely, persons receiving weekly wages. This
circumstance gives me the greatest delight. I am sure that no
better testimony could be borne to the merits and usefulness of
this Institution, and that no better guarantee could be given for
its continued prosperity and advancement.

To such Associations as this, in their darker hours, there may yet
reappear now and then the spectral shadow of a certain dead and
buried opposition; but before the light of a steady trust in them
on the part of the general people, bearing testimony to the
virtuous influences of such Institutions by their own intelligence
and conduct, the ghost will melt away like early vapour from the
ground. Fear of such Institutions as these! We have heard people
sometimes speak with jealousy of them,--with distrust of them!
Imagine here, on either hand, two great towns like Leeds, full of
busy men, all of them feeling necessarily, and some of them
heavily, the burdens and inequalities inseparable from civilized
society. In this town there is ignorance, dense and dark; in that
town, education--the best of education; that which the grown man
from day to day and year to year furnishes for himself and
maintains for himself, and in right of which his education goes on
all his life, instead of leaving off, complacently, just when he
begins to live in the social system. Now, which of these two towns
has a good man, or a good cause, reason to distrust and dread?
"The educated one," does some timid politician, with a marvellously
weak sight, say (as I have heard such politicians say), "because
knowledge is power, and because it won't do to have too much power
abroad." Why, ladies and gentlemen, reflect whether ignorance be
not power, and a very dreadful power. Look where we will, do we
not find it powerful for every kind of wrong and evil? Powerful to
take its enemies to its heart, and strike its best friends down--
powerful to fill the prisons, the hospitals, and the graves--
powerful for blind violence, prejudice, and error, in all their
gloomy and destructive shapes. Whereas the power of knowledge, if
I understand it, is, to bear and forbear; to learn the path of duty
and to tread it; to engender that self-respect which does not stop
at self, but cherishes the best respect for the best objects--to
turn an always enlarging acquaintance with the joys and sorrows,
capabilities and imperfections of our race to daily account in
mildness of life and gentleness of construction and humble efforts
for the improvement, stone by stone, of the whole social fabric.

I never heard but one tangible position taken against educational
establishments for the people, and that was, that in this or that
instance, or in these or those instances, education for the people
has failed. And I have never traced even this to its source but I
have found that the term education, so employed, meant anything but
education--implied the mere imperfect application of old, ignorant,
preposterous spelling-book lessons to the meanest purposes--as if
you should teach a child that there is no higher end in
electricity, for example, than expressly to strike a mutton-pie out
of the hand of a greedy boy--and on which it is as unreasonable to
found an objection to education in a comprehensive sense, as it
would be to object altogether to the combing of youthful hair,
because in a certain charity school they had a practice of combing
it into the pupils' eyes.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I turn to the report of this
Institution, on whose behalf we are met; and I start with the
education given there, and I find that it really is an education
that is deserving of the name. I find that there are papers read
and lectures delivered, on a variety of subjects of interest and
importance. I find that there are evening classes formed for the
acquisition of sound, useful English information, and for the study
of those two important languages, daily becoming more important in
the business of life,--the French and German. I find that there is
a class for drawing, a chemical class, subdivided into the
elementary branch and the manufacturing branch, most important
here. I find that there is a day-school at twelve shillings a
quarter, which small cost, besides including instruction in all
that is useful to the merchant and the man of business, admits to
all the advantages of the parent institution. I find that there is
a School of Design established in connexion with the Government
School; and that there was in January this year, a library of
between six and seven thousand books. Ladies and gentlemen, if any
man would tell me that anything but good could come of such
knowledge as this, all I can say is, that I should consider him a
new and most lamentable proof of the necessity of such
institutions, and should regard him in his own person as a
melancholy instance of what a man may come to by never having
belonged to one or sympathized with one.

There is one other paragraph in this report which struck my eye in
looking over it, and on which I cannot help offering a word of
joyful notice. It is the steady increase that appears to have
taken place in the number of lady members--among whom I hope I may
presume are included some of the bright fair faces that are
clustered around me. Gentlemen, I hold that it is not good for man
to be alone--even in Mechanics' Institutions; and I rank it as very
far from among the last or least of the merits of such places, that
he need not be alone there, and that he is not. I believe that the
sympathy and society of those who are our best and dearest friends
in infancy, in childhood, in manhood, and in old age, the most
devoted and least selfish natures that we know on earth, who turn
to us always constant and unchanged, when others turn away, should
greet us here, if anywhere, and go on with us side by side.

I know, gentlemen, by the evidence of my own proper senses at this
moment, that there are charms and graces in such greetings, such as
no other greeting can possess. I know that in every beautiful work
of the Almighty hand, which is illustrated in your lectures, and in
every real or ideal portraiture of fortitude and goodness that you
find in your books, there is something that must bring you home
again to them for its brightest and best example. And therefore,
gentlemen, I hope that you will never be without them, or without
an increasing number of them in your studies and your
commemorations; and that an immense number of new marriages, and
other domestic festivals naturally consequent upon those marriages,
may be traced back from time to time to the Leeds Mechanics'
Institution.

There are many gentlemen around me, distinguished by their public
position and service, or endeared to you by frequent intercourse,
or by their zealous efforts on behalf of the cause which brings us
together; and to them I shall beg leave to refer you for further
observations on this happy and interesting occasion; begging to
congratulate you finally upon the occasion itself; upon the
prosperity and thriving prospects of your institution; and upon our
common and general good fortune in living in these times, when the
means of mental culture and improvement are presented cheaply,
socially, and cheerfully, and not in dismal cells or lonely
garrets. And lastly, I congratulate myself, I assure you most
heartily, upon the part with which I am honoured on an occasion so
congenial to my warmest feelings and sympathies, and I beg to thank
you for such evidences of your good-will, as I never can coldly
remember and never forget.


[In acknowledging the vote of thanks, Mr, Dickens said:-]


Ladies and Gentlemen,--It is a great satisfaction to me that this
question has been put by the Mayor, inasmuch as I hope I may
receive it as a token that he has forgiven me those extremely large
letters, which I must say, from the glimpse I caught of them when I
arrived in the town, looked like a leaf from the first primer of a
very promising young giant.

I will only observe, in reference to the proceeding of this
evening, that after what I have seen, and the excellent speeches I
have heard from gentlemen of so many different callings and
persuasions, meeting here as on neutral ground, I do more strongly
and sincerely believe than I ever have in my life,--and that is
saying a great deal,--that institutions such as this will be the
means of refining and improving that social edifice which has been
so often mentioned to-night, until,--unlike that Babel tower that
would have taken heaven by storm,--it shall end in sweet accord and
harmony amongst all classes of its builders.

Ladies and gentlemen, most respectfully and heartily I bid you good
night and good-bye, and I trust the next time we meet it will be in
even greater numbers, and in a larger room, and that we often shall
meet again, to recal this evening, then of the past, and remember
it as one of a series of increasing triumphs of your excellent
institution.