Pg. 597

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 “Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS.” —Shakespeare.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 No. 129.] SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1852. [Price 2d.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 BOYS TO MEND.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Umbrellas to mend, and chairs to mend, and clocks to mend, are called in our streets daily. Who shall count up the numbers of thousands of children to mend, in and about those same streets, whose voice of ignorance cries aloud as the voice of wisdom once did, and is as little regarded; who go to pieces for the want of mending, and die unrepaired!

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 People are naturally glad to catch at any plea, in mitigation of a great national wicked­ness. Many good persons will urge, now-a-days, as to this neglected business of boy-mending, “O! but there are the Ragged Schools!” Admitting the full merit of the ragged schools; rendering the highest praise to those disin­terested and devoted teachers, of both sexes, who labour in them; urging the consideration of their claims on all who pass through the streets of great towns with eyes in their heads, and awakened hearts in their breasts; we still must not disguise the plain fact that they are, at best, a slight and ineffectual pallia­tive of an enormous evil. They want system, power, means, authority, experienced and thoroughly trained teachers. If the instruc­tion of ordinary children be an art requiring such a peculiar combination of qualities and such sound discretion, that but few skilled persons arrive at perfection in it, how much more difficult is the instruction of those who, even if they be children in years, have more to unlearn than they have to learn; whose ignorance has been coupled with constant evil education; and among whose intellects there is no such thing as virgin soil to be found! Good intentions alone, will never be a sufficient qualification for such a labour, while this world lasts. We have seen some­thing of ragged schools from their first esta­blishment, and have rarely seen one, free from very injudicious and mistaken teaching. And what they can do, is so little, relatively to the gigantic proportions of the monster with which they have to grapple, that if their existence were to be accepted as a sufficient excuse for leaving ill alone, we should hold it far better that they had never been.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Where, in England, is the public institution for the prevention of crime among that neglected class of youth to whom it is not second but first Nature; who are born to nothing else, and bred to nothing else? Where, for these, are the bolts and bars, outside the prison-door, which is so heavily fastened within? Nowhere, to our knowledge. The next best thing—though there is a broad, deep gulf between the two—is an institution for the reformation of such young offenders. And to that, we made a visit on one of these last hot summer days.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 1 A dull mist of heat had taken possession of the streets. Through the warm mist we roll in a warm omnibus. Over the parapet of London Bridge we see London in a heavy lump with the hot mist about it, and almost expect that St. Paul’s presently will throw out a spark, and the whole town, like a firework, begin to fizz and crackle. There is nothing that we might not be permitted to expect as a result of heat, upon the hottest morning of the hottest dog-days within the memory of the oldest dog.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 1 People who sit with us in the carriages of the Brighton train, wonder (and really not without occasion, as we ignorantly think) why a terminus must be built with a cover in the shape of an oven, and why it must bake batches of passengers in railway trains like cakes in tins. Now we are off, and it is cooler. We pass over the red, underdone surface of Lon­don, upon which the blacks are falling cruelly; if London be now frying, it will make a dirty dish, we fancy. Here are market gardens, fields, hills, stations, woods, villages, and way­side inns. Here is Bed Hill, where the train stops, and we get out.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 There is a cluster of inns outside the station, and certain freeholders of East Surrey, warm with sun and politics, seek coolness in beer out­side the inns. They are a little noisy; but, pass­ing between hedges we begin to toil up hill. The distant song of the freeholders is drowned by the nearer song of the thrush; and the dog roses that make a roadside garden of each hedge, put our hearts in good humour with the dog-days. Every hedge is a garden. Where did we ever see more wild flowers clustered together? There is a very California of honeysuckle. There are clumps of mallow, blossoming on hillocks beside every gate that leads into the corn fields; there are yellow stars of the ranunculus, and crimson poppy blossoms, and the delicate peaked fairy hats of which Bindweed is ostensibly the