In like manner did Thackeray and Dickens, despite all their sentiment.  Children were made to serve both the sentiment and the irony between which those two writers, alike in this, stood double-minded.  Thackeray, writing of his snobs, wreaks himself upon a child; there is no worse snob than his snob-child.  There are snob-children not only in the book dedicated to their parents, but in nearly all his novels.  There is a female snob-child in “Lovel the Widower,” who may be taken as a type, and there are snob-children at frequent intervals in “Philip.”  It is not certain that Thackeray intended the children of Pendennis himself to be innocent and exempt.

In one of Dickens’s early sketches there is a plot amongst the humorous dramatis personae, to avenge themselves on a little boy for the lack of tact whereby his parents have brought him with them to a party on the river.  The principal humorist frightens the child into convulsions.  The incident is the success of the day, and is obviously intended to have some kind of reflex action in amusing the reader.  In Dickens’s maturer books the burlesque little girl imitates her mother’s illusory fainting-fits.

Our glimpses of children in the fugitive pages of that day are grotesque.  A little girl in Punch improves on the talk of her dowdy mother with the maids.  An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies, hideous, from some hideous terror.

AUTHORSHIP

Authorship prevails in nurseries—­at least in some nurseries.  In many it is probably a fitful game, and since the days of the Brontes there has not been a large family without its magazine.  The weak point of all this literature is its commonplace.  The child’s effort is to write something as much like as possible to the tedious books that are read to him; he is apt to be fluent and foolish.  If a child simple enough to imitate were also simple enough not to imitate he might write nursery magazines that would not bore us.

As it is, there is sometimes nothing but the fresh and courageous spelling to make his stories go.  “He,” however, is hardly the pronoun.  The girls are the more active authors, and the more prosaic.  What they would write had they never read things written for them by the dull, it is not possible to know.  What they do write is this—­to take a passage:  “Poor Mrs. Bald (that was her name) thought she would never get to the wood where her aunt lived, she got down and pulled the donky on by the bridal . . .  Alas! her troubles were not over yet, the donky would not go where she wanted it, instead of turning down Rose Lane it went down another, which although Mrs. Bald did not know it led to a very deep and dangerous pond.  The donky ran into the pond and Mrs. Bald was dround.”

To give a prosperous look to the magazine containing the serial story just quoted, a few pages of mixed advertisements are laboriously written out:  “The Imatation of Christ is the best book in all the world.”  “Read Thompson’s poetry and you are in a world of delight.”  “Barrat’s ginger beer is the only ginger beer to drink.”  “The place for a ice.”  Under the indefinite heading “A Article,” readers are told “that they are liable to read the paper for nothing.”