Major Bagstock is contemplating young Rob, a product of that school where they never taught honor, but were "particularly strong in the engendering of hypocrisy," and deduces that "it never pays to educate that sort of people." Whereupon—[1]
"The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped
his son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged
and badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into
his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound,
might not have been educated on quite a right plan in some undiscovered
respect, when Mr. Dombey, angrily repeating 'The
usual return!' led the major away."
Young David Copperfield profits little by losing Murdstone
and gaining Creakle. The aspect of this pleasant
pedagogue so fascinates the gaze of the boys that they
cannot keep to their books. When a culprit is called before
the tribunal,—[2]
"Mr. Creakle cuts a joke before he beats him, and we laugh
at it,—miserable little dogs, we laugh, with our visages as white
as ashes, and our hearts sinking into our boots. * * *
Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject
we were to him! What a launch in life I think it now, on looking
back, to be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!"
From this infant purgatory the step to the college
seems a long one, for that is by comparison an Elysium,
however inane and frivolous. Those whose satiric arrows
speed thither are Peacock, Lytton, Trollope, Kingsley,
and Butler. Thackeray should be mentioned for his two
chapters on University Snobs, and the preceding one on
