Les Standiford by The Man Who Invented Christmas: Charles Dickens's Page A

reason, praising the occasion of their gathering in a venue “where we have no more knowledge of party difficulties, or public animosities between side and side…than if we were a public meeting in the commonwealth of Utopia.” And he followed by reiterating the credo that would guide him in his art and in his public life: “I take it, that it is not of greater importance to all of us than it is to every man who has learned to know that he has an interest in the moral and social elevation, the harmless relaxation, the peace, happiness, and improvement, of the community at large.”
    Of Manchester and the Athenaeum on behalf of which he spoke, Dickens said, “It well becomes…this little world of labour, that…she should have a splendid temple sacred to the education and improvement of a large class of those who, in their various useful stations, assist in the production of our wealth.”
    And he went on to add a bit of the poet’s touch in service of his point, with a gesture to the grand hall about them, “I think it is grand to know, that, while her factories re-echo with the clanking of stupendous engines, and the whirl and rattle of machinery, the immortal mechanism of God’s own hand, the mind, is not forgotten in the din and uproar, but is lodged and tended in a palace of its own.”
    He then turned to the circumstances that had brought him to the city. He reminded his audience that “the Athenaeum was projected at a time when commerce was in a vigorous and flourishing condition, and when those classes of society to which it particularly addresses itself were fully employed, and in the receipt of regular incomes.”
    He was speaking, however, at a time when unemployment in the mills hovered between 15 and 20 percent, and wages had dropped a similar percentage over the past ten years. “A season of depression almost without a parallel ensued,” he told his audience, “and large numbers of young men…suddenly found their occupation gone and themselves reduced to very straitened and penurious circumstances.”
    The downturn had led the Athenaeum—with its library of 6,000 volumes; classes for the study of languages, elocution, and music; exercise facilities; and regular programs of lectures and debate—to accumulate a debt of more than 3,000 pounds, Dickens told the audience; but the number of citizens willing to contribute a mere sixpence weekly for all the benefits had more than doubled in recent months, he said, and if more in the audience were willing to join, the amount of even that modest subscription would be reduced.
    With that behind him, he launched into the meat of his address. There were a few “dead-and-gone” objections that had traditionally been raised against the formation of such institutions as the Athenaeum, he said, and their philosophy could be summed up in one short sentence: “How often have we heard from a large class of men wise in their generation, who would really seem to be born and bred for no other purpose than to pass into currency counterfeit and mischievous scraps of wisdom…that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing.’”
    Dickens paused for emphasis, then went on. “Why, a little hanging was considered a very dangerous thing, according to the same authorities, with this difference, that, because a little hanging was dangerous, we had a great deal of it; and, because a little learning was dangerous, we were to have none at all.”
    We can imagine the roar of approval that those words brought from his audience. The lines carry the same pungency that had elevated the
Sketches,
and the observations of
Pickwick
’s Sam Weller, and the bite that kept
Oliver Twist
from collapsing under the weight of its convictions.
    Warming to his theme, Dickens continued, “I should be glad to hear such people’s estimate of the comparative danger of ‘a little learning’