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

and a vast amount of ignorance; I should be glad to know which they consider the most prolific parent of misery and crime.” At this point he turned personal. “I should be glad to assist them in their calculations,” he said of those who found learning a luxury, foreshadowing one of the plot devices of a certain novel-to-come, “by carrying them into certain gaols and nightly refuges I know of, where my own heart dies within me, when I see thousands of immortal creatures condemned…by years of this most wicked axiom.”
    He proclaimed his belief that with the pursuit and accumulation of knowledge, man had the capacity to change himself and his lot in life. With learning, said Dickens, a man “acquires for himself that property of soul which has in all times upheld struggling men of every degree.” The more a man learns, Dickens said, “the better, gentler, kinder man he must become. When he knows how much great minds have suffered for the truth in every age and time…he will become more tolerant of other men’s belief in all matters, and will incline more leniently to their sentiments when they chance to differ from his own.”
    He closed with the assertion to his Athenaeum audience that “long after your institution, and others of the same nature, have crumbled into dust, the noble harvest of the seed sown in them will shine out brightly in the wisdom, the mercy, and the forbearance of another race.” It was a speech that would have taken no more than ten or twelve minutes to deliver in its entirety, and yet in it, Dickens conveyed the essence of his most passionate beliefs: championing education, decrying ignorance and those who sought to perpetuate it, and thereby affirming a belief in the possibility of an individual’s capability for self-determination that fuels debate among social theorists to this day.
    Dickens had lifted himself up from penniless wretch to become the leading literary practitioner of his day; Andrew Carnegie would carry a version of the by-one’s-own-bootstraps gospel to America, remaking himself from bobbin boy into steel titan and richest man on earth—then building 3,000 free libraries so that others could presumably follow in his path. In this view, and with the application of his knowledge, reason, and innate decency, mankind had everything needed to make a just and happy world.

6.
    I f it is true that Dickens never left Manchester without bearing pleasure away, he could not have conceived of the gift that this 1843 visit to what had been called “the chimney of the world” would provide him. Yet it was in the hours after his speech at the Athenaeum, as he walked alone through the city’s darkened streets with his mind churning, that the idea came upon him for a new work, one that would one day be called the best-known work of fiction in the language.
    Dickens obviously had practical reasons for seeking inspiration: there was the matter of his debt to Chapman and Hall, and his marked decline in sales. But he also felt a deep desire to prove his critics wrong and an equal urgency to prove to himself as well as his public that he had not lost his touch.
    There were more positive factors at work as well. He assured his audience at the close of his speech that night that he would long carry with him the pleasure of seeing the response that his remarks had brought—all those bright eyes and beaming faces looking up at him. And he also acknowledged that his audience was counting on him: he would not “easily forget this scene, the pleasing tasks your favour has devolved on me.”
    As his letters to his friend Forster record, he also carried other memories with him as he walked the streets that night. Shortly before the trip to Manchester, he had taken a tour of a so-called ragged school in London, in the company of Baroness Angela Burdett Coutts, philanthropist and heiress to a banking fortune. He had gone to the