Dickens As an Educator

A Toronto schools inspector reads Dickens as pedagogy: Dotheboys Hall, Gradgrind's facts, the beaten boy and the loving one, and what the novels were arguing about how children should be taught. Hughes ran Toronto's schools for thirty-seven years and brought the kindergarten to Canada; his case is that Dickens changed the classroom more than any educationist. Fifty-nine plates from 1840 to 1915, among them interiors and portraits by Vilhelm Hammershøi and Félix Vallotton, picture the reading rooms, studies, and quiet domestic scenes in which Dickens was taught and discussed.