drudgery in London had made him realize, in other cases
beside his own, the degradation that followed from the neglect of
children. On undertaking to handle this subject in _Nicholas Nickleby_,
he journeyed to Yorkshire to gather evidence at first hand for his
picture of Dotheboys Hall. And for many years afterwards he continued to
correspond with active workers on the subject of Ragged Schools and on
the means of uplifting children out of the conditions which were so
fruitful a source of crime. He discovered for himself how easily
miscreants like Fagin could find recruits in the slums of London, and
how impossible it was to bring up aright boys who were bred in these
neglected homes. Even where efforts had been begun, the machinery was
quite inadequate, the teachers few, the schoolrooms cheerless and
ill-equipped. Mr. Crotch[22] has preserved a letter of 1843 in which
Dickens makes the practical offer of providing funds for a washing-place
in one school where the children seemed to be suffering from inattention
to the elementary needs. His heart warmed towards individual cases and
he faced them in practical fashion; he was not one of those reformers
who utter benevolent sentiments on the platform and go no further.

[Note 22: _Charles Dickens, Social Reformer_, by W. W. Crotch
(Chapman & Hall, 1913), p. 53.]

Critics have had much to say about Dickens's treatment of child
characters in his novels; the words 'sentimental' and 'mawkish' have
been hurled at scenes like the death of Paul Dombey and Little Nell and
at the more lurid episodes in _Oliver Twist_. But Dickens was a pioneer
in his treatment of children in fiction; and if he did smite resounding
blows which jar upon critical ears, at least he opened a rich vein of
literature where many have followed him. He wrote not for the critics
but for the great popular audience whom he had created, comprising all
ages and classes, and world-wide in extent. The best answer to such
criticism is to be found in the poem which Bret Harte dedicated to his
memory in 1870, which beautifully describes how the pathos of his
child-heroine could move the hearts of rough working men far away in the
Sierras of the West. Nor did this same character of Little Nell fail to
win special praise from literary critics so fastidious as Landor and
Francis Jeffrey.

In 1842 he embarked on his first voyage to America. Till then he had
travelled little outside his native land, and this expedition