The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle is a novel by the Scottish author Tobias Smollett (1721–1771), first published in 1751.
Excerpts
A chapter on the protagonist's childhood describes how he is, around the age of five, maltreated by a teacher for 18 months through excessive, mindless corporal punishment:
"It would be an endless and perhaps no very agreeable task, to enumerate all the unlucky pranks he played upon his uncle and others, before he attained the fourth year of his age; about which time he was sent, with an attendant, to a day-school in the neighborhood, that (to use his good mother’s own expression) he might be out of harm’s way. Here, however, he made little progress, except in mischief, which he practiced with impunity because the school-mistress would run no risk of disobliging a lady of fortune, by exercising unnecessary severities upon her only child. Nevertheless, Mrs. Pickle was not so blindly partial as to be pleased with such unseasonable indulgence. Perry was taken out of the hands of this courteous teacher and committed to the instruction of a pedagogue, who was ordered to administer such correction as the boy should in his opinion deserve. This authority he did not neglect to use, his pupil was regularly flogged twice a day; and after having been subjected to this course of discipline for the space of eighteen months, declared the most obstinate, dull, and untoward genius that ever had fallen under his cultivation; instead of being reformed, he seemed rather hardened and confirmed in his vicious inclinations, and was dead to all sense of fear as well as shame."""
– From The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, chapter X1
The instrument of the floggings is named a few sentences later:
"The boy, who was now turned of six, having profited so little under the birch of his unsparing governor, ..."
– From The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, chapter X1
And the effect of this abuse on the child's development is described in the following chapter, in which he enters a boarding school with a different pedagogical approach:
This tutor, whose name was Jennings, began with Perry, according to his constant maxim, by examining the soil; that is, studying his temper, in order to consult the bias of his disposition, which was strangely perverted by the absurd discipline he had undergone. He found him in a state of sullen insensibility, which the child had gradually contracted in a long course of stupefying correction; and at first, he was not in the least actuated by that commendation which animated the rest of his school-fellows; nor was it in the power of reproach to excite his ambition, which had been buried, as it were, in the grave of disgrace, ...""""
– From The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, chapter X1
See also
Links
- The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle on Project Gutenberg
- The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
- Peregrine Pickle, 1751
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