The next thing to do was try to find one of the articles Dickens wrote for the Daily News.
Here the Gutenberg Project was the helping hand. I discovered the following article on their
website:
-/f~
A week before (Friday30 January 1846) he had written: "I want a long talk with you.
I was obliged to come down here in a hurry to give out a travelling letter I meant to have
given out last night, and coiddnot call upon you. Will you dine with us to-morrow at six
sharp? I have been revolving plans in my mind this morning for quitting the paper and going
abroad again to write a new book in shilling numbers. Shall we go to Rochester to-morrow
week (my birthday) if the weather be, as it surely must be, better To Rochester accordingly
we had gone, he and Mrs. Dickens and her sister, with Maclise and Jerrold and myself; going
over the old Castle, Watts's Charity, and Chatham fortifications on the Saturday, passing
Sunday in Cobham church and Cobham Park; having our quarters both days at the "Bull" Inn
made famous in Pickwick; and thus, by indidgence of the desire which was always strangely
urgent in him, associating his new resolve in life with those earliest scenes of his youthful
time. On one point our feeling had been in thorough agreement. If long continuance with the
paper was not likely, the earliest possible departure from it was desirable. But as the letters
descriptive of his Italian travel (turned afterwards into Pictures from Italy) had begun with its
first number, his name could not at once be withdrawn; and, for the time during which they
were still to appear, he consented to contribute other occasional letters on important social
questions. Public executions and Ragged Schools were among the subjects chosen by him,
and all were handled with conspicuous ability. But the interval they covered was a short
one...
Crime and Education - Charles Dickens
I offer no apology for entreating the attention of the readers of The Daily News to an effort
which has been making for some three years and a half and which is making now, to
introduce among the most miserable and neglected outcasts in London, some knowledge of
the commonest principles of morality and religion; to commence their recognition as
immortal human creatures, before the Gaol Chaplain becomes their only schoolmaster; to
suggest to Society that its duty to this wretched throng, foredoomed to crime and punishment,
rightfully begins at some distance from the police office and that the careless maintenance
from year to year, in this, the capital city of the world, of a vast hopeless nursery of
ignorance, misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails: is horrible to
contemplate.
This attempt is being made in certain of the most obscure and squalid parts of the
Metropolis, where rooms are opened, at night, for the gratuitous instruction of all comers,
children or adults, under the title of RAGGED SCHOOLS. The name implies the purpose.
They who are too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any other place: who could
gain admission into no charity school, and who would be driven from any church door; are
invited to come in here, andfind some people not depraved, willing to teach them something,
and show them some sympathy, and stretch a hand out, which is not the iron hand of Law, for
their correction.
Before I describe a visit of my own to a Ragged School, and urge the readers of this letter
for God's sake to visit one themselves, and think of it (which is my main object), let me say,
that I know the prisons of London well; that I have visited the largest of them more times than
I could count; and that the children in them are enough to break the heart and hope of any
man. I have never taken a foreigner or a stranger of any kind to one of these establishments
but I have seen him so moved at sight of the child offenders, and so affected by the
