Retitled 'The Short-Timers' in collected editions of the series.

The Uncommercial's recollection of being 'one of seventy boys' at a school is closer to the circumstances of Dickens's life than the depiction of schooldays in the previous item: Wellington House Academy, Hampstead Road, which Dickens attended between 1825 and 1827, was a day school of about this size (see Vol. 1 of Dent edition of Dickens's Journalism, pp. xxx-xxxi).

Dickens's interest in the schools of London's East End went back at least to [?18] February 1846 when he was conducted round the pauper schools of the Stepney Parish Union by the then Chairman of the Board, George F. Young (see Pilgrim, Vol. IV, p. 552&n.). The present paper describes a return visit to the Stepney Union schools, located on the south side of Northey Street, and the trip was made in the company of Edwin Chadwick, the veteran sanitary reformer and commissioner, on 27 May 1863 (see Pilgrim, Vol. X, p. 251).

In 1860, Chadwick had written and publicised at least one short paper on the benefits of combining 'the military or the naval drill ... with half-time book instruction' (title page missing; [November 1860] p. xxvii), and praising the research into the half-time system conducted by Scottish educationalist and philosopher Horace Grant (see also The Examiner's report on a paper read by Chadwick earlier in the year, 'Military Drill in Public Schools', 31 March 1860, p. 195 cols. a, b). In his Biographical Notice of Mr Horace Grant prefaced to Grant's Geography for Young Children (1861), Chadwick noted his own role in promoting the latter's research:

[A]s one of the commissioners for inquiring into the labor of young persons in factories, I proposed with my colleagues, that compulsory school attendance should be limited to three hours daily.... At my instance, the same limit of half-time school attendance was adopted for district and other schools under control of the Poor-Law Board (p. xxviii).

Although the other 'authorities' listed are not cited in either of these pamphlets, it seems probable that they are among the 'small bundle of papers' on the half-time system by the 'indefatigable Mr Chadwick' which Dickens describes. On leaving the schools, Dickens signed the Visitors' Book, commenting:

I have never visited any similar establishment with so much pleasure. I have never seen any so well administered, and I have never seen children more reasonably, humanely, and intelligently treated (see The Dickensian, Vol. 14 [1919], p. 146f.; P. Collins, Dickens and Education, 1963, pp. 81-83).

Three other articles published by Dickens in AYR in the early 1860s had previously demonstrated the journal's commitment to promoting the Half-Time system: 'Stomach for Study' (20 October 1860), 'Children of all Work' (8 June 1861), and 'In and Out of School' (19 October 1861).

Literary allusions:

• 'wise as the serpent', 'wisdom of the serpent' etc.: St. Matthew 10:16;
• '...the cymbals to dash at a sounding answer': 1 Corinthians 13:1;
• 'little children... Kingdom of Heaven': Matthew 18:3;
•  'the child's jingle...bells of Step-ney': the old English nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons.

Author: John Drew; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers, 1859-1870, 2000.

DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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