Dickens, the most convincingly real ones are either vilely
unamiable or comically contemptible; whilst his attempts to
manufacture admirable heroines by idealizations of home-bred
womanhood are not only absurd but not even pleasantly absurd: one
has no patience with them.

As all this is corrigible by reducing home life and domestic
sentiment to something like reasonable proportions in the life of
the individual, the danger of it does not lie in human nature.
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage
is natural to a cockatoo. Its grave danger to the nation lies in
its narrow views, its unnaturally sustained and spitefully jealous
concupiscences, its petty tyrannies, its false social pretences,
its endless grudges and squabbles, its sacrifice of the boy's
future by setting him to earn money to help the family when he
should be in training for his adult life (remember the boy Dickens
and the blacking factory), and of the girl's chances by making her
a slave to sick or selfish parents, its unnatural packing into
little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity of ill-assorted
ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for behaving like
young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old for
behaving like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and
unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets
these evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest
attainable degree of honor and virtue, whilst any criticism of or
revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of
vice. The revolt, driven under ground and exacerbated, produces
debauchery veiled by hypocrisy, an overwhelming demand for
licentious theatrical entertainments which no censorship can stem,
and, worst of all, a confusion of virtue with the mere morality