The ignorance of laboring children in Victorian England was almost total, and deeply shocking to those who read the reports of the Children's Employment Commission (one of those who read them was Marx):
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 | | Four times four is 8; 4 fours are 16. A king is him that has all the money and gold. We have a King (told it is a Queen), they call her the Princess Alexandra. Have heard say that God made the world, and that all the people was drownded but one; heard say that one was a little bird. God made man, man made woman. Had been to chapel, but missed a good many times lately. One name that they preached about was Jesus Christ, but I cannot say any others, and I cannot tell anything about him. He was not killed but died like other people. The devil is a good person. I don't know where he lives. Christ was a wicked man.
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One wonders if there is a kind of twisted intelligence at work in some of this, but it is very different from Jo, though Jo is surely meant to be one of their company. Jo is, in fact, very articulate: his carefully limited solecisms (Sangsby for Snagsby, nothink for nothingeven some touches of misspelling that do not indicate the slightest mispronouncing like "wos" orr "wuns") cannot disguise the lucidity and complexity of his thinking. He has perceived that sectarian disputes interfere with piety and shares Dickens's own dislike of evangelicals. When Allan Woodcourt teaches him a prayer to die with, he is a ready pupil and appreciates what is being done for him: "I'll say anythink as you say, sir, fur I knows it's good." He repeats the words and dies saying, "Hallowed bethy.'' His death is not as different from Paul's as we might at first think, and is not meant to be.
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The death of little Johnny in
Our Mutual Friend
contains the same indignation, and the same address to "my lords and gentlemen and honourable boards" (the last expression is put in because the protest here is not simply about neglect but about the workings of the New Poor Law). Johnny does not die in such complete ignorance as Jo, and has more of Dick and Nell about him when he gives his toys to the poor child in the next bed; and he is more interesting because of Sloppy, his grandmother's "mangler," who speaks in Dickenspeak, turning the description of Johnny's illness into a splendid paragraph of colorful evasiveness:
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| | Mr Sloppyproceeded to remark that he thought Johnny "must have took 'em from the Minders." Being asked what he meant, he answered, them that
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