Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Dickens

Dickens is doing what he does best: turning sentiment into a moral ambush. The line starts with a deceptively playful proposition - send the child and the childish man together - then snaps into an accusation. The real target isn’t immaturity; it’s adult vanity. “Blush for the pride” is a command, not a suggestion, and it frames adulthood as a kind of self-serving lie we tell about childhood: that we’ve outgrown it, that we’ve improved on it, that we now stand at a higher rung of human seriousness.

The phrase “libels our own old happy state” is especially pointed. To call it libel is to imply malice and fabrication, as if the grown-up story of childhood as foolishness is a smear campaign designed to justify the losses adulthood quietly requires. Dickens’s subtext is that “childish” isn’t the opposite of wise; it’s the raw material of empathy, wonder, and moral clarity - qualities adults rebrand as naive because acknowledging them would indict the compromises we’ve accepted.

Then comes the mirror twist: pride “gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.” Adulthood, in this formulation, is not the polished portrait we imagine; it’s a caricature, swollen by ego and narrowed by habit. In Dickens’s Victorian context - a culture loudly invested in respectability, discipline, and industrial “progress” - that’s a sharp rebuke. He’s not romanticizing childhood so much as exposing how modern adulthood flatters itself by misnaming what it has abandoned.