[Literature] Charles Dickens: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby #2/456

I was always curious about them – fell, long afterwards, and at sundry times, into the way of hearing more about them – at last, having an audience, resolved to write about them.

Accordingly, Dickens and his illustrator, Hablot K. Browne, set off for Yorkshire on 30 January 1838 to investigate the conditions and educational methods prevalent in these highly profitable establishments. Although the schools’ fulsomely worded newspaper advertisements promised, for only 20 guineas a year, a wide-ranging, liberal education that paid particular attention to the ‘young gentlemen’s’ morals, most seem to have been barbarically cruel places in which the boys were starved, flogged and taught little or nothing. Inadequate sanitation and overcrowded living conditions allowed diseases to spread as rapidly as in the poorest slums. No doubt some boys were enrolled by credulous parents seduced by the high-flown language of the adverts, but the schools appealed also to those looking for a cheap and convenient way of disposing of unwanted or illegitimate offspring. The chilling statement ‘No Vacations’ invariably figured in their promotional literature.⁸

Dickens was particularly concerned to visit Bowes Academy – situated, like Dotheboys Hall, at Greta Bridge – whose proprietor, William Shaw, had been prosecuted in 1823 after several boys in his care went blind. The testimony of one of these, William Jones, who was 12 years old at the time of the trial, offers the most immediate insight into the schools’ domestic routines:

The boys washed in a long trough, like what horses drink out of: the biggest boys used to take advantage of the little boys, and get the dry part of the towel. There were two towels a day for the whole school. We had no supper; nothing after tea – we had dry bread, brown, and a drop of water and a drop of milk warmed. The flock of the bed was straw; one sheet and one quilt; four or five boys slept in a bed not very large. My brother and three more slept in my bed; about thirty beds in the room, and a great tub in the middle, full of… The tub used to be flowing all over the room. Every other morning we used to flea the beds. The usher used to cut the quills, and give us them to catch the fleas; and if you did not fill the quill, you caught a good beating. The pot-skimmings were called broth, and we used to have it for tea on Sunday; one of the ushers offered a penny a piece for every maggot, and there was a pot-full gathered: he never gave it them.⁹

Shaw was convicted and ordered to pay damages, but his academy was still thriving when Dickens visited the region 15 years later. The satire of the young author – whose ‘face’, a friend once noted, ‘used to blazewith indignation at any injustice or cruelty’¹⁰– was to prove more lethal to Shaw’s lucrative pedagogic methods than his court case. By the time Dickens came to write his 1848 Preface to the book, he was able to announce, with both pride and satisfaction, that in the decade that had passed since Nicholas Nicklebyhad alerted the world to their existence, nearly all the Yorkshire boarding schools had been forced to close down.

The early Dickens’s determination to scourge the social ills that most enraged him is reflected throughout Nicholas Nicklebyin the character and progress of its hero.¹¹Nicholas is the first, and least interesting, of Dickens’s self-projections, an almost generic leading man, whose actions and ideals are rarely complicated by the kinds of anxiety that motivate the development of David Copperfield or Pip. Like them, he is principally concerned with the business of establishing his identity as a gentleman, which is how he defines himself during his confrontation outside the coffee house with Sir Mulberry Hawk, the vicious aristocrat who has been attempting to seduce Kate:

‘You are an errand-boy for aught I know,’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk.

‘I am the son of a country gentleman,’ returned Nicholas, ‘your equal in birth and education, and your superior I trust in everything besides.’

Nicholas is one of Dickens’s most active heroes. The blood is for ever starting to his cheeks, as, ‘flushed with anger’, he challenges any who affront his acutely developed sense of his own worth. In his 1848 Preface, Dickens insists that Nicholas was not always meant to seem ‘blameless or agreeable’, but there is no doubting the visceral relish with which Dickens dramatizes his violent interventions and defiances. His stagey rhetoric is only a prelude to his taking thrilling, decisive action:

Nicholas sprang upon him [Squeers], wrested the weapon from his hand, and, pinning him by the throat, beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.