"Nicholas Nickleby" and Educational Reform

Abstract

...N OW THAT J. Arthur Rank's motion-picture adaptation of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby has enjoyed a long and successful run in both Great Britain and the United States, interest focuses anew on the unforgettable portrayal of the notorious nineteenth-century Yorkshire schools. Depend upon it, wrote Dickens to Mrs. S. C. Hall before half the novel had appeared serially, the rascalities of the Yorkshire schoolmasters cannot easily be exaggerated, and that I have kept down the strong truth and thrown as much comicality over it as I could. Even as a boy, according to John Forster, the novelist had been shocked by reports of the abuses perpetrated in these cheap boarding schools of the North. It is not surprising, then, that fairly early in his literary career Dickens turned his attention to the deplorable conditions prevalent in these institutions. Though it has been pointed out that William Shaw, the prototype of Wackford Squeers, was unjustly made the victim in Nicholas Nickleby of an attack that should have been leveled at the whole tribe of pedagogues,' the over-all picture of the Yorkshire schools was truly shocking. So profitable were these academies and such freedom did the masters enjoy in the conduct of their affairs that a large number of these institutions sprang up in the first third of the nineteenth