Cheap boarding schools in Yorkshire were advertised in the London papers with an emphasis on 'no holiday' and were a convenient place to dispose of unwanted or illegitimate children. Dickens and his illustrator Hablot Browne (phiz) traveled incognito to Yorkshire on a fact-finding mission in January 1838. There they encountered William Shaw, headmaster of Bowes Academy, in whose school several boys had died or went blind from mistreatment and neglect.

Visiting a cemetery in the area Dickens found the graves of many of the students of these schools and one in particular Dickens said "put Smike into my head". Smike was the abused inmate of Dotheboys Hall, the fictional school he based on Shaw's Bowes Academy in Nicholas Nickleby. The fictional headmaster of Dotheboys Hall, Wackford Squeers, was based on William Shaw.

The ignorance of the schoolmaster Squeers is more than a comic exaggeration. Edgar Johnson, in his biography of Dickens, notes that as late as 1851, 2.5 per cent of the schoolmasters and mistresses in private schools signed their census returns with a mark.

The theater is central to the plot of Nicholas Nickleby and Dickens dedicated the novel to his friend, distinguished actor and theater manager William Macready.

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Dickens third novel was illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz). Dickens and Browne, traveling under assumed names, visited the notorious boarding schools in Yorkshire to do background research for the novel, which deals with the mistreatment of children sent to these schools. Although the central theme takes on this serious subject, Dickens mixes in some of his best comic writing.

Dickens biographers George Gissing and G.K. Chesterton praised the comic characterization of the novel and Peter Ackroyd, in his biography Dickens, says that Nicholas Nickleby is "perhaps the funniest novel in the English language."

Mini Plot:

Hoping to provide support for his mother and sister after the death of his father Nicholas turns to his uncle Ralph for assistance. Ralph wants nothing to do with his late brother's family and feigns to help Nicholas by securing a position as assistant master at the Dotheboys Hall school in Yorkshire run by unscrupulous Wackford Squeers. Nicholas soon becomes disgusted with Squeer's treatment of his pupils and leaves, giving Squeers a sound thrashing and liberating Smike, whom Squeers has mistreated for years.

Nicholas and Smike move in with Newman Noggs in London and then travel to Portsmouth where they take up acting in Crummles stage company. On hearing of the mistreatment of his sister at the hands of his uncle, Nicholas and Smike return to London. Nicholas secures employment with the philanthropic Cheeryble brothers and later marries Madeline Bray whom he has helped rescue from the evil designs of Ralph and Arthur Gride.

"EDUCATION. -- At Mr Wackford Squeers's Academy, Dotheboys Hall, at the delightful village of Dotheboys, near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, Youth are boarded, clothed, booked, furnished with pocket-money, provided with all necessaries, instructed in all languages living and dead, mathematics, orthography, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry, the use of the globes, algebra, single stick (if required), writing, arithmetic, fortification, and every other branch of classical literature. Terms, twenty guineas per annum. No extras, no vacations, and diet unparalleled. Mr Squeers is in town, and attends daily, from one till four, at the Saracen's Head, Snow Hill. N.B. An able assistant wanted. Annual salary 5 pounds. A Master of Arts would be preferred."

Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect.

There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining.