Nicholas Nickleby

Produced by Donald Lainson





THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY,

containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes,

Uprisings, Downfallings and Complete Career of the Nickelby Family


by Charles Dickens




AUTHOR’S PREFACE


This story was begun, within a few months after the publication of
the completed “Pickwick Papers.” There were, then, a good many cheap
Yorkshire schools in existence. There are very few now.

Of the monstrous neglect of education in England, and the disregard
of it by the State as a means of forming good or bad citizens, and
miserable or happy men, private schools long afforded a notable example.
Although any man who had proved his unfitness for any other occupation
in life, was free, without examination or qualification, to open a
school anywhere; although preparation for the functions he undertook,
was required in the surgeon who assisted to bring a boy into the world,
or might one day assist, perhaps, to send him out of it; in the chemist,
the attorney, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker; the whole
round of crafts and trades, the schoolmaster excepted; and although
schoolmasters, as a race, were the blockheads and impostors who might
naturally be expected to spring from such a state of things, and to
flourish in it; these Yorkshire schoolmasters were the lowest and most
rotten round in the whole ladder. Traders in the avarice, indifference,
or imbecility of parents, and the helplessness of children; ignorant,
sordid, brutal men, to whom few considerate persons would have entrusted
the board and lodging of a horse or a dog; they formed the worthy
cornerstone of a structure, which, for absurdity and a magnificent
high-minded LAISSEZ-ALLER neglect, has rarely been exceeded in the
world.

We hear sometimes of an action for damages against the unqualified
medical practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to
heal it. But, what of the hundreds of thousands of minds that have been
deformed for ever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended to
form them!

I make mention of the race, as of the Yorkshire schoolmasters, in the
past tense. Though it has not yet finally disappeared, it is dwindling
daily. A long day’s work remains to be done about us in the way of
education, Heaven knows; but great improvements and facilities towards
the attainment of a good one, have been furnished, of late years.

I cannot call to mind, now, how I came to hear about Yorkshire schools
when I was a not very robust child, sitting in bye-places near Rochester
Castle, with a head full of PARTRIDGE, STRAP, TOM PIPES, and SANCHO
PANZA; but I know that my first impressions of them were picked up
at that time, and that they were somehow or other connected with a
suppurated abscess that some boy had come home with, in consequence of
his Yorkshire guide, philosopher, and friend, having ripped it open with
an inky pen-knife. The impression made upon me, however made, never left
me. I was always curious about Yorkshire schools--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.

With that intent I went down into Yorkshire before I began this book, in
very severe winter time which is pretty faithfully described herein.
As I wanted to see a schoolmaster or two, and was forewarned that those
gentlemen might, in their modesty, be shy of receiving a visit from the
author of the “Pickwick Papers,” I consulted with a professional friend
who had a Yorkshire connexion, and with whom I concerted a pious fraud.
He gave me some letters of introduction, in the name, I think, of my
travelling companion; they bore reference to a supposititious little boy
who had been left with a widowed mother who didn’t know what to do
with him; the poor lady had thought, as a means of thawing the tardy
compassion of her relations in his behalf, of sending him to a Yorkshire
school; I was the poor lady’s friend, travelling that way; and if
the recipient of the letter could inform me of a school in his
neighbourhood, the writer would be very much obliged.

I went to several places in that part of the country where I understood
the schools to be most plentifully sprinkled, and had no occasion to
deliver a letter until I came to a certain town which shall be nameless.
The person to whom it was addressed, was not at home; but he came down
at night, through the snow, to the inn where I was staying. It was after
dinner; and he needed little persuasion to sit down by the fire in a
warm corner, and take his share of the wine that was on the table.

I am afraid he is dead now. I recollect he was a jovial, ruddy,
broad-faced man; that we got acquainted directly; and that we talked
on all kinds of subjects, except the school, which he showed a great
anxiety to avoid. “Was there any large school near?” I asked him, in
reference to the letter.