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. “Oh yes,” he said; “there was a pratty big
‘un.” “Was it a good one?” I asked. “Ey!” he said, “it was as good as
anoother; that was a’ a matther of opinion”; and fell to looking at the
fire, staring round the room, and whistling a little. On my reverting to
some other topic that we had been discussing, he recovered immediately;
but, though I tried him again and again, I never approached the question
of the school, even if he were in the middle of a laugh, without
observing that his countenance fell, and that he became uncomfortable.
At last, when we had passed a couple of hours or so, very agreeably, he
suddenly took up his hat, and leaning over the table and looking me
full in the face, said, in a low voice: “Weel, Misther, we’ve been vara
pleasant toogather, and ar’ll spak’ my moind tiv’ee. Dinnot let the
weedur send her lattle boy to yan o’ our school-measthers, while there’s
a harse to hoold in a’ Lunnun, or a gootther to lie asleep in. Ar
wouldn’t mak’ ill words amang my neeburs, and ar speak tiv’ee quiet
loike. But I’m dom’d if ar can gang to bed and not tellee, for weedur’s
sak’, to keep the lattle boy from a’ sike scoondrels while there’s a
harse to hoold in a’ Lunnun, or a gootther to lie asleep in!” Repeating
these words with great heartiness, and with a solemnity on his jolly
face that made it look twice as large as before, he shook hands and went
away. I never saw him afterwards, but I sometimes imagine that I descry
a faint reflection of him in John Browdie.

In reference to these gentry, I may here quote a few words from the
original preface to this book.

“It has afforded the Author great amusement and satisfaction, during the
progress of this work, to learn, from country friends and from a variety
of ludicrous statements concerning himself in provincial newspapers,
that more than one Yorkshire schoolmaster lays claim to being the
original of Mr. Squeers. One worthy, he has reason to believe, has
actually consulted authorities learned in the law, as to his having good
grounds on which to rest an action for libel; another, has meditated a
journey to London, for the express purpose of committing an assault and
battery on his traducer; a third, perfectly remembers being waited on,
last January twelve-month, by two gentlemen, one of whom held him
in conversation while the other took his likeness; and, although Mr.
Squeers has but one eye, and he has two, and the published sketch does
not resemble him (whoever he may be) in any other respect, still he
and all his friends and neighbours know at once for whom it is meant,
because–the character is SO like him.

“While the Author cannot but feel the full force of the compliment thus
conveyed to him, he ventures to suggest that these contentions may arise
from the fact, that Mr. Squeers is the representative of a class, and
not of an individual. Where imposture, ignorance, and brutal cupidity,
are the stock in trade of a small body of men, and one is described
by these characteristics, all his fellows will recognise something
belonging to themselves, and each will have a misgiving that the
portrait is his own.

“The Author’s object in calling public attention to the system would be
very imperfectly fulfilled, if he did not state now, in his own person,
emphatically and earnestly, that Mr. Squeers and his school are faint
and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept
down lest they should be deemed impossible. That there are, upon record,
trials at law in which damages have been sought as a poor recompense
for lasting agonies and disfigurements inflicted upon children by the
treatment of the master in these places, involving such offensive and
foul details of neglect, cruelty, and disease, as no writer of fiction
would have the boldness to imagine. And that, since he has been engaged
upon these Adventures, he has received, from private quarters far beyond
the reach of suspicion or distrust, accounts of atrocities, in the
perpetration of which upon neglected or repudiated children, these
schools have been the main instruments, very far exceeding any that
appear in these pages.”

This comprises all I need say on the subject; except that if I had seen
occasion, I had resolved to reprint a few of these details of legal
proceedings, from certain old newspapers.

One other quotation from the same Preface may serve to introduce a fact
that my readers may think curious.

“To turn to a more pleasant subject, it may be right to say, that
there ARE two characters in this book which are drawn from life. It is
remarkable that what we call the world, which is so very credulous in
what professes to be true, is most incredulous in what professes to be
imaginary; and that, while, every day in real life, it will allow in one
man no blemishes, and in another no virtues, it will seldom admit a
very strongly-marked character, either good or bad, in a fictitious
narrative, to be within the limits of probability. But those who take an
interest in this tale, will be glad to learn that the BROTHERS CHEERYBLE
live; that their liberal charity, their singleness of heart, their
noble nature, and their unbounded benevolence, are no creations of the
Author’s brain; but are prompting every day (and oftenest by stealth)
some munificent and generous deed in that town of which they are the
pride and honour.”

If I were to attempt to sum up the thousands of letters, from all sorts
of people in all sorts of latitudes and climates, which this unlucky
paragraph brought down upon me, I should get into an arithmetical
difficulty from which I could not easily extricate myself. Suffice it
to say, that I believe the applications for loans, gifts, and offices
of profit that I have been requested to forward to the originals of the
BROTHERS CHEERYBLE (with whom I never interchanged any communication
in my life) would have exhausted the combined patronage of all the Lord
Chancellors since the accession of the House of Brunswick, and would
have broken the Rest of the Bank of England.

The Brothers are now dead.

There is only one other point, on which I would desire to offer a
remark. If Nicholas be not always found to be blameless or agreeable, he
is not always intended to appear so. He is a young man of an impetuous
temper and of little or no experience; and I saw no reason why such a
hero should be lifted out of nature.