The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby | Page 3

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This Etext prepared for Project Gutenberg 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,