Inspiration for Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Tucked into a loop of the broad-flowing Tees, the landscape around Barnard Castle does not look like the setting for cruelty or violence. It's a beautiful market town in a stunning setting. However, in Victorian England, reports of abuse in cheap Yorkshire boarding schools catering for unwanted - often illegitimate - children, started to spread .

It is not surprising then that Charles Dickens turned his attention to the deplorable conditions common in these institutions, denouncing them as examples of "the monstrous neglect of education in England". He must have read about the trial of Shaw’s Academy in Bowes and its headmaster, William Shaw, who had been convicted of negligence against some boys in his care some years earlier. Dickens set off to research the story for his novel Nicholas Nickleby, the story-line of which had been agreed in advance with his publisher. The novel was to serve as a vehicle for exposing the dreadful conditions in the Yorkshire schools.

Depend upon it, that the rascalities of Yorkshire schoolmaters cannot be easily exaggerated, and that I have kept down the strong truth and thrown as much comicality over it as I could.

Charles Dickens on his finished novel Nicholas Nickleby

Together with Hablot K Browne, the illustrator of his books, Dickens travelled from London to Greta Bridge by coach, the journey taking two whole days. It was a severe winter and they arrived at Greta Bridge near Barnard Castle on January 31, 1838. It was a long, cold and tiring journey.

“We reached a bare place with a house standing alone in the midst of a dreary moor which the guard informed us was Greta Bridge. It was fearfully cold and there were no outward signs of anyone being up at the house. But to our great joy we discovered a comfortable room with drawn curtains and a most blazing fire. In half an hour, they gave us a smoking supper and a bottle of mulled port.”

Nearby was the churchyard, an atmospheric place overlooked by the gaunt ruins of Bowes Castle. In the far corner, Dickens found the grave of George Ashton Taylor. The Wiltshire boy never survived Shaw's Academy and died there in 1822. As Dickens read the gravestone, he conceived the character of Smike, the boy who ran away from the horrors of the Hall in Nicholas Nickleby. Smike is a "crushed boy" whose "long and very sad history" is punctuated by "stripes and blows, stripes and blows, morning, noon, and night"  and finds kindness for the first time in his life, with Nicholas.

At the far end of the village, there was an elegant two-storey mansion,  which now bears a wooden plaque: "Dotheboys Hall, immortalised by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby." There, going incognito, the famous author met William Shaw, the headmaster. However, Mr Shaw had discovered who his visitor was and so, when he arrived showed him in at one door, led him straight through the school, and quickly out by another exit.

Dickens had seen enough and was far from pleased by this brusque reception and wrote his story about Nicholas Nickleby and the fictional Dotheboys Hall, with a tyrannical and cruel headmaster called Wackford Squeers. Readers were quick to link fact and fiction, especially as Wackford Squeers had the same initials as William Shaw, and both were blind in one eye. The resultant bad publicity caused parents to withdraw their children from Shaw’s Academy and it closed.

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.

Nicholas Nickleby

If you would be interested in taking a tour around Bowes and hear Charles Dicken's great great grandson, Gerald Dickens,  present “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” in May 2010, look at Barnard Castle Rotary Club for details.