Nicholas Nickleby

An advertisement in a London paper offers youth boarded, clothed, instructed in all languages living and dead, terms twenty guineas per annum, diet unparalleled. What waits at the end of the coach road is Dotheboys Hall, where forty boys wear the countenances of old men and are dosed with brimstone and treacle because it spoils the appetite and comes cheaper than breakfast. Dickens went north in a hard winter on a false errand, to see such schools for himself, and the fury never cooled. Yet the same book hands you a strolling theatrical company, a dressmaker's husband who calls the world demd and demnition, and a child actress who has been ten years old for five good years. The laughter never softens the cruelty; it sits beside it, close enough to touch. Read it and you can feel a whole trade of Yorkshire schools starting to die.