I can understand a man's dying of a broken neck, or suffering from a broken arm, or a broken head, or a broken leg, or a broken nose but a broken heart!-nonsense, it's the cant of the day. 'Pooh!' said Ralph, 'there's no such thing. Herb Moskovitz presents an overview of the theatrical life of Charles Dickens and his theatrical friends and characters.ĭickens loves to have people die of a broken heart and when Mrs Nickleby says that her husband has succumbed to this malady Ralph Nickleby has an opinion on the subject: Edgar Johnson, in his biography of Dickens, notes that as late as 1851, 2.5 per cent of the schoolmasters and mistresses in private schools signed their census returns with a mark ( Johnson, 1952, p.
The ignorance of the schoolmaster Squeers is more than a comic exaggeration. The fictional headmaster of Dotheboys Hall, Wackford Squeers, was based on William Shaw ( Ackroyd, 1990, p. Smike was the abused inmate of Dotheboys Hall, the fictional school he based on Shaw's Bowes Academy in Nicholas Nickleby. Visiting a cemetery in the area Dickens found the graves of many of the students of these schools and one in particular Dickens said "put Smike into my head". There they encountered William Shaw, headmaster of Bowes Academy, in whose school several boys had died or went blind from mistreatment and neglect. Charles Dickens and his illustrator Hablot Browne phiz) traveled incognito to Yorkshire on a fact-finding mission in January 1838. Cheap boarding schools in Yorkshire were advertised in the London papers with an emphasis on 'no holiday' and were a convenient place to dispose of unwanted or illegitimate children.
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