CHARLES DICKENS BORN I 8 I Z-DIED I 870 -- Editors x o t e Nicholas Nickleby, zcblished in montMy n m b d ursi. n g 183 and 1839, was the third great Dickens book. Like the first and second, it was written with the printers devil ever at the authors elbow. I must 1 buckle-to again and endeavour to get the steam U, he told Forster. If this were to go 0 long I should bust the boiler. 1 think Mrs. NickJebys love-scene will come ozlt rather unique. That optimism about the foolish but delightful Mm. Nickleby was I justijied also in regard to the whole book. Its two main ideas w beoth successficlly l achieved-the attack on the notorims cheap boarding-schools in Yorkshire, and the picturing of life with a second-rate theatrical touring company, wherein Dicke tss very youthfd e eriences as a writer for the Stage are rejected. In fact, Nicholas Nickleby secured for the author his place in contemporary estimation-as a novekist, and extended his opularity aboad. This edition is printed from the one carefully corrected by the Author in 1867 and 1868. -- 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 assistedto 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 imp sterws ho 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 Eaissez-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 days 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 nesu 8 Preface Rochester Castle, with a head full of PARTRIDGSET, RAPT, OM P IPES, andSANCHPOA NZAb u t I know that my first impressions of then1 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...