The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby, by
Charles Dickens

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Title: The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: April 27, 2006 [EBook #967]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NICHOLAS NICKLEBY ***

Produced 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