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PinkMonkey.com-Nicholas Nickelby by Charles Dickens




12

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


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PinkMonkey.com-Nicholas Nickelby by Charles Dickens



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