Education without the state has a bad image. It is provided above all, as so often with bad images of the 19th century, by Charles Dickens. In Nicholas Nickleby he turns his attention to schooling and claims that he is describing the sort of conditions that actually existed in a part of Yorkshire.

The young man Nicholas Nickleby becomes an assistant teacher and is appalled by what he finds in Dotheboys Hall. As he looked as the children who he is meant to teach,

How the last traces of hope, the remotest glimmering any good to be derived from his efforts in this den faded from the mind of Nicholas as he looked in dismay around! Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the har -lip, the corked foot and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives, which, from the earliest dawn of infancy had been on horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect...

...What an incipient Hell was breeding here!

It is indeed a Hell that Dickens goes on to describe - of cruelty and greed perpetrated by this school and the apparently ‘unnatural’ parents.

In Oliver Twist, of course, the hero is born in a poor house and treated with utter cruelty.

Then there is the ghastly teacher Gradgrind in Hard Times.

Dickens is the most read author of the 19th century. I love his works, especially A Christmas Carol.

But taking Dickens as a reliable source for understanding conditons in the 19th century - as many people do, who know no better - is as absurd as taking Harry Potter as an accurate guide to contemporary schools in Britain.

First, let us not forget the simple fact that Dickens was writing fiction. Second, in the case of Nicholas Nickleby, people in Yorkshire were so outraged by his calumny against the county that in the second preface, Dickens withdrew and said that he understood that such places no longer existed. It is pretty clear that no such place ever existed at all. Thirdly, Dickens was always writing about England at an earlier time in the 19th century. As we shall see, education changed drastically in that amazing century. To talk about education in, say, 1810 is utterly different to talking about it in 1880. They are like two different countries.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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