Nicholas Nickleby
Smike received another box on the ear for presuming to contradict his
mistress, together with a promise of a sound thrashing if he were not
more respectful in future; so that he took nothing very advantageous by
his motion.
‘A most invaluable woman, that, Nickleby,’ said Squeers when his consort
had hurried away, pushing the drudge before her.
‘Indeed, sir!’ observed Nicholas.
‘I don’t know her equal,’ said Squeers; ‘I do not know her equal. That
woman, Nickleby, is always the same--always the same bustling, lively,
active, saving creetur that you see her now.’
Nicholas sighed involuntarily at the thought of the agreeable domestic
prospect thus opened to him; but Squeers was, fortunately, too much
occupied with his own reflections to perceive it.
‘It’s my way to say, when I am up in London,’ continued Squeers, ‘that
to them boys she is a mother. But she is more than a mother to them;
ten times more. She does things for them boys, Nickleby, that I don’t
believe half the mothers going, would do for their own sons.’
‘I should think they would not, sir,’ answered Nicholas.
Now, the fact was, that both Mr. and Mrs. Squeers viewed the boys in the
light of their proper and natural enemies; or, in other words, they held
and considered that their business and profession was to get as much
from every boy as could by possibility be screwed out of him. On this
point they were both agreed, and behaved in unison accordingly. The
only difference between them was, that Mrs. Squeers waged war against
the enemy openly and fearlessly, and that Squeers covered his rascality,
even at home, with a spice of his habitual deceit; as if he really had
a notion of someday or other being able to take himself in, and persuade
his own mind that he was a very good fellow.
‘But come,’ said Squeers, interrupting the progress of some thoughts to
this effect in the mind of his usher, ‘let’s go to the schoolroom; and
lend me a hand with my school-coat, will you?’
Nicholas assisted his master to put on an old fustian shooting-jacket,
which he took down from a peg in the passage; and Squeers, arming
himself with his cane, led the way across a yard, to a door in the rear
of the house.
‘There,’ said the schoolmaster as they stepped in together; ‘this is our
shop, Nickleby!’
It was such a crowded scene, and there were so many objects to attract
attention, that, at first, Nicholas stared about him, really without
seeing anything at all. By degrees, however, the place resolved itself
into a bare and dirty room, with a couple of windows, whereof a
tenth part might be of glass, the remainder being stopped up with old
copy-books and paper. There were a couple of long old rickety desks, cut
and notched, and inked, and damaged, in every possible way; two or three
forms; a detached desk for Squeers; and another for his assistant. The
ceiling was supported, like that of a barn, by cross-beams and rafters;
and the walls were so stained and discoloured, that it was impossible to
tell whether they had ever been touched with paint or whitewash.
But the pupils--the young noblemen! How the last faint traces of hope,
the remotest glimmering of 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 hare-lip, the crooked 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 one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There
were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the
scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of
its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining;
there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like
malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins
of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary
nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every
kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and
healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion
that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in
silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here!
And yet this scene, painful as it was, had its grotesque features,
which, in a less interested observer than Nicholas, might have provoked
a smile. Mrs. Squeers stood at one of the desks, presiding over an
immense basin of brimstone and treacle, of which delicious compound she
administered a large instalment to each boy in succession: using for
the purpose a common wooden spoon, which might have been originally
manufactured for some gigantic top, and which widened every young
gentleman’s mouth considerably: they being all obliged, under heavy
corporal penalties, to take in the whole of the bowl at a gasp. In
another corner, huddled together for companionship, were the little
boys who had arrived on the preceding night, three of them in very large
leather breeches, and two in old trousers, a something tighter fit than
drawers are usually worn; at no great distance from these was seated
the juvenile son and heir of Mr. Squeers--a striking likeness of his
father--kicking, with great vigour, under the hands of Smike, who
was fitting upon him a pair of new boots that bore a most suspicious
resemblance to those which the least of the little boys had worn on
the journey down--as the little boy himself seemed to think, for he
was regarding the appropriation with a look of most rueful amazement.
Besides these, there was a long row of boys waiting, with countenances
of no pleasant anticipation, to be treacled; and another file, who
had just escaped from the infliction, making a variety of wry mouths
indicative of anything but satisfaction. The whole were attired in
such motley, ill-assorted, extraordinary garments, as would have been
irresistibly ridiculous, but for the foul appearance of dirt, disorder,
and disease, with which they were associated.
‘Now,’ said Squeers, giving the desk a great rap with his cane, which
made half the little boys nearly jump out of their boots, ‘is that
physicking over?’
‘Just over,’ said Mrs. Squeers, choking the last boy in her hurry, and
tapping the crown of his head with the wooden spoon to restore him.
‘Here, you Smike; take away now. Look sharp!’
Smike shuffled out with the basin, and Mrs. Squeers having called up a
little boy with a curly head, and wiped her hands upon it, hurried out
after him into a species of wash-house, where there was a small fire and
a large kettle, together with a number of little wooden bowls which were
arranged upon a board.
Into these bowls, Mrs. Squeers, assisted by the hungry servant, poured
a brown composition, which looked like diluted pincushions without
the covers, and was called porridge. A minute wedge of brown bread was
inserted in each bowl, and when they had eaten their porridge by means
of the bread, the boys ate the bread itself, and had finished their
breakfast; whereupon Mr. Squeers said, in a solemn voice, ‘For what we
have received, may the Lord make us truly thankful!’--and went away to
his own.
Nicholas distended his stomach with a bowl of porridge, for much the
same reason which induces some savages to swallow earth--lest they
should be inconveniently hungry when there is nothing to eat. Having
further disposed of a slice of bread and butter, allotted to him in
virtue of his office, he sat himself down, to wait for school-time.
He could not but observe how silent and sad the boys all seemed to be.
There was none of the noise and clamour of a schoolroom; none of
its boisterous play, or hearty mirth. The children sat crouching and
shivering together, and seemed to lack the spirit to move about. The
only pupil who evinced the slightest tendency towards locomotion or
playfulness was Master Squeers, and as his chief amusement was to tread
upon the other boys’ toes in his new boots, his flow of spirits was
rather disagreeable than otherwise.
After some half-hour’s delay, Mr. Squeers reappeared, and the boys took
their places and their books, of which latter commodity the average
might be about one to eight learners. A few minutes having elapsed,
during which Mr. Squeers looked very profound, as if he had a perfect
apprehension of what was inside all the books, and could say every word
of their contents by heart if he only chose to take the trouble, that
gentleman called up the first class.
Obedient to this summons there ranged themselves in front of the
schoolmaster’s desk, half-a-dozen scarecrows, out at knees and elbows,
one of whom placed a torn and filthy book beneath his learned eye.
‘This is the first class in English spelling and philosophy, Nickleby,’
said Squeers, beckoning Nicholas to stand beside him. ‘We’ll get up a
Latin one, and hand that over to you. Now, then, where’s the first boy?’
‘Please, sir, he’s cleaning the back-parlour window,’ said the temporary
head of the philosophical class.
‘So he is, to be sure,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘We go upon the practical mode
of teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean,
verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a
casement. When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. It’s
just the same principle as the use of the globes. Where’s the second
boy?’
‘Please, sir, he’s weeding the garden,’ replied a small voice.
‘To be sure,’ said Squeers, by no means disconcerted. ‘So he is. B-o-t,
bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive,
a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottinney means a
knowledge of plants, he goes and knows ‘em. That’s our system, Nickleby:
what do you think of it?’
‘It’s very useful one, at any rate,’ answered Nicholas.
‘I believe you,’ rejoined Squeers, not remarking the emphasis of his
usher. ‘Third boy, what’s horse?’
‘A beast, sir,’ replied the boy.
‘So it is,’ said Squeers. ‘Ain’t it, Nickleby?’
‘I believe there is no doubt of that, sir,’ answered Nicholas.
‘Of course there isn’t,’ said Squeers. ‘A horse is a quadruped, and
quadruped’s Latin for beast, as everybody that’s gone through the
grammar knows, or else where’s the use of having grammars at all?’
‘Where, indeed!’ said Nicholas abstractedly.
‘As you’re perfect in that,’ resumed Squeers, turning to the boy, ‘go
and look after MY horse, and rub him down well, or I’ll rub you down.
The rest of the class go and draw water up, till somebody tells you
to leave off, for it’s washing-day tomorrow, and they want the coppers
filled.’
So saying, he dismissed the first class to their experiments in
practical philosophy, and eyed Nicholas with a look, half cunning and
half doubtful, as if he were not altogether certain what he might think
of him by this time.
‘That’s the way we do it, Nickleby,’ he said, after a pause.
Nicholas shrugged his shoulders in a manner that was scarcely
perceptible, and said he saw it was.
‘And a very good way it is, too,’ said Squeers. ‘Now, just take them
fourteen little boys and hear them some reading, because, you know, you
must begin to be useful. Idling about here won’t do.’
Mr. Squeers said this, as if it had suddenly occurred to him, either that
he must not say too much to his assistant, or that his assistant did
not say enough to him in praise of the establishment. The children were