The disappearance from our newspapers of strings of “Education”
advertisements of Schools with low tariffs in Yorkshire, shows the
effect of satiric humour in correcting abuses of our own time. The
dietary of a school in Yorkshire, barmecide breakfasts and dinners, was
often held up _in terrorem_ to refractory boys, who heard the threat of
“I’ll send you to Yorkshire,” with fear and trembling. Mr. Dickens gives
an admirable exposure of this Spartan system in his tale of _Nicholas
Nickleby_, in the preface to which he says:
I cannot call to mind now how I came to hear about Yorkshire
schools, when I was not a very robust child, sitting in bye places,
near Rochester Castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom
Pipes, and Sancho Panza; but I know that my first impressions of
them 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 penknife.
Before the book was written, Mr. Dickens went into Yorkshire to look for
a school in which the imaginary boy of an imaginary widow might be put
away until the thawing of a tardy compassion in that widow’s imaginary
friends. Then some stern realities were seen; and we are told also, in
the preface, of a supper with a real John Browdie, whose answer as to
the search for a cheap Yorkshire schoolmaster was, “Dom’d if ar can gang
to bed and not tellee, for weedur’s sak’, to keep the lattle boy from a’
sike scoundrels, while there’s a harse to hoold in a’ London, or a
goother to lie asleep in!”