Excerpt from Charles Dickens and the Yorkshire Schools: With His Letter to Mrs. Hall It has always been a subject of keen discussion as to whether Dickens drew the character of Wackford Squeers from a real individual or not, and the question has been ably argued from either side ever since the book first appeared; the balance of opinion inclined to the belief that while, in the words of Dickens' own preface, Mr. Squeers is the representative of a class, and not of an individual, and therefore is a composite creation, he must have had some foundation in fact, and a likely enough prototype was discovered in the person of a Mr. William Shaw, who Was brought into un enviable notoriety through several actions for cruelty to his helpless charges, a few years before Nicholas Nickleby was written; but the controversy did not appear likely to be settled satis factorily either way. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.