A restored Victorian-era classroom at Queen Street School in Barton-on-Humber, Yorkshire, as it might have been in the 1890s. No evidence for schools like the fictional (?) Dotheboys Hall was uncovered by the painstaking Newcastle Commission of 1859, but the inspector for Yorkshire, Joshua Fitch, still complained of penny-pinching, hidden charges, dull or set-piece lessons with consequent indiscipline, training boys for ‘the world of work’ rather than educating them roundly, and a lack of provision for girls. Dickens had high hopes for State intervention, Sir Joshua did not. Whether the subsequent 150 years has justified Dickens or Sir Joshua is a matter for debate.
Part 1 of 2
‘DRAT the things,’ said the lady, opening the cupboard; ‘I can’t find the school spoon anywhere.’
‘Never mind it, my dear,’ observed Squeers in a soothing manner; ‘it’s of no consequence.’
‘No consequence, why how you talk!’ retorted Mrs Squeers sharply; ‘isn’t it brimstone morning?’
‘I forgot, my dear,’ rejoined Squeers; ‘yes, it certainly is. We purify the boys’ bloods now and then, Nickleby.’
‘Purify fiddlesticks’ ends,’ said his lady. ‘Don’t think, young man, that we go to the expense of flower of brimstone and molasses, just to purify them; because if you think we carry on the business in that way, you’ll find yourself mistaken, and so I tell you plainly.’
‘My dear,’ said Squeers frowning. ‘Hem!’
Part Two
A rack for wooden spoons on a wall at the Rural Architecture Museum of Sanok in Poland. Brimstone and treacle is sulphur, cream of tartar and molasses, and like many folk remedies was curiously insightful. Sulphonamides developed in 1930s Germany were the first antibacterial drugs widely used in medicine, superseded shortly afterwards by the Penicillin discovered by Alexander Fleming and developed by Howard Florey and Norman Heatley.
‘OH! nonsense,’ rejoined Mrs Squeers. ‘If the young man comes to be a teacher here, let him understand, at once, that we don’t want any foolery about the boys. They have the brimstone and treacle, partly because if they hadn’t something or other in the way of medicine they’d be always ailing and giving a world of trouble, and partly because it spoils their appetites and comes cheaper than breakfast and dinner. So, it does them good and us good at the same time, and that’s fair enough I’m sure.’
A vast deal of searching and rummaging ensued, and it proving fruitless, Smike was called in, and pushed by Mrs Squeers, and boxed by Mr Squeers; which course of treatment brightening his intellects, enabled him to suggest that possibly Mrs Squeers might have the spoon in her pocket, as indeed turned out to be the case.*
The Newcastle Commission formed in 1859 was a response to a public anxiety about education stirred in part by Dickens’s vision of Dotheboys Hall. For Joshua (later Sir Joshua) Fitch’s report on private boarding-schools in Yorkshire, see Could Do Better.
