Nicholas Nickleby

A young man is sent to teach at a Yorkshire school where the pupils are unwanted children being starved quietly for profit, and the book leaves it for the theater and the road. Dickens visited such a school under a false name before writing; within a few years of publication the Yorkshire schools were closing. Few novels have done as much damage to an industry. Ninety-nine plates spanning 1688 to 1898, including Stubbs and Romney, offer portraits and schoolroom scenes that echo the novel's world of masters and dependents.