Nicholas Nickleby

When his father dies penniless, nineteen-year-old Nicholas Nickleby, with his mother and sister Kate, turns for help to his rich uncle Ralph, a cold-hearted moneylender, who sends him to teach at Dotheboys Hall, a Yorkshire school run by the brutal, one-eyed Wackford Squeers, where unwanted boys are starved and beaten. Nicholas rebels, thrashes Squeers and escapes with Smike, a broken young drudge, and they join a travelling theatre company before returning to London to protect Kate from his uncle's schemes.

Charles Dickens visited Yorkshire schools under a false name before writing the novel, published in 1838 and 1839, and his portrait of Squeers helped bring such schools to an end. Full of comedy, including the theatrical Crummles family, it was his third novel, after Oliver Twist. See his life.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.

Published in instalments, books such as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol mixed comedy and social protest.