Squeers, a past business associate of Ralph’s, agrees to hire Nicholas, who is overjoyed at what he naively believes is his uncle’s kindness. Illegitimate, deformed, or otherwise unwanted boys from poor families were consigned to these places, where insufficient food and harsh treatment led to injuries, as well as many premature deaths. Ralph brings Nicholas to the Dotheboys School for Boys in Yorkshire, having learned from a newspaper advertisement that the headmaster is seeking a ‘‘first assistant master.’’ Dotheboys is a fictionalized version of a type of institution infamous in that era as a ‘‘Yorkshire school,’’ the eradication of which was Dickens’s goal in writing the novel. Squeers, like Noggs, also has only one eye and is of freakish appearance. Wackford Squeers, headmaster of Dotheboys School for Boys in Yorkshire. Ralph, while perceiving Kate’s beauty, takes an instant dislike to Nicholas because he resembles his late father (Ralph’s brother), for whom Ralph feels a scornful envy. Nickleby is weak-minded and easily influenced by anyone with authority. The family’s first meeting with Ralph goes badly. Nickleby, have come to London from their home in the country and are renting rooms while they wait for an audience with Ralph, who, they hope, will help them. Meanwhile the eponymous hero, Nicholas, his sister Kate, and their mother, Mrs. Ralph himself is dressed in a manner suggesting financial stability, and there is ‘‘something in his very wrinkles, and in his cold restless eye, which seemed to tell of cunning that would announce itself in spite of him.’’ This chapter also mocks the British Parliament as it debates the merits of the Muffin Trade, Muffin Boys, and the Muffin System, eventually voting in favor of a muffin monopoly. In Newman’s case, it is due to his ‘‘two goggle eyes, of which one was a fixture’’, his absurdly small clothes, and his incessant knuckle-cracking. Newman is the first of many characters in the novel who is deformed in some way. The scene shifts to the office of the children’s uncle, Ralph Nickleby, in Golden Square, where readers first meet Ralph’s assistant, Newman Noggs, another former gentleman who was ruined through bad investments. He dies a broken man, leaving his wife and two children, Nicholas and Kate, penniless. Cold and miserly Ralph becomes a rich money-lender, while the kinder Nicholas remains poor, eventually investing badly in the stock market and losing what little he has. He buys a farm and raises two sons, Nicholas and Ralph. Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby opens with Nicholas’s grandfather Godfrey Nickleby, who has been driven by poverty almost to the point of suicide, inheriting money from an uncle.
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