A NEW CANDIDATE FOR SQUEERS?

On 18 March this year The Observer breathlessly announced that a new 'suspect’ had emerged as the model for Wackford Squeers, when it reported the forthcoming sale at a New York auction of a letter written by Dickens - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/chalrles-dickens-letter-nicholas-nickleby-wackford-squeers. Unfortunately, this was nothing new. The letter, which The Observer claimed “could identify the real-life teacher who inspired the Dotheboys headmaster in Nicholas Nickleby,” referred to a school in Winton, Westmorland (now Cumbria, but not far from Bowes) run by Thomas Twycross. It had been brought to Dickens's attention when Lord Robert Grosvenor sent him a newspaper cutting containing an advertisement for the school in July 1838, part-way through the serialisation of Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens wrote in his letter that he had been unaware of the school (therefore of course knocking on the head the idea that Twycross was the model for Squeers straight away), even though he had visited the area earlier that year. The letter was already well-known to scholars, having been published in Volume 1 of thePilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens in 1982.

Winton Hall was founded in 1834, and appears to have closed down in 1855. The Westmorland poet John close praised the school, and Twycross, in a poem published in 1842, although ironically in November 1842 some local newspapers reported that four boys had run away from the school and ended up in Hull, complaining of Dotheboys-like conditions. However, as with Bowes Academy, and other Yorkshire schools which came to the media's attention, several people came forward in support of Twycross. But even if the conditions at Winton Hall left something to be desired, it is clearly ludicrous to link Twycross with Squeers.

Robert Kirkpatrick, author of Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby and the Yorkshire Schools: Fact v Fiction