"Education. By Mr. Shaw, at Bowes Academy, Greta Bridge, Yorkshire.—Youths are carefully INSTRUCTED in the English, Latin, and Greek languages, common and decimal arithmetic, book-keeping, mensuration, surveying, geometry, geography, and navigation, with the most useful branches of the mathematics, and provided with board, clothes, and every necessary, at 20 guineas per annum each. No extra charges. No vacations. Further particulars may be known on application to.... Mr. Shaw attends at the George and Blue Boar, Holborn, from 12 to 2 daily, where a card of particulars may be seen."
Times, September 18, 1830—
"At Kirby Hill Academy, near Richmond, Yorkshire, conducted by I. Nelson and assistants. The system of instruction comprehends all the usual branches of a liberal education, comprising the Greek and Latin Classics, mathematics, etc., at 22 guineas per annum. No extra charges. No vacation. French language and drawing on the usual terms. I. N. will attend daily at the Saracen's Head, Snow Hill, etc."
In these two advertisements we have, in the first, Greta Bridge and Squeers's prospectus; in the other, his London place of abode, the Saracen's Head, Snow Hill. Bowes is about five miles from Castle Barnard.
Mr. Jonathan Bourchier sends a communication to Notes and Queries (4th S. xii. 324) enclosing extracts from a letter from an old friend who writes from Bowes—
"It is a very fine country—fresh mountain air. Dotheboys Hall is still here, no longer a school. Mr. Shaw, the original of Squeers, married a Miss Laidman, who was a sort of cousin of my father. The school buildings are pulled down, but the house (Dotheboys) is still a very nice handsome one, with large offices, cowhouses, etc. We learn from our landlady that in the room where we are now sitting (Unicorn Inn, Bowes) Dickens had lunch the day he and a friend rode over from Barnard Castle to see and make sketches of Mr. Shaw's school, and this same old lady, Mrs. Highmoor, waited on them. Dickens was only here that day, but he stayed longer in Barnard Castle, and got a great deal of gossip, not too true, about the school from one ——, a quondam usher of Shaw's and 'a bad lot,' who had, indeed, been turned off for bad conduct.
"Mrs. Highmoor tells me, as indeed my father always says, that Dotheboys Hall is a most exaggerated caricature. But somehow the description was in some respects so correct that everybody recognized it. Poor Shaw quite took it to heart, and did no more good, got childish and paralytic, and soon died. The school went down fast. Mrs. Shaw also died broken-hearted. But a good deal of money was left behind. Mrs. Highmoor says there were an immense number of boys; that Mr. Shaw chartered a special coach to bring them from London (this place is on one of the great coaching roads between York and Glasgow); and that there was great joy in the village on the arrival of the coach and its precious freight—quite the event it was. She says the boys were used very well, and fed as well as could be expected for £20 a-year; that there might be things wrong, but no complaints were ever made; that Shaw made money, because on his own farm he grazed the cows and fed the sheep and pigs which supplied the boys' food.
"My impression is that Yorkshire schools were bad, but not so bad as Dickens makes out, and Shaw's was better than most of them. There is a strong feeling here of indignation against Dickens, who no doubt ruined poor Shaw."
"An old pupil of Mr. Squires—the Mr. Squeers of Dickens's 'Nicholas Nickleby'—has died at New Brunswick, leaving behind a record of his schooldays. This is to be published as a sort of post-mortem vindication of Mr. Squires, whose career as a pedagogue was rather unfairly caricatured by the novelist. The old pupil is the Rev. Ralph Willis, a native of London. He went to school at Bowes, in Yorkshire, and it was through his father that Dickens heard of the school. Many of the scenes in the book he describes as inventions; but the moral of the reminiscences is that Squires was not as black as he was painted" (Globe, June 5, 1895).