Nicholas Nickleby Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Squeers waits at an inn in London for pupils to arrive. He’ll travel with them tomorrow to go to the school in Yorkshire. He’s upset because during the summer, he had 20 prospective students signed up, but only three have shown up. One of those boys sits on his trunk nearby. Squeers examines him, trying to find something the boy is doing wrong, so he can punish him. The boy isn’t doing anything but Squeers boxes his ears anyway. The boy then sneezes, and Squeers knocks him off his trunk for sneezing.

Like Ralph, Squeers seems to believe that the power he holds over others gives him the right to abuse those people. Notably, Squeers goes out of his way to find fault with the boy sitting on the trunk, suggesting that his abuse of the boys doesn’t just come from misguided ideas about discipline but is instead based on an inborn malice and desire to harm people who are vulnerable.

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A man named Mr. Snawley arrives with two children. He says that he’s the boys’ stepfather. Squeers says that many of the boys at the school are from families where the mother has remarried. Snawley thinks the mother will spoil the boys if they stay at home, and he wants Squeers to teach them morality. Squeers assures Snawley that the boys will be well-instructed in all moral concerns and that he’ll keep them at the school until payments stop coming or until they run away. They’ll also only write home once a year, at Christmas, when they’ll say how much they’re enjoying the school. Snawley couldn’t be more pleased. He shakes Squeers’s hand and entrusts the boys to him.

This passage shows that Dotheboys Hall exists, at least in part, as a place where stepparents can send the unwanted children of their spouses’ previous marriages and then forget about those children. Squeers briefly switches into the role of a salesperson when discussing the school, promising that the school teaches edifying lessons about morality when, just moments before, he struck a child for no reason. That irony shows that Squeers is, like the politicians, someone who loudly proclaims his interest in the well-being of others while in reality he is concerned first and foremost with himself.

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Ralph and Nicholas arrive to speak to Squeers. Ralph asks if Squeers remembers him, and Squeers recalls that Ralph paid him on behalf of some parents whose child died at the school. Squeers says that his wife (Mrs. Squeers) especially doted on that child. Ralph says that he’s brought his nephew, Nicholas, as a candidate for the role of Squeers’s assistant. Squeers takes one look at Nicholas and says he doesn’t seem like he would be a good fit. Squeers’s doubts grow even stronger when he learns Nicholas doesn’t have a college degree.

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The death of a child at the school is a foreboding sign about what kinds of things might happen at Dotheboys Hall. Ralph’s involvement with the parents of the child who died could mean that he was acting as a beneficent intermediary between those parents and the school. On the other hand, Ralph’s prior involvement with Squeers and Dotheboys Hall could also reinforce the idea that Ralph, like Squeers, seems to be an untrustworthy character.

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Ralph explains that Nicholas will be motivated because if he’s not successful, then Ralph will stop supporting his mother and sister. Ralph then takes Squeers aside. When they return, Squeers says he’s excited to hire Nicholas. Nicholas is overjoyed. He enthusiastically shakes Ralph’s hand and thanks him for his help. Ralph tells Nicholas to go and pack and also asks him to take some papers to his office. When Nicholas goes to Ralph’s office, he meets Newman. He tells Newman that Ralph secured him a job at Dotheboys Hall. Newman looks ill and begins cracking his knuckles. Nicholas doesn’t know how to interpret Newman’s response. Eventually, he decides that Newman is drunk and leaves.

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In Nicholas’s presence, Ralph explains that he is essentially extorting Nicholas by implicitly threatening his sister’s and mother’s well-being. Ralph’s willingness to say that out in the open suggests that extortion and coercion are part and parcel of how he normally does business. He seems to have become so inured to that approach that he either no longer recognizes that it is immoral, or he doesn’t care. The fact that Squeers changes his tune after Ralph speaks to him in private suggests that Ralph has further engaged in some underhanded dealings to get Nicholas the job.

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Nicholas Nickleby: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis