Yorkshire Shrines: Dotheboys Hall and Rokeby
Village of Bowes—Dickens—Squeers’s School—The Master and his Family—Haunt of Scott.
Bowes
Dotheboys Hall
From the familiar shrines of Cumberland, the lakeside haunts of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, a journey across a wild moorland region—from whose higher crags we see through the fog-rifts the German Ocean and the Irish Sea—brings us into Gretavale, on the northern border of great Yorkshire. In the upper portion of the valley, among the outlying spurs of the Pennines, the storied Greta flows at the foot of a bleak, treeless hill on whose summit we find the village of Bowes. This was the Lavatræ of the Romans, who for three centuries had here a station, and remains of great Roman works may still be traced in the vicinage; but to the literary pilgrim Bowes is chiefly of interest as representing “the delightful village of Dotheboys” described in Squeers’s advertisement of his school in “Nicholas Nickleby.” The aspect of the village is dreary and desolate in the extreme. A single street, steep and straight, bordered by straggling houses of dull gray stone, extends along the hill, which is crowned by the church and an ancient castle: the dun moors decline steeply on every side, leaving the treeless village dismal and bare and often exposed to a wind “fit to knock a man off his legs,” as Squeers said to Nicholas. In the midst of the village stands a cosy inn, where Dickens for some time lodged and was visited by John Browdie, and where we are shown the wainscoted apartment in which some portion of “Nickleby” was noted. At the time of Dickens’s sojourn here, Bowes was the centre of the pernicious cheap-school system which he came to expose, and half the houses of the village were “academies” similar to that of Squeers: among them one is pointed out as being the place where Cobden was a pupil. But most interesting of all is the large house at the top of the hill which Dickens depicted as Dotheboys Hall,—by which name it was long known among the older dwellers of the place,—a long, heavy, two-storied, dingy structure of stone, with many windows along its front, and presenting, despite its bowering vines and trees, an aspect so chill and cheerless that one can scarcely conceive of a more depressing domicile for the neglected children who once thronged it. Through an archway at one end could be seen the pump which was frozen on the first morning of Nicholas’s stay, and beyond it the garden which, by a surprising mistake, Dickens represents a pupil to be weeding on a freezing winter’s day.
Squeers
A few residents of the neighborhood remember the “measther” of Dotheboys Hall; his name, like Squeers’s, was of one syllable and began with S; in person he was not like Squeers, nor was he an ignorant man. A quondam pupil of the school informed the writer that Johnny S. was fairly drawn as Wackford Squeers, but Miss S. was a young lady of considerable refinement and was in no sense like the spiteful Fanny of the tale. Squeers had the largest of the schools, and, besides rooms in the adjoining house, he hired barns in which to lodge his many pupils. A farm attached to his house was cultivated by the scholars, whose food was chiefly oatmeal: scanty diet and liberal flogging was the portion of all who displeased the master. According to local belief, this school was not so bad as some of its neighbors, and no one of the schools realized all the wretchedness which Dickens portrays; yet, despite the author’s avowal that Squeers was a representative of a class, and not an individual, the popular identification of this school as the typical Dotheboys, and the odium consequent thereupon, wrought its speedy ruin and the death of the master and mistress. The latter result is to be deplored, for the reason that in the case of this pair the abhorrence seems to have been not wholly deserved. Two charges, at least, which affected them most painfully—that of goading the boys to suicide and that of feeding them upon the flesh of diseased cattle—were, by the testimony of their neighbors, unfounded so far as the proprietors of this school were concerned. Relatives of Squeers lately occupied Dotheboys Hall, which had become a farm-house, and other relatives and descendants are respectable denizens of the vicinity. Dickens’s exposure of the schools led to their extinction and to the consignment of Bowes to its present somnolent condition. In the village church-yard lie the lovers whose simultaneous deaths were commemorated by Mallet in “Edwin and Emma.” At Barnard Castle, a few miles away, the prototype of Newman Noggs is still traditionally known, and known as “a gentleman.”
Rokeby
The abounding beauties of the Greta have been painted by Turner and sung by Scott, both frequenters of this vale. From Bowes, a ramble along the lovely stream, between steep tree-shaded banks where it chafes and “greets” over the great rocks, and through mossy dells where it softly murmurs its content, brings us to the demesne of Rokeby, where Scott laid the scene of his famous poem. On every hand amid this region of enchantment, in glade and grove, in riven cliff and headlong torrent, in sunny slope and dingle’s shade, we recognize the poetic imagery of Scott. Every turn reveals some new vista, rendered doubly delightful by the romantic associations with which the great poet has invested it. To the poet himself Greta’s banks were potent allurements, and they were his habitual haunts during his sojourns in the valley. A descendant of the friend whom Scott visited here and to whom the poem is inscribed, points out to us a natural grotto, in the precipitous bank above the stream, where the poet often sat, and where some part of “Rokeby” was pondered and composed amid the scenery it portrays.