Cheap boarding schools in Yorkshire were advertised in the London papers with an emphasis on no holiday and were a convenient place to dispose of unwanted or illegitimate children. Dickens and his illustrator Hablot Browne traveled incognito to Yorkshire on a fact-finding mission in January 1838. There they encountered William Shaw, headmaster of Bowes Academy, in whose school several boys had died or went blind from mistreatment and neglect.
 
Visiting a cemetery in the area Dickens found the graves of many of the students of these schools and one in particular Dickens said: "put Smike into my head". Smike was the abused inmate of Dotheboys Hall, the fictional school he based on Shaws Bowes Academy in Nicholas Nickleby. The fictional headmaster of Dotheboys Hall, Wackford Squeers, was based on William Shaw.
 
The ignorance of the schoolmaster Squeers is more than a comic exaggeration. Edgar Johnson, in his biography of Dickens, notes that as late as 1851, 2.5% of the schoolmasters and mistresses in private schools signed their census returns with a mark."