Dorr, Thomas Wilson

Thomas Wilson (1805-1854), a Rhode Island politician and lawyer. He was a member of the Rhode Island Assembly from 1833-37. He was the leader of the people in a demand for a reform in the state constitution, which had remained unchanged from 1663. Only property holders could vote. Some of the older and smaller towns had more representatives in the legislature than the newer towns having several times their population. Failing to induce the privileged classes who were in power to grant the desired changes, Dorr organized an uprising known in American history as Dorr's Rebellions. It finally assumed such proportions that the United States government interfered and sent a force to suppress him. He was arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was pardoned, however, and died soon afterward a natural death, but not before he had lived to see the desired reforms carried into execution. Without doubt he was a patriotic man of excellent intentions. See Rhode Island

Dotheboys (do-the-boys) Hall, in Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, a school for boys, located in Yorkshire. Of the twenty-eight schools described by Dickens in his various stories none is better known than Dotheboys Hall. Moreover there is no type of school which stood more in need of reform. The schoolmaster is Mr. Squeers, a coarse, brutal, ignorant, self-satisfied man, who not only starves, neglects, and abuses his pupils, but whose methods of giving instruction are so absurd as to be laughable, were not the whole picture so pitiful that amusement is lost in indignation. The boys on certain mornings were dosed with treacle and brimstone,--"To purify their bloods," said Mr. Squeers. "Purify fiddlesticks ends," said his lady. . . . "It spoils their appetites, and comes cheaper than breakfast and dinner."

The breakfast that follows the medicine is "a brown composition which looked like diluted pincushions without the covers, and was called porridge." The pupils are supplied with "one book to eight learners." Mr. Squeers explains his method of instructing the class in "English spelling and philosophy." "We go upon the practical mode of teaching; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of a book he goes and does it. It's just the same principle as the use of globes."

That Dickens' picture of Yorkshire schools was not overdrawn and that he purposely aimed to bring about the reform which resulted from his exposure of existing conditions is clearly shown in the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, from which the following quotation is taken :

It has afforded the author great amusement and satisfaction, during the progress of this work, to learn, from country friends and from a variety of ludicrous statements concerning himself in provincial newspapers, that more than one Yorkshire schoolmaster lays claim to being the original of Mr. Squeers. One worthy, he has reason to believe, has actually consulted authorities learned in the law, as to his having good grounds on which to rest an action for libel. . . . The author's object in calling public attention to the system would be very imperfectly fulfilled, if he did not state now, in his own person, emphatically and earnestly, that Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down, lest they should be deemed impossible--that there are, upon record, trials at law in which damages have been sought as a poor recompense for lasting agonies and disfigurements inflicted upon children by the treatment of the master in these places, involving such offensive and foul details of neglect, cruelty, and disease, as no writer of fiction would have the boldness to imagine.