A boy is sent to teach at a Yorkshire school where the pupils are unwanted children being starved quietly for profit, and the book leaves it for the theater and the road. Dickens visited such a school under a false name before writing; within a few years of publication the Yorkshire schools were closing. Few novels have done as much damage to an industry. Sixty plates by painters including Giuseppe Castiglione and Théodore Ralli turn from the salon and the gallery wall to the church and the schoolroom, the interiors where the young are kept and watched.