What unites a Charles Dickens novel from 1838 and a TV drama that recently aired in Britain?
In 1838, Dickens read an article about the cruelty and neglect of one William Shaw, who ran an academy in Yorkshire where, for £21 per year, boys could be “educated”. There were many such establishments in Yorkshire, some 200 miles north of London, promising a good education at a cheap rate and (somewhat ominously) informing parents that no vacations would be allowed.
All of this appealed to parents who were anxious to get young sons — many of them illegitimate, inconvenient, or deemed “backward” — far from the family home. Some might have thought that their offspring were truly getting a good education, but the reality was that the boys lived in brutal conditions and were often cruelly underfed and poorly clothed. Their “education” was left to unqualified men who often physically abused the boys, who were treated more as unpaid labourers than students. Shaw found himself in court after the parents of several pupils alleged that the boys had gone blind due to the treatment they received at his academy.
Despite this, the Yorkshire schools continued to flourish, and Dickens travelled to Yorkshire to see them for himself. The result was his creation of Dotheboys Hall and its monstrous proprietor, Wackford Squeers, in Nicholas Nickleby. Although the schools had been around for many years, Dickens’ depiction of what went on in these “academies” stirred the public into outrage, so much so that within a very short time the schools were forced to shut down.
In Britain, a TV show depicting a more recent tragedy looks as if it is having the same effect as Dickens’ novel. Mr. Bates vs the Post Office focuses on Alan Bates, who was a subpostmaster in Wales from 1998 to 2003. Subpostmasters are in charge of local post office branches, and in 1999 the Post Office in Britain introduced the Horizon accounting system and software to its hundreds of branches. Almost immediately, subpostmasters began noticing that the system was showing false shortfalls, sometimes for thousands of pounds, and reported their findings.
The Post Office insisted there was nothing wrong with the system, and tried to force subpostmasters to make up the missing amounts. More than 900 people were prosecuted for theft, false accounting, and fraud, resulting in criminal convictions, imprisonment, and bankruptcy for many. People lost their homes and livelihoods, received criminal records, and saw the break-up of their marriages due to the stress; at least four people committed suicide as a result of the Post Office response.
Computer Weekly broke the story about the problems with the system in May 2009, and in November 2009 Bates set up the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. In 2019, after years of trying to get justice, he led a group of 555 subpostmasters to victory in a court action against the Post Office, but only some of the more than 200 false convictions have been overturned. A public inquiry has been grinding along since 2020, stymied by government indifference and by the Post Office, which continued to defend the Horizon system and deny wrongdoing.
Well, all that changed with the broadcast of Mr. Bates, which was written by Gwyneth Hughes. Millions of Britons, suddenly made aware of what has been called the greatest miscarriage of justice in British history, have expressed outrage over the situation, forcing the government to finally propose concrete remedies to swiftly exonerate the falsely accused and compensate them for monies lost.
It’s a long way from an 1838 novel to a 2024 TV series, but never underestimate the power of fiction to expose brutal facts, and bring about justice for those who deserve it and accountability for those who deny it. I have a feeling that Charles Dickens would be proud.
