Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here!

Basic set-up:

Nicholas Nickleby, the hero of Dickens's novel, is sent to Dotheboys Hall, a school for children who have been orphaned or abandoned. The excerpt above is a description of the boys in the school.

Dickens was big on social critique. Many of his novels—from the famous ones like Great Expectations to the not-so-famous ones like The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby—exposed the terrible conditions that many poor people lived in in Victorian society.

In the excerpt above, we have a very explicit description of just how miserable this school for unwanted children is. The children's faces are "pale and haggard," their bodies are deformed, their expressions show anger and misery and suffering. This is not a happy a place.

Dickens is giving us so much detail about the suffering of these children because he wants to critique the way that society treats its orphans. By showing how miserable this place is, and how miserable these children are, he's commenting on what a terrible job Victorian society is doing in looking after its own helpless kids.

There is loads and loads of detail in this excerpt. We really see those children: the face with the "hare-lip," the boy with the "crooked foot," the "lank and bony" bodies.

Realist writers, as we've mentioned, love detail. And that's because it allows them to build a picture for the reader that's true to life. Here, Dickens uses detail not only to create verisimilitude, but to overwhelm the reader with the suffering of these children. He wants us to wake up and and do something about all of those poor, suffering children.