Ramsbottom Grant Arms Hotel in Market Place was the home of William and Daniel Grant, 19th century industrialists closely associated with the rise of the town and reputed to be the inspiration for the Cheeryble brothers in "Nicholas Nickleby" by Charles Dickens. The Grants' employees were paid in tokens that had to be redeemed at a public house owned by the company. The landlord converted the tokens into cash, but only after deducting threepence per person, which had to be spent on beer, a variation on the truck system. A network of roads and railways routed through Ramsbottom allowed for a
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens the behaviour of races to be "fixed"; rather his appeal to "civilization" suggests not biological fixity but the possibility of alteration. However, "Dickens views of racial others, most fully developed in his short fiction, indicate that for him 'savages' functioned as a handy foil against which British national identity could emerge." The "Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature" similarly notes that while Dickens praised middle-class values, William Oddie argues that Dickens's racism "grew progressively more illiberal over the course of his career" particularly after the Indian rebellion. Grace Moore, on the other hand, argues that Dickens, a staunch abolitionist and opponent