Donald Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal immortalised as the "Cheeryble Brothers" in Charles Dickens' book, Nicholas Nickleby. Donald's mother was the sister of the Canadian explorer John Stuart, partner of the North West Company who rose to become Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Smith was educated at Anderson's Free School and on leaving at age sixteen he was apprenticed to become a lawyer in the offices of Robert Watson, Town Clerk of Forres. By the age of eighteen, Smith chose another career path: offered entry into mercantile life at Manchester, and a career in the Indian Civil Service, his choice was to pattern himself
Francis Dickens Rudy Wiebe. In recent decades, Francis Dickens has been depicted as a comic figure. In "W.G. Grace's Last Case" (1984), by William Rushton, in a fantastic plot that includes fictional characters like Jekyll and Hyde and Dr. Watson, Francis Dickens encounters Apache Indians and (anachronistically) meets the famed cricketer of the title during the latter's team's 1872 North American tour. Francis Dickens later was the subject of a comic novel by humorist Eric Nicol, "Dickens of the Mounted" (1989). The book is a series of fictional letters, a mock document purporting to be a record of Dickens's correspondence spanning his