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
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens a "historic moment". "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners" is an early work of fiction co-authored by Dickens and Wilkie Collins dealing allegorically with the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Patrick Brantlinger regards it as melodramatic and wildly inaccurate. It appeared in the 1857 Christmas number of "Household Words". In "Perils" Dickens describes the "native Sambo", a paradigm of the Indian mutineers, as a "double-dyed traitor, and a most infernal villain" who takes part in a massacre of women and children, in an allusion to the Cawnpore Massacre. Dickens was much incensed by the massacre in which over a hundred English