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 foreign European cultures and taking his attitude to "colonized people" to "genocidal extremes", albeit based mainly on a vision of British virtue, rather than any concept of heredity. Ledger and Ferneaux do not believe he advocated any form of "scientific racism" regarding heredity – but still had the highest possible antipathy for the lifestyles of native peoples in British colonies, and believed that the sooner they were civilised, the better. Dickens scholar Grace Moore sees Dickens' racism as having abated in his later years, while cultural historian Patrick Brantlinger and journalist William Oddie see it as having intensified. Moore contends