“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!”
- Dotheboys Hall, and the way the boys are treated at it. The worst part? It was based on real schools at the time.
- The entire Squeers family:
- Wackford Squeers. He's a sadistic, cruel bully with one eye, disguised as a schoolmaster who regularly canes, starves, and abuses the boys in his care. The worst part? He's based on a real-life Yorkshire schoolmaster William Shaw.
- His wife, Mrs Squeers, is crueller and even less affectionate to the boys at Dotheboys Hall. While Wackford Squeers kept his cruelty under a pleasant facade when in public, she exercised her cruelty openly while making no attempt to conceal it.
- Young Wackford Squeers, the son of Mr and Mrs Squeers, isn't much better. A Fat Bastard preoccupied with filling his belly as often as he can and bullying his father's boys, to his father's great pride, he is the very definition of Enfant Terrible.
- Fanny Squeers. She appears to be better than her family in that she isn't interested in abusing the boys at Dotheboys Hall, as she is more interested in finding a husband. It's only when Nicholas rebuffs her affections, that she reveals herself to be just as bad as, if not moreso than, her family. She is an extremely selfish, manipulative, and ill-tempered woman who could make Nicholas situation agreeable if he was her friend or husband, but can make his situation difficult if he was her enemy. And since Nicholas rebuffed her, she is as good as her word on making life at Dotheboys difficult for him. And after Nicholas' attack on her father, she writes a letter to his uncle, viciously exaggerating the events in order to slander Nicholas, showing her manipulative side.
- Pretty much everything to do with Sir Mulberry Hawk. He manipulates Lord Verisopht into getting himself into horrendous debt (and is implied to have done it before with other foolish young gentlemen), he obsesses over Kate (who is still quite a young girl), he ends up murdering Lord Verisopht because he can't let go of his desire for Kate and hatred at Nicholas, and he would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for the fact that he ended up losing all of his money and died in a debtor's prison.
- Taken up to eleven in the 1980 stage version where he flat-out attempts to rape Kate on their first meeting (in the book it's more ambiguous). Even his theme music is creepy...
- Kate's entire situation is this as well. This is a young girl who is essentially pimped out by both her uncle and her mother after Nicholas is forced to leave. She is assaulted and essentially stalked by a wealthy and influential man who continuously charms his way into the acquaintance of anyone who might protect her and her numerous pleas for help are either dismissed with "ignore him and he'll go away" (he doesn't) or outright ignored in favour of telling her it's her own fault until she feels completely alone, and someone else has to alert her brother to what's happening because she refuses to "burden" him because, to her, this is just something that happens and she, as a beautiful young girl, has to put up with it. The scariest part? It all seems so horribly contemporary... Fortunately, Nicholas learns of this, and set out to attack the man responsible for her situation and save her from her uncle.
- The very idea of marrying a young girl who can't be older that 17 or 18 to lecherous older gentlemen like Arthur Gride, who is 75 years old, (Sir Mulberry Hawk is more ambiguous in age, since he's described in his first appearance as something older than the young Lord Verisopht, but doesn't elaborate on how old he is, so it could mean that he's just as young as Verisopht, just older than him) is quite disturbing.
