VERIFIED HISTORICAL CLAIM

A smell of ironing in Nicholas Nickleby

In Charles Dickens's novel Nicholas Nickleby (1839), a strong smell of ironing fills the little passage of a tailor's house where the family's linen is being got up.

Scope

A depiction in a novel published in 1839; it shows how the scene was written, not a record of a real household, and says nothing about ironing today.

How this was found

Historical text. A published historical text, read on a digitised page; it records what was written when it was published.

Source: historical record · literary work (novel, poem or play).

This describes what kind of text the source is. What the claim itself covers is its scope, above; how SmellBook checked the claim, where it could, is the next section.

How this claim was checked

SmellBook checked this claim against the source's own words, so that the claim says no more than the source says. This checks what the source records, not whether what it records was true.

The statement the claim rests on was found word for word in the text of the cited page or chapter of the digitised source, fetched from the named service, and an editor read that whole text against every part of the claim. The passage is cited by its locator; SmellBook does not reproduce the passage. Source text from Wikisource (transcription of the page).

Historical passage checked

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, p. 230 Printed page 230 is image 282 of the digitised volume.Published 1839, the latest time it can describe; not the present. The passage states no time; the source's publication date is used as the latest possible time it describes. Checked 2026-10-19.