Smike is one of a series of poorly treated innocents who haunt Dickens' fictive universe. Smike first appears in Dickens' third novel, "Nicholas Nickleby," as a cruelly abused and severely disabled child who is unlucky enough to have been left at a "school" run by the villainous Wackford Squeers. Smike is rescued by the novel's title character and becomes fiercely loyal to him. Only when Smike has died does Nicholas discover that Smike was his own cousin – the son of his scheming uncle, Ralph Nickleby.
