Nicholas Nickleby (Oxford World's Classics) Book

Peter Ackroyd, in his ground-breaking biography of Charles Dickens, says that Nicholas Nickleby is "perhaps the funniest novel in the English language". The complete title of the novel is perhaps a bit of a mouthful,

"The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes, Uprisings, Downfallings and Complete Career of the Nickleby Family".

It was published, as his previous novels had been, in monthly installments, between 1838 and 1839, and the last part was again a double issue. Whilst Dickens was writing this he was between 26 and 27 years of age, and also putting the final touches to his enormously successful "Oliver Twist".

Some of the plot elements, and Dickens's social criticisms, are very much in the vein of "Oliver Twist". Yet in many ways the novel is more similar to his first installment novel, "The Pickwick Papers". It has a comic rather than a tragic feel, and is certainly more lightweight and humorous than "Oliver Twist". It could be classed as ironic social satire, pointing up social injustices, while full of Dickens's taste for absurdity.

The picaresque style of "The Pickwick Papers" recalls very much the earlier 18th century fashion for vignettes, such as those written by Henry Fielding. Although Nicholas Nickleby is held together by a continuing saga, it is still very episodic; subject to shifts in focus, and with such a wealth of characters and subplots that the main thrust of the novel occasionally seems to be lost. However, this episodic feel was still a very popular style of the time. When it was published the book was an immediate success, further establishing Dickens's reputation. Indeed, an engraving of one of the most famous portraits of Dickens, is used as the frontispiece, and is called "the Nickleby Portrait". Charles Dickens sat for this portrait in June 1839, partway through the serialisation of the novel. It was by the artist Daniel Maclise, and had been commissioned by Dickens's publishers, Chapman and Hall.

Nicholas Nickleby is typical of many early English novels, being focused on one person's life, and as such is more of a fictional biography than being especially plot-driven. Unlike his preceding novel, "Oliver Twist", the title character of this is already a young man with family responsibilities at the start of the novel. His future is very uncertain, due to the death of his father, who had made some poor investments. The readers sees that the major conflict in this novel is going to be the struggle of a small family to make their way in the world after suffering a tragic loss. To some extent, this is autobiographical. The Nickleby family are genteel but impoverished. Dickens's own personal struggles and experiences as a young man were similar, since his father had also forfeited his gentility because of financial incompetence.

In Nicholas Nickleby we are introduced to the protagonist's uncle, Ralph Nickleby, very near the beginning. As soon as Ralph comes on the scene we realise this will add spice to the situation. For what a miserable old skinflint he is,

"there was something in his very wrinkles, and in his cold restless eye, which seemed to tell of cunning that would announce itself in spite of him."

Ralph takes against Nicholas right from the start, apparently purely based on envy, because Nicholas is young, bright and open. At this point we realise he is destined to be Nicholas's antagonist. And the warning bells begin to ring when we are told that Ralph Nickleby is unscrupulous in his financial dealings, because Nicholas has turned to his uncle for assistance, hoping for support for his mother and sister after the death of his father.

Very quickly then, we identify Ralph as "the villain of the piece". And Dickens gives full rein to his talent for inventing over-the-top characters, who stay in the mind far longer than the details of the story itself. Who can forget the grotesque headmaster Wackford Squeers, with his,

"one eye when the popular prejudice is in favour of two."

Or Mrs Nickleby with her rapid barrage of discursions which would put Mrs. Bennet of Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" to shame? Or the kindly, generous benefactors, the Cheeryble brothers, Charles and Ned, who have built a thriving business on treating others with respect and compassion. They address each other as "my dear fellow" and not only look and act alike but also dress alike and wear white hats. As well as the main characters there are a myriad of minor eccentric characters in this novel, all of whom are a delight. Blink and you may miss them! The Crummles's family of actors, with their daughter Ninette, the starry "Infant Phenomenon", who at the age of ten had,

"been precisely the same age - not perhaps to the full extent of the memory of the oldest inhabitant, but certainly for five good years. But she had been kept up late every night, and put upon an unlimited allowance of gin-and-water from infancy, to prevent her growing tall, and perhaps this system of training had produced in the infant phenomenon these additional phenomena."

The other actors, unsurprisingly, were none too keen on her privileged position. The leading man Mr Folair termed her the "Infernal Phenomenon"! Then there is Mrs. Mantalini, the astute business-woman who owns a dressmaking and millinery shop, for whom Nicholas's sister Kate is sent to work as a seamstress, and her husband, a foppish fellow with extravagent tastes, given to histrionics and repeated attempts to kill himself. There is the fun-loving but ultimately self-seeking Kenwigs family, the revolting, lusting, scheming old man Arthur Gride, denounced as a wretch and a villain, and the dastardly nobleman whom we all want to boo, Sir Mulberry Hawk.

The names too are typical Dickens whimsy, chosen with an eye to amuse and appeal. "Dotheboys Hall, the vile school where the boys were well and truly "done to", with Wackford Squeers as its headmaster, overkeen on whacking his pupils. Miss Knag - the spiteful forewoman of the dressmakers and milliners. There is Lord Frederick Verisoft - soft of brain - "weak and silly", his friend the Honourable Mr Snobb, and Sir Mulberry Hawk - "the most knowing card in the pack" - who treats everyone, including his "friends", as his prey. The Cheeryble brothers; now who can read their name without smiling? Mrs Wititterly who seems to witter a lot and has "an air of sweet insipidity". There is such a superfluity of names, some in characters who shine brightly for a paragraph or two, and then disappear without trace. There is Mr Crowl, who "utters a low querulous growl", and perhaps the best of the lot, Sir Tumley Snuffim, who is perhaps not such a good doctor if his patients "snuff it"!

All the episodes with these larger than life characters seem tailor-made for the stage. Many of the speeches seem to cry out for an actor's ringing declamation on stage in a 19th century melodrama. Nicholas's way of talking is very stilted, and sadly, this stiff formal kind of language sometimes does alienate the modern reader, such as this, a simple acquiescence,

"It's not in my nature... to resist any entreaty, unless it is to do something positively wrong; and, beyond a feeling of pride, I know nothing which should prevent my doing this. I know nobody here, and nobody knows me. So be it then. I yield."

Dickens does indulge his love of all things theatrical in this novel, with a large part of the action being devoted to scenes in Portsmouth, where Nickleby aka "Mr Johnson" both writes and performs in the acting troupes, much as Dickens himself did. Perhaps this was deliberately so, because he dedicates it to his friend, the distinguished actor and theatre director William Macready. You can see Dickens's love of the theatre in almost every scene here.

But this makes the tragic scenes so much more powerful, because of the contrasting comic scenes. And who, out of the general reading population of the time, would really have stayed with a piece of tragic literature about their contemporaries - including the poorest of them all - had it not been made so hugely entertaining? It's a real rarity for the time, for an author to focus on the lives of such poor people. Noggs and Smike are fully developed characters, but few of Dickens's contemporaries - Thackeray for instance - would bother with them. Dickens is quite deliberately appealing to the common people. He has "the common touch" and Trollope's disparaging nickname for him of "Mr Popular Sentiment" is perhaps not given without a certain amount of malicious envy.

The characters here are very much larger than life characters, but the main characters we are following are more sensitively drawn. Madeline Bray is an heroic, brave character, beautiful and self-sacrificing, going through agonies of mind as she stays loyal to her father depite his despicable deeds. The reader is positively willing for her to have a good end. The character of Smike, the ex-Dotheboys Hall boy, is portrayed in such an affecting way, without resort to sentiment, that Dickens manages to tug at our heart-strings whenever he comes into the action. Then there are those others such as Newman Noggs, whom we know has fallen into the service and clutches of Ralph Nickleby through his own weakness for drink. Yet throughout we are willing him to somehow escape, recognising that here is a man of worth and principle. He is virtually a guardian angel to Nicholas, because of his benevolence and integrity. Dickens makes it abundantly clear to his readers just who are the goodies, and who are the baddies. This is at root an entertainment of a novel, although one very much designed to expose a scandal of the time.

For just as "Oliver Twist" was intended to alert the largest possible audience to the scandal of the workhouses in the light of the recent changes to the Poor Law, Nicholas Nickleby was deliberately written to expose the ugly truth about Yorkshire boarding schools. In the preface to the novel Dickens calls Yorkshire schoolmasters,

"Traders in the avarice, indifference, or imbecility of parents, and the helplessness of children; ignorant, sordid, brutal men, to whom few considerate persons would have entrusted the board and lodging of a horse or a dog"

Then in his second preface, to the 1848 Cheap Edition, he notes that such schools as Dotheboys were common in Yorkshire at the time of writing but had begun to disappear,

"This story was begun, within a few months after the publication of the completed "Pickwick Papers." There were, then, a good many cheap Yorkshire schools in existence. There are very few now."

Such then was the power of a Dickens novel to influence popular opinion. When a great author of such stature and persuasive ability aimed his satirical voice at one social problem after another, both society and Parliament itself rapidly moved to change things. His fiction influenced both public perception and social reform, and this is one of the reasons he is truly a great author.

We know that prior to Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens had seen advertisements in the London papers for cheap boarding schools in Yorkshire. It was stressed that there were "no holidays" from these schools. Dickens's antennae must have gone up, as he knew they were a convenient place to dispose of unwanted or illegitimate children. During the writing of "Oliver Twist" Dickens and his friend, Hablot Browne (who was to illustrate the book) had travelled in secret to Yorkshire to investigate these schools in January 1838. There they met William Shaw, the headmaster of Bowes Academy. The neglect and maltreatment at this notorious school was responsible for the blindness of several boys, and some actually died as a consequence. There is no doubt that Dickens intended the headmaster Wackford Squeers to be a portrayal of William Shaw, and that Dotheboys Hall was Bowes Academy. It became so infamous that "Bowes Academy", eventually (by 1903) became known as "Dotheboys Hall"!

Many of the other characters were also based on real life people. The character of Miss La Crevy, who befriended the Nickleby family, was based on the actual person, Rosa Emma Drummond, who painted a miniature engraved portrait of Dickens on ivory. Dickens had commissioned this, so that he could give it to his fiancee, Catherine Hogarth as an engagement present. Like Miss Drummond, Miss La Creevy, was a good-natured, middle-aged miniature painter, described by Dickens as a "mincing young lady of fifty".

Vincent Crummles and his daughter "The Infant Phenomenon" were based on the actor-manager T. D. Davenport and his nine year old prodigy of a daughter, Jean. "Infant phenomena" were a regular feature of many theatrical shows during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Davenport and his daughter appeared on the Portsmouth stage in March 1837.

Dickens's own mother, Elizabeth Dickens, was the model for Mrs. Nickleby. Luckily for Charles she didn't recognise herself in the character. In fact she asked someone if they, "really believed there ever was such a woman"!

And most surprising and notable of all is that the Cheeryble brothers were based on real life characters too! They are based on two benefactors who were brothers, Daniel and William Grant. They came from Scotland, but settled in Ramsbottom in Greater Manchester (although during Dickens's time, this will have been thought of as part of the county of Lancashire.) Some of the fine houses they built are still there. For instance, St. Andrew's Church from 1832 is also known as Grant's Church. It was originally consecrated as a Scottish Presbyterian Chapel, with a donation of £5,000 by William Grant. The Grant brothers regularly gave money to promising new enterprises and for education, supporting schools, libraries and the charitable institutions, and when homes and farmlands on Speyside were swept away by floods in 1829, gave £100 to swell "The Flood Fund". Dickens was keen to make sure everyone knew of these remarkable pair. This is from his preface, in May, 1848,

"It may be right to say that there are 2 characters in this book which are drawn from life. Those who take an interest in this tale will be glad to learn that the Brothers Cheeryble do live; that their liberal charity, their singleness of heart, noble nature and unbounded benevolence are no creatures of the author's brain, but are prompting every day some munificent and generous deed in that town of which they are the pride and honour."

He was writing at breakneck speed again. "Oliver Twist" had overlapped "The Pickwick Papers" by 10 months, and when he started "Nicholas Nickleby", "Oliver Twist" was still a long way from being completed. So perhaps the persuasive writing he was so keen on, the social conscience he displayed in his writing in the early part of this novel, feels very familiar, because it was written on the same days as the latter half of Oliver Twist. He was also, of course, doing his editing work too. Dickens seemed to delight in working under pressure at high speed!

What the reader takes away from this novel is mainly a memory of the dramatic, eccentric and unique characters, although probably only a fraction of the total proliferation stay with us. We may remember the plot too. Yet credit should also be given to Dickens's masterly powers of description, which are also very apparent in Nicholas Nickleby. Often Dickens will exaggerate for effect, or use personification, or even the pathetic fallacy, where he is keen to convey a mood. He is adept at attributing human qualities and emotions to inanimate objects.

Here's a wonderful description of Arthur Gride,

"a little old man, of about seventy or seventy-five years of age, of a very lean figure, much bent and slightly twisted. He wore... such scanty trousers as displayed his shrunken spindle-shanks in their full ugliness...His nose and chin were sharp and prominent, his jaws had fallen inwards from loss of teeth, his face was shrivelled and yellow, save where the cheeks were streaked with the colour of a dry winter apple; and where his beard had been, there lingered yet a few grey tufts which seemed, like the ragged eyebrows, to denote the badness of the soil from which they sprung. The whole air and attitude of the form was one of stealthy cat-like obsequiousness; the whole expression of the face was concentrated in a wrinkled leer, compounded of cunning, lecherousness, slyness, and avarice."

And here is his house,

"an old house, dismal dark and dusty, which seemed to have withered, like himself, and to have grown yellow and shrivelled in hoarding him from the light of day, as he had in hoarding his money... Meagre old chairs and tables, of spare and bony make, and hard and cold as misers' hearts, were ranged, in grim array, against the gloomy walls; attenuated presses, grown lank and lantern-jawed in guarding the treasures they enclosed, and tottering, as though from constant fear and dread of thieves, shrunk up in dark corners, whence they cast no shadows on the ground, and seemed to hide and cower from observation."

Arthur Gride's house, thus seems to take on the aspect of a living creature itself, as though the essence of its inhabitant had oozed into the very fibres of the house and its contents. Of course it is exaggerated and whimsical rather than realistic, but it is brilliantly described.

Here's another example, where a different house is described. It feels less organic, but holds more of a portent. Kate Nickleby has this to say of the house Ralph acquires for them,

"This house depresses and chills one and seems as if some blight had fallen on it. If I were superstitious, I should be almost inclined to believe that some dreadful crime had been perpetrated within these old walls, and that the place had never prospered since. How frowning and how dark it looks!"

So this house seems to foreshadow the sinister plans that Ralph has for Kate. Both of these to me show Dickens's supreme craft as a writer.

Nicholas Nickleby is partly a "bildungsroman" - a story about the coming of age of the main character - and partly a social commentary on injustice. The maltreatment of children in the educational system features highly throughout, with Dickens using all the tricks of the trade to persuade his readers; pathos, comedy, satire, and powerful storytelling. He also employs coincidences, which we all love in life, and melodrama, which heightened the entertainment value at the time it was written. As well as focusing on the private Yorkshire poor schools, savagely condemning those responsible for the system that treated children so cruelly, it also indicts those who use fraudulent financial tactics and other dishonest business practices. There is certainly a memorable plot, and it could be thought of as "Three Weddings and a Funeral" - but there are two funerals here, and they are poles apart. They are both highly dramatic and tragic, because they are ultimately both avoidable.

So is it the funniest novel in the English language? Well it all depends on your taste. It is possibly the funniest novel ever written by Dickens himself. Yet it is also extremely poignant, sad, chilling, bitter and (it has to be said) overblown and melodramatic. It is by turns absurd, comic, tragic and moving. It is quintessentially Charles Dickens. If you love Dickens, you'll love this one - don't miss it!