Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens, 1838-39 ★★½

Great Characters, But a Bit of a Mess

Everything that’s right – and wrong – about early Charles Dickens comes to roost in his third novel, less celebrated now but as popular then as anything he wrote. If Nicholas Nickleby often misses the mark for today’s reader, that speaks more to time’s passage than lack of talent.

A big takeaway from reading Nicholas Nickleby, far more than its story or characters: Dickens’s boundless imagination.

Our title character comes to London with his mother and sister Kate, impoverished by the sudden passing of his father. There Nicholas meets his uncle Ralph, an unscrupulous loanshark who takes an immediate dislike to his nephew. Ralph gets Nicholas a job at a Yorkshire boarding school, which clears Ralph’s own path to exploiting pretty Kate.

Can Nicholas preserve his sanity amid the horrors of Dotheboys Hall? Just get a load of what’s on the menu:

“They have the brimstone and treacle, partly because if they hadn’t something or other in the way of medicine they’d be always ailing and giving a world of trouble, and partly because it spoils their appetites and comes cheaper than breakfast and dinner. So it does them good and us good at the same time, and that’s fair enough I’m sure.”

The charming speaker is Mrs. Squeers. She and husband Wackford Squeers, Dotheboys’ one-eyed master, are two of the many villains Nicholas squares off against, their outsized comic rascality dominating the first and best quarter of the narrative. Looking back, it is a surprise to realize how small a portion of total text the Squeers represent.

Mrs. Squeers doles out the medicine at Dotheboys Hall. "The only difference between them was, that Mrs. Squeers waged war against the enemy openly and fearlessly, and that Squeers covered his rascality, even at home, with a spice of his habitual deceit, as if he really had a notion of some day or other being able to take himself in." Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne, or "Phiz," from https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-nicholas-nickleby.html

That’s good as far as the Squeers go (making a powerful impression in a relatively short time), but bad for Nicholas Nickleby.

Returning to London, Nicholas runs a gamut of life experiences that showcase Dickens’ ability to wordpaint different situations and deliver rich humor and insights from each. But the accompanying story staggers with the weight of overt authorial manipulation and contrivance.

The more people Nicholas encounters, the more it turns out they have some unguessed-at secret connection. He walks into one public house to chance upon a drunken conversation about Kate. He walks into another to overhear an argument about a young woman with whom he happens to be in love. That same woman centers unknowingly in a scam being perpetuated by wily old Ralph.

“Why, I don’t believe now,” Dickens has one character exclaim, “that there’s such a place in all the world for coincidences as London is!”

Poster art from the 2002 film version of Nicholas Nickleby, starring Charlie Hunnam as Nicholas and Christopher Plummer as Ralph. Image from https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nicholas-Nickleby-DVD-Charlie-Hunnam/dp/B0000BZND5.

The bathos that threatens at times to engulf Oliver Twist runs deeper still here. Nicholas takes up a companion at Dotheboys Hall, a tragic simpleton named Smike who offers much rumination about man’s inhumanity to man. “In the churchyard we are all alike, but here there are none like me. I am a poor creature, but I know that well,” he sighs.

Smike is mostly a silent presence; Dickens apparently at a loss as to what to do with him other than trot him out whenever Nicholas’ decency needs burnishing. Dickens’ ability to invent singular characters exceeds at times his notions of what to do with them.

For a long interlude, Nicholas and Smike join a traveling theatrical troupe run by Vincent Crummles, where Nicholas earns money writing dialogue for the stage. Crummles & Co. offer a comic highpoint, probably the purest for pure comedy in the story as their stage-fed egos clash, but Nicholas’s sudden reinvention as successful dramatist is one of many times Dickens seems to be throwing what he can into the pot.

Roger Rees as Nicholas and David Threlfall as Smike, in a legendary 1980 Royal Shakespeare Company production. A single performance of the entire play lasted eight and a half hours, running on either successive evenings or a full day with a dinner break in between. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/525795325221846398/?lp=true.  

To be fair, Nicholas Nickleby is a pot crammed with a lot of personality and humor. The characterizations alone are every bit as good as you expect from the boisterous author of The Pickwick Papers:

He was a tough, burly, thick-headed gentleman, with a loud voice, a pompous manner, a tolerable command of sentences with no meaning in them, and in short every requisite for a very good member [of Parliament] indeed…

It may be further remarked, that Miss Knag still aimed at youth, though she had shot beyond it years ago; and that she was weak and vain, and one of those people who are best described by the axiom, that you may trust them as far as you can see them, and no farther…

It was a satisfactory thing to hear that the old gentleman was going to lead a new life, for it was pretty evident that his old one would not last him much longer. The mere exertion of protracted chuckling reduced him to a fearful ebb of coughing and gasping…

Add to this the varied depictions of London – not as grimy as seen in Oliver Twist but rough and tumble all the same – and you have a young artist at the height of his powers. Nicholas Nickleby is a comic novel by an author who knows what his audience wants and how to deliver same. At times, the sheer joy of creation seems to get away from him.

Vincent Crummles bids a theatrical adieu to Nicholas, "inflicting upon him a rapid succession of stage embraces, which, as everybody knows, are performed by the embracer's laying his or her chin on the shoulder of the object of affection, and looking over it." A Phiz illustration from http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/nickleby/19.html.

How else to explain the insufferable Cheeryble brothers? Charles and Ned are prosperous international merchants who take Nicholas under their wing and turn the tide for all good people from ruin to prosperity. Later they are joined by their nephew Frank, every bit as kind-hearted, who takes a special interest in Kate Nickleby.

Dickens may have seen a need to offset the otherwise dismal portrait he paints of English mercantilism at the dawn of the Industrial Age. The Cheerybles are certainly a positive counterweight to devious Ralph Nickleby and the gang of usurers and conmen who hover around him.

But the Cheerybles kill dead any suspense about how Nicholas will extract himself from his uncle’s coils. Money solves everything here.

Ralph Nickleby has the most potential of any character in this book for investing it with real personality. He starts out a cold and material-minded man, then experiences some minor stirrings of conscience. But Nicholas’ solidly-upright manner eventually drives him to a still-blacker path.

Nicholas first meets his uncle Ralph, as his mother and sister look on. Figuring out Ralph's evil nature takes Nicholas an uncommonly long time, given their initial coldness to one another. A Phiz illustration from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Nickleby. 

“As a portion of the world affect to despise the power of money, I must try and show them what it is,” Ralph harrumphs.

This line triggers Ralph’s emergence in the second half as a dedicated villain, his hatred of Nicholas overriding all. Dickens’ idea here seems solid, personifying the harsh nature of capitalist excess, but the coolness and disinterest that once typified Ralph in a realistic way is replaced by stock villainy. I wasn’t looking for a Scrooge-like redemption from Ralph, but how he involves himself in assorted schemes against his nephew were another way the plot felt less organic to me than forced.

My main hesitation against recommending Nicholas Nickleby is its length. Though not Dickens’ longest novel (David Copperfield and Dombey And Son clock in at 357,500 words apiece), Nickleby’s 323,700 words did weigh me down, particularly when Dickens in the second half spends so much of it detailing Nicholas’s preoccupation with propriety in his pursuit of Madeline Bray as well as Kate’s budding romance with Frank Cheeryble. It is here the age of the novel really tells.

Author Charles Dickens, in an 1843 portrait by Margaret Gillies recently rediscovered in South Africa after having disappeared for 174 years. It shows the author in the prime of his youth. Image from https://www.cnn.com/style/article/charles-dickens-portrait-scli-intl/index.html.

The perfection of brother and sister both is indeed stultifying. Even one of Ralph’s company pronounces himself impressed by it:

“I do believe now, upon my honour I do believe, that the sister is as virtuous and modest a young lady as she is a handsome one; and of the brother, I say this, that he acted as her brother should, and in a manly and spirited manner. And I only wish with all my heart and soul that any one of us came out of this matter half as well as he does.”

Dullness never overtakes Nicholas Nickleby. Something engaging or involving is always just around the corner. Whereas Pickwick Papers plays as pure sunlight and Oliver Twist often dark as midnight, Nicholas Nickleby is more in the line of tragicomedy, as with the Dotheboys sequence where the laughs come hard against real human misery.

A poster from the 1947 film adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, which suffered both from a much-condensed plot and unfavorable comparisons to the prior year's adaptation of Great Expectations directed by David Lean. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Adventures_of_Nicholas_Nickleby_(1947_film).

Social justice remains a concern. When it connects, it’s marvelous:

There are some men, who, living with the one object of enriching themselves, no matter by what means, and being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day toward this end, affect nevertheless – even to themselves – a high tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the world.

That’s a counterargument to the inclusion of the Cheerybles, as they offer both Nicholas and the reader an out in the form of real hope in an otherwise cruel world. They don’t add anything to the novel’s comic qualities, but with them around the humor is never quite so black.

The role of female characters for Dickens remains problematic. They are often played here as comic harpies or worse. Dismissive treatment as that is, it works better than the one-note goodness of Kate and Madeline.

In a scene from the 1980 RSC production, Graham Crowden as Vincent Crummles is paired with his daughter (Julie Peasgood), dubbed the "Infant Phenomenon" although her true age is a carefully-guarded mystery. Her small size is attributed to being kept a strict gin-and-water diet by her doting parents. Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/117049683@N05/12590634144/

Most taxing at times is Nicholas’ mother, a pedantic ditz who drones on and on about everything. “…although there was no evil and little real selfishness in Mrs. Nickleby’s heart, she had a weak head and a vain one,” Dickens explains.

But she does entertain us, too; something which can also be said of Nicholas Nickleby as a whole. Not Dickens’ greatest work, but one crammed with comic invention as well as wry observations about life: “Quadruped lions are said to be savage only when they are hungry; biped lions are rarely sulky longer than when their appetite for distinction remains unappeased.”

Nickleby serves as a solid if wobbly stepping stone for author and reader alike in appreciating his unique approach to life and art. Enjoyable more for its parts than its whole, but enjoyable all the same.