posted on 07 May 2025

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Over the past month I have been reading more Charles Dickens – something I have been promising myself I would do for a very long time. This time, after Great Expectations and Bleak House I continued with Nicholas Nickleby.

I’ve never really had a grasp of the chronology of his novels or what distinguishes his early, middle and late phases and so recently have done a bit of background reading. Nicholas Nickleby was his third novel, first serialised in 1838/39. Once I began to look into it properly I was astonished to find that Dickens published five novels – The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge – before he turned thirty. That’s something like 1.25 million words. Dickens apparently said of himself that he was working so furiously in those early years that he sometimes felt he was in danger of ‘busting the boiler’ and some modern critics now seem to acknowledge that it led to work of patchy quality. More on that later. 

It is a bit of a a truism to describe Dickens’ novels as essentially comic in their earliest forms, becoming darker and more serious in intent the later they are, but nonetheless there is some truth in this. Dickens scholar Michael Slater describes them as developing a ‘more savage humour’, which seems a very accurate description. There may always be some humour there, bubbling beneath the surface, but increasingly in the late, great novels it is more securely coupled with Dickens’ scalpel-sharp anger to reveal the great festering injustices of the day and the greed, hypocrisy and self-serving, moralising cant that made those injustices tolerable.

Nicholas Nickleby, then, is about the Nickleby family – or rather, what remains of the Nickleby family: Mrs Nickleby and her son Nicholas and daughter Kate have been left penniless following the death of their father and they make the disastrous decision of seeking help from their only relative, Ralph Nickleby, their father’s older brother. Ralph Nickleby is a usurer, a money-lender who will do anything and everything that will earn him obscene amounts of interest from those whom he considers too stupid or greedy or dim or unfortunate to manage their money as carefully as as he does. He is entirely untroubled by any kind of moral scruple – in fact, considers these and virtually all other human feelings mere impediments to what he sees as his sole responsibility: that of maximising the profit he derives from lending out money.

Amidst a vast gallery of comic characters and incident there are two main strands to the novel. The first is the pretension and hypocrisy of the middle class and lower middle class, and I think Nicholas Nickleby may be a little unusual in that if we regard Mrs Nickleby and her children as broadly speaking its central characters and perhaps the closest thing it has to heroes, they are lashed as furiously for their pretension and snobbery as any characters in the book. And second, there is the bigger ‘social theme’, the appalling industry of private boarding schools which became infamously known as ‘Yorkshire schools’ and which Dickens’ novel was largely responsible for destroying. Yorkshire schools were little more than cheap prison camps at which unwanted children – the ill, the disabled and especially the illegitimate – could be boarded, often in conditions rivalling even those of the punitive workhouses. It was not unusual for children to die at these schools. The reptilian Wackford Squeers is the Yorkshire school master in Nicholas Nickleby, and a more loathsome or predatory creature it would be difficult to imagine. But in fact he was not imagined. Dickens and his regular illustrator Hablot Browne (‘Phiz’) undertook a fact-finding trip to Yorkshire and Squeers was based on a William Shaw, who ran such a school for over twenty years. 

What ‘help’ Ralph Nickleby offers his nephew and niece consists of getting Nicholas a job at Squeers’ Yorkshire school and using Kate as bait to secure the business of Lord Frederick Verisopht and his rapacious friend Sir Mulberry Hawk, two dissolute and licentious gamblers, both of whom are infatuated with Kate.

At this point I will admit that I ran out of steam with Nicholas Nickleby some two hundred pages short of the end. It is an immense novel – well over 900-pages in the Penguin edition – and eventually I found it wearing. I suggested in opening that Dickens’ early work can be of variable quality. Well, despite its inventiveness and the sheer exuberance of its imagining, I do think Nicholas Nickleby illustrates this. Its main weakness, I think, is that Dickens conceived it as a comic novel along the lines of The Pickwick Papers and set out to mine every scrap of humorous potential from its vast gallery of eccentric characters. This is exhausting. But I think worse than this it is also repetitious in that it suffers from a similarity of incident – too many of the same kind of things happen over and over again. And I say this in full awareness that in reading Victorian fiction one needs to abandon modern expectations regarding aesthetic and narrative judgements. This is not always easy and I think there are better causes in which to abandon them.

Nonetheless, I don’t regard it as time wasted. I enjoyed much of what I did read, and have begun to get a better understanding of Dickens’ methods and the overall trajectory of his novels. And when next I’m in the mood for Dickens, I shall make sure that whatever I reach for is one of his later novels.

 

Alun Severn

May 2025

 

Dickens elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

Charles Dickens by George Orwell

 

The Victorian City: Everyday Life In Dickens’ London by Judith Flanders

 

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, abridged for young readers by A.L.Kennedy

 

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens illustrated by Ronald Searle