Nicholas Nickleby

From Jill Muller's Introduction toNicholas Nickleby Appropriately dedicated to actor-manager William Macready,Nicholas Nicklebyis the most theatrical of Dickens's novels. The members of the Crummles troupe of provincial players are only the most honest actors in a huge cast of performers: comedians, tragedians, villains and heroes of melodrama, monologists and mimes. Yet the show business exuberance of the novel is shadowed by a constant awareness of the injustice and cruelty of the world offstage. Dickens knew very well that the clown's tomfoolery is sometimes a brittle defense against despair. Indeed while working on the early episodes ofNicholas Nickleby, he was also engaged in editing the memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, the most celebrated clown in early Victorian England. Dickens and Grimaldi had much in common: Both men were driven and insecure, obsessively punctual and neat, and haunted by childhood misery. InNicholas Nickleby, the writer's two sides, comedian and social reformer, coexist in an exhilarating but sometimes uneasy partnership. Scenes of shocking abuse slide into slapstick and farce. Acts of violence and exploitation are performed by hilarious grotesques. Victims and villains are dogged by their comic doubles. Dickens derives the central plot ofNicholas Nicklebyfrom his own primal scene of childhood abandonment. As inOliver Twist, the victim-hero is less interesting than many of the characters he encounters, and the sum of incidents and episodes far more entertaining and memorable than the underlying plot. However, the author has plainly learned from the main fault ofOliver Twist, the passivity and colorlessness of the hero, because this time he divides his experience of childhood suffering between two characters, Nicholas and Smike. Oliver's passivity is bestowed upon Smike, freeing Dickens to place the more dynamic figure of Nicholas at the center of his narrative. Smike, the pitiful, mentally retarded son ofNicholas Nickleby's chief villain, Ralph Nickleby, is abandoned in infancy to the tender mercies of the Squeers family at their Yorkshire boarding school, Dotheboys Hall. Although eventually rescued by Nicholas, he is too damaged to survive. He dies of a combination of tuberculosis and unrequited love. The novel's closing scenes of marriages and pastoral contentment yield to a final contemplation of Smike's grave. The dead boy represents the child victim that Dickens always carried within him, and to whom he would return with still more self-indulgent pathos in the figure of Little Nell in his next novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. Smike's fate is the fate Dickens believed could have been his if he had lacked the energy and talent that propelled him out of poverty to early fame. In Nicholas, Smike's cousin and doppelganger, Dickens presents a more robust victim-hero who succeeds, like his creator, in triumphing over humiliation and misfortune. The eponymous protagonist ofNicholas Nicklebyis a genteel Victorian version of Tom Jones or Roderick Random, the picaresque heroes of Fielding and Smollett, whose stories were Dickens's favorite childhood reading. Young, handsome, and brave, forced by his parents' financial mismanagement to fend for himself in a hostile world, he is also a rather flattering portrait of the artist as a young man. Like Dickens himself, and unlike Smike, Nicholas plays an active role in improving his fortunes; he is clever, resourceful, and quick to defend himself and those he loves from insult or injury. Yet, for all his intelligence and vigor, Nicholas is unable to win back his lost birthright, his identity as a gentleman, without the help of an unconvincing pair of fairy godfathers, the merchant-philanthropists Ned and Charles Cheeryble.Dickens, Charles is the author of 'Nicholas Nickleby ' with ISBN 9781593083007 and ISBN 1593083009.