A young Dickens at his most Dickens. On his Nicholas Nickleby.
I don’t know why for the longest time I thought that the titular character is named Nickerby instead of Nickleby. Both have got a nice ring to it — a tiny bit of alliteration with the Nicks. Nicholas Nickleby is the last (finished) great Dickens novel that I haven’t put on my shelf, if you discount Barnaby Rudge for whatever reason. Dickens for me, had always been a flawed writer with a repertoire of hits and misses, but none of his hits are massive hits for me. Yet, he has also written some of the most beautiful sentences ever put into the form of the novel.
Even in the final legs of the Dickens collection, because let’s face it, I won’t reread any of his work, I still have a love and hate relationship with the Englishman. Nicholas Nickleby, like many of his novels, is the embodiment of the reasons why I love and hate Dickens. We need to take in mind that Dickens wrote this when he was twenty-six, about the same age Stephen King wrote The Stand. There is denying his talent as a wordsmith, but at this point his storytelling has not fully matured. But you know what? I prefer the young Dickens more than his middle or older versions. Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and now, Nicholas Nickleby.
The fall and rise of the Nicklebys
When the patriarch Nicholas Nickleby died after following his darling wife’s advice to take more financial risks for the sake of posterity, his family was left stranded with no fortune and little connections save the brother-in-law, Ralph Nickleby. Ralph is not a humanitarian however, and has every intention to either dispatch or take advantage of his newlyfound family members.
Nicholas was set up as an assistant to a Yorkshire school run by the dubious Squeers. He found very quickly that the children are living under despicable conditions and were under the constant threat of the headmaster, his wife and his spoiled brat of a son. Needless to say, they underfed and treated Nick like shite as well. But Nick made a friend called Smike, sickly young man now doing odd jobs for Squeers since he’s been supposively orphaned. When Nicholas has an altercation in which he humiliated and physically abused his employer, he scrammed out of Yorkshire. In a strange turn of event, he took up a career in the stage with resounding success.
Meanwhile, Kate was working as an assistant milliner, but she was quickly pushed out as she became the new favourite of the customers, alienating the old hands. Ralph was also planning to groom his niece as a fly trap, so that she’s able to attract unassuming lords to her uncle’s net. This goes awry however, when she got tangled with the slimy Sir Mulberry Hawk. Nicholas was called back to London to support his sister when by chance, he ran into the perpetrators and beat Mulberry Hawk half to death.
In the background, old uncle Ralph is scheming for even greater things. When Arthur Gride, an associate who had a nefarious intention of marrying a girl who was bound to inherit a fund on her maturity, Ralph went all in, but this is only the start of the unwinding of the spool as the thread comes out and Ralph tangles himself in due time, in the dead ends of his schemes. It doesn’t help that Nicholas was also infatuated with the girl and has every intention in saving her honour.
A story worth every Nickleby.
My relationship with Charles Dickens is perhaps best defined as loose acquaintances, who’d know each other pretty well but not necessarily like each other. We’d see each other at different parties, talked our stories through and know those stories back to front. These stories are like snacks: great for the time of the conversation but it may not necessarily leave an impact after the story’s done. And if I don’t meet the dude again in the next party, life goes on.
Dickens stories, after a while, feel like the same old tune. Like Shakespeare, he follows certain tropes unique for his style but beats that to death with a whip: The inheritance to a character of humble status, the coincidences that drives the plot, the damsel in distress and that one annoying fucking character that takes up a hundred pages of dialogue and just wouldn’t shut the fuck up. I’m looking at you Mrs Nickleby. On a side note, she’s also the hidden villain in this story.
But in many ways, Nicholas Nickleby has a cohesion which elevates the conflict between the two main characters: the nephew and his uncle. Nicholas, though a very representation of heroism is deeply flawed in his temperament. We see his actions as brash and potentially damaging even to those who he holds dear. Ralph Nickleby, on the other hand is one of the most intriguing villains in Dickens’s repertoire. Though he is borderline amoral, he shows shades of humanity before he fed his niece to the wolves. At the verge of his death, he regretted that he did not do better for his long, lost son.
There is a shred of humanity which had always to come out from the underbellies of Ralph Nickleby’s soul but had always been suppressed in pursuit of his financial success. Yet, the other side of the coin is also true for Nicholas, despite his ideals and heroic tendencies, he is always one step away from being unhinged and from breaking his morality, not in the pursuit of financial gains but to satisfy violence. We dare say that the friction between the two is that they recognise this contradictory similarity, which makes one despise the other more.
Ralph Nickleby is also one of the most well constructed out of all Dickens villains because of his self-awareness. He is a single-minded man on a very straight but very wrong road. He had known never to contact his brother when he was younger for fear that he is obliged to assist his nephew and niece sometime in the future. He is aware of the flaws of the systems that he would soon take advantage of, the people who he would extract every cent from, metamorphosing his personality likewise. If he had been heroic in the beginning instead of having this single-mindedness, he might have touched on the tragic hero status.
Though the battle between the nephew and the uncle is the core conflict of the novel, it is very much padded by its supporting characters, most of which were not fully developed and quite a few which were donwright unnecessary. On second thought, fully developed is not the right way to put it, but their character development were far from satisfactory. A clear example is Kate, who could be a strong feminist figure but who dwindled after a couple of failed attempts of being employed. Finally, she ended up marrying Frank. After a strong start to stake a claim on herself, she was practically rescued from her situation instead of being able to sustain herself in a feeble capitulation.
However imperfect the characters may be, we take delight in most of these characters. Soapy as they may be, who could argue that the Cheeryble twins are the ideal employers that everybody wished they can work for? Newman Noggs, the poor drunkard who had infinite capacity of compassion took Nicholas out of his den of misery and provided him a shelter to kickstart a new life. There are other delightful characters as there are loathsome ones: Miss La Creevy, John Brodie, the Crummlesses; all with names as unique and caricaturish as Dickens could only muster.
Nicholas Nickleby is also one of the most Shakespearean out of all the Dickens novel, mainly due to the presence of the stage and the mentions of Shakespeare, as Dickens tried to emulate the bard. It is no secret that Dickens had always been infatuated with the theatre, and its influence is the clearest in this novel. Nicholas, who became his own successful playwright and actor was almost Shakespeare reborn before the story took a drastic turn and the facets of the theatre won’t be touched again until the Crumlesses bid their goodbye much later on.
In some ways, I question whether the theatre’s impact on Dickens’s writing has an overall positive impact to his works. Dickens’s characters oftentimes talk as though they were in a play in front of a judging audience, that their words and their actions have to be grandiose instead of subdued, oftentimes the story would as Shakespeare’s plays comedies would: in a fury of marriages, as in the case of Nicholas Nickleby. I think this is why I have never loved a Dickens book: because it just seems too theatrical, the drama too contrived.
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It is a book that is far from perfect, but no Dickens book is. It is still a book which may floor you with its language on occasions and delight you with the interactions of its characters. Here’s a taste of some of that honey prose when our title character was touched by nostalgia towards the end of the novel:
“There was not a lane, or brook, or copse, or cottage near, with which some childish event was not entwined, and back it came upon the mind — as events of childhood do — nothing in itself: perhaps a word, a laugh, a look, some slight distress, a passing thought of fear: and yet more strongly and distinctly marked, and better remembered than the hardest trials or severest sorrows of a year ago.”
