WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

Nicholas Nickleby

CHARLES DICKENS

Introduction and Notes by Dr T. C. B. Cook

Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz)

Following the success of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby was hailed as a comic triumph and firmly established Dickens as a "literary gentleman". It has a full supporting cast of delectable characters that range from the iniquitous Wackford Squeers and his family, to the delightful Mrs Nickleby, taking in the eccentric Crummies and his travelling players, the Mantalinis, the Kenwigs and many more. Combining these with typically Dickensian elements of burlesque and farce, the novel is eminently suited to dramatic adaptation. So great was its impact as it left Dickens' pen that many pirated versions appeared in print and on stage before the original was even finished.

Often neglected by critics, Nicholas Nickleby has never ceased to delight readers and is widely regarded as one of the greatest comic masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION	XII
BIBLIOGRAPHY	XXV
AUTHOR'S PREFACE	3

I	Introduces all the rest	9
II	Of Mr Ralph Nickleby, and his establishment, and his undertakings, and of a great joint-stock company of vast national importance	13
III	Mr Ralph Nickleby receives sad tidings of his brother, but bears up nobly against the intelligence communicated to him. The reader is informed how he liked Nicholas, who is herein introduced, and how kindly he proposed to make his fortune at once	24
IV	Nicholas and his uncle (to secure the fortune without loss of time) wait upon Mr Wackford Squeers, the Yorkshire schoolmaster	35
V	Nicholas starts for Yorkshire. Of his leave-taking and his fellow-travellers, and what befell them on the road	47
VI	In which the occurrence of the accident mentioned in the last chapter, affords an opportunity to a couple of gentlemen to tell stories against each other	58
VII	Mr and Mrs Squeers at home	79
VIII	Of the internal economy of Dotheboys Hall	86
IX	Of Miss Squeers, Mrs Squeers, Master Squeers, and Mr Squeers; and of various matters and persons connected no less with the Squeerses than Nicholas Nickleby	98
X	How Mr Ralph Nickleby provided for his niece and sister-in-law	112
XI	Newman Noggs inducts Mrs and Miss Nickleby into their new dwelling in the City	126
XII	Whereby the reader will be enabled to trace the further course of Miss Fanny Squeers's love, and to ascertain whether it ran smooth or otherwise	132
XIII	Nicholas varies the monotony of Dothebys Hall by a most vigorous and remarkable proceeding, which leads to consequences of some importance	142
XIV	Having the misfortune to treat of none but common people, is necessarily of a mean and vulgar character	155
XV	Acquaints the reader with the cause and origin of the interruption described in the last chapter, and with some other matters necessary to be known	166
XVI	Nicholas seeks to employ himself in a new capacity, and, being unsuccessful, accepts an engagement as tutor in a private family	177
XVII	Follows the fortunes of Miss Nickleby	196
XVIII	Miss Knag, after doting on Kate Nickleby for three whole days, makes up her mind to hate her for evermore. The causes which led Miss Knag to form this resolution	206
XIX	Descriptive of a dinner at Mr Ralph Nickleby's, and of the manner in which the company entertained themselves, before dinner, at dinner, and after dinner	218
XX	Wherein Nicholas at length encounters his uncle, to whom he expresses his sentiments with much candour. His resolution	233
XXI	Madam Mantalini finds herself in a situation of some difficulty, and Miss Nickleby finds herself in no situation at all	244
XXII	Nicholas, accompanied by Smike, sallies forth to seek his fortune. He encounters Mr Vincent Crummles; and who he was, is herein made manifest	257
XXIII	Treats of the company of Mr Vincent Crummles, and of his affairs, domestic and theatrical	272
XIV	Of the great bespeak for Miss Snevellicci, and the first appearance of Nicholas upon any stage	283
XXV	Concerning a young lady from London, who joins the company, and an elderly admirer who follows in her train; with an affecting ceremony consequent on their arrival	299
XXVI	Is fraught with some danger to Miss Nickleby's peace of mind	312
XXVII	Mrs Nickleby becomes acquainted with Messrs Pyke and Pluck, whose affection and interest are beyond all bounds	322
XXVIII	Miss Nickleby, rendered desperate by the persecution of Sir Mulberry Hawk, and the complicated difficulties and distresses which surround her, appeals, as a last resource, to her uncle for protection	336
XXIX	Of the proceedings of Nicholas, and certain internal divisions in the company of Mr Vincent Crummles	351
XXX	Festivities are held in honour of Nicholas, who suddenly withdraws himself from the society of Mr Vincent Crummles and his theatrical companions	360
XXXI	Of Ralph Nickleby and Newman Noggs, and some wise precautions, the success or failure of which will appear in the sequel	374
XXXII	Relating chiefly to some remarkable conversation, and some remarkable proceedings to which it gives rise	382
XXXIII	In which Mr Ralph Nickleby is relieved, by a very expeditious process, from all commerce with his relations	392
XXXIV	Wherein Mr Ralph Nickleby is visited by persons with whom the reader has been already made acquainted	399
XXXV	Smike becomes known to Mrs Nickleby and Kate. Nicholas also meets with new acquaintances, and brighter days seem to dawn upon the family	414
XXXVI	Private and confidential; relating to family matters. Showing how Mr Kenwigs underwent violent agitation, and how Mrs Kenwigs was as well as could be expected	429
XXXVII	Nicholas finds further favour in the eyes of the brothers Cheeryble and Mr Timothy Linkinwater. The brothers give a banquet on a great annual occasion. Nicholas, on returning home from it, receives a mysterious and important disclosure from the lips of Mrs Nickleby	438
XXXVIII	Comprises certain particulars arising out of a visit of condolence, which may prove important hereafter. Smike unexpectedly encounters a very old friend, who invites him to his house, and will take no denial	454
XXXIX	In which another old friend encounters Smike, very opportunely and to some purpose	468
XL	In which Nicholas falls in love. He employs a mediator, whose proceedings are crowned with unexpected success, excepting in one solitary particular	477
XLI	Containing some romantic passages between Mrs Nickleby and the gentleman in the small-clothes next door	493
XLII	Illustrative of the convivial sentiment, that the best of friends must sometimes part	505
XLIII	Officiates as a kind of gentleman usher, in bringing various people together	516
XLIV	Mr Ralph Nickleby cuts an old acquaintance. It would also appear from the contents hereof, that a joke, even between husband and wife, may be sometimes carried too far	528
XLV	Containing matter of a surprising kind	543
XLVI	Throws some light upon Nicholas's love; but whether for good or evil the reader must determine	555
XLVII	Mr Ralph Nickleby has some confidential intercourse with another old friend. They concert between them a project, which promises well for both	569
XLVIII	Being for the benefit of Mr Vincent Crummles, and positively his last appearance on this stage	584
XLIX	Chronicles the further proceedings of the Nickleby family, and the sequel of the adventure of the gentleman in the small clothes	594
L	Involves a serious catastrophe	609
LI	The project of Mr Ralph Nickleby and his friend approaching a successful issue, becomes unexpectedly known to another party, not admitted into their confidence	622
LII	Nicholas despairs of rescuing Madeline Bray, but plucks up his spirits again, and determines to attempt it. Domestic intelligence of the Kenwigses and Lillyvicks	633
LIII	Containing the farther progress of the plot contrived by Mr Ralph Nickleby and Mr Arthur Gride	645
LIV	The crisis of the project, and its result	660
LV	Of family matters, cares, hopes, disappointments, and sorrows	671
LVI	Ralph Nickleby, baffled by his nephew in his late design, hatches a scheme of retaliation which accident suggests to him, and takes into his counsels a tried auxiliary	682
LVII	How Ralph Nickleby's auxiliary went about his work, and how he prospered with it	693
LVIII	In which one scene of this history is closed	704
LIX	The plots begin to fail, and doubts and dangers to disturb the plotter	710
LX	The dangers thicken, and the worst is told	723
LXI	Wherein Nicholas and his sister forfeit the good opinion of all worldly and prudent people	733
LXII	Ralph makes one last appointment - and keeps it	742
LXIII	The brothers Cheeryble make various declarations for themselves and others. Tim Linkinwater makes a declaration for himself	747
LXIV	An old acquaintance is recognised under melancholy circumstances, and Dotheboys Hall breaks up for ever	757
LXV	Conclusion	767

NOTES

771

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write broad-ranging, jargon-free Introductions and to provide Notes that would assist the understanding of our readers, rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Advisor
KEITH CARABINE
Rutherford College
University of Kent at Canterbury

INTRODUCTION

Genesis and literary ancestry

By the time he began Nicholas Nickleby in 1838 Dickens was already a celebrity thanks to the great success of his Sketches by Boz (1833-6) and his two earlier novels The Pickwick Papers (1836-7) and Oliver Twist (1837-8). In Pickwick he had already, amongst other targets, satirised the law and Parliamentary corruption. In Oliver Twist he had dealt memorably with the brutal exploitation of children by the adult world, whether by officialdom, in the shape of institutions such as the workhouse, or by criminals, ranging from fraudsters to burglars such as Bill Sikes and fences such as Fagin.

The maltreatment of children was something that particularly enraged Dickens. His feelings were given a particular edge by his own childhood experiences in the blacking warehouse where he was sent to work by his parents when, thanks to his father's debts, they could not afford to educate him. He never forgot the miserable time he endured there, keeping the bitter memory secret for years, and he never forgave his mother, who wanted to keep him there against his remorseful Micawber-like father's wishes. It is no surprise, therefore, that his novels are full of unsatisfactory mothers, of whom the widowed Mrs Nickleby is the supreme, unforgettably derided example.

He had heard about the hideous treatment of unwanted children in certain schools in Yorkshire long before he became a writer, and the memory clearly suggested to him one major target for satire. As he tells us in his own preface, he researched for the project by actually visiting Yorkshire and interviewing people there, including the headmaster William Shaw, whose initials and lack of an eye are shared with his fictional reincarnation in the cruel and ignorant head of Dotheboys Hall, Wackford Squeers.

The pages in which Dotheboys Hall and its setting are described are amongst the most vivid in Dickens's writings, with its savagely comic portraits of Squeers himself and his equally unpleasant family. We meet his even more callous wife, his grossly spoilt bully of a son and his ugly but vain and self-deluding daughter Fanny, whose unrequited passion for Nicholas and bitchy relationship with her friend 'Tilda Price provide us with some splendid comic moments. But this humour is always qualified and put in context by the descriptions of the sufferings of their victims, and especially of the tortures inflicted on the mentally retarded nineteen-year-old Smike, a character perhaps inspired by the tombstone to a nineteen-year-old pupil of William Shaw's that Dickens had seen when visiting his academy near Greta Bridge.

The grotesque and pathetic figure of Smike, still wearing the boy's clothes in which he arrived when dumped at Dotheboys Hall by a mysterious stranger, immediately captures the reader's sympathy. We cheer Nicholas on when his exasperation at the cruelties inflicted on the boy drive him to seize Squeers' weapon and turn it on the teacher himself. But for those who know the novels by Smollett and Fielding that inspired Dickens himself as a young boy, the incident reminds us strongly of Nicholas Nickleby's literary antecedents. One of his favourite novels was Smollett's Roderick Random (1748), a work filled with grotesque characters, one a hated schoolmaster who is beaten by his pupils. Physical violence of this kind in a hero figure, described enthusiastically by the author, is common in Smollett but increasingly less so in Dickens as his art matured.

Roderick Random and another of Dickens's favourite novels, Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), both belong partly to the picaresque tradition in the history of the early novel. This involves the use of a hero, often something of a rogue, who sets out on his travels accompanied by a less intelligent, socially inferior acquaintance, and has a variety of adventures in which different facets of society are satirised. The situations vary, but the pattern is repeated many times in the eighteenth century, and indeed its origins go back to one of the greatest of all novels, another Dickens favourite, Don Quixote. These novels often use inset stories told by people the hero meets on his travels, stories that seem to have little to do with the main novel, though they may be thematically connected with it in some way. In Chapter VI of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens imitates this practice.

Another element which Dickens takes over from his predecessors and uses more than once in his plots is that of the child of unknown origin who ultimately turns out to be the long lost or unknown child or close relation of a principal character. He had already of course used this motif in Oliver Twist. His originality lies in the different uses he makes of the patterns he revives: for example, there is a world of difference between Smike and Tom Jones's companion Partridge or Roderick Random's Strap.

Nicholas himself, upright and good-hearted, if occasionally over hasty in his actions, has much in common also with past literary heroes: he is a less violent Roderick Random, or a Tom Jones born in wedlock and without the sex drive. Unlike some of Dickens's later heroes such as Pip in Great Expectations (1860-1) or the eponymous hero of David Copperfield (1849-50), a novel incorporating much from Dickens's own life, he does not really develop in character during the story, any more than do the heroes of fairy stories, another shaping influence on Dickens's imagination. He and the other people in the novel are, to use E. M. Forster's definition, "flat characters". ¹

It is from the fairy-tale world that many of Dickens's villains are recognisably drawn: Fagin in Oliver Twist as an evil wizard in his den transforming small boys into thieves, Bill Sikes as an ogre figure and Wackford Squeers as another, both terrifying small boys, as in Great Expectations the convict Magwitch was to do. Magwitch, however, undergoes late in the novel the kind of transformation in the reader's eyes that the mature Dickens could achieve, but which was at this time beyond his powers. Like Nicholas, Dickens's villains in Nicholas Nickleby remain unchanged throughout. Ralph is a combination of the wicked uncle of fairy story with the stock figure of the miser, sacrificing everything to his avarice, who recurs constantly in drama from Classical comedy to Victorian melodrama.

It is true that, at the end of the book, Ralph may seem to repent and punish himself for the past evils he has inflicted, and it is true also that he is occasionally softened by contact with Kate Nickleby, to the extent at one point of rescuing her from the attentions of Sir Mulberry Hawk. His death, however, can be seen as the result of his fundamentally selfish despair at his involvement in the destruction of his own bloodline in Smike, his genetic suicide in other words, coupled with the fact of his displacement as his unknown son's "parent" by his hated nephew, the son of the brother whose values and generosity of spirit he despised. On the other hand his occasional stirrings of sympathy for Kate simply throw his villainy into sharper relief, since he persists with his plans to use her as pawn in his money-making games. The fact that a fictional villain has a moral sense, however deeply suppressed, makes any ultimate come-uppance he receives more just. One thinks of Milton's Satan. Dickens, of course, may have intended us to infer that there was a sexual element in Ralph's feelings, though the inhibiting influence of Victorian morality would have prevented him from making this explicit.

Ralph's associates in villainy, Sir Mulberry Hawk and Arthur Gride, the fellow miser to whom he is perfectly prepared to sacrifice that other female victim, Madeline Bray, so demonstrating his total lack of real human feeling, are even more purely stereotypical than he is. Sir Mulberry is a Regency rake, following on in a long tradition of unscrupulous would-be seducers of young women traceable back through Fielding's Lord Fellamar in Tom Jones and Lovelace in Richardson's Clarissa to the Restoration drama of Wycherley and Congreve. Even in Fielding's novel the character is a stock type, and by Dickens's time the tradition was too well worn for originality to be possible.

Nicholas Nickleby, like all Dickens's novels, was initially published in serial form, with his public waiting eagerly for the next month's instalment, rather as the modern television audience awaits its weekly dose of soap opera. In his early novels this serial publication is reflected in the rather loose episodic structure of the work. One has a strong sense in Nickleby of the author thinking, "What shall I entertain my readership with next month?" and then drawing on his own experience for yet more material. Most of the original sections end on a note of suspense, designed to leave the readership eager for the sequel.

There are points, too, at which the plotting is a little too obvious, even crude. The book is full of unlikely coincidences (see note to p. 497). The evil businessman uncle is parallelled by the generous fairy-godfather twins, who are themselves benign uncles to Frank, and Ralph's beaten-down clerk, the "decayed gentleman" Newman Noggs, has a counterpart in the well-treated Cheeryble employee Tim Linkinwater, who seems firmly lower-middle-class in origin. At the end of the book, the story of Madeline Bray and Arthur Gride and the arrival of Frank Cheeryble on the scene seem too clearly contrived to provide a conventionally happy matrimonial ending to the story. Finally, just as in the novels of his admired predecessor Fielding, the author is always intruding into the novel, commenting like a dramatic chorus on the action and characters rather than letting them speak for themselves. However, few readers carried along on the stream of Dickens's comic inventiveness will care about such signs of his creative immaturity, or what Miriam Allott has called somewhat patronisingly his "embarrassingly naïve" moral assumptions. ²

The political context

So much for the literary ancestry and structure of Nicholas Nickleby, which, combined with elements drawn from Dickens's own experience, helped to produce the novel we have. Most writers of novels work into them a good deal of autobiographical material, and some, like James Joyce, base their early work largely on their own lives. In Dickens's case the world had to wait for years before he had come to terms with his bitter memories enough to produce, in David Copperfield, his own equivalent of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Nickleby he borrows ideas from his reading but enlivens and expands his work with vivid pictures derived from his work as an extremely observant journalist and parliamentary reporter. They are pictures in which his own political sympathies as a self-made man with liberal but far from revolutionary views about Victorian society are very clear.

In 1832, six years before Dickens started work on Nicholas Nickleby, Parliament had passed the first of the great Reform Acts which began the political transformation of Britain into the democracy based on universal franchise that exists today. That act gave many middle-class men the vote, and reflected the increasing power of their class, whose enthusiasm and approval of his work was to ensure Dickens's future status and success. Its values, too, helped to define, and in some ways to restrict, the range of his subject matter.

As the son of a struggling civil servant John Dickens, a well-meaning, even lovable man, but financially incompetent and therefore constantly at the mercy of his creditors, Dickens developed a hatred for moneylenders living off the misfortunes of others. Ralph Nickleby the usurer (as he describes himself - a point missed by some critics who think he is given no occupation), with financial profit as his only motive, is just one of many Dickensian villains representing what Edward Heath once called "the unacceptable face of capitalism". Dickens possibly never heard of Emmanuel Kant, but he would certainly have agreed with the great moral philosopher's dictum that the basis of morality was to treat other people as ends in themselves rather than as means to an end, which of course is the way that Ralph treats his niece Kate when her father's death puts her in his power.

However, Dickens, beginning Nicholas Nickleby just over ten years before the publication of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, was certainly no thorough-going opponent of the social system of his day, however much his satire might attack individuals typical of those prominent in the power structure of mid-nineteenth-century England. At about the time he finished Nickleby, the People's Charter was first presented to Parliament, initiating the Chartist movement, which sought to improve the position of the working classes, and beginning a tradition of political agitation which was to alarm the middle classes and remind them of the excesses of the French Revolution. Those excesses would later be portrayed by Dickens in an extremely hostile manner in A Tale of Two Cities. Indeed, shortly after completing Nickleby itself, he was to demonstrate his horror of mob violence and fanaticism in his novel about the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of the 1780s, Barnaby Rudge.

The exploited children of Nicholas Nickleby are of course middle class in origin, since they were the rejected or illegitimate offspring or relations of people who could afford the modest fees demanded by the Yorkshire schools for keeping them in misery. However, even they seem to become sinister and threatening once they unite into a mob after the final downfall of Squeers and set about the destruction of the school.

Indeed, as George Orwell has pointed out, in his well-known essay on Dickens, although in Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby Dickens's horror at the maltreatment of children is clear, and although, as we have seen, he bitterly resented his own subjection as a bright middle-class child to the indignities of the blacking warehouse, he does not condemn the fact that working-class children were part of the Victorian labour force. ³

It was certainly not mass action or universal male franchise, let alone one that included women, that Dickens saw as bringing about solutions to the social problems of his time. Rather, it was the encouragement of a very traditional kind of individual benevolence and charity on the part of the privileged, a point of view that has much in common with the utopian expectations of certain politicians today that philanthropic businessmen can make up for the lack of adequate state support for the poor. Dickens himself was deeply impressed by the charitable activities of the Grant brothers of Manchester, the models for the brothers Cheeryble. At the end of the novel, through the patronage of those two fairy godfathers, Nicholas himself becomes a rich and evidently benign but clearly conservative (with a small c) businessman, living in what Orwell describes as Dickens's ideal of "featherbed respectability". ⁴

In fact Dickens's vision of the just society would probably be one in which the still very powerful aristocracy of the mid-nineteenth century was replaced by a dominant class of self-made businessmen dedicated to helping those less fortunate than themselves. As someone who had lived mainly in London and other urban environments he had little knowledge of the landed gentry, and his work in general shows that, though he seems to have admired the monarchy, he had little respect for others privileged by their birth. In Nicholas Nickleby itself, as mentioned, the baronet Sir Mulberry Hawk is a sexually predatory parasite, while his exploited patron Lord Frederick Verisopht, even though he dies honourably in a duel over Kate, obeying an already obsolete code of aristocratic behaviour, is given a name that unsubtly indicates what the young Dickens felt about aristocratic decadence.

While he may have been horrified by the violence of the French Revolution, he clearly understood the hatred of long oppressed people for their aristocratic rulers. On the other hand, his experiences as a parliamentary reporter had given him no faith at all in the ability or integrity of politicians in Britain's evolving democracy. One of the most memorable short scenes in the book is Nicholas's interview for the post of secretary to the MP Mr Gregsbury, a figure still very recognisable to us today, since he is far more concerned for his own career, image and prosperity than for any moral or political principles.

Women in the Nickleby world

The female character that most people remember from Nicholas Nickleby, long after they have finished the novel, is almost certainly Mrs Nickleby herself, based, as we have seen, to some extent on Dickens's own not much loved mother. Indeed Dickens may well be indicating what his mother thought of his own profession as writer when, in conversation with Mrs Wititterley in Chapter XXVII, Mrs Nickleby says that she was pregnant with Nicholas when visiting Stratford, and that "it was quite a mercy, ma'am, that my son didn't turn out to be a Shakespeare, and what a dreadful thing that would have been."

We have little idea of her physical appearance, but we know what to expect whenever she opens her mouth: a series of rambling reminiscences of the past, often anecdotes about acquaintances, which help to support her optimism about the future of her children. Her utterances are usually irrelevant in the context in which they are made, since she lives in a world of her own, utterly insensitive to the reactions of the people around her, who pay her monologues very little attention. Nevertheless, they have a kind of scatty charm which adds vastly to the comic texture of the novel as a whole.

Indeed one of the major, much discussed, sources of Dickens's humour is the way in which he shows us people behaving with almost mechanical predictability. We are soon made familiar with their idiosycracies and become almost impatient for the next occasion when they will delight us with their foibles and eccentricities. As with Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin or today's Basil Fawlty, we always know partly what to expect. It is in the variations enclosed within a repeated comic structure that the brilliance of the writer or comedian makes itself felt.

As a virtually penniless widow, in a society with no state help to support her financially, Mrs Nickleby is forced to turn, since her son Nicholas is not yet earning his own living, to her husband's successful brother, Ralph. Her one asset is her pretty daughter Kate, a potentially valuable commodity, whose monetary worth Ralph is quick to recognize and exploit in pursuit of the profits that are his own main interest in life.

Ralph sees Kate as ideal bait to attract rich prey, a sexual object rather than a person. Similarly, in the sub-plot designed to provide Nicholas towards the end of the novel with a suitable mate, Madeline Bray is almost sacrificed by her debtor father for money to the miser Arthur Gride, who is keen to satisfy the senile lust he has for her but more importantly for the property he illegally stands to gain from having her. To Ralph Nickleby Madeline's reluctant, but ultimately willing, proposed sexual self-sacrifice is a trivial matter, since he tells her she will be a rich woman after Gride's death, which she will not have long to wait for. He leaves unspoken the fact that at that time a rich woman's fortune passed into the control of her husband, so that upon remarriage Madeline would be as much a victim of the dominant patriarchy as ever. The Married Women's Property Act was still far off in the future.

Ralph plans to achieve the profit he seeks to make through Kate as cheaply as possible. Instead of accommodating the women in his own roomy house, he finds them dingy lodgings and expects Kate to earn her keep. This presented another problem, since there was little respectable employment available for young and impoverished unmarried women, not only in Dickens's day but for most of the nineteenth century. One possibility was that of becoming a lady's companion or governess in a well-off household. Another was to work in the nineteenth-century equivalent of the high-class fashion boutique. Kate tries two of these possibilities and suffers many indignities as a result before her problems as an unsupported woman are solved, in the traditional fictional way, by Frank Cheeryble and matrimony.

Dickens does, of course, show us, in the diminutive and fundamentally good-hearted Miss La Creevy, a single woman trying to survive less conventionally, by working as a miniaturist. However her taste, in the shape of her colour sense, with her liking for salmon-pink flesh tones, is implicitly mocked, as are her views on art, and we do not feel that the world will miss her painterly talents when her creator tidies her up by marrying her off, somewhat surprisingly, at the end of the novel, to Tim Linkinwater.

As a literary character, Kate is relatively undeveloped. Like her mother, but for a shorter time, she tries to be optimistic about Ralph Nickleby and his motives. She shows natural embarrassment and discomfort when sexually harassed, and, though she is never put under the same pressure as heroines in some eighteenth-century novels, she would clearly defend her virtue with the spirit that literary heroines were expected to show. Indeed she is not really presented as having any sexual desires at all. In this she differs from those eighteenth-century predecessors.

We do however have a highly comic, if cruel, version of female desire in the person of Fanny Squeers, the headmaster's unattractive daughter, who falls in love with Nicholas at first sight and loses no opportunity to demonstrate her affection and her hope of becoming his bride. True, she is also motivated by a wish to compete with her prettier friend, Miss Price, who has successfully landed the boorish but good-hearted young Yorkshire farmer, John Browdie. But there is no doubt of the strength of her feelings, and the depth of her bitterness when she is disillusioned comes out in the comic but pathetic letter she writes to Ralph Nickleby after Nicholas's violent end to his career at Dotheboys Hall. Here are the final semi-literate paragraphs, after she has described Nicholas's attack on her parents, with an all too revealing postscript:

Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I hope will excuse mistakes.

The monster having sasiatied his thirst for blood ran away, taking with him a boy of desperate character that he had excited to rebellyon, and a garnet ring belonging to my ma, and not having been apprehended by the constables is supposed to have been took up by some stage-coach. My pa begs that if he comes to you the ring may be returned, and that you will let the thief and assassin go, as if we prosecuted him he would only be transported, and if he is let go he is sure to be hung before long which will save us trouble and be much more satisfactory. Hoping to hear from you when convenient

I remain

Yours and cetrer

FANNY SQUEERS

P.S. I pity his ignorance and despise him.

Another possible variation on the theme of desire could be found in the relationship between the unprepossessing Miss Knag, who supervises the young women employed by Madame Mantalini, and Kate Nickleby. It is a totally one-sided relationship certainly, but one in which Miss Knag's interest in Kate seems to go well beyond friendship - until, that is, she feels her own position threatened by the preference of rich customers for Kate's assistance with their fashionable attire. Although such attachments were hardly recognised in Dickens's day for what they were, a modern readership may well look beneath the surface of the keen observation of human relationships from which he drew his material.

Madam Mantalini herself remains not much more than a sketchy figure. Although the business and responsibility for it are hers, she is, until she finally rebels, another female victim, constantly provoked by her husband's philandering and extravagance with her money and constantly placated by him in an affected voice, presented phonetically with great comic success by Dickens. There is more satiric force in the portrayal of Kate's other employer, Mrs Wititterly, an indolent middle-class lady with pretensions to culture and what she thinks is a deeply sensitive soul. Her real taste in literature, though, is for "silver fork" romances with aristocratic characters that appeal to her snobbery, and Shakespeare, though a "delicious creature", is too strong for the fragile constitution that her indulgent husband makes it his business to protect. Finally, lower down the social scale, there is the harassed Mrs Kenwigs, similarly delicate in constitution, but forced by circumstances to manage a large family with minimal help and at the same time to flatter and spoil the one person who may eventually relieve their penury, her uncle - the water-rate collector Mr Lillyvick.

Dickens does, then, show considerable awareness of the vulnerability of women at the time he was writing, but, as with his portrayal of society in general, he suggests no solution other than greater benevolence on the part of of those with power - in this case, the husbands and other male relations who, legally and financially, dominated that rigidly patriarchal society.

Dickens and the theatre

In the modern world, a Kate Nickleby might have thought of becoming an actress. In the nineteenth century, however, even a Ralph Nickleby would have dismissed that as unthinkable, though things had moved on since Elizabethan times when unlicensed actors were liable to be arrested and imprisoned. Actresses especially were often assumed to have doubtful morals and ostracised socially. It is true that Dickens makes one, Henrietta Petowker, abandon her stuffy husband, Mr Lillyvick, for love, but she abandons his money too and has actually been married partly for her own salary. Otherwise the women in the company from Miss Snevellicci to the Infant Phenomenon are represented with great, if amused, affection.

Indeed Dickens shows no sign of anti-theatrical prejudices, having loved actors and the stage since he was a boy. Though he was not successful himself as a playwright, he was a keen participator in amateur dramatics. He appreciated some, though certainly not all,⁵ of the adaptations of his novels that appeared on the stage, and later in his career gave dramatic readings of scenes from his writing to enthusiastic audiences. Nickleby itself is dedicated to the actor-manager William Macready, by then a friend of the author, while Vincent Crummies and the Infant Phenomenon may be based on a father-daughter stage partnership⁶ Dickens encountered in Portsmouth.

The sections in which Crummies and his troupe appear with their various characteristics and foibles are amongst the most hilarious in an often very funny novel. They also tell us much about the somewhat low-brow taste of early Victorian audiences for melodrama, variety and pantomime. They worked extremely well as scenes in the memorable RSC production of David Edgar's splendid dramatisation in 1981, when a brilliant cast in multiple roles brought to life over eighty named characters and several more nameless ones, showing how easily this most theatrical of novels could be transferred to the stage

The fact that the theatre episodes themselves are barely integrated into the action of the novel as a whole may seem to some to limit its artistic worth. For most readers, though, they enhance Nicholas Nickleby's value as a highly successful and varied entertainment which is also a powerful attack on cruelty and materialism, reflecting the despair of Dickens as he contemplates contemporary Victorian society. This despair finds its most concentrated expression in a long passage in Chapter LIII describing Nicholas's despondent thoughts about the world. Then there are those unforgettable scenes at Dotheboys Hall, which became one of the most popular of Dickens's dramatic readings. They remind us today of me moral indignation that inspired his writing and of the darkness of a world that desperately needed the light relief of a Crummles performance and the humour of Dickensian comedy.

DR TIM COOK

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

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.

Of the monstrous neglect of education in England, and the disregard of it by the State as a means of forming good or bad citizens, and miserable or happy men, this class of schools long afforded a notable example. Although any man who had proved his unfitness for any other occupation in life, was free, without examination or qualification, to open a school anywhere; although preparation for the functions he undertook, was required in the surgeon who assisted to bring a boy into the world, or might one day assist, perhaps, to send him out of it, - in the chemist, the attorney, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, - the whole round of crafts and trades, the schoolmaster excepted; and although schoolmasters, as a race, were the blockheads and impostors that might naturally be expected to arise from such a state of things, and to flourish in it; these Yorkshire schoolmasters were the lowest and most rotten round in the whole ladder. 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 intrusted the board and lodging of a horse or a dog; they formed the worthy corner-stone of a structure, which for absurdity and a magnificent high-handed laissez-aller neglect, has rarely been exceeded in the world.

We hear sometimes of an action for damages against the unqualified medical practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to heal it. But, what about the hundreds of thousands of minds that have been deformed for ever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended to form them?

I make mention of the race, as of the Yorkshire schoolmasters, in the past tense. Though it has not yet finally disappeared, it is dwindling daily. A long day's work remains to be done about us in the way of education, Heaven knows; but great improvements and facilities towards the attainment of a good one have been furnished, of late years, to those who can afford to pay for it.

I cannot call to mind, now, how I came to hear about Yorkshire schools when I was a not very robust child, sitting in by-places, near Rochester Castle, with a head full of PARTRIDGE, STRAP, TOM PIPES, and SANCHO PANZA; but, I know that my first impressions of them were picked up at that time, and that they were, somehow or other, connected with a suppurated abscess that some boy had come home with, in consequence of his Yorkshire guide, philosopher, and friend, having ripped it open with an inky penknife. The impression made upon me, however made, never left me. I was always curious about them - fell, long afterwards, and at sundry times, into the way of hearing more about them - at last, having an audience, resolved to write about them.

With that intent I went down into Yorkshire before I began this book, in very severe winter-time which is pretty faithfully described herein. As I wanted to see a schoolmaster or two, and was forewarned that those gentlemen might, in their modesty, be shy of receiving a visit from me, I consulted with a professional friend here, who had a Yorkshire connection, and with whom I concerted a pious fraud. He gave me some letters of introduction, in the name, I think, of my travelling companion; they bore reference to a supposititious little boy who had been left with a widowed mother who didn't know what to do with him; the poor lady had thought, as a means of thawing the tardy compassion of her relations in his behalf, of sending him to a Yorkshire school; I was the poor lady's friend, travelling that way; and if the recipient of the letter could inform me of a school in his neighbourhood, the writer would be very much obliged.

I went to several places in that part of the country where I understood these schools to be plentifully sprinkled, and had no occasion to deliver a letter until I came to a certain town which shall be nameless. The person to whom it was addressed was not at home; but, he came down at night, through the snow, to the inn where I was staying. It was after dinner; and he needed little persuasion to sit down by the fire in a warm corner, and take his share of the wine that was on the table.

I am afraid he is dead now. I recollect he was a jovial, ruddy, broad-faced man; that we got acquainted directly, and that we talked on all kinds of subjects, except the school, which he showed a great anxiety to avoid. Was there any large school near? I asked him, in reference to the letter. "Oh yes," he said; "there was a pratty big 'un." "Was it a good one?" I asked. "Ey!" he said, "it was as good as anoother; that was a' a matther of opinion;" and fell to looking at the fire, staring round the room, and whistling a little. On my reverting to some other topic that we had been discussing, he recovered immediately; but, though I tried him again and again, I never approached the question of the school, even if he were in the middle of a laugh, without observing that his countenance fell, and that he became uncomfortable. At last, when we had passed a couple of hours or so agreeably, he suddenly took up his hat, and leaning over the table and looking me full in the face, said, in a low voice: "Weel, Misther, we've been vary pleasant toogather, and ar'll spak' my moind tiv'ee. Dinnot let the weedur send her lattle boy to yan o' our schoolmeasthers, while there's a harse to hoold in a' Lunnun, or a gootther to lie asleep in. Ar wouldn't mak' ill words amang my neeburs, and ar speak tiv'ee quiet loike. But I'm dom'd if ar can gang to bed and not tell'ee, for weedur's sak', to keep the lattle boy from a' sike scoondrels while there's a harse to hoold in a' Lunnun, or a gootther to lie asleep in!" Repeating these words with great heartiness, and with a solemnity on his jolly face that made it look twice as large as before, he shook hands and went away. I never saw him afterwards, but I sometimes imagine that I descry a faint reflection of him in John Browdie.

In reference to these gentry, I may here quote a few words from the original Preface to this book.

"It has afforded the Author great amusement and satisfaction, during the progress of this work, to learn, from country friends and from a variety of ludicrous statements concerning himself in provincial newspapers, that more than one Yorkshire schoolmaster lays claim to being the original of Mr Squeers. One worthy, he has reason to believe, has actually consulted authorities learned in the law, as to his having good grounds on which to rest an action for libel; another has meditated a journey to London, for the express purpose of committing an assault and battery on his traducer; a third, perfectly remembers being waited on, last January twelvemonth, by two gentlemen, one of whom held him in conversation while the other took his likeness; and, although Mr Squeers has but one eye, and he has two, and the published sketch does not resemble him (whoever he may be) in any other respect, still he and all his friends and neighbours know at once for whom it is meant, because - the character is so like him.

"While the Author cannot but feel the full force of the compliment thus conveyed to him, he ventures to suggest that these contentions may arise from the fact, that Mr Squeers is the representative of a class, and not of an individual. Where imposture, ignorance, and brutal cupidity, are the stock in trade or a small body of men, and one is described by these characteristics, all his fellows will recognise something belonging to themselves, and each will have a misgiving that the portrait is his own.

"The Author's object in calling public attention to the system would be very imperfectly fulfilled, if he did not state now, in his own person, emphatically and earnestly, that Mr Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down, lest they should be deemed impossible - that there are, upon record, trials at law in which damages have been sought as a poor recompense for lasting agonies and disfigurements inflicted upon children by the treatment of the master in these places, involving such offensive and foul details of neglect, cruelty, and disease, as no writer of fiction would have the boldness to imagine - and that, since he has been engaged upon these Adventures, he has received, from private quarters far beyond the reach of suspicion or distrust, accounts of atrocities, in the perpetration of which, upon neglected or repudiated children, these schools have been the main instruments, very far exceeding any that appear in these pages."

This comprises all I need say on the subject; except that, if I had seen occasion, I had resolved to reprint a few of these details of legal proceedings, from certain old newspapers.

One other quotation from the same Preface may serve to introduce a fact that my readers may think curious.

"To turn to a more pleasant subject, it may be right to say, that there are two characters in this book which are drawn from life. It is remarkable that what we call the world, which is so very credulous in what professes to be true, is most incredulous in what professes to be imaginary; and that, while, every day in real life, it will allow in one man no blemishes, and in another no virtues, it will seldom admit a very strongly marked character, either good or bad, in a fictitious narrative, to be within the limits of probability. But, those who take an interest in this tale will be glad to learn that the BROTHERS CHEERYBLE live; that their liberal charity, their singleness of heart, their noble nature, and their unbounded benevolence, are no creations of the Author's brain; but are prompting every day (and oftenest by stealth) some munificent and generous deed in that town of which they are the pride and honour."

If I were to attempt to sum up the hundreds upon hundreds of letters, from all sorts of people in all sorts of latitudes and climates, to which this unlucky paragraph has since given rise, I should get into an arithmetical difficulty from which I could not easily extricate myself.

Suffice it to say, that I believe the applications for loans, gifts, and offices of profit which I have been requested to forward to the originals of the BROTHERS CHEERYBLE (with whom I never interchanged any communication in my life), would have exhausted the combined patronage of all the Lord Chancellors since the accession of the House of Brunswick, and would have broken the Rest of the Bank of England.

There is only one other point on which I would desire to offer a remark. If Nicholas be not always found to be blameless or agreeable, he is not always intended to appear so. He is a young man of an impetuous temper and of little or no experience; and I saw no reason why such a hero should be lifted out of nature.

1 see E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, pp. 75-81

2 see M. Allott, Novelists on the Novel, p. 34

3 George Orwell, "Charles Dickens" (see Bibliography) pp. 450-460

4 Orwell, op. cit, p. 490

5 See Johnson's account of Dickens's agony at seeing an appalling production of Oliver Twist (Johnson, Charles Dickens, p. 141)

6 that of the actor manager T. J. Davenport and his daughter Jean; see under the characters' names in The Dickens Index