Nicholas Nickleby

Dickens (1812-1870) is one of British literature’s most famous figures. Celebrated during his lifetime and influential to this day, Dickens was an author and a social critic whose novels exposed the ills of society and embraced Victorian values of goodness, honesty, and The Importance of Family.

Dickens grew up middle class, but his father’s reckless spending forced him into bankruptcy and debtors’ prison. This experience had a lasting impact on both Dickens and his stories; Nicholas Nickleby portrays the tragic financial downfalls of good families while broadly critiquing the socioeconomic conditions of 19th-century England, where industrialization made the rich richer and the poor poorer. Nicholas Nickleby particularly illustrates Dickens’s antipathy toward debtors’ prison, with characters who fall on hard times fearing the institution so much that they turn to manipulative businessmen like Ralph, who lend out money with the expectations of interest and currying of favors. Dickens was also intimately familiar with the need to become self-sufficient at an early age—he had to support his family when his father was imprisoned—which informs his depiction of Nicholas, who takes responsibility for his family in his father’s absence.

Before he achieved success with his novels, Dickens worked as a journalist and an actor. His experiences as a journalist shaped his keen observations of the social divisions in London, as depicted in Nicholas Nickleby. His experiences as an actor influenced Nicholas’s short-lived but meaningful work in the theater.

In 1836, Dickens started publishing The Pickwick Papers through serialization, a form of episodic publication that was immensely popular in the 19th century. The Pickwick Papers, like the novels that would come later, appealed to both working-class and upper-class readers. Much of Dickens’s early literature evoked pathos through descriptions of abused or impoverished children, a vulnerable and often ignored population. This is evident in Nicholas Nickleby, which depicts the horrors of Dotheboys Hall and the long-term effects of abuse on Smike.

Dickens is perhaps best known for his creation of the Christmas story. His novella A Christmas Carol remains one of the most widely read and adapted Christmas stories in contemporary culture. Published in 1843, A Christmas Carol warns readers against the dangers of greed and highlights the deplorable conditions of the poor.

Although Dickens’s focus as a writer would shift over time, with his later novels growing darker in tone, his work always retained a satirical bent and an emphasis on social criticism. These and other features of Dickens’s work—comically repulsive antagonists, Victorian sentimentality, sprawling casts, elaborate plotting, whimsical yet suggestive character names, etc.—have become so synonymous with the author that the term “Dickensian” commonly describes not only Dickens’s own work but anything that resembles it in style and subject matter. Nicholas Nickleby is an excellent example of these Dickensian characteristics. The villainy of characters like Mr. Squeers is suggested in their ridiculous or repulsive physical appearance; their behavior as the novel unfolds parallels this exterior ugliness. There is sentimentality in Nicholas Nickleby, such as in Nicholas’s devoted love for Madeline Bray and Smike’s tumultuous and tragic life and death. There is also an elaborate cast of characters whose lives intersect in complicated and unexpected ways—e.g., the revelation that Smike was Ralph Nickleby’s son. Though published early in Dickens’s career, Nicholas Nickleby exemplifies many of his stylistic and thematic concerns.