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    Nicholas Nickleby (with an Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple)
    Nicholas Nickleby (with an Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple)
    Nicholas Nickleby (with an Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple)
    Ebook1,209 pages19 hours

    Nicholas Nickleby (with an Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple)

    By Charles Dickens

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    Though only Dickens’ third novel, “Nicholas Nickleby” is a well-crafted and significant precursor to his other great works. The tale follows the fortunes of a young man, the son of an imprudent gentleman who leaves his family without resources. Fiercely devoted to his mother and sisters, as well as his true friends, Nicholas is occasionally emotional and even violent, yet always idealistic. He seeks the aid of his villainous uncle, Ralph Nickleby, who comes to hate his nephew and wishes him serious harm. Nicholas attempts more than once to achieve gainful employment, being first disgusted by the abuse of the schoolmaster Squeers, later surprised by the acting and antics of Vincent Crummles, and finally assisted by the merchant Cheeryble brothers. Dickens employs a cast of characters, both good and unsavory, in this adventurous story of Nicholas Nickleby, who helps those in need, despises wickedness, grows in self-awareness, and eventually falls in love, in a plot that is by turns melodramatic and comedic. An uplifting tale full of poignant indictments on Victorian society, “Nicholas Nickleby” has all the best characteristics of Dickens’ other classics. This edition includes an introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple and a biographical afterword.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateSep 27, 2018
    ISBN9781420959062
    Nicholas Nickleby (with an Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple)
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was one of England's greatest writers. Best known for his classic serialized novels, such as Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, Dickens wrote about the London he lived in, the conditions of the poor, and the growing tensions between the classes. He achieved critical and popular international success in his lifetime and was honored with burial in Westminster Abbey.

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    Reviews for Nicholas Nickleby (with an Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple)

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    • 5/5
      What is not to love about Nicholas Nickleby? Everything you love in normal Dickens, plus righteous fisticuffs.
    • 5/5
      Nicholas's father left him, his sister, and his mother without a home or any money at all at his death, and so they seek help from a rich uncle, who turns out to be the great villain of the plot. Nicholas must seek his own fortune and meets an outstanding variety of characters along the way, who run the spectrum from angelic to despicable with plenty of comic relief in between. It reads like a Shakespearean comedy on a grand and intricate scale, complete with a coming-of-age story and multiple marriages at the end. I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
    • 4/5
      A very mixed book, this is an early Dickens, coming after the great Pickwick Papers and the melodramatic but wholly absorbing Oliver Twist.The positive aspects of the novel are led by the marvelous comic characters: Mrs Nickelby, who would drive the most patient of listeners to commit mayhem; Mr Lilyvick of the modest fortune and ever-changing will; Mr Crummles and his unusual family, which includes the Infant Prodigy, and several others. Another two believable, if less comic, characters are Newman Noggs and Miss LaCreevy. The settings are beautifully developed, and there’s a considerable amount of humor in the book. And the horrors of Dotheboys Hall are Dickens at his best—so good, in fact, that several headmasters considered suing Dickens for his portrayal, citing it as libelous.But my heavens! The plot is, even for Dickens, too full of coincidence and deus ex machina for the modern reader to take seriously. Parts of the ending are eminently satisfying, but other parts are too pat. And the book is so very, very long.Taken as a whole, this is an above-average novel, but it’s certainly not one of Dickens’s best.
    • 4/5
      Dickens 4th book, and 3rd novel, published in 1838-39 and cementing his speedy celebrity, Nickleby combines the angry social statements of Oliver Twist with something of the sense of sharp satire of The Pickwick Papers. True, neither Nicholas nor Kate exhibit much in the way of interesting features, but as Tintin-esque Everypeople, they are surrounded by a gallery of delightful characters. The Victorian pathos is there in spades, and some of it is really quite silly, but one can feel Dickens gaining such a sense of self-assuredness as he works through this novel, and the picaresque nature of Nickleby's travels will not be equalled by any of the other novels that feature extensive journeys. The acting troupe, the brutal world of Mantilini's dress shop, and the figure of Ralph Nickleby, who extends on Fagin's sparks of life to suggest that the author might one day be interested in creating characters with more than one-and-a-half dimensions.

      Excepting parts of Little Dorrit and David Copperfield, this is the Dickens novel that has the purest sense of fun, and combined with some of the powerful statements about the workhouse and the place of women, it's a very worthy read. To be honest, I think this is the height of the Dickens canon for several years, until Copperfield comes along.
    • 2/5
      Not one of Dickens' strongest tales. I just couldn't make myself care much about Nicholas although I liked Kate a bit more. But his secondary characters were brilliant as usual -- Ralph Nickleby, Wackford Squeers, Smike, the Brothers Cheerfull -- all wonderful. But my favorite part was the happy ending for Linkinwater and Miss La Creevy in the final chapter -- a beautiful, sentimental, feel-good poignant passage.
    • 4/5
      In Nicholas Nickleby we find Dickens consolidating his approach begun in his two previous novels, returning to some of the humor found in Pickwick while continuing the social criticism begun in Oliver Twist. The focus is on boys' boarding schools in Yorkshire which were notorious for their poor conditions. Early in 1838 Dickens visited the schools in Yorkshire accompanied by his illustrator Hablot Browne and Dickens used some of his experiences in his novel. With Nicholas Nickleby comes Dickens first attempt using a young man as his protagonist and incorporating the bildungsroman style into the novel along with the picaresque approach that was so effective in Pickwick Papers. The novel begins with Nicholas and his sister Kate and their mother destitute upon the death of their father. Turning to their uncle, Ralph Nickleby, they find a man comparable to Dicken's later creation, Marley, (whose ghost will torment Scrooge). Nicholas is sent to Mr. Wackford Squeer's Academy, Dotheboys Hall where he assists Mr. Squeers. His education is immediate and jolting to his refined character.Some of Dickens' main themes the theater. It is a passion of Dickens and that passion is quite evident in this novel. Once Nicholas has left the "boys' school" run by the Squeers he soon takes up with a theater troupe. He is successful translating plays from French into English and doing some acting. This leads me to the theme of illusion and reality. There are examples of this in almost every chapter. In the first scenes of the novel we see Nicholas' family lose their modest wealth when his father's investments are more illusory than real. Nicholas' mother turns to her brother-in-law for help upon the death of her husband only to find any notion of family bonds is also an illusion. Of course the "school" where Nicholas is posted by his uncle Ralph is an utter illusion, much to the detriment of the boys confined therein. As we read further in the novel we find that characters are more likely to not be what they first seem to be; finally, it is somewhat ironic that Nicholas would find himself in a theater troupe learning the profession of creating illusions for a paying audience.The number of characters seems to grow geometrically as is typical in most of Dicken's novels, but most of the characters introduced so far are interesting enough to keep the reader's attention. Nicholas' growth and education (this novel is a bildungsroman of sorts) is the most interesting aspect of the novel for this reader. But I wonder what it would be like to have the story told from the point of view of his sister Kate? The city of London is very much a character in the novel with Dickens sharing his love for this city more than once probably drawing on the experiences he had on the long walks that he often took (cf. pp. 390 & 446, and 2) the narrator includes brief comments on the state of novel-writing itself (p. 345).Nicholas Nickleby ends well for Nicholas and his sister Kate. Along with their mother they can look forward to a much brighter future than the one that they faced as the novel began. In creating this 'happy' ending Dickens left many of the most eccentric comic characters by the wayside, gone are the Crummles and Miss Knagg along with other minor characters left by the wayside. Whether this is a flaw in the novel (perhaps) or not the last section of the story does move rapidly to tie up loose ends and provide answers to the more intricate mysteries of relations among the characters. For the details of these answers I suggest you read the novel.In spite of its seeming lack of structure, a claim which is belied by the strong arcs of both Nicholas' education in life and Ralph Nickleby's search for rewards for his greed and miserliness, the novel is Dickens' first success in the genre (his previous three books being journalistic and picaresque treats, but not novels). One theme that is embodied in this novel is expressed by Newman Noggs as Nicholas despairs that the schemes of Ralph and Arthur Gride will defeat him, his family and Madeline Bray (his one true love). Newman responds with what may be considered the main theme of the novel:'Hope to the last,' said Newman, clapping him on the back. 'Always hope, that's a dear boy. Never leave off hoping, it don't answer. Don't leave a stone unturned. It's always something to know know you've done the most you could. But don't leave off hoping, or it's of no use doing anything. Hope, hope to the last!'- p. 641, Nicholas NicklebyAs I reader you have hope for the good in Nicholas and Newman and John Browdie with the support of the Cherryble brothers; and, you have hope that the evil of Ralph Nickleby, Gride and Squeers will receive justice. You hope to the last.
    • 5/5
      Deliciously satirical Dickens, the author hell-bent on seeing evildoers get their come-uppance, and the innocent prevail, while ridiculing, with varying degrees of fierceness, everything he points his nib at. I recently read, and loved Bleak House, and while Nicholas Nickleby wasn’t quite that cohesive a story - the serial nature of its release slightly more obvious - I still enjoyed it enormously (perhaps even more than Bleak House on the basis of the quality of writing). I worried, through the first few pages, that the biting humour might distance me from enjoying the story for its own sake, but didn’t allow for Dickens’ incredible storytelling capacity and unrivalled talent for character. It’s impossible not to be invested in the fate of the most idly-sketched person in any of his works.Nicholas, our hero, is a pleasant and agreeable young man in pursuit of means after the death of his father leaves his family practically destitute. Relying at first upon the kindness of his uncle, and then discovering the man has none, he is first employed as a teacher at a school for young boys under the management of the brutal Mr. Squeers, where he takes under his wing – and takes off with - the loyal, if childlike, Smike. Nicholas sets about taking his fortunes into his own hands, and releasing his family, and especially his sister, Kate, from the clutches of the avaricious and vengeful Ralph Nickleby (characters whom I’d like to slap, list, head of). Some of the most hilarious, satisfying scenes in literature fall between the covers of Nicholas Nickleby, those wherein Nicholas makes delightful use of his fists (always where others commit outrages on those under his charge) being particularly enjoyable; the fantastic Newman Noggs finally getting to tell off his employer, and the remarkable prison break of the re-captured Smike, masterminded by the Yorkshireman, John Browdie, whose stifling of his own hilarity caused me to half-choke on mine.Better yet, barely a scene passes that isn’t pasted up and down with Dickens’ satirical social commentary, the perfect tone for this story which deals with the inconsistencies and injustices of a rampantly money-conscious society.Any work can be described as flawed if examined closely enough; caught up in the story, I didn’t care to poke too critically at anything, and the negatives I can summon are very slight… there are several examples of Dickens’ more sentimentally ‘perfect’ characters – the brothers, Ned and Charles (enjoyable), come to mind, as does Kate Nickleby (bland), although for once it’s hard to knock the stereotypical ‘perfection’ of one woman in a novel, when the entire cast consists of people drawn at the extremes of nature – and, being a tale with a happy ending for most of those that deserve it, the single undeserved tragedy feels rather more unfair to its victim than normal. Far more poignant and clever is the end of the antagonist, towards whom the reader had developed a sort of complicated pity (which in no way precluded the urge to slap him). There exists, perhaps, a weakness in the very last tying up of the plot in that the final machinations of Ralph Nickleby seem to have, in the end, been undone largely by the virtuous following the villainous around for a bit until things reveal themselves.It took me a fortnight to read Nicholas Nickleby and, despite the pressing urge to read other books on my pile, and the unpleasantly small text in my copy, I consider it time well spent, an auspicious beginning to the year’s reading, and a new favourite.
    • 3/5
      3.5 stars. Typical Dickens which I normally love but this was not one of my favorites. It is the first one that I listened to and it took me quite awhile to get through so I think I just never got fully engaged with it. Despite that an average book by Dickens is still really enjoyable. Good characters with a strong narrator made for some entertaining scenes.
    • 5/5
      This was a great read. Romance and evil villains and minor theatricals. A from rags-to-riches kind of tale. It was relaxing to read about a time where things moved only as fast as your feet (or your horses) and not faster than your brain can conceive of. If everyone today read a course of Dickens I think we'd be much less stressed out and more happy. Turn off your screens.
    • 3/5
      I enjoy Dickens very much and fin some of his novels have had a deep impact on me. Nicholas Nickleby is a typical Dickens novel--memorable names, poor family survives adversity to prosper, and commentary on social evils (a certain class of for-profit schools and usury) and it was enjoyable to read. Somehow, it felt to me a bit below-par for Dickens. I was very conscious of the "plot machinery" creaking along toward the entirely predictable denouement, something not true of most of the other Dickens novels I have read.
    • 4/5
      This was Dickens' third novel which he started writing in 1838, while he was finishing Oliver Twist, and finished writing in 1839, while he was starting The Old Curiosity Shop. Like most of his novels, it was originally published in monthly instalments before being published in a single volume.Initially I found Nicholas Nickleby a strange mixture of styles; Dickens' contract with his publishers was to write something 'of a similar character and of the same extent and contents in point of quantity' to The Pickwick Papers, Dickens' first novel, which was a lighter, more episodic work than Oliver Twist. However, Dickens' had been doing some investigative work in respect of the infamous 'Yorkshire schools' of the period and wanted to include some criticism of these schools in Nicholas Nickleby in the same way that he criticised the Poor Laws in Oliver Twist so it has some darker sections unlike The Pickwick Papers.Nicholas Nickleby follows the adventures of our eponymous hero, Nicholas Nickleby, his mother and his sister Kate after the death of their father. The family begin the story in a very bad way as Nicholas' father was in debt when he died. They are forced on the mercy of their uncle, the dastardly Ralph Nickleby who obtains a position for Nicholas as a teacher at a Yorkshire boarding school. The first quarter of the book shows us the appalling realities of life in a boys' boarding school in Yorkshire through the eyes of Nicholas. The villains who run the school are appropriately grotesque and their pupils appropriately pathetic so it would be easy for the reader to assume that Dickens' descriptions of these schools was an exaggeration. However, from the information in the introduction to my edition (the Penguin Classics edition) it seems that Dickens' description of these schools was all too accurate. Thankfully, the popularity of Nicholas Nickleby meant that most of these schools were forced to close down over the next ten years.As with all of Dickens' stories, the family who are obviously good and begin the book in poverty don't end the book that way, although there are many twists and turns before all the characters get what they deserve. I initially found the story somewhat rambling in nature and it felt like a lot of the incidents described, although amusing, didn't really have a bearing on the main plot. It helped me to think of these asides as being similar to The Pickwick Papers which is less plot driven and apparently this style of writing is similar to the picaresque style used by Henry Fielding in Tom Jones and Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker.In terms of characters there were some wonderful villains such as Wackford Squeers, the owner of the Yorkshire school, and Ralph Nickleby, Nicholas' uncle who takes an immediate dislike to his nephew. Both were so deliciously villainous that I felt myself wanting to boo or hiss at them in pantomime style every time they entered the story. There are also many ridiculous characters to laugh at such as Nicholas' mother who never fails to wander from the point in the most amusing fashion and the deceitful yet entertainingly flattering Mr Mantalini. To me Nicholas Nickleby seems to lie somewhere in between Dickens' first two novels in terms of style, or rather, it seems to be combine aspects of both and so overall, I didn't think it worked quite as well as either. However, I still enjoyed it a lot, especially once I was past the slower first quarter of the book.
    • 4/5
      It was a happy day when I, for whatever reason, elected to sample Charles Dickens. Having read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, I digressed to more popular fiction (Michener, Clavell, McMurtry, King, Grisham), as well as periods of science fiction and even non-fiction (Ambrose, McCollough for example), before making an effort to upgrade my reading list.I read some Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck and Hemingway with mixed success before reading Great Expectations. I liked it enough to read David Copperfield, and I was hooked. A Tale of Two Cities followed and then Oliver Twist (not my favorite) and Bleak House (another below average Dickens novel in my opinion) before taking on this lengthy tome.As in many of his previous works, Dickens introduces his protagonist and then follows him throughout succeeding adventures, introducing many quirky and fascinating characters. It is these characters that spice up the narrative and are the strength of Dickens’s writing in my opinion. Midway through this novel, I compared it favorably to David Copperfield (the gold standard), but as the book droned on, it diminished in enjoyment. Perhaps the fact that it was introduced in serial form had an effect on the flow of the story once it was incorporated into a single novel, but for whatever reason, I grew tired of it before its conclusion. Having read several Dickens works prior to this one, I was aware that a period of acclimation is required before becoming comfortable with both the language and the cultural landscape. Unlike Bleak House, whose dialogue I found to be overly florid and tortured at times, I had no such problem with this work. If you have never read Dickens, it may take a little while to become comfortable, but if you have, you should have no problem.Make no mistake, at nearly 900 pages this is a real door stop, and while it is not my favorite Dickens effort, it is nonetheless worth the time and effort to read.
    • 4/5
      Nicholas Nickleby wasn't, for me, the best Dickens I've read so far (and I've still got a lot to go...!). At times it felt a little aimless, but as usual, the characters and the descriptions are just brilliant. You know it's going to end well, but how it gets there is often a bit of a roundabout journey. My favourite characters were Mr Squeers (love that name!), Miss La Creevey, and Mrs Nickleby. They were hilarious.
    • 4/5
      A picaresque novel by Dickens gives us a smorgasboard of delightfully crafted characters. The good the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. Dickens tells the story of a widow and her two children who seek help from her deceased husband's brother and are treated meanly and stingily by him. A social commentary told through the characters in this book and the main character, Nicholas Nickleby is a young man who comes to age as he takes care of his mother and sister and is kind to others he encounters on the way. This is Dickens third novel and a episodic and humorous book and also a first for romance for Dickens.
    • 4/5
      Great opening paragraph eases readers smoothly into the challenging life of Nicholas Nickleby.The plot moves gently along with lovely entries like "Snow Hill!" "coffee-rooms,""...for gold conjures up a mist about a man."and: "He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two."Dickens weaves his humor into Nicholas' conversation as he exposes the vivid contrastsof the lives of the poor with the wanton material wealth of the rich.Unfortunately, he also proceeds to lapse us into catatonia with his muffins resolutions parody.But, what does Dickens have against Smike?!? His trials were painful to read,even when John Brodie brings actual comedy.This was welcome to both readers and to "...Nicholas sat down, so depressed and self-degraded by the consciousness of his position, that if death could have come upon himat that time, he would have been almost happy to meet it."Nicholas' words on Shakespeare were a true delight in the midst of the paid-by-wordserialization that made for some truly boring side plots.This is my favorite of all Dickens novels.
    • 5/5
      Q: Why, more than 140 years+ after his death is Charles Dickens still regarded as the greatest novelist the English language has ever seen?A: Because that is what he is.Nicholas Nickleby is a good illustration. I set myself to finish this - 776 pages in this edition - in a month; in the event it took twelve days. On most days, I only put it down because my eyes were throbbing from the small print.Of course, 776 pages is a lot of book but there is a lot of story; a lot happens to a lot of people. The reader must be given a chance to get to know these people if he is to a give a damn what happens to them. Dickens gives us this time; it is part of his art. He takes time, too, to describe people and places; remember that he wrote in the days before television, or newsreels, or even cheap picture-books. If he wanted the reader to know what something looked like, he had to describe it.To many, in this world where one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a sound-bite, such a deliberate approach to story-telling will prove too taxing. To those with a more traditional attention span, it must simply add to the experience.And experience it is. Nickleby loses nothing with the passing of years. Dickens dealt, as do all great writers, with human nature and the real world. At root, neither changes. We are still afflicted with businessmen who know no morality beyond the p&l account; educationalists who substitute cant for understanding and choose to forget the humanity of their charges; gold diggers, cheats and frauds; and parents who care nothing for their children.Nicholas Nickleby was a page-turner in 1838 and it is a page-turner today. It has, by turns, villainy and romance, comedy and tragedy, sudden death and new beginnings. Truly, all human life is here.
    • 2/5
      I remember finding this one pretty tedious, although some of the characters intrigued me deeply.
    • 4/5
      Nicholas Nickleby is the tale of a young man whose father has died leaving his family penniless. Nicholas must find a job to support his mother and sister, Kate. The family turns for help to their uncle, Ralph Nickleby, a ruthless businessman, who has taken a dislike to his relatives. Nicholas, aided by many diverse characters, must protect his family from his uncle’s machinations.Nicholas Nickleby was the third book written by Charles Dickens, and it was published in serial form monthly in 1838 and 1839 before being published as a book in 1839.At first, I found the book very readable. As with many books written in the 1800s, the prose tends to be very wordy, and the style of the language is more stilted and formal than in books written more recently. However, I feel that Dickens’ style is perhaps a little more casual than some authors of that time which made reading the book more enjoyable. I felt there were a lot of descriptive passages in the book that could have been edited, making the book more streamlined. After a while, I felt that I got bogged down in the detail which made it somewhat less enjoyable to read. Also, Dickens introduces many characters throughout the book who really do not have a bearing on the overall tale. The characters seem to be part of amusing anecdotes used as filler to keep the serial going as long as possible. I felt that there was a lot of buildup to a climax, and then the story just petered out with minimal wrap-up compared to the amount of buildup. For instance, we learn much about two aristocratic gentlemen and also a family of performers, none of whom figure largely at the end of the story, but there is very little to be learned about the future spouses of both Nicholas and Kate, even though they would have more bearing on the longer story. Please skip the next paragraph as there are spoilers contained. I felt that there were some inconsistencies in how certain characters reacted. Nicholas seemed to be a very kind and honorable young man; however, at the beginning of the story, he seems to have a terrible temper which gets him into trouble. Not long afterward, he seems to have matured, and there is little reason for this given by the author. He may have realized the error of his ways, but Dickens did not see fit to mention this. Also, Ralph Nickleby is portrayed as a mean and heartless man. He finds that he has a son who was ill-treated before he was befriended by the Nickleby family and has now died. Because of this Ralph commits suicide, which seems very out of character. I did enjoy the classic good-triumphs over evil storyline. I also enjoyed meeting the many and varied characters introduced by Dickens, although there were a lot to keep track of. Dickens does a fabulous job of fleshing out some of the characters, but he does leave other characters feeling flat.
    • 5/5
      My favorite Dickens book so far. I'll read this one again someday.
    • 4/5
      A more appropriate title might be “The Nicklebys” or “The Nickleby Family”. Mean, miserly Uncle Ralph is as much the center of the novel as Nicholas, and there’s Kate Nickleby, and Nicholas’s mother. It’s a Victorian plot full of coincidences and family secrets – a joy to read and discover.
    • 2/5
      Heavyweight classic. very funny, in that old-fashioned sort of way, but fuck, it's long. Well worth it though. Not something to be enjoyed on a hot summer day. I'd rather read it in winter with a cup of hot chocolate. The characters are hilarious. I wish people still wrote like that.
    • 2/5
      Heavyweight classic. very funny, in that old-fashioned sort of way, but fuck, it's long. Well worth it though. Not something to be enjoyed on a hot summer day. I'd rather read it in winter with a cup of hot chocolate. The characters are hilarious. I wish people still wrote like that.
    • 5/5
      My favorite Dickens, partly because it helped close down abusive residential "Public Schools" like Mr Squeers'; this effective critique of education holds much appeal to a lifelong teacher whose critiques of education have had much less dramatic effect. The scenes from the North England Dotheby's Hall are both convincing in their detailed cruelty and devastating as satire. Nickleby rescues the handicapped (or "retarded") Smike and they both leave after Nicholas is driven to beating the sadistic headmaster. The complex plot also satirizes the semi-professional theater of the day, in the Dover company of Crummles that includes the "infant phenomenon"--reminiscent of our own child actors, like Justin Biber, whom nobody satirizes now. Nicholas is hired as juvenile male lead and playwright-adapter of French plays to their minimal acting skills. This is a lively, generous, myriad-plotted book that will engage and amuse any reader with sufficient time not to feel rushed and burdened--i.e., most readers not reading for a college class. Other strands include the millenary business which Nicholas's sister Kate works in, and the machinations of the cruel "rich uncle."
    • 5/5
      One of the great books of English literature - so no need to bore you with a review. I loved it.
      Also - the unabridged audio read by Alex Jennings is nothing short of phenomenal.
    • 3/5
      A long and complicated story that is not very interesting.
    • 4/5
      I found the plot of Nicholas Nickleby hard to follow at times, but in the end felt that it was a book I might enjoy watching a film adaptation of. As writing, it pales in comparison to its predecessor, "Oliver Twist." Dickens tries to mix some of the same social criticism of the former work into this book (and apparently had quite an effect on the general population at the time, much to the detriment of the Yorkshire schools portrayed in this book), but with a greater focus on comedy. I was disappointed that he reverts back to such shallow portrayals of women after doing such an outstanding job of writing Nancy in "Oliver Twist," but to his credit I would say that I could imagine Kate as a living breathing character (and one who was far stronger than he seemed to be willing to portray her). Dickens also goes for the twist ending again here, but the melodrama seems forced. I would concur with critics who say that this book suffered from the time constraints on the author as he sought to hastily complete one overlapping manuscript after another.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book even more than Great Expectations - maybe because I was reading it on the beach. Dickens creates such wonderful heroes and such funny conversation.
    • 4/5
      I am glad I chose Nicholas Nickleby to be the first Dickens book to complete on my own (not counting the required 6th grade reading of A Christmas Carol). Sure, there's the downtrodden miserable children and nasty older men, but I didn't have the droopy feeling of depression I thought I'd feel while reading. Sometimes the story would go off tangent (the storytelling on the first journey to Yorkshire left me slightly impatient), but most books I've read written in the 19th century went that way. Besides, the story moved forward when it needed to. Once I'd learned to keep track of the vast cast of characters, it was just fine. Plus, (slight spoiler) it cleans up very well at the end.As for Ralph Nickleby, the evil uncle, can I just say he makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like an absolute saint! At least Scrooge didn't make a point to ruin people's lives, especially not his own family (as I recall, Scrooge had kind feelings for his nephew, but swept it under the rug for most of that story.) Of course, Ralph's ending looked to be a moral to the reader - a very Victorian choice of eventuality,The other characters are all well painted if perhaps caricatures - the pathetic and saintly Smike, the burly and heavily accented Browdie, a weak gentleman named Verisopht...so much fun to keep track of. Favorite first name: Wackford.All in all, enjoyed this, and will continue with Dickens a little longer.
    • 5/5
      Very entertaining and fast-moving, although quite fairy-tale like in places: Nicholas seemed to lead a charmed life. I particularly enjoyed his stint as an actor/playwright and most of his mother's speeches. The Cheerybles were too good to be true (did Nicholas ever do any real work for them), but handy for the resolution of the plot. I found Madeline to be very underwritten, and Smike's true identity came completely out of left-field, but it was such a romp that it didn't really matter.The potential fates of both Madeline and Kate, while realistic, seemed quite racy for a Victorian novel, especially as I have read of Dickens asking Trollope to alter things in his novels on morality grounds...
    • 5/5
      NICHOLAS NICKLEBY is a significant Dickens in the uncannily absorbing way the narrative diversifies to various literary discourses. The protagonist's experiences and encounters in adverse milieu through life not only embody melodrama, comic relief, political satire, class comedy, social criticism, and domestic farce, they allow Dickens the opportunity to portray, to the minutest nuance, an extraordinary cast of rogues and eccentrics. The main frame of NICHOLAS NICKLEBY is a quintessential Dickens: a generic, virtuous man who concerns with the affair of establishing his identity as a gentleman and the pruning of whom entwines him in a checkered fate. Nicholas Nickleby has committed no fault and offenses, and yet he is to be entirely alone in the world, to be separated from the people he loves, and to be proscribed like a criminal. The more unbearable the ordeals and the more injudicious the deal of the hand from life, the more profusely the novel accentuates Dickens' outrage at the cruelty and social injustice. When Nicholas Nickleby is left exiguous after his father's death, he turns to his hard-hearted uncle to solicit succor. But Ralph Nickleby, a most unscrupulous and avarious man he is, demonstrates that he is proof against all appeals of blood and kindred, and is steeled against every tale of distress and sorrows. The man will never fail to exert any resolution or cunning that will promise increase of money for there is scarcely anything he will not have hazarded to gratify his greed. It's not that he is unconscious of the baseness of the means with which he acquires his gains. He cares only for gratification of his passions of avarice and hatred. He might have from the beginning conceived dislike to his nephew whom he brazenly places in Squeers' Dotheboys Hall, a school for unwanted boys, as an assistant master. The cruelty of Squeers, who's coarse and ruffian behavior even at his best temper, Nicholas has been an unwilling witness. The filthy condition of the school and the bodily distortion of the boys impart in him a dismal feeling. The thought of being a helper and abettor of such squalid practice fills his with honest disgust and indignation. The cruelties descend upon helpless infancy fuel this rightful indignation in Nicholas, who interferes with the schoolmaster's flogging a boy named Smike and astonishes everyone in school. Not only does Ralph persuade Nicholas' family to renounce him for the atrocities to Squeers of which he is guilty, he also betrays his niece Kate into the company of some libertine men who are clients of his and who speak of her in a most casual, lecherous, ribald and vulgar terms. She is roused beyond all endurance by a profusion of compliments of which coarseness becomes humor and of which vulgarity softens down to the most charming eccentricity. The mutual hatred between uncle and nephew aggravates as Nicholas overhears conversations about his sister. The hidden feud further percolates to the surface and leads to a pitch to its malignity as he tries to rescue a girl from a marriage to which she has been impelled. As the uncle insidiously hatches a scheme to retaliate against his nephew who has in every step of the way interceded and thwarted his plans for mercenary gains, Nicholas entwines with a cast of characters who are humorous, memorable, and true to life. Peripheral to his molding to become a gentleman are episodes of political satire, theatrical success, courtship, family farce, and chicanery. The most significant character is no doubt Smike, whom Nicholas saves from the hellish grip of the schoolmaster and has become his best friend. Nicholas' unfailing love and protectiveness toward the boy accentuates his being the novel's hero, whose domestic virtues, affections, compassion, and delicacy of feelings qualifies him to his later fortune and does him justice. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY is a flamboyantly exuberant work in which Dickens wreaks the tension of his social satire to a pitch. Details on the Yorkshire school offer such magnifying vision of the cruelty, filthiness, and despotism in the boarding schools. Nor does he spare the rogues and the greedy, whose squeamishness he sarcastically embellishes as a common honesty and whose pride as self-respect. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY also evokes the subtle problem of human nature in establishing boundary of one's remorse. Although Ralph might feel no remorse in his betraying his niece to the temptation of his libertine clients, he hates them for doing what he has expected them to do. In a sense, Nicholas is seen as the unswerving force that is determined to right the wrong of the society. He tries to appeal to the compassion and humanity of those who have gone astray and to lead them to consider the innocent and the helpless. Nicholas might embody energy for radicalism and ambition to challenge social injustice; his ultimate goal is the recovery of his ancestral position in the social hierarchy. But in the effort to undertake the good deeds, he is influenced by no selfish or personal consideration but by pity for the people he helps and detestation and abhorrence of the heartless schemes. In the same way he is determined to appeal to his uncle's humanity and not to wreak revenge on him. But Ralph's hatred for his nephew has been fed upon his own defeat, nourished on his interference with all his schemes. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY is a sober social commentary woven with social and domestic issues. Woven in one man's aspiration to restore family's ancestral dignity is Dickens' own musing, monologues, teachings on the soul, the life, and the moral. The discourse at times assumes a voice of despondency, sobriety and indignation.

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    Nicholas Nickleby (with an Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple) - Charles Dickens

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    NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

    By CHARLES DICKENS

    Introduction by EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE

    Nicholas Nickleby

    By Charles Dickens

    Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5905-5

    eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5906-2

    This edition copyright © 2018. Digireads.com Publishing.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

    Cover Image: a detail of Fanny Squeers and Nicholas Nickleby (colour litho), by Harold Copping (1863-1932) / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images.

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    CONTENTS

    Introduction

    Author’s Preface

    Chapter 1.

    Chapter 2.

    Chapter 3.

    Chapter 4.

    Chapter 5.

    Chapter 6.

    Chapter 7.

    Chapter 8.

    Chapter 9.

    Chapter 10.

    Chapter 11.

    Chapter 12.

    Chapter 13.

    Chapter 14.

    Chapter 15.

    Chapter 16.

    Chapter 17.

    Chapter 18.

    Chapter 19.

    Chapter 20.

    Chapter 21.

    Chapter 22.

    Chapter 23.

    Chapter 24.

    Chapter 25.

    Chapter 26.

    Chapter 27.

    Chapter 28.

    Chapter 29.

    Chapter 30.

    Chapter 31.

    Chapter 32.

    Chapter 33.

    Chapter 34.

    Chapter 35.

    Chapter 36.

    Chapter 37.

    Chapter 38.

    Chapter 39.

    Chapter 40.

    Chapter 41.

    Chapter 42.

    Chapter 43.

    Chapter 44.

    Chapter 45.

    Chapter 46.

    Chapter 47.

    Chapter 48.

    Chapter 49.

    Chapter 50.

    Chapter 51.

    Chapter 52.

    Chapter 53.

    Chapter 54.

    Chapter 55.

    Chapter 56.

    Chapter 57.

    Chapter 58.

    Chapter 59.

    Chapter 60.

    Chapter 61.

    Chapter 62.

    Chapter 63.

    Chapter 64.

    Chapter 65.

    Biographical Afterword

    Introduction

    The first number of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby was published on the morning of the first of April, 1838. The author’s heart was gladdened, on the festal evening that followed, with the intelligence that fifty thousand copies were ordered or sold on the day of publication. The rapid growth of Dickens’s reputation is indicated by the difference between his verbal agreement with Chapman & Hall as to the price to be paid for Pickwick, and the formal document which records his stipulations with the same publishers as to the sum to be paid for Nickleby. For Pickwick he was to receive fifteen guineas a number, to be increased if the speculation proved successful. Thirty guineas were advanced to him to defray the expenses of his marriage, on April 2d, 1836, with Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of George Hogarth, a gentleman who had been associated with him in literary work for the London Evening Chronicle. Instead of three hundred guineas, Chapman & Hall paid him, for Pickwick, £3000, according to the statement of Mr. Chapman, or £2500, according to the more accurate statement of Mr. Forster, it being understood that Dickens was further to receive a share in the copyright after five years had elapsed. For Nickleby the publishers agreed to pay him £150 for each of the twenty numbers, giving him also a share in the copyright five years after its completion; and so strong was now the competition of other publishers with Chapman & Hall, that the latter paid an additional £1500 for Nickleby, in order that they might secure the right to publish his next work, Master Humphrey’s Clock.

    During the composition of Nickleby, Dickens was in a high state of physical and mental exhilaration. He indulged lavishly in walks, rides, and athletic sports which would have exhausted the physical energy of most men of letters,—the energy on which intellectual creativeness more or less depends. Our great American romancer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, complained to Dr. Holmes, who is an accomplished physiologist as well as a poet and novelist, that his long, delightful forenoon walks through the beautiful scenery of the Berkshire Hills incapacitated him for literary effort. The reason is plain, said Holmes; do your true work after breakfast; take your exercise when it is done. Your early walks tire your mind as well as your body. Your power of intellectual production is weakened with every expenditure of nervous force in aimless wandering over hills and meadows. Emerson struck at the same general conditions of mental efficiency when he declared that "there is an infatuating sweetness in the air of the mountains which lures the idler on to his sure destruction." But Dickens was so physically strong, so ebullient, so furious, in animal spirits, and at the same time was so haunted with the creations of his imagination, that nearly half of the day or night spent in walking, bar-leaping, bowling, and quoits, was necessary to preserve the sanity of his mental constitution. The intoxication which accompanied his vivid, mirthful conceptions, the depression which followed his intense realization of pathetic and tragic incidents, demanded physical exercise as a corrective of the hallucinations of his imagination. His spontaneous creativeness required to be tired and tamed by bodily exertion before it could hope to become creative art; and walks of fifteen or twenty miles often failed so to weary out his animal energy as to keep his creativeness within the bounds which separate realization from exaggeration and character from caricature.

    In writing Nickleby, Dickens always had, in Forster’s phrase, the printer at his heels. In this story he was never a single number ahead, but trusted to inspiration and luck that he would be ready with copy at the appointed time. In the romances that followed, he was generally careful to be two or three numbers in advance of his monthly engagement. His private letters at this period boil over with boyish, exulting, irrepressible jocularity and glee. They remind us of Campbell’s remark in regard to what must have been Shakespeare’s mood of mind while writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream.Thank God, said Campbell, there was at one time on this miserable planet at least one man who was perfectly happy. In a letter directed from an inn in Exeter, Dickens describes a visit from an upholsterer in this rollicking vein: "I think they took me here at New London for the Wonderful Being I am; they were amazingly sedulous; and no doubt they looked for my being visited by the nobility and gentry of the neighborhood. My first and only visitor came to-night: a ruddy-faced man in faded black, with extracts from a feather bed all over him; an extraordinary and quite miraculously dirty face; a thick stick; and the personal appearance altogether of an amiable bailiff in a green old age. I have not seen the proper waiter since, and more than suspect I shall not recover this blow. He was announced (by the waiter) as ‘a person.’ I expect my bill every minute. . . . The waiter is laughing outside the door with another waiter; this is the latest intelligence of my condition. The reader will easily detect in the passages we have italicized the characteristics of Dickens’s drollery,—the instinctive and transforming operation of his humorous fancy on the slightest hint from observation or experience. He was, indeed, during the twenty months consumed in writing The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, a happy husband, a happy father, and a happy man of genius; rejoicing in everything which could make life pleasant, with intervals which raised enjoyment to the point of ecstasy; happy in his home, happy in the sense of suddenly acquired fame, happy in the love and admiration of many personal and intimate friends, and happy likewise in a host of well-wishers who were magnetized by his genius, who were drawn to him by sympathy though most of them never looked upon his face, and who afterwards clung to him, through good and evil report, as a great Public, whose affection nothing that he said or did, and nothing that malignant scandal reported of his sayings and doings, could alter or alienate. So entirely did he taste the richest, finest and most satisfying delight which springs from what may he called the vanity of genius, so completely did he convert his readers into personal friends and champions, that Thackeray once said, in private conversation, Dickens might commit any crime without losing a single reader. Scandal-mongers may forge any number of accusations against him of immorality, and still moral England will stand by him to a man and to a woman. The acutest of observers thus indicated his perception of the overwhelming vitality of nature by which Dickens may be said to have Dickensized his public. Other contemporary romances addressed powerfully certain classes, or certain classes of minds; Dickens forced all classes into some sympathy, instinctive or reluctant, with his own creations, in spite of certain solid critical objections to his general method of representing character, and to the doubtful contrivances on which he sometimes relied to call forth laughter and tears. Many cultivated people laughed and cried against the rules they had set up to direct their laughter and crying, and were sometimes indignant at their weakness in yielding to such vulgar" temptations to mirth and sorrow as Dickens supplied; but still they could not help laughing and crying at his bidding. In the opinion of some cool, hard, resisting minds, it was provoking that an ignorant young fellow of twenty-seven should attain the throne of romance at a bound, and as an absolute sovereign should issue ordinances for the regulation of society based, not on large reason and wide experience, but on the shifting requirements of philanthropic sentiment. It must be admitted that Dickens was ignorant of much that a genius so aggressive as well as so bright should have known; but the vividness of his perception of the particular evil or abuse he assailed, and the immense resources of humor, pathos, and passion he exhibited in holding it up to public ridicule or execration, triumphed over every obstacle that the jurist or economist could interpose.

    The style of Nicholas Nickleby has more ease, simplicity and spontaneousness than that of most of its successors. With fewer verbal felicities and ingenuities wrought into the substance of the diction, it has a fluency, pliancy, and buoyancy of movement admirably adapted to the requirements of such a narrative. Many chapters bear the marks of having been written with joyous rapidity; but the haste was evidently the result of the impatient pressure of inventiveness upon expression, leaving no time for those pauses of reflection to which Dickens commonly owes most of his happiest phrases and wittiest verbal combinations. There is hardly more plot in this novel than in the Pickwick Papers. It is literally, as the author calls it, "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, and its merit lies rather in the succession than in the combination of incidents and characters. The mere story might have been easily told in one number; in the hands of such a master of swift, compact, and brilliant narrative as Voltaire, it would hardly have occupied a page; but what interests us in Nicholas Nickleby is not so much the story, as the crowd of persons to whom we are introduced, and whom the writer has the art of converting into our personal acquaintances. It is useless to object that many of them are over-charged in the representation, and seem to have been delineated while the author was in a kind of hilarious mental intoxication, laughing himself with heartier violence than he makes his readers laugh; for the hold on character is firm, even when its peculiarities seem exaggerated into caricature, and the persons are accepted by us as real human beings, though we feel that the mode of representing them is droll to the point of extravagance. A more serious objection to Dickens’s method is that he so turns his characters inside out, he makes them betray themselves so thoroughly, that we wonder how his cheats and pretenders can deceive anybody. Squeers, for example, is so repulsive, physically, mentally and morally, that a parent of the least discernment would as soon trust a child to a wolf as to him. To vary an old saying, charlatan, swindler and ruffian were so legibly imprinted by God Almighty on his countenance, that it would be impiety to doubt the superscription." To prevent any possible misconception of his character, his school is called Dotheboys Hall.{1} In his advertisement he states that youth are there instructed in all languages, living and dead, mathematics, orthography, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry, the use of the globes, algebra, single stick (if required), writing, arithmetic, fortification, and every other branch of classical literature. This is very funny, and the stroke about single stick (if required) keenly humorous; but what simpleton would be taken in by such palpable ignorance and impudence?Dickens’s object was to level a deadly blow at the whole system of cheap schools in Yorkshire, where boys were said to be cruelly treated by brutal schoolmasters. Some rumors of this treatment had excited his indignation when he was himself a boy; and before writing Nickleby he made a visit to Yorkshire for the purpose of personally examining the schools. While there he probably made the acquaintance of a pedagogue who furnished him the hint for Squeers. But surely the schoolmasters as a body had sufficient sense to employ somebody to draw up advertisements which were not a jumble of illiterate absurdities, and sufficient hypocrisy to make a decent show of human feeling; whereas Squeers exposes his ignorance, knavery and brutality in every word he utters. If it be said that his pupils were mostly confined to boys that parents were ashamed to own, or that guardians were desirous of getting out of the way, still this could not be the case with all the pupils of all the schools. There must have been, on the part of the schoolmasters, some hypocrisy which imposed on the credulity of parents and guardians; and Squeers, as represented by Dickens, could impose on nobody. Yet Squeers is a character and not a caricature; his continual self-exposure of his baseness, greediness, ferocity and depravity is almost hidden from himself by self-conceit; and experience shows that creatures such as he exist, though they are too completely immoral to mimic morality with any success.{2}

    A prominent figure in the novel is Ralph Nickleby; but he is portrayed from the outside, and hardly reaches real individuality, being a kind of personified abstraction of avarice and malignity. His heart and soul are as impenetrable to the author as to the reader. Dickens never succeeded in giving vitality to such hard forms of character. In his novels they appear as they appear on the Exchange, mere petrifactions of men, and we miss the insight which should reveal their inward natures. Arthur Gride, on the contrary, though as villainous and miserly as Ralph, is of a more supple constitution of mind, and becomes a character through his cowardice, his sickly, impotent voluptuousness, the nervous eagerness of his greed, and the rapid alternations of his central rascality between the fears and raptures of avarice. He is, however, too disgusting and detestable a creature for the purposes of romance; Madeline, the heroine of the book, receives a stain by having her image fondled and pawed upon in the foul imagination of this satyr-usurer; and the commonplace expedient of making her consent to marry him in order to save a father from want is an exaggerated form of criminal self-sacrifice copied from the worst models of the worst sentimental novelists.

    The strength of Dickens in characterization is in seizing and setting forth the oddities, singularities, and eccentricities of character, without exactly individualizing any special trait. In the present novel, as in all his novels, there are some excellent satirical sketches, in which we obtain a passing glimpse of persons who are in no sense characters, and who are introduced merely to give point and sting to the satire. Such is the account of the meeting to organize the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company. Sir Matthew Pupker, says Mr. Bonney, takes the chair, and three members of Parliament are positively coming. I have seen two of them safely out of bed. The third, who was at Crockford’s all night, has just gone home to put a clean shirt on, and take a bottle or two of soda water, and will certainly be with us in time to address the meeting. He is a little excited by last night, but never mind that; he always speaks the stronger for it The speeches that follow are capital parodies of that peculiar kind of eloquence which is used to push the schemes of financial swindlers, but the natures of the impostors who speak are as much hidden as they intend their motives shall be. Dickens’s experience as a reporter seems to have resulted in giving him an unfavorable opinion of most members of the House of Commons, and he rarely introduces one into his books except to make him a mark for his animosity and contempt. In the sixteenth chapter of the novel he describes Mr. Gregsbury as a tough, burly, thick-headed gentleman, with a loud voice, a pompous manner, a tolerable command of sentences with no meaning in them, and, in short, every requisite for a very good member indeed; and the account of the reception this personified platitude gives to his swindled constituents, and the statement of his interview afterwards with Nicholas, are full of pungent satire; but Mr. Gregsbury himself still remains nothing more than a racily impersonated jest.

    Again, Nicholas Nickleby, the hero, though a brave, honest, affectionate and high-spirited young fellow, is but a thin and poor specimen of characterization. The same must be said of Kate Nickleby and Madeline Bray. At this early period of his career, Dickens could not give to the good young women he took for heroines the impressive individuality he afterwards proved himself capable of conferring upon Little Dorrit, Esther Summerson, and Lucie Manette. Under the detecting touch and delicate fashioning of Jane Austen’s genius, Kate and Madeline would have stood forth as real characters, interesting for what they were in themselves as well as for what they suffered and did, with every nice peculiarity which distinguished them from other good young women subtly indicated. In Miss Edge worth’s hands they would at least have been gifted with vigorous individuality. But as drawn by Dickens they seem introduced for the purpose of illustrating Pope’s maxim that most women have no characters at all. We become instantly conscious of this defect when we contrast them with such specimens of feminine nature as Fanny Squeers and ’Tilda Price, who have peculiarities and singularities on which their delineator can fasten, and he accordingly endows them with such life and individuality that they appear to start up and out from the page, so that we seem to see and listen to them, rather than to read about them.

    It is necessary to make such distinctions as these, in order to discriminate between Dickens’s solid characters, his characters which are perceived as both inwardly and outwardly alive, and his hints of character, his sketches of character, and his satires on personified abuses and vices, all of which are equally endowed with proper names, and appear in his books as persons. There are, in the novel of Nicholas Nickleby, many delightful examples of Dickens’s real power and felicity of characterization. Mrs. Nickleby is a very foolish old lady, and we have perhaps too much of her conversation, but the conceit and vanity which mingle with her simplicity and affectionateness, the helpless incapacity of her mind to resist accidental associations of ideas, and her self-delusion in insisting, after a thing has happened, that she predicted or produced it, almost make her the ideal standard of the class of women to which she belongs. At least nobody doubts either her originality or her existence,{3} and nobody doubts the existence and originality of Newman Noggs, Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummies, the Phenomenon, Miss Snevellicci, Mantalini, Miss Knag, Miss La Creevy, Mr. and Mrs. Kenwigs, Mr. Lillyvick, Tim Linkinwater, John Browdie, not to mention a score of others; and the scenes and incidents in which they appear are richly humorous. These persons pushed their way at once into the imaginations of all classes of the public, and were more warmly welcomed than most actual friends and neighbors. Whilst the work was in course of publication, Sydney Smith invited Dickens to meet at dinner some ladies who were enthusiastic admirers of his genius. My friends, Sydney jocosely added, have not the smallest objection to be put into a number, but on the contrary would be proud of the distinction; and Lady Charlotte, in particular, you may marry to Newman Noggs. Leigh Hunt declared that Fanny Squeers’s letter to Ralph Nickleby, giving her account of the way that Nicholas had, in John Browdie’s phrase, beatten the schoolmeasther, surpassed the best things of the kind in Smollett that he could remember; and certain it is that if Winifred Jenkins suggested to Fanny the rules of English composition, the pupil far excelled the teacher in carrying them out. My pa, she begins, requests me to write to you, the doctors considering it doubtful whether he will ever recover the use of his legs which prevents his holding a pen. . . . When your never that you recommended for a teacher had done this to my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also langwedge which I will not pullet my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back comb several inches into her head. . . . 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 sasiated his thirst for blood ran away taking with him a 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. . . . P. S. I pity his ignorance and despise him. The postscript probably is a dark allusion to the circumstance that Fanny had once lavished on this unappreciating monster the whole wealth of her young affections.

    The pathos of the book centres in poor Smike. This character was the first result of a series of psychological studies, in which Dickens attempted to give an accurate representation of unsound or imperfectly developed intellects when united to gentleness of temper and goodness of heart. The harmlessness and helplessness of Smike, the fortitude with which he endures brutal treatment, the innocent wonder with which he receives from Nicholas the first intimations that there exist people who can be kind and compassionate, the depth of his affection for his benefactors, the gleams of memory and reason which occasionally shoot across the vacancy of his mind, the awakening and growth, through the tender pity of Kate, of the sentiment of love in his nature, and the broken-hearted prayer with which he sinks into the rest of death, all combine to lend to the character a peculiar pathetic interest. Forster tells us that so strong was the sympathy felt for Smike, that, during the serial publication of the novel, the author received as many letters imploring him not to kill him, as had been sent by young ladies to Richardson to spare Lovelace’s soul alive, or, as he might have added, to spare the life of Lovelace’s victim, Clarissa herself. The device of Dickens to strike at the inmost soul of Ralph Nickleby, and compel him to feel some pang of remorse, by furnishing him with the proof that the poor lad he had hounded on to death was his own son, seems to have been suggested by Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame; but the dull agony of Ralph is as nothing compared to the overwhelming intensity of anguish which rends the heart of the mother of Esmerelda, when she discovers too late that the girl she has always been persecuting is the daughter she has always been seeking.

    Nicholas Nickleby ranks with the most popular of Dickens’s works, though it does not adequately embody the deeper qualities of his genius. It must be kept in mind that up to the publication of David Copperfield his whole nature steadily grew, and that this growth was a growth in all his faculties and all his sentiments. What charms most readers in Nicholas Nickleby is the breezy, buoyant, external, out-of-door feeling which animates the narrative, the quick succession of exciting incidents, the apparently instinctive skill with which the characters are grouped, the cheerful, hopeful, humane spirit which breathes through the book; but there is a comparative absence of the intense inwardness which afterwards so strikingly marked the writer’s genius,—of that imaginative power which penetrated every description of outward nature, every house and every piece of furniture in it, with the life of the mental mood in which the object was surveyed. The popularity of Nicholas Nickleby, however, is richly deserved. If the fun of the work makes its readers feel happier, its benevolent spirit makes them feel better. The loving portrayal of the Cheeryble Brothers anticipates and answers some of the objections made by socialists to the distribution of wealth. The goodness of the Cheerybles is not without a certain taint of do-me-goodness, and some experienced men of business are, we understand, daily looking for their names in the bankrupt’s gazette; but still their brotherly feeling, not merely to each other, but to all mankind, has taken a strong hold on the sympathies of most readers, and their characters are constantly referred to as realizing the ideal perfection of the beneficence of the bourgeois.

    EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE.

    1876.

    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, private 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 who might naturally be expected to spring 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 entrusted the board and lodging of a horse or a dog; they formed the worthy cornerstone of a structure, which, for absurdity and a magnificent high-minded 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 of 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.

    I cannot call to mind, now, how I came to hear about Yorkshire schools when I was a not very robust child, sitting in bye-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 pen-knife. The impression made upon me, however made, never left me. I was always curious about Yorkshire schools—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 the author of the Pickwick Papers, I consulted with a professional friend who had a Yorkshire connexion, 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 the schools to be most 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, very 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 vara pleasant toogather, and ar’ll spak’ my moind tiv’ee. Dinnot let the weedur send her lattle boy to yan o’ our school-measthers, 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 tellee, 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 twelve-month, 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 of a small body of men, and one is described by these characteristics, all his fellows will recognize 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 thousands of letters, from all sorts of people in all sorts of latitudes and climates, which this unlucky paragraph brought down upon me, 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 that 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.

    The Brothers are now dead.

    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.

    Chapter 1.

    INTRODUCES ALL THE REST

    There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason. Thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.

    Some ill-conditioned persons who sneer at the life-matrimonial, may perhaps suggest, in this place, that the good couple would be better likened to two principals in a sparring match, who, when fortune is low and backers scarce, will chivalrously set to, for the mere pleasure of the buffeting; and in one respect indeed this comparison would hold good; for, as the adventurous pair of the Fives’ Court will afterwards send round a hat, and trust to the bounty of the lookers-on for the means of regaling themselves, so Mr. Godfrey Nickleby and his partner, the honeymoon being over, looked out wistfully into the world, relying in no inconsiderable degree upon chance for the improvement of their means. Mr. Nickleby’s income, at the period of his marriage, fluctuated between sixty and eighty pounds per annum.

    There are people enough in the world, Heaven knows! and even in London (where Mr. Nickleby dwelt in those days) but few complaints prevail, of the population being scanty. It is extraordinary how long a man may look among the crowd without discovering the face of a friend, but it is no less true. Mr. Nickleby looked, and looked, till his eyes became sore as his heart, but no friend appeared; and when, growing tired of the search, he turned his eyes homeward, he saw very little there to relieve his weary vision. A painter who has gazed too long upon some glaring colour, refreshes his dazzled sight by looking upon a darker and more sombre tint; but everything that met Mr. Nickleby’s gaze wore so black and gloomy a hue, that he would have been beyond description refreshed by the very reverse of the contrast.

    At length, after five years, when Mrs. Nickleby had presented her husband with a couple of sons, and that embarrassed gentleman, impressed with the necessity of making some provision for his family, was seriously revolving in his mind a little commercial speculation of insuring his life next quarter-day, and then falling from the top of the Monument by accident, there came, one morning, by the general post, a black-bordered letter to inform him how his uncle, Mr. Ralph Nickleby, was dead, and had left him the bulk of his little property, amounting in all to five thousand pounds sterling.

    As the deceased had taken no further notice of his nephew in his lifetime, than sending to his eldest boy (who had been christened after him, on desperate speculation) a silver spoon in a morocco case, which, as he had not too much to eat with it, seemed a kind of satire upon his having been born without that useful article of plate in his mouth, Mr. Godfrey Nickleby could, at first, scarcely believe the tidings thus conveyed to him. On examination, however, they turned out to be strictly correct. The amiable old gentleman, it seemed, had intended to leave the whole to the Royal Humane Society, and had indeed executed a will to that effect; but the Institution, having been unfortunate enough, a few months before, to save the life of a poor relation to whom he paid a weekly allowance of three shillings and sixpence, he had, in a fit of very natural exasperation, revoked the bequest in a codicil, and left it all to Mr. Godfrey Nickleby; with a special mention of his indignation, not only against the society for saving the poor relation’s life, but against the poor relation also, for allowing himself to be saved.

    With a portion of this property Mr. Godfrey Nickleby purchased a small farm, near Dawlish in Devonshire, whither he retired with his wife and two children, to live upon the best interest he could get for the rest of his money, and the little produce he could raise from his land. The two prospered so well together that, when he died, some fifteen years after this period, and some five after his wife, he was enabled to leave, to his eldest son, Ralph, three thousand pounds in cash, and to his youngest son, Nicholas, one thousand and the farm, which was as small a landed estate as one would desire to see.

    These two brothers had been brought up together in a school at Exeter; and, being accustomed to go home once a week, had often heard, from their mother’s lips, long accounts of their father’s sufferings in his days of poverty, and of their deceased uncle’s importance in his days of affluence: which recitals produced a very different impression on the two: for, while the younger, who was of a timid and retiring disposition, gleaned from thence nothing but forewarnings to shun the great world and attach himself to the quiet routine of a country life, Ralph, the elder, deduced from the often-repeated tale the two great morals that riches are the only true source of happiness and power, and that it is lawful and just to compass their acquisition by all means short of felony. ‘And,’ reasoned Ralph with himself, ‘if no good came of my uncle’s money when he was alive, a great deal of good came of it after he was dead, inasmuch as my father has got it now, and is saving it up for me, which is a highly virtuous purpose; and, going back to the old gentleman, good did come of it to him too, for he had the pleasure of thinking of it all his life long, and of being envied and courted by all his family besides.’ And Ralph always wound up these mental soliloquies by arriving at the conclusion, that there was nothing like money.

    Not confining himself to theory, or permitting his faculties to rust, even at that early age, in mere abstract speculations, this promising lad commenced usurer on a limited scale at school; putting out at good interest a small capital of slate-pencil and marbles, and gradually extending his operations until they aspired to the copper coinage of this realm, in which he speculated to considerable advantage. Nor did he trouble his borrowers with abstract calculations of figures, or references to ready-reckoners; his simple rule of interest being all comprised in the one golden sentence, ‘two-pence for every half-penny,’ which greatly simplified the accounts, and which, as a familiar precept, more easily acquired and retained in the memory than any known rule of arithmetic, cannot be too strongly recommended to the notice of capitalists, both large and small, and more especially of money-brokers and bill-discounters. Indeed, to do these gentlemen justice, many of them are to this day in the frequent habit of adopting it, with eminent success.

    In like manner, did young Ralph Nickleby avoid all those minute and intricate calculations of odd days, which nobody who has worked sums in simple-interest can fail to have found most embarrassing, by establishing the one general rule that all sums of principal and interest should be paid on pocket-money day, that is to say, on Saturday: and that whether a loan were contracted on the Monday, or on the Friday, the amount of interest should be, in both cases, the same. Indeed he argued, and with great show of reason, that it ought to be rather more for one day than for five, inasmuch as the borrower might in the former case be very fairly presumed to be in great extremity, otherwise he would not borrow at all with such odds against him. This fact is interesting, as illustrating the secret connection and sympathy which always exist between great minds. Though Master Ralph Nickleby was not at that time aware of it, the class of gentlemen before alluded to, proceed on just the same principle in all their transactions.

    From what we have said of this young gentleman, and the natural admiration the reader will immediately conceive of his character, it may perhaps be inferred that he is to be the hero of the work which we shall presently begin. To set this point at rest, for once and for ever, we hasten to undeceive them, and stride to its commencement.

    On the death of his father, Ralph Nickleby, who had been some time before placed in a mercantile house in London, applied himself passionately to his old pursuit of money-getting, in which he speedily became so buried and absorbed, that he quite forgot his brother for many years; and if, at times, a recollection of his old playfellow broke upon him through the haze in which he lived—for gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal—it brought along with it a companion thought, that if they were intimate he would want to borrow money of him. So, Mr. Ralph Nickleby shrugged his shoulders, and said things were better as they were.

    As for Nicholas, he lived a single man on the patrimonial estate until he grew tired of living alone, and then he took to wife the daughter of a neighbouring gentleman with a dower of one thousand pounds. This good lady bore him two children, a son and a daughter, and when the son was about nineteen, and the daughter fourteen, as near as we can guess—impartial records of young ladies’ ages being, before the passing of the new act, nowhere preserved in the registries of this country—Mr. Nickleby looked about him for the means of repairing his capital, now sadly reduced by this increase in his family, and the expenses of their education.

    ‘Speculate with it,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

    ‘Spec—u—late, my dear?’ said Mr. Nickleby, as though in doubt.

    ‘Why not?’ asked Mrs. Nickleby.

    ‘Because, my dear, if we should lose it,’ rejoined Mr. Nickleby, who was a slow and time-taking speaker, ‘if we should lose it, we shall no longer be able to live, my dear.’

    ‘Fiddle,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

    ‘I am not altogether sure of that, my dear,’ said Mr. Nickleby.

    ‘There’s Nicholas,’ pursued the lady, ‘quite a young man—it’s time he was in the way of doing something for himself; and Kate too, poor girl, without a penny in the world. Think of your brother! Would he be what he is, if he hadn’t speculated?’

    ‘That’s true,’ replied Mr. Nickleby. ‘Very good, my dear. Yes. I will speculate, my dear.’

    Speculation is a round game; the players see little or nothing of their cards at first starting; gains may be great—and so may losses. The run of luck went against Mr. Nickleby. A mania prevailed, a bubble burst, four stock-brokers took villa residences at Florence, four hundred nobodies were ruined, and among them Mr. Nickleby.

    ‘The very house I live in,’ sighed the poor gentleman, ‘may be taken from me tomorrow. Not an article of my old furniture, but will be sold to strangers!’

    The last reflection hurt him so much, that he took at once to his bed; apparently resolved to keep that, at all events.

    ‘Cheer up, sir!’ said the apothecary.

    ‘You mustn’t let yourself be cast down, sir,’ said the nurse.

    ‘Such things happen every day,’ remarked the lawyer.

    ‘And it is very sinful to rebel against them,’ whispered the clergyman.

    ‘And what no man with a family ought to do,’ added the neighbours.

    Mr. Nickleby shook his head, and motioning them all out of the room, embraced his wife and children, and having pressed them by turns to his languidly beating heart, sunk exhausted on his pillow. They were concerned to find that his reason went astray after this; for he babbled, for a long time, about the generosity and goodness of his brother, and the merry old times when they were at school together. This fit of wandering past, he solemnly commended them to One who never deserted the widow or her fatherless children, and, smiling gently on them, turned upon his face, and observed, that he thought he could fall asleep.

    Chapter 2.

    OF MR. RALPH NICKLEBY, AND HIS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND HIS UNDERTAKINGS, AND OF A GREAT JOINT STOCK COMPANY OF VAST NATIONAL IMPORTANCE

    Mr. Ralph Nickleby was not, strictly speaking, what you would call a merchant, neither was he a banker, nor an attorney, nor a special pleader, nor a notary. He was certainly not a tradesman, and still less could he lay any claim to the title of a professional gentleman; for it would have been impossible to mention any recognised profession to which he belonged. Nevertheless, as he lived in a spacious house in Golden Square, which, in addition to a brass plate upon the street-door, had another brass plate two sizes and a half smaller upon the left hand door-post, surrounding a brass model of an infant’s fist grasping a fragment of a skewer, and displaying the word ‘Office,’ it was clear that Mr. Ralph Nickleby did, or pretended to do, business of some kind; and the fact, if it required any further circumstantial evidence, was abundantly demonstrated by the diurnal attendance, between the hours of half-past nine and five, of a sallow-faced man in rusty brown, who sat upon an uncommonly hard stool in a species of butler’s pantry at the end of the passage, and always had a pen behind his ear when he answered the bell.

    Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden Square, it is not exactly in anybody’s way to or from anywhere. It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they give away the orders,—all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it. Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the Opera band reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square. On a summer’s night, windows are thrown open, and groups of swarthy mustachioed men are seen by the passer-by, lounging at the casements, and smoking fearfully. Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening’s silence; and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars, and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee-singers quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its boundaries.

    This would not seem a spot very well adapted to the transaction of business; but Mr. Ralph Nickleby had lived there, notwithstanding, for many years, and uttered no complaint on that score. He knew nobody round about, and nobody knew him, although he enjoyed the reputation of being immensely rich. The tradesmen held that he was a sort of lawyer, and the other neighbours opined that he was a kind of general agent; both of which guesses were as correct and definite as guesses about other people’s affairs usually are, or need to be.

    Mr. Ralph Nickleby sat in his private office one morning, ready dressed to walk abroad. He wore a bottle-green spencer over a blue coat; a white waistcoat, grey mixture pantaloons, and Wellington boots drawn over them. The corner of a small-plaited shirt-frill struggled out, as if insisting to show itself, from between his chin and the top button of his spencer; and the latter garment was not made low enough to conceal a long gold watch-chain, composed of a series of plain rings, which had its beginning at the handle of a gold repeater in Mr. Nickleby’s pocket, and its termination in two little keys: one belonging to the watch itself, and the other to some patent padlock. He wore a sprinkling of powder upon his head, as if to make himself look benevolent; but if that were his purpose, he would perhaps have done better to powder his countenance also, for there was something in its very wrinkles, and in his cold restless eye, which seemed to tell of cunning that would announce itself in spite of him. However this might be, there he was; and as he was all alone, neither the powder, nor the wrinkles, nor the eyes, had the smallest effect, good or bad, upon anybody just then, and are consequently no business of ours just now.

    Mr. Nickleby closed an account-book which lay on his desk, and, throwing himself back in his chair, gazed with an air of abstraction through the dirty window. Some London houses have a melancholy little plot of ground behind them, usually fenced in by four high whitewashed walls, and frowned upon by stacks of chimneys: in which there withers on, from year to year, a crippled tree, that makes a show of putting forth a few leaves late in autumn when other trees shed theirs, and, drooping in the effort, lingers on, all crackled and smoke-dried, till the following season, when it repeats the same process, and perhaps, if the weather be particularly genial, even tempts some rheumatic sparrow to chirrup in its branches. People sometimes call these dark yards ‘gardens’; it is not supposed that they were ever planted, but rather that they are pieces of unreclaimed land, with the withered vegetation of the original brick-field. No man thinks of walking in this desolate place, or of turning it to any account. A few hampers, half-a-dozen broken bottles, and such-like rubbish, may be thrown there, when the tenant first moves in, but nothing more; and there they remain until he goes away again: the damp straw taking just as long to moulder as it thinks proper: and mingling with the scanty box, and stunted everbrowns, and broken flower-pots, that are scattered mournfully about—a prey to ‘blacks’ and dirt.

    It was into a place of this kind that Mr. Ralph Nickleby gazed, as he sat with his hands in his pockets looking out of the window. He had fixed his eyes upon a distorted fir tree, planted by some former tenant in a tub that had once been green, and left there, years before, to rot away piecemeal. There was nothing very inviting in the object, but Mr. Nickleby was wrapt in a brown study, and sat contemplating it with far greater attention than, in a more conscious mood, he would have deigned to bestow upon the rarest exotic. At length, his eyes wandered to a little dirty window on the left, through which the face of the clerk was dimly visible; that worthy chancing to look up, he beckoned him to attend.

    In obedience to this summons the clerk got off the high stool (to which he had communicated a high polish by countless gettings off and on), and presented himself in Mr. Nickleby’s room. He was a tall man of middle age, with two goggle eyes whereof one was a fixture, a rubicund nose, a cadaverous face, and a suit of clothes (if the term be allowable when they suited him not at all) much the worse for wear, very much too small, and placed upon such a short allowance of buttons that it was marvellous how he contrived to keep them on.

    ‘Was that half-past twelve, Noggs?’ said Mr. Nickleby, in a sharp and grating voice.

    ‘Not more than five-and-twenty minutes by the—’ Noggs was going to add public-house clock, but recollecting himself, substituted ‘regular time.’

    ‘My watch has stopped,’ said Mr. Nickleby; ‘I don’t know from what cause.’

    ‘Not wound up,’ said Noggs.

    ‘Yes it is,’ said Mr. Nickleby.

    ‘Over-wound then,’ rejoined Noggs.

    ‘That can’t very well be,’ observed Mr. Nickleby.

    ‘Must be,’ said Noggs.

    ‘Well!’ said Mr. Nickleby, putting the repeater back in his pocket; ‘perhaps it is.’

    Noggs gave a peculiar grunt, as was his custom at the end of all disputes with his master, to imply that he (Noggs) triumphed; and (as he rarely spoke to anybody unless somebody spoke to him) fell into a grim silence, and rubbed his hands slowly over each other: cracking the joints of his fingers, and squeezing them into all possible distortions. The incessant performance of this routine on every occasion, and the communication of a fixed and rigid look to his unaffected eye, so as to make it uniform with the other, and to render it impossible for anybody to determine where or at what he was looking, were two among the numerous peculiarities of Mr. Noggs, which struck an inexperienced observer at first sight.

    ‘I am going to the London Tavern this morning,’ said Mr. Nickleby.

    ‘Public meeting?’ inquired Noggs.

    Mr. Nickleby nodded. ‘I expect a letter from the solicitor respecting that mortgage of Ruddle’s. If it comes at all, it will be here by the two o’clock delivery. I shall leave the city about that time and walk to Charing Cross on the left-hand side of the way; if there are any letters, come and meet me, and bring them with you.’

    Noggs nodded; and as he nodded, there came a ring at the office bell. The master looked up from his papers, and the clerk calmly remained in a stationary position.

    ‘The bell,’ said Noggs, as though in explanation. ‘At home?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘To anybody?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘To the tax-gatherer?’

    ‘No! Let him call again.’

    Noggs gave vent to his usual grunt, as much as to say ‘I thought so!’ and, the ring being repeated, went to the door, whence he presently returned, ushering in, by the name of Mr. Bonney, a pale gentleman in a violent hurry,

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