Review: Nicholas Nickleby

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Two things strike me after reading this one.

First, this is funnier than I remember Dickens being. I guess there are terrific vignettes in a lot of places – my father always loved the scene of “give a nod to the aged P” in Great Expectations – but I found myself laughing throughout this. The narrative here can drag on a lot – the bits with Mrs. Nickleby, especially after he finds her meandering style of speaking in the middle and after, go on a long time – but then he has a way of pithily stating some contradiction or humorous insight. I listened to this, so I can’t go back and find specific lines, but I don’t know how funny they’d be out of context in any case. Instead, it’s just a matter of cutting through the fluff, of making light of someone or other in an elegant understated way.

Second, and more absorbing, I feel as if this comes perilously close to what I think of as the Marvel Comics’ villain problem. In most of those movies, the antagonist seems to have powers that mirror the hero’s. Iron Man battles someone in a large suit; Ant-Man goes up against someone who can shrink; Captain American faces off with someone who went through the same serum-strengthening technique he did.

In this case, we could see Nicholas – if we twisted the context – as looking a lot like the sort of person he otherwise tells us he despises. Consider: he beats up two people, Mr. Squeers and Sir Mulberry Hawk, so badly that they are temporarily bed-ridden, and he threatens or actually strikes at least two more. He actually takes a valuable ring from the Squeers, though he returns it when he discovers he’s done it. He toys with the emotions of Fanny Squeers (though he claims he didn’t even really see her – which is quite an insult when you think of it), and then he sneaks in the basement to meet the woman, Cecilia, whom he thinks is Madeline. In the end, though he protests that he doesn’t want to be one of those guys who marries for money, he does indeed marry Madeline, inherit her fortune, and go into business.

I acknowledge that context excuses him in every case. He’s always so darned noble that we have to forgive him. But look how easily we could make the case that he resembles his uncle and nemesis, Ralph.

We’re supposed to dislike Ralph because his business is all speculation, but Nicholas eventually takes over the Cheeryble firm, meaning that he’s speculating as well. (Yes, I realize he’s dealing in real goods rather than financial instruments or straight-out usury, but it’s still business on a large scale with all the attendant risks.) We’re supposed to dislike Ralph because he’s single-minded and cunning, refusing to rest until he gets what he wants, but we could say the same about Nicholas. (True, Nicholas wants things that are good for others while Ralph is entirely selfish, but the point is that each refuses to compromise.) And each is, in the end, a Nickleby, not merely in name but in the enterprise of putting one nickel by another, in realizing that wealth and happiness, however designated, comes incrementally rather than in one fell swoop.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of all that, except to think that, in later novels, Dickens seems to distinguish his protagonists from their antagonists more clearly. Pip is nothing like Miss Havisham – he’s all about embracing life while she lives for the dead. Uriah Heep isn’t like David Copperfield; he doesn’t even enter the book until the halfway point.

What I’m driving at is that, certainly here, it’s context that redeems Nicholas. Maybe, as Dickens moved on to later novels, he sharpened his critique on the world and distinguished his positive characters more fully from his malevolent ones. He made them more different to play to a notion that it wasn’t merely that the 19th Century British economy and social structure hurt so many, but that it also had more evidently evil people populating it.

Or, maybe, I’m just over-thinking this. I do know that part of what I liked was the sense that Nicholas is, in many ways, a tough and persistent guy. He wouldn’t succeed on his happy terms if not for a lot of clear authorial intervention. And, maybe, that’s a sign that Nicholas’s good fortune doesn’t entirely redeem him.


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