[Literature] Charles Dickens: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby #1/456

INTRODUCTION

A few weeks before the opening number of Nicholas Nicklebywas due to be published on 31 March 1838, Dickens issued a three-page pseudo-legal statement that warned of the dire punishments awaiting any literary pirates who might ‘presume to hoist but one shred of the good ship NICKLEBY’, and advertised the new work to the reading public in the most reassuring of terms: ‘it will be our aim to amuse, by producing a rapid succession of characters and incidents, and describing them as cheerfully and pleasantly as in us lies’.¹

Needless to say, Dickens’s lurid threats had no effect on the various hacks who scraped a living by churning out cheap imitations and stage versions of the works of ‘the only true and lawful Boz’, as he described himself in the NicklebyProclamation. Existing copyright legislation, about which Dickens complains several times in the course of Nicholas Nicklebyitself, offered authors almost no protection against plagiarists, who had only slightly to alter the characters’ names to avoid prosecution. A certain ‘Bos’, who had already produced 112 instalments of The Posthumorous Notes of the Pickwick Cluband a serial called Oliver Twiss, was soon following Dickens’s new novel under the title of Nickelas Nickelbery,²while London theatres began presenting adaptations – with invented endings – as early as November 1838, before Dickens was even halfway through his story.³

These rogue publications and productions were, in the main, deeply resented by Dickens, but do serve to illustrate how completely he achieved his ‘aim to amuse’. Nicholas Nicklebyis among those novels which reveal with particular clarity his debt to the forms of popular entertainment⁴that underlie his art – as he seems to have discovered himself over twenty years later, almost with surprise, when he first incorporated part of the book into the repertoire of his public performances. ‘I think Nickleby tops all the readings,’ he wrote to Georgina Hogarth from Bury St Edmunds on 30 October 1861. ‘Somehow it seems to have got in it, by accident, exactly the qualities best suited to the purpose, and it went last night not only with roars, but with a general hilarity and pleasure that I have never seen surpassed.’⁵

Although his third full-length work of fiction, Nicholas Nicklebyis much more the inaugural prototype of the Dickensian novel than either Pickwick Papersor Oliver Twist, both works so wholly sui generisas to be unrepeatable. Chesterton goes so far as to claim that Nicholas Nicklebyrepresents the crux of Dickens’s career, the ‘supreme moment’ at which he turned away from the fragmentary sketch and committed himself to the all-linking form of the novel. ‘This book,’ Chesterton declares, ‘coincides with his resolution to be a great novelist and his final belief that he could be one.’⁶

Nicholas Nicklebyis made up, nevertheless, of all manner of different kinds of writing – melodrama, political satire, class comedy, social criticism, domestic farce – while its loose, episodic narrative style allows Dickens to push the story at almost any moment in whatever direction happens to appeal. Its open, haphazard progress harks back to the picaresque traditions of the eighteenth century – particularly Smollett and Fielding – and contrasts absolutely with the nightmarish world of Oliver Twist, which was only half written at the time his manic schedule obliged him to begin work on his new serial. It is revealing that Dickens so arranged his contracts that for six months he was producing novels embodying such different visions of the world simultaneously.

The NicklebyProclamation’s insistence on the cheerful approach Dickens planned to adopt towards his new material would have consoled any readers dismayed by the rapacious atmosphere of Oliver Twist, that at least in the next novel Dickens would return to the comic modes of his first great triumph. Indeed, Dickens’s agreement with Chapman and Hall, signed in November of 1837, stipulated that the work be ‘of a similar character and of the same extent and contents in point of quantity’ as Pickwickitself.⁷However, Dickens also intended to continue the assault on flagrant social injustices that he had begun with Oliver Twist’sexposure of the brutalities of the Poor Law. In his 1848 Preface to the first Cheap Edition of the book, he relates how he first heard about the ‘Yorkshire schools’ during his childhood at Rochester:

I know that my first impressions of them were picked up at that time, and that they were, somehow or other, connected with a suppurated abscess that some boy had come home with, in consequence of his Yorkshire guide, philosopher, and friend, having ripped it open with an inky penknife. The impression made upon me, however made, never left me.