[Literature] Charles Dickens: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby #7/456
‘She calls me cruel – me – me – who for her sake will become a demd damp, moist, unpleasant body!’ exclaimed Mr Mantalini.
Like Mrs Nickleby’s recollections, such flights of fancy display a self-sustaining, anarchic inventiveness, but also convey with hilarious accuracy the bizarre textures and incongruities of the physical world – that ‘demd damp, moist, unpleasant body’, for instance. Momentarily Mantalini even makes Ralph seem physically present and distinctive: on hearing it was Nicholas who attacked Sir Mulberry, the money-lender flies into a stock villainous rage, snarling and ‘clenching his fists and turning a livid white’. ‘It is but manner,’ he weakly apologizes. ‘It is a demd uncomfortable and private-madhouse-sort of manner,’ retorts the affrighted dandy.
When her husband’s prodigal habits reduce Madame Mantalini to an ‘out-and-out smash’, the bailiff Mr Scaley comforts her with the reflection that ‘a good half of wot’s here isn’t paid for I des-say, and wot a consolation oughtn’t that to be to her feelings’, before taking up temporary ‘possession’ of the millinery. Until the Cheerybles begin loading the Nickleby family down with the all too solid emblems of bourgeois bliss (‘One day it was a grapevine, and another day it was a boiler… and so on through a hundred items’), they too live in a world of temporary ‘possession’, able only to look forward to a shared home in the future, or lament, as Mrs Nickleby does so fondly and accurately to an impatient Ralph, the loss of all they owned – ‘four-and-twenty silver tea spoons, brother-in-law, two gravies, four salts, all the amethysts – necklace, brooch, and ear-rings – all made away with at the same time’.
Yet the book’s intoxicating atmosphere of romance and freedom – ‘a carnival of liberty’,18as Chesterton called it – derives wholly from the financial and social insecurities attendant upon the family’s impoverishment. The novel communicates – at least until the arrival of the Cheerybles – a gloriously ardent sense of possibility and adventure; its successive episodes unfold almost without reference to each other, hired by the narrative in just the provisional spirit in which Nicholas rents his few common articles of furniture. Dickens once commented on ‘the wayward and unsettled feeling which is part (I suppose) of the tenure on which one holds an imaginative life’,19and the remark seems particularly relevant to Nicholas Nickleby, in which vitality and instability are so interlinked: once the Nicklebys are respectably settled in their cosy Bow Street cottage, the plot’s trajectory becomes depressingly predictable, and the writing loses much of its zest.
The most sustained alternative that the book offers to the ideals of gentility and domestic harmony enshrined in the cottage is the protean world of the Crummleses’ theatre company, to which Nicholas briefly considers returning just before he runs into Charles Cheeryble. However, the profession’s low status, erratic rewards and peripatetic lifestyle dissuade him:20
How could he carry his sister from town to town, and place to place, and debar her from any other associates than those with whom he would be compelled, almost without distinction, to mingle? ‘It won’t do,’ said Nicholas shaking his head; ‘I must try something else.’
Dickens was obsessed with all things theatrical throughout his life, and in 1832 actually arranged an audition for himself with the manager of Covent Garden theatre, cancelling at the last moment on account of a heavy cold and swollen face. He claims to have attended a show of some sort – anything from pantomime to tragedy – every night for about three years during his early adulthood, and in later life became a fervently enthusiastic amateur performer. Theatrical motifs and methods permeate practically all Dickens’s fiction, but the Crummles episodes constitute one of his most direct and extended treatments of the life of professional artistes. The book is even dedicated to an actor, the tragedian William Charles Macready, to whom Dickens was introduced by Forster in June 1837 in Macready’s dressing room at Covent Garden.
Nicholas and Smike meet Crummles and sons in best picaresque fashion, at a roadside inn 12 miles short of Portsmouth, where the company has repaired ‘not for the regular season, but in the course of a wandering speculation’. Nicholas is preparing – like any number of novelistic heroes before him – to seek his fortunes at sea, but the theatre in fact provides a more thoroughgoing escape from all that is ‘regular’ than the standard journey abroad. Nicholas is not confronted as, say, Swift’s Gulliver or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe are, by an exoticism that makes him question his own humanity.