[Literature] Charles Dickens: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby #8/456

Rather, he is asked to collude in a childishly simple set of codes, which require, for instance, that the Indian Savage (Mr Folair) indicate his admiration for the Maiden (the Phenomenon), by stroking ‘his face several times with his right thumb and four fingers’ and then giving himself a series of ‘severe thumps in the chest’.

Part of Dickens’s delight in the theatre’s conventions springs from the ease with which they allow an individual to lay aside a given identity and assume another. Looking around backstage just before the Highland drama commences, Nicholas is amazed to discover everyone ‘so much changed that he scarcely knew them. False hair, false colour, false calves, false muscles – they had become different beings.’ Even Smike, presented up to this point wholly through Nicholas’s relentlessly pitying eyes, is able to slough off for a while his poor fool role and expand in unforeseen directions. While Nicholas is busy Englishing a French melodrama, Smike is required to appear on stage ‘with another gentleman as a general rebellion’. As the mysterious Mr Digby, he attracts curious attention rather than stifling compassion, and his oddities equip him perfectly for the ‘starved business’ – roles such as the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet. ‘He is admirable,’ declares Mrs Crummles solemnly. ‘An acquisition, indeed!’

The acceptance of Smike by the troupe reflects its willingness to tolerate, indeed celebrate, all forms of eccentricity. Mr Crummles recalls how he fell in love at first sight with his gifted partner:

‘She stood upon her head on the butt-end of a spear, surrounded by blazing fire-works.’

‘You astonish me!’ said Nicholas.

‘Sheastonished me!’returned Mr Crummles with a very serious countenance. ‘Such grace, coupled with such dignity! I adored her from that moment.’

The actors so enjoy the self-display performing allows them that they continually behave as if in-character even when off-stage. ‘What, ho! within there!’ booms the tragedian Mr Lenville, come to pay a social call on Nicholas and Smike. ‘Farewell, my noble, my lion-hearted boy!’ intones Crummles at Nicholas’s departure, embracing him in the highest style of melodrama, much ‘to that young gentleman’s most profound annoyance’. The actors, however, can switch from role to role without embarrassment. Angered by Nicholas’s meteoric rise to success, Lenville confronts the upstart in the style of a defiant tyrant (‘Object of my scorn and hatred! I hold ye in contempt’), but when the new leading man unimaginatively knocks him down, he at once adopts a different character, movingly yielding to his pregnant wife who threatens to sprawl, ‘a blighted corse’, at his feet: ‘The ties of nature are strong. The weak husband and the father – the father that is yet to be – relents.’

While the performers surf upon the clichés of early nineteenth-century melodrama, Nicholas – sheltering behind the pseudonym of Mr Johnson – attempts to figure his sojourn among them in slightly more noble dramatic terms, lamenting, Prince Hal-style, the time he has spent ‘fooling’ in their frivolous world. Yet, in many ways, the decision to embroil Nicholas directly in the production of populist theatre is one of the most significant moments, not only in the book, but in Dickens’s entire career: the jubilant parody of the Crummles episodes coincides with his developing awareness of how the layered interconnections of melodrama may be adapted into the form of the novel, and used to represent the complex social relationships of contemporary society in a manner beyond the linear narrative of the picaresque. Although the serious melodrama of Nicholas Nicklebyis far from convincing, the experiment leads in the end to the sweeping, multiple dependencies enacted in Bleak Houseor Little Dorrit. Nicholas works diligently away at his piece, which, Crummles insists, must not only ‘bring out the whole strength of the company’, but also include ‘a real pump and two washing-tubs’; when staged, it is as rapturously received as Dickens’s own early literary performances, with ‘such a shout of enthusiasm, as had not been heard in those walls for many and many a day’.

Such triumphs, however, mean little to Nicholas, concerned as he is with issues of social status rather than artistic success. Whereas the concluding chapters of David Copperfieldreveal how the two are linked in the hero’s career, in the earlier novel Nicholas’s achievements as an actor-writer and his aspirations to gentility are presented in decisive mutual opposition. During the period of the book’s composition Dickens was himself rapidly ascending the social scale – in June 1838, for instance, he was elected a member of the prestigious Athenaeum Club – and was eager on all occasions to defend the dignity of his profession.