24
The Nicklebys’ social and financial uncertainties are comically echoed in the pretensions to gentility that animate the Kenwigses and Fanny Squeers, and with surprising force in Dickens’s portrayal of Walter Bray. Though obviously not as complex or ambivalently presented as William Dorrit – Dickens’s most resonant version of the selfish debtor – Walter Bray’s feverish efforts to maintain his gentlemanly status within the Rules of the King’s Bench Prison reveal Dickens’s early interest in the internal divisions that make a character at once pitiable and ruthless, helpless and frighteningly possessive. Like Dorrit, Bray is prepared to barter his daughter in marriage to protect his interests, but not to acknowledge a fact so wounding to his self-esteem: ‘I couldn’t do anything better for her than advise her to accept these proposals, could I? Now, I ask you, Nickleby, as a man of the world – could I?’ Bray’s tortuous self-persuasions are abruptly cut short by the exigencies of the plot, but look forward to some of the later Dickens’s subtlest effects.
In general, however, the Dickens of Nicholas Nicklebyis not much driven to analytical probing of the motivations and inner conflicts of his characters, who appeal – or not – on the most primary terms. In this, his approach resembles that of the first-tragedy man fondly remembered by Crummles, ‘who, when he played Othello, used to black himself all over. But that’s feeling a part and going into it as if you meant it; it isn’t usual – more’s the pity.’
The book’s unwillingness to explore, or even pause over, its own contradictions is offset, on the other hand, by the delirious fertility of its comic invention. Its most memorable characters may not develop, but Dickens is for ever finding fresh ways to express different facets of their essential being, new situations to which they vigorously respond: ‘I never thrashed a boy in a hackney-coach before,’ declares Squeers, exhausted by his assault on the recaptured Smike. ‘There’s inconveniency in it, but the novelty gives it a sort of relish too!’ Or, who would have guessed the pompous water-rate collector, Mr Lillyvick, might rise to describe Henrietta Petowker’s performance on the Portsmouth stage in a manner at once so characteristic and yet lyrical:‘ “I say delicious,” repeated Mr Lillyvick. “Absorbing, fairy-like, toomultuous” ’?
Nevertheless, Nicholas Nicklebyhas not fared particularly well with the critics over the years. George Gissing considered much of it ‘unreadable by any but the very young’.25Nor has its reputation among Dickens scholars ever quite matched its general popularity, especially when adapted for the theatre, to which it obviously lends itself (in Dickens Dramatized, Philip Bolton identifies over 250 productions of stage versions of the novel).26Certainly it lacks both the emotional and intellectual range of Dickens’s later works, and the troubling kinds of self-awareness they shadow forth, but this is at least in part because Nicholas Nicklebyso often succeeds in transfiguring Dickens’s major anxieties into the wildest, most exhilarating forms of comedy.
NOTES
1.For the full text of the Nickleby‘Proclamation’, see Appendix 1.
2.For further details of these plagiarisms, see Michael Slater, The Composition and Monthly Publication of Nicholas Nickleby(London: Scolar Press, 1973), pp. xxvi – xxviii, and Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man 1830 – 1850(London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 63 – 4.
3.The first stage version of Nicholas Nicklebywas performed on 19 November 1838 at the Adelphi Theatre in London. This adaptation by Edward Stirling was based on the first six numbers, and produced by Frederick Yates, who himself played the part of Mr Mantalini. Dickens seems to have enjoyed the production, and even supported the play’s publication. For further details of this and subsequent contemporary productions, see Slater, pp. xliii ff. and Philip H. Bolton, Dickens Dramatized(London: Mansell, 1987), pp. 154 – 86.
4.See Paul Schlicke, Dickens and Popular Entertainment(London: Allen and Unwin, 1985; with alterations, 1988), pp. 33 – 86.
5.Letters of Charles Dickens(London: The Nonesuch Edition, 1938), vol. iii, p. 246.
6.Chesterton on Dickens(London: J. M. Dent, 1992; first published 1911) p. 31.
7.The agreement between Dickens and Chapman and Hall is reproduced in full in Appendix C of Volume One (1820 – 1839) of the Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, etal. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965 – ) pp. 658 – 62.
8.For further details, see Philip Collins, Dickens and Education(London: Macmillan, 1963, reprinted with alterations 1965), pp. 98 – 112, Slater, pp. ix – xxvi, and V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, ‘Benevolent Teachers of Youth’, CornhillMagazine, 169 (1957), pp. 361 – 82.
9.The Times, 31 October 1823.
10.‘Recollections of the Late Hon.