In addition, the book throws up an astonishing variety of minor characters whom Dickens hits off with insouciant brilliance: Mortimer Knag, Mrs Grudden, Mrs Blockson, Mr Snittle Timberry, the bailiffs Mr Tix and Mr Scaley, Mr Crummles’s performing pony who ‘ate apple-pie at a circus for upwards of fourteen years, fired pistols, and went to bed in a nightcap’, the Curdles, the Wititterlys, Miss Snevellici’s drunken pa, the page Alphonse who ‘if there was an Alphonse who carried plain Bill in his face and figure, that page was the boy’. Mrs Nickleby’s reminiscences generate yet more supernumeraries – the Miss Dowdleses, Miss Browndock, Miss Biffin, the Peltiroguses, Mr Watkins, Miss Cropley, her suitors Lukin, Mogley, Tipslark, Cabbery, and Smifser, the Hawkinses of Taunton Vale… The book seethes with random, disparate anecdotes that elude its facile moral intentions and constantly disrupt its centripetal impetus.
In a review of Dickens’s last novel, Our Mutual Friend, Henry James declared it to be ‘one of the chief conditions of his genius not to see beneath the surface of things’,15but characters like Mrs Nickleby, or Mrs Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit, or Flora Finching in Little Dorrit, body forth in their freeflowing monologues a kind of syntax of the subconscious as striking as that of Joyce’s Molly Bloom. Mrs Nickleby, as she herself often notes with pride, sees far ‘beneath the surface of things’; so far, in fact, that she often leaves her listeners dazed and bemused:
‘Kate, my dear,’ said Mrs Nickleby; ‘I don’t know how it is, but a fine warm summer day like this, with the birds singing in every direction, always puts me in mind of roast pig, with sage and onion sauce and made gravy.’
‘That’s a curious association of ideas, is it not, mama?’
‘Upon my word, my dear, I don’t know,’ replied Mrs Nickleby. ‘Roast pig – let me see. On the day five weeks after you were christened, we had a roast – no that couldn’t have been a pig, either, because I recollect there were a pair of them to carve, and your poor papa and I could never have thought of sitting down to two pigs – they must have been partridges. Roast pig! I hardly think we ever could have had one, now I come to remember, for your papa could never bear the sight of them in the shops, and used to say that they always put him in mind of very little babies, only the pigs had much fairer complexions; and he had a horror of little babies, too, because he couldn’t very well afford any increase to his family, and had a natural dislike to the subject. It’s very odd now, what can put that in my head! I recollect dining once at Mrs Bevan’s, in that broad street, round the corner by the coach-maker’s, where the tipsy man fell through the cellar-flap of an empty house nearly a week before quarter-day, and wasn’t found till the new tenant went in – and we had roast pig there. It must be that, I think, that reminds me of it, especially as there was a little bird in the room that would keep on singing all the time of dinner – at least, not a little bird, for it was a parrot, and he didn’t sing exactly, for he talked and swore dreadfully; but I think it must be that. Indeed, I am sure it must. Shouldn’t you say so, my dear?’
Mrs Nickleby’s seamless, sprawling recollections unfold according to a mysterious but irresistible inner logic that defies all interruptions and contradictions. Although she is presented as a supreme solipsist, it is the world’s arbitrary abundance that galvanizes her compulsive curiosity. ‘The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail’,16observed George Orwell, and the wonderfully redundant particulars that characterize Mrs Nickleby’s speech reveal at its least inhibited this talent for excess. Unimpressed by Nicholas’s rescue of Madeline from the clutches of old Arthur Gride, she adduces the example of one Jane Dibabs, who happily married a man much her senior and lived in a thatched cottage ‘with an exquisite little porch with twining honeysuckles and all sorts of things, where the earwigs used to fall into one’s tea on a summer evening, and always fell upon their backs and kicked dreadfully, and where the frogs used to get into the rushlight shades when one stopped all night, and sit up and look through the little holes like Christians’.