Penguin Classics Nicholas Nickleby [Paperback]

This Yorkshire school, called Dotheboys Hall, turns out to be little more than a prison in the way it is run by its headmaster, an improbably cruel cyclops named Wackford Squeers who badly mistreats and miseducates the students. Now, historical records indicate that while Squeers may be an exaggeration, his school is definitely not, Dickens intending to warn his readers of the day that some such places were indeed that bad. The duration at Dotheboys Hall constitutes only a small portion of the novel, but Squeers and his grotesque family reappear throughout the rest of the story like gremlins who are always causing bad things to happen to our hero.

Nicholas's fortunes after escaping from Dotheboys Hall with Smike, a particularly abused older boy whom Squeers had worked like a slave, revolve largely around the circumstances of Kate and Uncle Ralph, who is starting to view the young man as a nuisance inclined to interfere in his machinations. Having been vilified by Squeers for his brash conduct at the Hall, Nicholas takes to the road with Smike in tow, where in Portsmouth they meet a thespian named Vincent Crummles who persuades the fugitives to become actors in his theatrical troupe; this episode, the strangest of Nicholas's adventures, seems more than anything else to reflect Dickens's own interest in the theater. Eventually Nicholas returns to London and gets a job as a clerk at a counting-house owned by a pair of merchants, the cheery Cheeryble brothers, where he encounters a beautiful girl in distress who will become a major factor in the final showdown between Nicholas and his uncle.

The supporting characters are numerous and extremely colorful to the point of cartoonishness, such as Miss La Creevy, a talkative spinster and amateur painter; John Browdie, the gruff Yorkshireman whose dialect is so severe he needs a translator; Sir Mulberry Hawk, the arrogant suitor whom Kates tries to rebuff; Newman Noggs, Uncle Ralph's benevolent clerk who helps our hero when he can. In fact, the most curious thing about the characterization in this novel is that its main characters are almost completely devoid of personality; Nicholas and Kate, perhaps being by necessity innocuous paragons of virtue, are practically mere mannequins to whom people talk and things happen. Even the sickly and wretchedly humble Smike, the mystery of whose parentage becomes a part of the plot, does not induce as much pity as Dickens probably intended because he seems trapped in a story that doesn't really want him except as a device to expose even more of Uncle Ralph's villainy.

There is much to like in "Nicholas Nickleby": The prose is finely detailed, the satire of various types of characters is on target, the humor is sharp -- there is a particularly funny and suspenseful scene with an unexpected outcome in which Nicholas dispatches Newman to discover the identity of the mysterious beautiful girl. And there is much not to like: The plot coincidences are ridiculously contrived in typical Dickensian fashion; the drama is manipulative, designed to cheer the reader all the more when the author comes to rescue the heroes from their despair and hopelessness; the sentimentality is overwhelming -- by the end "Nicholas Nickleby" becomes so saccharine it makes "David Copperfield" look like "Blood Meridian." But Dickens remains eminently readable because of his flair for portraying and celebrating human oddity in all its varieties, his knowledge that life is all about taking the bad with the good, and his sense that fiction is all about maximizing the contrast.