Recommendations
Books Like Nicholas Nickleby
Best books to read after Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby combines Dickens's greatest comic energies with his first sustained attack on a specific social evil — the Yorkshire boarding schools that warehoused unwanted children in conditions of starvation and abuse. If the novel's picaresque energy and its theatrical gallery of characters moved you, these books share its delight in character, its moral seriousness, and its sense that the world contains villains who deserve to be exposed and people who deserve better than they get.
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The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's debut novel and the purest expression of his early comic energy — the picaresque adventures of Mr. Pickwick and his friends through the highways and inns of England; the natural predecessor to Nicholas Nickleby in its delight in character and its sense that the world, for all its comic villains, is ultimately benign
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David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
The psychological deepening of everything Nicholas Nickleby begins — another young man making his way through the world, but with the benefit of Dickens's full autobiographical honesty and his mature novelistic technique; where Nicholas is a melodramatic hero, David is a psychologically real one
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Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding
Fielding's 18th-century novel about a foundling's adventures through English society — the formal and tonal ancestor of Nicholas Nickleby; the picaresque hero who keeps his moral integrity through misadventure, the comic rogues, the benevolent mentors; Dickens knew Fielding well and his influence is visible throughout
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Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
Published simultaneously with Nicholas Nickleby — both show Dickens using the novel form to attack specific social evils while organizing the attack around a virtuous young protagonist; reading them together gives the fullest picture of the early Dickens's extraordinary productivity and his range across comic and melodramatic modes
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Roderick Random
by Tobias Smollett
Smollett's 18th-century picaresque novel about a Scottish adventurer making his way through the world — the other major formal ancestor of Nicholas Nickleby, alongside Tom Jones; Dickens's early novels are directly descended from the 18th-century picaresque tradition, and Smollett was one of the novelists he knew best from childhood
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Martin Chuzzlewit
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's fifth novel, immediately following Nicholas Nickleby in his career, but darker and more thematically focused on selfishness as a moral and social disease; the natural next step for readers who want to continue through Dickens's development after Nicholas Nickleby
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A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's most beloved short work and the purest expression of the moral vision that underlies Nicholas Nickleby — the conviction that cruelty and selfishness are moral diseases and that human warmth, generosity, and connection are both the right way to live and the source of genuine happiness
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
Twain's American picaresque shares Nicholas Nickleby's delight in the journey through a social world that reveals its varieties of virtue and vice through a series of episodic encounters; both novels use the mobile young protagonist as a means of social critique across class and institutional lines
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