Recommendations
Books Like Nicholas Nickleby
Best books to read after Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens's third novel (1838-39) exposed the brutal Yorkshire schools, created the unforgettable theatrical world of Vincent Crummles, and established Dickens as the champion of the socially vulnerable. These recommendations extend the experience through Dickens's other social reform novels, through the picaresque tradition Nicholas Nickleby inhabits, and through Victorian theatrical fiction.
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Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
The novel immediately preceding Nicholas Nickleby in Dickens's career and the one it most directly developed from — Oliver Twist established the template of the innocent young person surrounded by social corruption, and Nicholas Nickleby is in many ways a richer and more socially panoramic version of the same story.
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David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's semi-autobiographical novel and the one he considered his favorite — the story of David's survival of a brutal school education (Salem House and Mr. Creakle) and his eventual career as a novelist inherits the Nicholas Nickleby template but achieves it at greater depth and psychological richness.
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Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding
The great eighteenth-century picaresque novel that Nicholas Nickleby most directly inhabits — Tom Jones's journey through English society, his encounters with hypocrisy and generosity, and his eventual romantic vindication are the template for the genre that Dickens extended into the Victorian period.
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Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's most formally accomplished first-person novel and the work in which the themes of Nicholas Nickleby — social ambition, the corruption of wealth, the education of a young man in the nature of genuine goodness — are most fully realized; Pip's education reverses Nickleby's in instructive ways.
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Barnaby Rudge
by Charles Dickens
The novel that followed Nicholas Nickleby in Dickens's publishing schedule and that shows his development from social-reform picaresque toward historical fiction — the two novels together trace Dickens's ambition expanding from the exposure of specific social abuses toward the historical imagination of crowd violence.
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The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's first novel and the one that established the picaresque structure Nicholas Nickleby inherited — Mr. Pickwick's benevolent journey through English social types with his loyal companions Sam Weller is the model for Nicholas's journey, but in a lower emotional register (comedy without the darkness of Squeers).
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Martin Chuzzlewit
by Charles Dickens
The novel that followed Barnaby Rudge and marked Dickens's turn toward more systematic thematic ambition — where Nicholas Nickleby exposes specific social abuses, Martin Chuzzlewit analyzes a single vice (selfishness) throughout an entire society; the development from social reform to moral philosophy.
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Roderick Random
by Tobias Smollett
Smollett's picaresque novel of the mid-eighteenth century is the most important Scottish-tradition ancestor of Nicholas Nickleby — Roderick's progress through the brutal world of the Royal Navy and London society is the model for the picaresque hero who survives through energy, anger, and loyalty rather than through the gentler virtues of Tom Jones.
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