Question 1

What were the Yorkshire schools that Dickens attacked?

Accepted Answer

Yorkshire schools were boarding schools (mostly concentrated in Yorkshire because of the county's distance from London and consequent freedom from oversight) that offered to take unwanted boys — often illegitimate children, orphans, or boys whose families could not afford to maintain them — for a flat fee, educate them year-round (including at Christmas), and ask no awkward questions. In practice they were often places of deliberate neglect and cruelty: boys were underfed, housed in unsanitary conditions, beaten routinely, and educated minimally or not at all. Dickens visited Yorkshire disguised as a prospective parent before writing Nicholas Nickleby, and his portrait of Dotheboys Hall and Wackford Squeers was based on what he saw and heard. The resulting public attention contributed to the decline and eventual closure of the schools.

Question 2

Who are the Crummles, and why do readers love them?

Accepted Answer

Vincent Crummles is the manager of a traveling theatrical company who hires Nicholas as an actor and playwright when Nicholas is destitute; his company includes his wife, his daughter (the Infant Phenomenon), and an assortment of eccentric actors and actresses. The theatrical scenes — in which Crummles plans productions, Nicholas adapts French plays into English, and the company navigates the provincial circuits — are Dickens's most sustained comedy and his most affectionate portrait of professional theatrical life. Crummles's promotional instincts, his boundless confidence, and the Infant Phenomenon (who has been 'ten years of age' for several consecutive years of her theatrical career) are among the novel's most beloved characters.

Question 3

Who is Ralph Nickleby, and how does he function as a villain?

Accepted Answer

Ralph Nickleby is Nicholas's uncle — a moneylender and financial operator who takes the family in after their father's death and then exploits them, attempts to sell Nicholas's sister Smike (whom Nicholas protects) into a mercenary marriage, and conspires against Nicholas throughout the novel. His villainy is purely mercantile — he is motivated by greed and calculation rather than passion — and Dickens uses him to analyze the morality of the commercial world more systematically than in the earlier novels. His eventual fate — suicide when he learns that Smike (whose death he helped cause) was his own illegitimate son — is one of the novel's most melodramatic moments and is somewhat prepared for in the earlier action.

Question 4

Is Nicholas Nickleby Dickens's most theatrical novel?

Accepted Answer

It is certainly the one most deeply engaged with theatrical life. Dickens was himself a passionate amateur actor and theatergoer throughout his life, and the Crummles theatrical troupe is the first extended portrait of professional theatrical life in English fiction. But the whole novel has a theatrical quality — its episodic structure, its reliance on coincidence and revelation, its extreme types of goodness and villainy, and its emotional range from broad comedy to intense pathos all reflect theatrical conventions. Dickens's later novels (particularly Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend) are more novelistically integrated; Nicholas Nickleby has the energy and variety of a great theatrical entertainment.

Nicholas Nickleby Reading Order

Complete Nicholas Nickleby Book List