A Study Guide for Charles Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Charles Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Mar 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535820639

Book preview

10

Nicholas Nickleby

Charles Dickens

1839

Introduction

Charles Dickens wrote Nicholas Nickleby between February 1838 and October 1839. It was commissioned to appear in monthly installments by the London publisher Chapman and Hall, a contract Dickens received based on the tremendous popularity of his previous novel, The Pickwick Papers. Dickens was offered a payment of 150 pounds per month, an amount ten times higher than what he received for The Pickwick Papers. And unlike the previous novel, copyright was to revert to the author after five years. Dickens met every deadline, although he was at no time even one number ahead of the publication schedule. On April 1, 1938, fifty thousand readers bought the first number of Dickens's new novel.

Nicholas Nickleby is considered one of Dickens's minor works. While it paved the way for his more thematically and technically complex novels, it is essentially a light romantic comedy. However, the novel contains a remarkable roster of 117 speaking characters, and every one of its nearly nine hundred pages has its own heading. Nicholas himself is a classic romantic hero, and his journey from boyhood to manhood, through all of the social strata of Victorian London, allows Dickens to develop tools for social critique that he will wield with greater precision in later works. In Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens sharpens these critiquing tools by taking on one of the social scourges of his day: the infamous Yorkshire schools, institutions for poor, deformed, illegitimate, or otherwise unwanted boys.

Dickens's genius for creating believable characters from all walks of life, especially villains and outsiders, was already in evidence when he published Nicholas Nickleby at the age of twenty-six. His villain here, Ralph Nickleby, uncle to the title character, remains one of his most subtly and completely developed characters. Dickens's talent for developing complex plots and writing hilarious dialogue is also clearly in evidence in the novel, as is his commitment, new in the English literary world, to present poor people in a realistic light, giving their struggles and hopes as much serious attention as books of that era generally accorded only to the educated classes.

Author Biography

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England—a port city near London. He was the first son of John and Elizabeth Dickens. Elizabeth Dickens was a vivacious woman who loved to dance; in fact, she went dancing on the night before Charles was born. In Dickens's early youth his father held steady employment as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, but the family lived beyond their means, and when Dickens was twelve years old, the entire family was forced to take up residence at the Marshalsea, an infamous debtors' prison in London that was to figure darkly in several of Dickens's novels. The boy was forced to leave school to work in a blacking shop, where he pasted labels on bottles of shoe polish. This interlude led to his lifelong concern about the living and working conditions of poor children.

The success of The Pickwick Papers, published in serialized form in 1836 and 1837 when Dickens was only twenty-four, made him the most successful writer of his era. In many ways, he became the first modern