In her reading diary ‘Jacob’s Room is full of books’ Susan Hill describes her habit of reading one Dickens novel a year. This struck me as an eminently sensible habit – if you tried to read them all in one you would go a bit mad, and I suspect the novels would start to bleed into one another. One a year on the other hand allows plenty of time for other reading and would leave most readers with a realistic prospect of working their way through the whole canon. So I thought I would give this practice a go, starting with one of the more accessible novels, ‘Nicholas Nickleby’.

‘Nicholas Nickleby’ was Dickens’s third novel, published in monthly instalments over 18 months in 1838 and 1839. In many ways it is quintessential Dickens. Almost all of the features of a typical Dickens novel appear – the episodic switching between narrative threads, the mysterious stranger who reveals a long buried secret, fortunes lost and re-won, child-like romances, and the long drawn out death of consumptive innocents. Probably the one other most distinctive feature of all Dickens’ work is his concern with social justice. This aspect of his work is already fully formed in this novel, as for example here in this extraordinary meditation by Nicholas:

But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles’ heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice, misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.

This is classic Dickens, with its clinical and yet at the same time passionate dissection of the social ills of Victorian Britain, but sadly also without offering any hope or constructive solutions. Yes the bad guys always come to a messy end in his novels, either the gallows, deportation or similar, and the central characters find happiness and prosperity through the bequests of long lost relatives, but the poverty disease and degradation are still all there.

The other source of enjoyment I find in Dickens is his wonderfully perceptive portraits of the fallibility of human nature. In this he probably has no peer other than Jane Austen. Mrs Nickleby is a particular favourite, bringing to mind her obvious predecessors Mr Woodhouse and Mrs Bennett, where the author’s use of reported speech conveys the full impact of her rambling complaints, without us having to work our way through them all:

To this, Mrs. Nickleby only replied that she durst say she was very stupid, indeed she had no doubt she was, for her own children almost as much as told her so, every day of her life; to be sure she was a little older than they, and perhaps some foolish people might think she ought reasonably to know best. However, no doubt she was wrong; of course she was; she always was, she couldn’t be right, she couldn’t be expected to be; so she had better not expose herself any more; and to all Kate’s conciliations and concessions for an hour ensuing, the good lady gave no other replies than Oh, certainly, why did they ask her?, her opinion was of no consequence, it didn’t matter what she said, with many other rejoinders of the same class.

There’s no denying the fact that Dickens’s villains are two dimensional, with very few shades of grey in their character, but what wonderfully wicked villains they are. Even if you have not read any Dickens, you will be able to get a good idea of the character of the schoolmaster Wackford Squeers simply through his name alone.

So why isn’t ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ considered in the top rank of Dickens’ work? That assessment is open to debate of course, but I think it reflects a consensus. Dickens had five novels in the BBC Big Read list of the 100 most loved novels (‘Bleak House’, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, ‘David Copperfield’, ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’) but Nickleby was omitted. My theory is that this is because the scenes of peril in the novel are rarely sustained. The dangers characters face at different points is never very serious, and is usually resolved quickly. (This is reminiscent of the ‘fake’ deaths at the end of many Disney films: the scene in which a character appears to die, only to revive moments later is a feature of many children’s films, and it is a very reliable rule that the quicker they revive (think of Baloo surviving the fight with Shere Khan in ‘Jungle Book’, or the brief moment in ‘Robin Hood’ when we think he has been shot with an arrow and drowned) the younger the target audience.

From this perspective Nicholas lives a charmed life. When his father dies unexpectedly, rather than ending up in the workhouse, his family has a rich uncle Frank to turn to. He easily gets a job as a teacher despite his lack of qualifications. While Dotheboys Hall is a nightmarish place for the boys, for Nicholas it is far less uncomfortable, and when his patience is pushed too far he can simply beat Wackford and walk away, something of which the boys can only dream.

His sister Kate and their mother are given lodgings free of charge by the villainous uncle, and Kate is found a perfectly respectable job as a milliner’s assistant. When this does not work out another equally respectable job, as a lady’s companion, appears quickly enough. The trauma of the subsequent assault on Kate by Sir Mulberry Hawk is obviously serious, but is quickly stopped by Ralph.

Nick’s good fortune however continues. He finds a job on the stage in Portsmouth and debuts almost immediately as Romeo. Later, compelled to return to London, he again finds well-paid work straight away with the lovable merchants, the Cheeryble the brothers. Nicholas has been accompanied on his adventures by Smike, an orphan runaway from Dotheboys. Smike has the misfortune to run into Squeers, who kidnaps him, but is rescued within hours. A subsequent attempt to reclaim Smike by the use of forged documents to the effect that he is the long-lost son of a man named Snawley is avoided by the simple expedient of ignoring it.

Inevitably, romantic interest intervenes. Nicholas nobly tries to avoid making Madeline Bray, the penniless daughter of a debtor, fall in love with him, but it comes as no surprise when this plan fails. There is a far-fetched plan to marry Madeline off to Arthur Gride, an early iteration of Fagin, in return for the promise of paying off her father’s debts to be foiled. This scheme falls apart on the day of the wedding when her father drops conveniently dead. The happily-ever-after then comes in a rush as all the plots against Nicholas fall away as so much background noise.

There is much more sustained threat in Dickens’ later novels. Imagine how more scary being a pupil at Dotheboys would have been compared to being a master? Indeed, Dickens gives us this comparative experience himself with David Copperfield’s experiences at Salem House, and those of Oliver Twist in the workhouse. Ultimately, this lack of genuine peril is what makes this novel considered suitable for children. if you are looking for an introduction to Dickens for a younger reader this is an excellent place to start.