Rereading Nicholas Nickleby is always a pleasure. This is true for YHB despite the many flaws in the novel. It’s structurally haphazard, the pacing is inconsistent and in places it drags. The female characters are faint and uninteresting. Even the Mrs. and Miss Squeers aren’t terribly vivid, Henrietta Petowker and Miss Snevellicci are briefly amusing but not really characters, and Kate Nickleby and Madeline Gride are beyond hopeless. Mrs. Nickleby is hyper-real, and Charles Dickens sketches her with brutal glee almost as if she were a man, but there isn’t anything in the book to compare with Lady Dedlock or Miss Wade, or even Miss Pross or Miss Flyte.
The men, though, are fantastic: Ralph Nickleby, Newman Noggs, Wackford Squeers, Vincent Crummles, Mr. Mantalini, Mulberry Hawk, John Browdie, even Tim Linkinwater are wonderful creations, Dickensian in the best sense. I think NickNick may have the best characters (male) of all the novels. In the later books, Mr. Dickens reins in everything to serve the plot and the point, which makes for better books, more powerful and deeper, in some sense. But there’s a sort of profligate joy in NickNick.
This is the book that most clearly shows Mr. Dickins’ses’ lack of seriously critical social thinking. Other than the Christmas Carol, I suppose. If we were all Cheerybles and none of us Ralph Nicklebys, if there were no Marleys and all the Scrooges saw the light, how wonderful it would be! Dotheboys Hall would be broken up, and the milliner’s shop no longer a front for prostitution (as evidently milliner’s shops were notorious for being, which is why the news that Kate Nickleby has been placed in one causes consternation and alarm), usury and license would no longer ruin the aristocracy, and bastard children wouldn’t be shut away from parental love. Which is, you know, true and all, but not actually helpful.
In the later books, Mr. Dickens takes structures and systems into account, with the ways that the Ralph Nicklebys are fertilized by those social institutions and would not be so plentiful without them. The villains in Dombey and Son and Bleak House and Little Dorrit are still individual, vicious and sinful, but they also expose the viciousness of the institutions that encourage and protect them; vanquishing the villains is necessary but insufficient.
Not that every book has to be politically astute. The flaws and weaknesses in NickNick are substantial, but the book is terrific.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.