This study of Nicholas Nickleby takes the Dickens novel which is
perhaps the least critically discussed, though it is very popular,
and examines its appeal and its significance, and finds it one of
the most rewarding and powerful of Dickens's texts. Nicholas
Nickleby deals with the abduction and destruction of children,
often with the collusion of their parents. It concentrates on this
theme in a way which continues from Oliver Twist, describing such
oppression, and the resistance to it, in the language of melodrama,
of parody and comedy. With chapters on the school-system that
Dickens attacks, and its grotesque embodiment in Squeers, and with
discussion of how the novel reshapes eighteenth century literary
traditions, and such topics as the novel's comedy, and the concept
of the 'humorist'; and 'theatricality' and its debt to Carlyle,,
the book delves into the way that the novel explores madness within
the city in those whose lives have been fractured, or ruined, as so
many have been, and considers the symptoms of hypocrisy in the
lives of the oppressors and the oppressed alike; taking hypocrisy
as a Dickensian subject which deserves further examination.
Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death explores ways in
which Dickens draws on medieval and baroque traditions in how he
analyses death and its grotesquerie, especially drawing on the
visual tradition of the 'dance of death' which is referred to here
and which is prevalent throughout Dickens's novels. It shows these
traditions to be at the heart of London, and aims to illuminate a
strand within Dickens's thinking from first to last. Drawing on the
critical theory of Walter Benjamin, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, and
with close detailed readings of such well-known figures as Mrs
Nickleby, Vincent Crummles and his theatrical troupe, and Mr
Mantalini, and attention to Dickens's description, imagery, irony,
and sense of the singular, this book is a major study which will
help in the revaluation of Dickens's early novels.
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