NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, PART 1

Having chosen Nicholas Nickleby as my February read, I put the Penguin edition on hold at the library, and when I received it I was disappointed to see that it was the movie tie-in edition (always more embarrassing to carry around, plus it warps my vision of the characters, so that Wackford Squeers is always Jim Broadbent and Nicholas is that cute British guy from Undeclared, which I guess is not too much of a problem now that I think about it). Instead of being written by a Dickens scholar, the introduction was by Douglas McGrath, the screenwriter/director of the film. Luckily, McGrath is a smart, nimble writer who charmingly details the agonizing process of distilling such a rich novel into a short screenplay: “Most readers begin a new chapter with the hope that it will have something interesting in it. I often kicked off a new chapter with the hope that it contained something boring I could remove.” In doing so, he sums up the themes of the book more clearly than many literary critics would be capable of.

McGrath says (brilliantly, I think), “Given the astonishing fact that Dickens wrote Pickwick and Twist simultaneously, Nicholas Nickleby is their love child: it merges the wandering, comic qualities of the first with the gothic social vision of the second.” Honestly, I was a little worried about that “wandering” bit. Combined with the description on the back of the book, it made me downright twitchy: “Nicholas Nickleby’s loose, haphazard progress harks back to the picaresque novels of the eighteenth century.” Ack, the P-word! Give me something described as picaresque, and nine times out of ten I’ll hate it. Sure, I found Candide, Don Quixote, and Moll Flanders intermittently amusing, at least conceptually, but in practice they left me cold. And bored. I like a good plot, and it’s the Victorian-melodrama aspect of Dickens that appeals to me.

Luckily, so far I’m liking NN. The only time the P-word sprung to mind was in Chapter 6, when the coach crashes on the way to Yorkshire, and the passengers engage in a little impromptu storytelling session, a la The Canterbury Tales. We are treated to two random stories that are completely irrelevant to the story and drag on for about 15 pages. The endnotes observe that “Dickens seems to have inserted this…as a means of filling out the second number,” or installment, of NN. McGrath more charitably calls them “the literary equivalent of bonus tracks.” I skimmed them. As long as it doesn’t happen again, I’m OK.

NN high points so far:

• Dickens’s famously concise summary in Chapter 1 of how Nicholas’s father was financially ruined by poor investments: “A mania prevailed, a bubble burst, four stockbrokers took villa residences in Florence, four hundred nobodies were ruined.”

• Chapter 2, which hilariously brings to mind the 1990s dot-com boom (new, ludicrously named companies springing up every day, making sweeping claims to lure stockholders and boost share prices until the bubble bursts) and takes full advantage of the comic potential of the word “muffin” while describing the joint-stock meeting of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company:
  
  “The honourable gentleman made a speech which drew tears from the eyes of the ladies, and awakened the liveliest emotions in every individual present. He had visited the homes of the poor in the various districts of London, and had found them destitute of the slightest vestige of a muffin…. He had found that among muffin sellers there existed drunkenness, debauchery, and profligacy…. He had found the same vices among the poorer class of people who ought to be muffin consumers, and this he attributed to the despair engendered by their being placed beyond the reach of that nutritious article, which drove them to seek a false stimulant in intoxicating liquors.”
  
  Then an Irishman gets up “with such a speech as only an Irish member can make, breathing the true soul and spirit of poetry, and poured forth with such fervour, that it made one warm to look at him; in the course whereof he told them how he would demand the extension of that great boon to his native country; how he would claim for her equal rights in the muffin laws as in all other laws; and how he yet hoped to see the day when crumpets should be toasted in her lowly cabins, and muffin bells should ring in her rich green valleys.”

• The delightful description of Squeers in Chapter 4 (even if, as the endnotes tell me, Dickens did crib it from Sheridan): “He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.”

• Dickens’s description of the poor, neglected students of Dotheboys Hall in Chapter 8 is a tour de force: “Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long, meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies . . . there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding there!”
  
  Wow.