Wackford Squeers!

The aforementioned schoolmaster is probably the most famous character (with the obvious exception of Nicholas himself) in Dickens’ third novel. Indeed, in my memory of this book – which I last read some fifteen years ago – Wackford Squeers featured as one of the dominant figures. And that’s somewhat odd as he is not the major villain of the piece, he is merely one of a gallery of grotesque rogues the Nickleby children encounter. So why does he linger so long in the mind? I think it’s because Dickens idealised children and hated the thought of harm happening to them, and yet was simultaneously able to imagine these harms in enthusiastic detail. As such the scenes in the Yorkshire schoolhouse still have incredible power: Dickens lets loose his full moral fury, but combines it with a gleeful relish at the brutal suffering of these hard beaten boys. It’s a heady combination, and one which had a great effect at the time (serving to expose the scandal of such institutions) and now – in a Western society which reveres children to an even greater extent – serves as a warning from a harsher and less enlightened time. Wackford Squeers will probably always be with us.

However the greatest shame of our askew collective memory of this book, is that the main villain should be better remembered. Ralph Nickleby is a prototype Ebeneezer Scrooge (except one even more evil as he isn’t participating in a spiritual morality play), a man who will crush all in his pursuit of money and prefers spite to love. He is a superbly realised character, a magnificent brooding presence with more space to grow into than Scrooge ever had. He absolutely comes to dominate this novel, and that’s impressive as not only is there Squeers, but amongst the rogue’s gallery there’s boorish vampiric aristocrat Sir Mulberry Hawk and lecherous spendthrift Mr Mantalani. You really have to take your cap off to the grotesques Dickens creates for ‘Nicholas Nickleby’.

The lead character I find particularly interesting as well. Sometimes Dickens can make the mistake of painting his heroes as too good to be true (see Twist, Oliver). And whereas that’s certainly the case with other players in this book (Kate Nickleby, Madeline, the Cherryble brothers) there’s something about Nicholas which is almost unlikeable. He starts off haughty and arrogant and never really loses that. He’s the kind of person who if he doesn’t like you on first meeting will try to win you over with rudeness and aggression, and if that doesn’t work will just become ruder and even more aggressive. All the people who become his enemies are seen as being reprehensible themselves, but it’s undoubtedly true that Nicholas has a rare talent for rubbing people up the wrong way.

That this book works so well, with a difficult hero and a bumper crop of villains, is testament to the incredible whirlwind skills of the young Dickens. The way he grabs these elements – be they schoolrooms or provincial theatres or swindles concerning wills or dotty mothers – and makes them into a coherent whole with laughs, drama and suspense along the way is really quite magnificent. Yes, he does fall back upon melodramatic coincidence a few times and it lacks the clear themes of his later books, but the enthusiastic vim with which it’s all delivered means that it’s impossible not to be swept along.

I was particularly interested in the way Dickens crowbars his more personal concerns into the text. There was no copyright law in his day, an author would be paid on first publication but after that had little control. Any other publisher could knock out truncated versions of the book, or a theatrical manager stage unapproved adaptations. Obviously this wasn’t a matter close to the public’s heart (unlike the maltreatment of children) but he passionately raises it anyway.

Early in the novel Nicholas has a job interview with a Member of Parliament (who is wonderfully described as “a tough, burly, thick headed gentleman, with a loud voice, a pompous manner, a tolerable command of sentences with no meaning in them, and, in short, every requisite for a very good member indeed.”) This MP laughs at “the poor grubbing devils of authors [wanting] a right to their own property,” and likens it to a man who utters a joke receiving recompense every time it’s uttered. Although Nicholas stays quiet in that chapter, anxious for a job, he clearly doesn’t agree. In a later chapter he meets Mr Snittle Timberry, ‘a literary gentleman’ who adapts novels for the stage. Here Nicholas (and, through him, Charles) turns the metaphoric shotgun on such wretches and shoots them full in the face:

“You take the uncompleted books of living authors, fresh from their hands, wet from the press, cut, hack and carve them to the powers and capacities of your actors, and the capability of your theatres, finish unfinished works, hastily and crudely vamp up ideas not yet worked out by their original projector, but which have doubtless cost him many thoughtful days and sleepless nights... all without his permission, and against his will; and then, to crown the whole proceeding, publish in some mean pamphlet, an unmeaning farrago of garbled extracts from his work, to which you put your name as author.”

Okay, so the copyright issue is no longer as vexing as it once was, but it’s fascinating to watch the young, and already great, author, rise up and forcibly introduce his voice and his issues so blatantly into proceedings. This is the great inimitable whirlwind of Charles Dickens himself, speaking out against those who would rip him off. No doubt he already knew he had a masterpiece on his hands and wanted to do all he could to protect it. And even if in the short term he failed, we can still feel the hairs rise on the back of our necks when we hear his voice speak out so clearly from this brilliant, brilliant book.