Nicholas Nickleby Study Guide

Charles Dickens remains one of the most well-known and influential authors in the English language. He was born in Portsmouth, England, to a middle-class family. When Dickens was a child, his father’s extravagant lifestyle led the family to fall into debt. His father was arrested and sent to a debtors’ prison when Dickens was 12, which led him to leave school and begin working in a factory. Three years later, Dickens returned to school before becoming a clerk in a solicitor’s office and later a journalist who covered Parliament. His work in journalism led to his career as an author. During his career, Dickens wrote 15 novels and hundreds of short stories and articles. He is perhaps best known for his novels Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Bleak House and his novella A Christmas Carol. He published most of his novels (including Nicholas Nickleby) serially, meaning that he would publish a new installment every week or month. Dickens was immensely popular during his time, and new installments of his novels were highly anticipated. Dickens’s work often touches on themes of social commentary, and Dickens himself was an advocate for children’s and workers’ rights, among other causes.

In Nicholas Nickleby, Nicholas goes to work at Dotheboys Hall, a school in Yorkshire run by Wackford Squeers. Dotheboys Hall is a fictional representation of the corrupt Yorkshire boarding school industry, which flourished in the early 19th century. Those boarding schools were relatively inexpensive and existed as a place for middle-class families to send illegitimate and unwanted children. The schools were largely unregulated, and students were subjected to rampant abuse. Dickens seems to have taken much of the information about Dotheboys Hall from two well-known court cases filed by parents against the headmaster of the real-life Bowes Academy. Those cases date back to the 1820s, and The Times (one of the leading newspapers in London) covered them in depth. Many of those Yorkshire schools (including Bowes Academy) went out of business in 1840, in part due to the influence of Nicholas Nickleby. The treatment of children, and the abolition of child labor, were causes that were close to Dickens’s heart, owing in part to his own experience working in a factory beginning when he was 12 years old. The questions of child labor and the treatment of children were widely debated issues in England in the 1830s, following parliamentary reports about the conditions children faced when working. Legislation passed in the 1840s reduced the amount of child labor in England but didn’t eliminate it completely.

Nicholas Nickleby was Dickens’s third novel, following The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. In many ways, Nicholas Nickleby is a continuation of the techniques and themes he employed in those previous novels. Like those novels, Nicholas Nickleby displays Dickens’s hallmark portrayal of down-on-their-luck characters facing off against, and ultimately triumphing over, corrupt and abusive oppressors. Nicholas Nickleby also paves the way for Dickens’s following works of fiction. In many ways, the character of Ralph Nickleby can be seen as a progenitor of one of Dickens’s most famous characters, Ebenezer Scrooge, who appears in A Christmas Carol (published in 1843). Dickens’s descriptions of Mr. Crummles and the stage in Nicholas Nickleby come from his interest in the theater and his own time pursuing a career as an actor. Nicholas Nickleby specifically references several plays by Shakespeare, including Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Hamlet. Dickens’s approach and style have become so characteristic that “Dickensian” has become an descriptor for other writers and novels. Contemporary novels that have been called Dickensian include The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and the works of John Irving, who has cited Dickens as one of his primary influences. Barbara Kingsolver’s 2022 novel Demon Copperhead is also a contemporary retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield.