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Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Nicholas Nickleby, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Greed and Selfishness
Power and Abuse
Altruism and Humility
Family and Loyalty
Injustice, Complicity, and Moral Integrity
Summary
Analysis
One day when Nicholas wakes up, Smike is missing. Squeers questions Nicholas and is convinced that Nicholas knows where Smike is or told him to leave. Nicholas says he doesn’t know anything about it. Squeers questions the students, and one suggests that Smike might have run away. The Squeerses think that must be what happened. Mrs. Squeers says he’s probably on the public road because he’ll have to beg for food and money, and that’s the most likely place where he would meet anyone. She sets off to track him down. The Squeerses track down runaways so they can make an example of them to try and dissuade others from running away. The next day, Mrs. Squeers returns with Smike. His ankles are tied, so he can’t run away again.
The Squeerses’ decision to track down Smike, along with their belief that they must make an example of boys who run away to ensure other students don’t follow their example, show that the Squeerses run Dotheboys Hall like a kind of prison. Boys are prohibited from leaving, and if they do leave, they’re tracked down like fugitives. That comes into clearer focus when Mrs. Squeers catches Smike and brings him back to the school in shackles, as if he were a criminal. Notably, Smike doesn’t even attend the school, suggesting that the Squeerses are kidnapping him when they bring him back to Dotheboys Hall. Again, they can enact gross injustices with impunity because of the lack of oversight at the school.
Themes
Squeers drags Smike in front of the other students and begins beating him with a cane. Nicholas tells Squeers to stop. Squeers keeps going, and Nicholas rushes to intervene. He begins beating Squeers. Mrs. Squeers, the Squeerses’ son (Master Squeers), and Fanny jump on top of Nicholas to try and get him to stop, but Nicholas barely notices them and continues to whale on Squeers. The students watch without moving. Nicholas then flees the school. On the road, he meets John. Nicholas worries that John will be upset with him after what happened when they had tea, so he apologizes to John for any offense he might have caused. John forgives Nicholas and asks him what happened to his face.
Nicholas’s sense of complicity in the Squeerses’ wrongdoing becomes too much for him to bear. In his eyes, witnessing injustice and doing nothing to stop it makes him guilty of that injustice, even if he’s not personally carrying it out. To consider himself a decent person, then, Nicholas feels compelled to intervene to protect Smike. Nicholas’s intervention shows how much he, in contrast to Squeers, cares about the well-being of others. While Squeers cares only about himself, Nicholas is willing to sacrifice himself for the good of other people like Smike.
Themes
Nicholas explains to John that he beat up the schoolmaster Squeers and now intends to walk to London. John reacts ecstatically to that news. He says he loves Nicholas for what he’s done and offers to lend Nicholas money for the trip to London. Nicholas tries to refuse, but John won’t take no for an answer. Nicholas ends up borrowing a small sum of money. That night, he finds a barn just off the road to sleep in. When he wakes up the next morning, he sees a figure close to him. When he investigates, he sees that it’s Smike. Nicholas surmises that Smike must have followed him from the school. Smike asks if he can go with Nicholas and promises to be his faithful servant. Nicholas tells Smike that “the world will deal by you as it does by me,” and the two set off together.
This passage shows that Nicholas tends to make friends everywhere he goes. Even someone like John, who Nicholas initially thought didn’t like him, becomes a friend to Nicholas. Smike pledges to be Nicholas’s faithful servant, essentially granting Nicholas the same kind of power that Squeers held over him (Smike). Nicholas’s response that “the world will deal by you as it does by me” effectively renounces that power by embracing equality between the two of them, as he insists that they will be equal in the eyes of the world.
Themes
