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Chapter 61
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
Ralph walks home after leaving the Cheeryble Brothers. He walks past a paupers’ cemetery and thinks of the people in the graves. He recalls a jury he served on many years ago for a man who had committed suicide. Ralph was especially struck that the man who had last seen the suicide victim alive had remarked that he had seemed to be in a cheerful mood when they parted. Ralph remembers that the man who committed suicide is buried in the cemetery.
The novel returns to a recurring motif of suicide, which came up most explicitly in the story-within-the-story of the Baron of Grogzwig. Ralph’s reflections while passing the cemetery reflect where his mind might be at this point, after he has heard Brooker’s revelation that Smike was his (Ralph’s) son.
Themes
When Ralph gets home, he thinks of what he’s been told about Smike. As soon as he heard the story, he knew it was true. Ralph thinks he has lost everything. His friends won’t speak to him, Frederick is dead, and Mulberry is in hiding. Ralph’s schemes have been discovered, and he recently lost 10,000 pounds in an investment that didn’t work out. He feels like he’s ruined. The worst of it is that his son, Smike, looked up to his nemesis, Nicholas, as if Nicholas had been an angel. The fact that Nicholas was Smike’s “protector and faithful friend” drives Ralph to feel a kind of agony he cannot bear. Ralph goes to the room where Smike stayed when he briefly lived at Ralph’s house. He moves a chest under an iron hook on a ceiling beam.
Ralph is driven to agony not out of compassion for others but by his own self-interest. He laments that he has been deserted by the people he once considered allies, and he has recently lost a significant amount of money. More than that, when Ralph thinks of Smike, he doesn’t think of how he failed his son and how he might reform after reckoning with that failure. Instead, Ralph is most aggrieved by the idea that Nicholas has triumphed over him, showing again how selfishness runs Ralph’s life in a way that is ultimately unfulfilling, misguided, and destructive.
Themes
Someone shouts from outside. The person asks if the Cheeryble Brothers should keep Brooker around. Ralph shouts down that they should. When the person asks when they should plan to meet the next day, Ralph says they can come by at any time. The next day, a group of people gather outside of Ralph’s house. It is still shuttered and locked from the day before. Some of the men sneak in through a window. They cannot find Ralph anywhere. Eventually, they go to Smike’s old room. Ralph is hanging from a strip of rope that he cut from the chest and wound around the hook. The hook is directly under the trap door in the ceiling that Smike, when he lived there, had often looked at in terror. One of the men cuts down Ralph’s body.
After learning that Smike was his son, Ralph commits suicide. Again, the novel makes it clear that he wasn’t driven to suicide because he felt bad for failing his son, but because he sensed that Nicholas had triumphed over him, and he (Ralph) had lost. With that in mind, Ralph’s suicide represents his final decision to avoid reckoning with the cruelty and selfishness of his life in a way that might have enabled him to reform and seek redemption. Instead, Ralph refuses to examine himself and kills himself instead.
Themes
