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Chapter 6
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
Nicholas, Squeers, and the students arrive at the school. Squeers tells Nicholas that he calls the school Dotheboys Hall in London only because it sounds good. He doesn’t use the word “Hall” unless he’s trying to impress someone. In reality, the school is a cold, one-story house. There is a barn and stable nearby. A boy named Smike rushes to meet them. Squeers asks Smike why he’s late, and Smike says he fell asleep beside the fire. Squeers says Smike wouldn’t have fallen asleep if he had stayed out in the cold. Nicholas feels dismayed and homesick.
Squeers admits to Nicholas that he paints a false image of the school to try and lure parents to send their children there. That underlines Squeers’s tendency to lie to try and get what he wants. His treatment of Smike also highlights how little concern he has for the well-being of others. He wants Smike to sacrifice any modicum of comfort so that he is ready to serve Squeers at a moment’s notice.
Themes
Inside, Mrs. Squeers tells Squeers that one of the students has caught a cold. Mrs. Squeers is convinced the boy gets sick on purpose and thinks that hitting him might persuade him to stop becoming ill. Squeers empties his pockets of letters to the students. Smike asks if there’s anything for him, and Squeers says no. When Smike appears dejected, Squeers says Smike should consider himself lucky because Squeers has let him live at the school even though payments for him stopped coming after the first six years. Smike seems to be 18 or 19 years old and is dressed in clothes much too small for him.
Mrs. Squeers’s treatment of the boy with the cold suggests that abusing students at the school is institutionalized. In other words, it’s part of how the school is run, and everyone in a position of power seems to take part in that abuse. There also don’t seem to be any dissenting voices that try to put a stop to the abuse. When Squeers talks to Smike, he again tries to argue that he is acting altruistically—by “letting” Smike stay at the school—when he is really acting self-interestedly by forcing Smike to work for no pay.
Themes
Nicholas eats dinner with Mrs. Squeers and Squeers. The Squeerses buy premium meat for themselves but buy meat from animals that have died of natural causes for the students. The Squeerses make a bed of straw for Nicholas and say they’ll find him a proper place to sleep tomorrow. Work will start at 7 a.m. the next day. In the room alone, Nicholas resolves to make the best of the situation so that Ralph has no reason to abandon his mother, Mrs. Nickleby, and sister, Kate.
Nicholas’s private thoughts reinforce the difficult bind he is in, as Ralph has threatened the well-being of Kate and Mrs. Nickleby if Nicholas doesn’t do well in the job. Notably, Nicholas gets into that bind because he has no money, and Ralph holds power over him because of his wealth, highlighting the novel’s arguments about how the wealthy exploit those who have less money.
Themes
As Nicholas gets ready for bed, the letter from Newman falls from his pocket. In the letter, Newman writes that Nicholas’s father, Nicholas Sr., had once been kind to him. Newman says that if anything should happen and if Nicholas ever needs anything in London, Nicholas should find him, and he’ll give Nicholas a place to stay. Nicholas is touched by Newman’s letter, and tears well in his eyes.
Newman’s letter serves as a testimony to the power of kindness and shows the kind of loyalty that kindness can engender. Though Nicholas Sr. was kind to Newman many years ago, the act meant so much to Newman that he remains loyal not just to Nicholas Sr. but to Nicholas as well.
Themes
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