Posted: November 24,2021
Nicholas Nickleby
Money is just like fire, it can be of aid to you but it can also burn you up.
Nicholas Nickleby starts with an event which I consider to be particularly nightmarish: A family's fall due to loss of money. Seeing the Nicklebys in front of Ralph Nickleby, defenseless, utterly dependent, it makes me cringe. They have no defense against Ralph's sneering arrogance; the best that can be done is Nicholas's haughty mein. A feeble thing, nothing really. The pain of being a pauper would be brought home to Nicholas very acutely during the start of his service with Squeers. A particular memorable part is when he just arrived at Dotheboys. I could feel how much Nicholas wanted to be away from the place.
So much of this novel is about money and what it means to have it and what it means to be without it. There is a clear demarcation line here that is marked by the arrival of the Cheerybles into Nicholas' life. Life before the Cheerybles for Nicholas was fraught and worrisome and full of compromise and doing without and enduring. After the Cheerybles, life for Nicholas becomes full of options and comfort and the ability to live as one wants to a certain extent. The Cheerybles symbolize, if not wealth, than a regular paycheck coming in; and that makes a big difference. It's not the cash that you have but the regular cashflow, the reliable income, that dictates the quality of your life.
In this Ralph Nickleby is right to give money importance. I admire his industry, his focus, his determination to grow his inheritance. It is his method that is foolish. Ralph Nickleby does not add value, he is a parasite who profits from people's foolishness and misery. This is the right focus without the proper moral compass. When Arthur Gride came into the scene I saw a man cut from the same cloth as Ralph Nickleby. Arthur Gride is what Ralph Nickleby would be during his later years, if he had grown any older. One of my favorite parts of this book was Dickens describing Arthur Gride's house. Pure genius that description - giving the house the essence of its miserly master.
Nicholas for all his youthful impulsiveness did a very wise thing that taught me a lesson. It happened after he quit Dotheboys Hall and was sheltering- together with Smike -with Newman Noggs. Nicholas was looking for work and he got an offer from this politician to be a sort of assistant for fifteen shillings a week. Now I'm doing the calculation in my head and that comes out to 3 pounds a month. Nicholas just came from a job with Squeers that paid 5 pounds a year, so I thought that Nicholas should take the job seeing that it paid significantly more. But he turns it down since the pay is too meager for the amount of work. And at this moment I learn something about myself and I am schooled by "Nicholas Nickleby".
You see I am the type of person who would have accepted that job. I have done so in the past. I did it because being jobless scared me. I am the one to be blinded by money and not consider if the job was worth the pay. My wife has saved me from such a job once and here I am, reading "Nicholas Nickleby", showing the same sorry inclination. But Nicholas reminds me that it is better to do without than accept a bad deal. I really, really, have to learn this lesson.
Miss La Creevy is also a particularly lovable character for me. She's actually living my dream life - at least before her marriage to Tim Linkinwater. She lives alone in an income-earning property and she works at a craft she loves. It's a peaceful life and oh how I envy her. When, in the book, she mentions someone observing to her that her life must be a lonely one she answers something to the effect that the days roll by peacefully for her or some such phrase. At that point I just wanted to live her life.
I'll always wonder if Dotheboys Hall is a real description of a real Victorian establishment. The situation at Dotheboys Hall is so hellish for those young boys that I'm inclined to think that Dickens indulged in an exaggerated caricature. I hope so; when I was reading about it, it was hell on Earth.
In all of Nicholas Nickleby my favorite character is Newman Noggs. Broke but not broken, Newman nonetheless stands as the hero in the darkest times of the book. When Nicholas and his family didn't know what they were in for with Ralph, Newman stood as best he could as a guardian. And he was that throughout the book, a guardian. The fact that he had very little means only made him shine the brighter. I love this shabbily dressed ruin of a man, still refusing to back down and sell out.
I recently watched a YouTube video describing Dickens's novels as "big wodges". At a thousand pages Nicholas Nickleby certainly is that. But the thing about Dickens - and this happened to me several times while reading Nicholas Nickleby- is that his writing, though verbose, is mesmerizing. There is a magnetic quality to his writing that makes it flow so well that you're just reading and reading and reading and the big wodge of a book just gets read. Nicholas Nickleby is a world you can get lost in, happily. There's lots to see and plenty of people to meet; and it is, in the end, a satisfying romp which might teach you a lesson or two, like it did in my case.