The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Themes)

Themes

Money

Ralph Nickleby is a prototype for Ebeneezer Scrooge, the covetous miser of A Christmas Carol. Having himself lived the life of a poor child forced to work in a shoe blackening company at a young age, Dickens was fascinated by the power and influence of money, with its potential to push bad men to the point of irretrievable corruption and evil. The nineteenth century was a period obsessed with money and ways to make it, as capitalism hit its stride. Investment opportunities existed throughout the burgeoning British Empire — both legitimate and not. Dickens’s novel appealed to a wide public, fascinated with the amassing of wealth that bought status and power. And, regardless of their own financial status, they could join in approbation of his avaricious villains and their rapacious manner of swindling their fellow citizens. Money concerns lie at the heart of almost every problem in Nicholas Nickleby, from the break-up of the Mantalinis to Kate’s vulnerability to Sir Mulberry Hawk. Daughters and unwanted children are particularly at risk when a family cannot provide for them, and avaricious people like Ralph profit from the innocence of others. Dickens seems to be saying that families must overcome the obstacle of poverty in order for the society to be a moral one.

School Reform

Dickens, a reformist who targeted many of the social inequities of Victorian England, originally intended his serially published novel The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby(1838-1839) to attract attention to the abuses being committed in schools for cast-off children in the Yorkshire area. He had gathered information about the problem by interviewing several Yorkshire schools, in the guise of someone wanting to board his children at one of them. He was appalled by the conditions of the children and of the license taken by their schoolmasters. Dickens said that Squeers and Dotheboys Hall were, as Dickens reported in his 1848 Preface, “faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be deemed impossible.” With no government funding, the schools relied on collecting school fees from the neglecting parents themselves and on contributions from the few benefactors who might have some interest in the well-being of unwanted children, many of whom were illegitimate or physically deformed. It was a cottage industry that attracted the worst sort, those willing to line their pockets by skimming the tuition of unfortunate and unsponsored children. Ten years after its original publication in monthly serial form, Dickens took credit for reducing the number of Yorkshire schools in the Preface to the 1848 edition of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.

Some sort of education was needed for poor children, so Dickens also worked toward establishing a public school system for this purpose. His efforts were gratified with the establishment in 1844 of the Ragged School Union, a program for running schools for poor children in London and other crowded cities. Dickens later praised this program in several issues of his weekly news magazine, Household Words.

The Change of Heart

The change of heart is a common theme in the novels of Charles Dickens. In fact, the moment of climax usually involves the complete transformation of a formerly wicked character who has had a sudden epiphany about his own evil actions. The stages of this transformation are symbolically outlined in his work A Christmas Carol. Ebeneezer Scrooge undergoes three realizations: 1) that he has lost his connection to other people, 2) that he is causing suffering to others, and 3) that his heart will be assessed after his death. In A Christmas Carol, the three stages are marshalled in by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. His connections to his deceased sister and to his fiancée remind him of the power of love, seeing the suffering he has caused the Marley family reminds him of his mistakes, and seeing his own gravestone causes him to reflect upon his day of reckoning. With these three crucial stages accomplished, Scrooge experiences a transformation from an embittered and selfish miser to a paragon of generosity and kindness. In The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, written five years before A Christmas Carol, Ralph Nickleby undergoes the same three realizations, although his transformation is temporary and aborted by suicide. First, Ralph Nickleby feels an echo of human connection when he looks into Kate’s eyes and sees her resemblance to his dead brother. This connection allows him to see the pain he has caused her through exposing her to Hawk’s unwelcome advances. He gets a second dose of guilt when he learns that Smike is the son he had sent away years ago; this knowledge puts a new face on his abuse of Smike as a means to punish his nephew Nicholas. With these two realizations, Ralph can no longer distance himself from the suffering he has caused to others. In a soliloquy, Ralph weighs his life decisions in the scales of judgment and finds himself wanting. He muses about the man he might have become, had he raised Smike himself, and then realizes that the boy has been taught to hate his very name instead. Because he feels condemned by the hatred of his son, he cannot imagine redemption, and so he kills himself.

Edgar retains the first two aspects of the change of heart in his adaptation of the Dickens novel, although he leaves out Dickens’s episode of Ralph taking a walk through a cemetery, which reminds him of a man who committed suicide. This episode contains the seeds of the graveyard scene conducted by the Ghost of Christmas Future in A Christmas Carol. In the original Dickens story, Ralph, calling on the Devil for help, commits suicide as a final act of violence against Nicholas and his friends, as a way to “spurn their mercy and compassion.” Edgar’s version is closer to the redemptive change of heart that would become the hallmark of Dickens’s novels. In Edgar’s play, Ralph experiences his judgment day as he envisions the father he might have become and realizes that he has caused his son to hate his very name. Despairing of redemption, even though the angelic brothers Cheeryble are trying to contact him, Ralph mutters, “Cast out. And homeless. Me,” and hangs himself. In Edgar’s adaptation, the audience is painfully aware of the change of heart that Ralph is unable to experience.

Topics for Further Study

• Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby ends happily, with the siblings’ marriages. Why does Edgar change the ending to show a second Smike?
• How did the fact that, in nineteenth-century Britain, married women could not own property affect their life choices?
• Does Nicholas’s fractious personality detract from his character? Explain your point of view.
• What is the role of money in this play?