The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Criticism)

Criticism

Carole Hamilton

Hamilton is an English teacher at Cary Academy, an innovative private college preparatory school in Cary, North Carolina. In this essay, Hamilton examines the effect of financial difficulties on Victorian families as represented in Edgar’s adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.

Charles Dickens grew up in a family with eight children, a family that continually struggled to make ends meet. At the age of twelve, he had to work in a shoe blacking factory while his father served time in debtor’s prison. Not surprisingly, Charles Dickens shared the Victorian fascination with money: with ways of getting it and how money problems affected family relationships. The original title of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby emphasizes these two concerns, for it continued, “Containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes, Uprisings, Downfallings and Complete Career of the Nickleby Family, edited by ’Boz.’” The inclusion of the word “family” is significant, as is the pun of the family name that suggests that the family sought their living “nickel by nickel.” Furthermore, the title words such as “uprisings” and “downfallings” cast the family history in the terms of a financial stock. Clearly, Dickens equated family fortune with financial fortune, and his readers enthusiastically followed the ups and downs of the Nickleby family fortune as each of the twenty serialized chapters appeared in monthly installments. Although the novel was not one of his best-structured works, being a rambling series of disconnected episodes, its desultoriness suits the theme of financial ups and downs. Like stock investments, the fad of Victorian financiers, the Nickleby family quest for fortune takes many twists and turns and often succeeds by mere chance. Dickens records a society alas it makes a transition from the clarity and predictability of inherited fortune to becoming a society in which fortunes can be made but with little or no predictability other than that the blind pursuit of fortune destroys families. He does this by portraying a series of families and the various harms that come to them as they put financial gain above the sanctity of the family.

One of the worst effects of the pursuit of money on the family unit portrayed by The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby is separation. When Nicholas departs from his mother and sister for remote Yorkshire to take a post as assistant at a boys’ school, he leaves them unprotected, and Kate becomes vulnerable to the unwanted attentions of Sir Mulberry Hawk. Nicholas himself moves from a healthy, natural family situation to the hodge-podge of miserable, unwanted children and their cruel guardians that constitute the “family” of Dotheboys Hall. The contrast lies at the heart of the Victorian social problem — that the nuclear family was being threatened and could not be replaced. In addition, Nicholas’s peregrinations do not bring him the wealth he seeks. He never obtains financial security until he returns to his family, takes up again his role of protector of the women, and generates another family tie, that of marrying the heiress Madeline Bray.

The Kenwigs family demonstrates the interpersonal strains that financial worries cause in families. The Kenwigs are a warm, loving family, with the virtue of hospitality that they naturally extend to Nicholas. They rejoice at the birth of a fifth child, even though it means another mouth to feed. However, their worries about their daughters preoccupy them so much that it distorts their relationship with the one relative who might offer them a secure future. The Kenwigs patronize Uncle Lillyvick in the hope that he will confer his inheritance on their daughters. They urge their pretty daughter Morleena to kiss him and jump to attention at his frequent criticisms. Instead of Uncle Lillyvick enjoying the respect due to him as an elderly relation, the family bends to mollify his every whim. In effect, their obsequiousness has turned him into a peevish and miserable person. Through the portrayal of the Kenwigs, Dickens demonstrates how family power relationships are distorted by need. They experience the height of family betrayal, in Victorian terms, when he elopes with an actress. And they enjoy the classic Victorian happy ending — a reunited, financially secure family — when he returns and promises, “I shall settle on your children all these moneys I once planned to leave them in my will.”

The Bray family demonstrates the worst-case family scenario, in which a father “sells” his daughter into marriage. Walter Bray has squandered his fortune through his dissolute lifestyle, yet his innocent daughter Madeline still reveres him, true to the Victorian ideal of the all-suffering daughter and woman. She willingly goes along with his arrangement to marry Arthur Gride, a lecherous old man of seventy-five. Nicholas identifies her decision as a contest between family and money, and he warns her that “the most degraded poverty is better than the misery you’d undergo as wife to such a man as this.” Her misguided resolve stems from the hope that her act will release her father “not from this place, but from the jaws of death,” for poverty is killing his will to live. Like the impoverished apothecary who is forced by his own poverty to consent to sell poison to Romeo, Madeline is forced by poverty to consent to an unhappy marriage. She fails to realize that money alone cannot repair the damage that poverty has caused, and she fails to realize that her desperation would have desecrated her new “family,” thus extending the cycle of misery, had Nicholas not saved her.

Dickens also portrays families that manage to evade the effects of financial insolvency, at least for a time. The theatrical Crummles family is, as Lillyvick exclaims at the wedding they host for him, “chock full of blessings and phenomena.” The Crummleses are generous to Nicholas, paying him one pound a week to act and write scripts for them, and welcoming to anyone who joins their path. Their instant acceptance of Smike is one of the most heartwarming events in the play. They feed, clothe, and employ a child who had been undernourished, beaten, and misused by the Squeers. In more ways than this, the Crummles family is the antithesis of the Squeer “family.” The Crummles family, too, is a hodge-podge: the Crummles entourage includes a myriad of actors they have picked up during their travels. But in the Crummles “family,” each member has his or her own skill or talent, and each is welcome at the expansive dinner table, even though the Crummleses live hand-to-mouth as they travel from one theatrical engagement to another. But, like the revised happy endings they tack onto every dramatic piece they perform, they are living in a

fantasy world that has little relevancy to real life. It is they who seal the vows between Lillyvick and Miss Petowker, and it is they who harbor the actor she runs away with, leaving Lillyvick hurt and alone. They flaunt the rules of conventional social institutions. They cannot even accept the maturation of their “infant phenomenon,” a girl of fifteen who has been playing the role of a ten-year-old for more than five years. Nicholas finds solace for a time at the breast of this family, but while he acts the part of Romeo, his sister is being stalked by the vile Sir Mulberry Hawk. Her situation is compared to that of Juliet, when her parents announce her arranged marriage, while she is secretly in love with Romeo.

Edgar emphasizes the parallels by having the players enact the Romeo and Juliet scene all around Kate, and the lines meant for Juliet take on an ironic double meaning when applied to Kate. The apothecary’s line, “Who calls so loud?” initiates the only moment in the play that Ralph exhibits true familial concern, for it is spoken just as he looks at Kate’s hair, rumpled during her escape from Hawk. Noggs narrates, “And Ralph Nickleby, who was proof against all appeals of blood and kindred — who was steeled against every tale of sorrow and distress — staggered while he looked, and reeled back into the house, as a man who had seen a spirit from a world beyond the grave.” The line from Romeo and Juliet, “who calls so loud?” seems to imply a calling to conscience for Ralph, who momentarily experiences a family bond. It also calls to Nicholas, who has been living in a fantasy world, separated from his sister, who clearly needs his presence to protect her. In the beginning of Act 2, Mr. Crummles admits that he thinks his family should settle down, for, as he points out, “we’re not immortal.” His words lead Nicholas to feel a pang of worry about his mother and sister. He has been brought back down to earth, and, as he tells Smike, he rues “the time we have spent dallying here.” Perhaps Dickens is expressing his own guilt for having indulged himself in playwriting while he was at Wellington House Academy, soon after his father’s release from debtor’s prison. He was to be forced to leave school when his family once again fell on hard times. Autobiographical connections aside, including the Crummles family in Nicholas Nickleby demonstrates that the idealized family is little more than a fantasy, one that Nicholas ultimately rejects in favor of taking responsibility for his mother and sister.

To further emphasize the mistake of delusional fantasy, Dickens presents the mismatched couple of Mr. and Mrs. Mantalini. Mr. Mantalini hides his peccadilloes behind a mask of insincerity that reaches comic proportions as he calls his wife everything from a “rose in a demd flowerpot” to “juice of pine-apple.” For years he has been frittering away the money his wife earns from her milliner’s shop, as the workers and Miss Knag all realize. However, Mrs. Mantalini continually forgives him, taken in by his ridiculous remonstrances of undying love and his lame, staged “attempts” to kill himself. It is only when creditors begin the process of foreclosure — when money problems prevail — that she assesses the situation realistically and separates from him. However, Mrs. Mantalini shows great financial astuteness; she has taken the precaution of signing over the shop to Miss Knag so that it will not revert to him, since the Victorian marriage laws proscribed married women from owning property themselves. Through the portrayal of the Mantalinis, Dickens condemns this policy and demonstrates that granting too much power to dissolute husbands licenses profligacy and destroys the foundation of a marriage. A better model is one that evenhandedly distributes power and does not impinge the woman’s freedom to find a new mate when her husband proves unsuitable.

Ironically, the proper familial spirit is portrayed in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby not by a family but by a pair of brothers, the Cheerybles. The need for true “Brotherhood” is underscored by the fact that the book opens and closes with two very different sets of brothers. Dickens suggests that the antithetical Nickleby brothers, Ralph and Godfrey, who pursue separate life paths, should have behaved like Ned and Charles Cheeryble, who act like twins and who cooperate to earn money and also care enough about others to share their riches. The brothers Cheeryble “adopt” Madeline and rescue her, with the assistance of Nicholas as a go-between. Like the Crummles, the brothers accept their fellow humans as they are and offer brotherly love and fatherly help. They even produce a husband for Kate, in the form of their nephew Frank. In contrast, Ralph Nickleby fails in every familial role: he refuses aid to his brother’s family and attempts to destroy Nicholas for defying him, which essentially is to say that Ralph hates Nicholas for valuing family above money. Ralph’s worst anti-family acts are to “sell” his niece to cement a business relationship and to give up his own child without a moment of remorse until after the child is dead. All of his failed family relationships stem from avarice, for money holds the place in his values system that family should hold. Nicholas, through the “Uprisings and Downfallings” of his “life and adventures,” discovers that his family means more to him than fortune, and he feels unable to marry Madeline, for fear that she might think her wealth attracted him. Of course, his virtue is rewarded both with marriage and money. The play also demonstrates that when families break apart to pursue financial security at the price of family stability, these fissures form cracks in the larger family of society, but that upholding family and brotherly love brings its own form of prosperity.

Source: Carole Hamilton, Critical Essay on The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Melodie Monahan

Monahan operates The Inkwell Works, an editorial service, and teaches English literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. In this essay, Monahan places David Edgar’s adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel in its historical context and explains its stage success in terms of production techniques Edgar devised to translate the novel’s Victorian insights to the 1970s English stage.

The first inkling of an English stage production of Dickens occurred to director Trevor Nunn when he visited the Soviet Union in 1977 and realized the Gorky Theater was engaged in transforming The Pickwick Papers into drama. Nunn discovered, in fact, that stage productions of Dickens were commonly done in the Soviet Union. Two years later, in England, Nunn, along with codirector John Caird, began to pool ideas for a similar venture. The hope was to create a play that presented on stage the whole of a Charles Dickens novel. The novel of choice was The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. There was only one choice for the playwright: the socialist, activist, and extraordinarily prolific David Edgar, who had just completed two adaptations, Mary Barnes and The Jail Diary ofAlbie Sachs(both written in 1978). These works, along with Edgar’s known fascination for agitprop technique, suggested that his approach would resonate naturally with the social justice theme in Charles Dickens’s novel.

Staging Dickens’s work was not a new idea, however. In fact, during the novelist’s life, many adaptations of his plays were produced, and existing copyright laws did not protect his work from these truncated reproductions. What made the present idea unique was the aspiration to present the entire novel on the stage, to leave out nothing. The play was ultimately performed in two parts by The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 1980, entailing thirty-nine actors playing 123 speaking parts in ninety-five scenes, lasting eight and a half hours. Reviewing the play for the London Sunday Times, Bernard Levin wrote:

This production... is a tribute to England’s greatest writer of prose and of the teeming world he conjured up... It is a celebration of love and justice that is true to the spirit of Dickens’ belief that those are the fulcrums on which the universe is moved.

This essay introduces readers to some of the bridge-making strategies David Edgar used to bring Dickens to the stage and connect his nineteenth-century text to the 1970s world of English theatergoers.

If not immediately upon its opening, then immediately after Levin’s positive review, Edgar’s play was an extraordinary success. It had two more runs in England, from November 13, 1980, to January 3, 1981, and again from April 23 to June 20, 1981, and then the play had a fourteen-week run in New York City, opening September 23, 1981. It played in Cleveland, in Chicago, and then, on December 10, 1983, it opened in Sidney, Australia. David Edgar’s Nicholas Nickleby was a phenomenon, a unique stage experience, both contemporary and Victorian, both socialistic and sentimental. The play won awards both in England and in the United States. It was, moreover, a perfect vehicle for some of the deeply held dramatic and ethical convictions of the man who reconceived it.

In his interview with Elizabeth Swain, included in her book David Edgar: Playwright and Politician(1986), Edgar pointed out that his parents conceived him just two doors up the street from the address at which Charles Dickens (1812-1870) wrote Nicholas Nickleby. This coincidence seemed in line with other affinities between the playwright and novelist. Born 112 years after the novel’s composition and

coming of age in the turbulent protest-driven 1960s, Edgar developed his own brand of Dickensian outrage at human cruelty, and as of 2001 he has written over sixty pieces, many of which were carefully researched and designed to foreground individuals caught in historical events. Like Dickens, Edgar wrote in social protest, casting a spotlight on injustice, abuse, and oppression. Like Dickens in Victorian England, Edgar in the England of the 1970s and 1980s tried to change public consciousness by exposing what people may well not have seen on their own. The two adaptations Edgar wrote for the stage immediately preceding Nicholas Nickleby are examples.

The play Mary Barnes is a stage adaptation of the psychological case history, Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness, which was co-authored by the schizophrenic and successful painter, Mary Barnes, and her doctor, Joseph Berke. The play, like the book, dramatizes the apparent cure of Barnes who was treated at Kingsley Hall (1965-1970), following the nurturing guidelines of R. D. Laing, while it criticizes conventional shock treatment therapy. The second adaptation by Edgar brought to the stage Albie Sachs’s account of his imprisonment in South Africa, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. A Jewish lawyer who defended opponents of apartheid, Sachs was held in solitary confinement for three years without ever being charged with a crime. In each of these cases, Edgar turned the spotlight on an important individual and social issue.

As a socialist, Edgar also brought to the production of Nicholas Nickleby his fascination with the early 1970s technique called agitprop. The term itself, according to Swain, derives from the Soviet idea that agitation and propaganda are effective forms of shaping public opinion. Agitprop technique can be used in various ways, but the part Edgar used entails presenting a significant problem to an audience and inviting the audience to participate. The point is to engage the audience in protest, to reveal a social evil, an oppression, or injustice, and to invite viewers to react. One scene in Nicholas Nickleby illustrates this technique.

In Edgar’s play, an early scene shows a meeting of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company. In the production of the Edgar’s play, some actors integrate the audience, object loudly to the on-stage action, and encourage members of the audience to join them as they throw muffins onto the stage in protest. The top hats on stage are capitalists, moneymakers, who exploit their workers and the starving street people. By inference, the people in the audience become the exploited ones who protest the meeting. Thus, the play begins with this dramatic display of an idea, economic exploitation, and it invites an interaction of challenge and protest by aligning the audience with the underdogs.

Another important topic for the novel and the play is the abusive proprietary schools in nineteenth-century Yorkshire. Like Edgar, Dickens researched his subjects before he dramatized them in his writings. Charles Dickens began as a journalist, and like a journalist preparing a story, he investigated the Yorkshire boys’ schools, the originals upon which his Dotheboys Hall is based. In the Author’s Preface to the novel, Dickens explains how he pretended to be a gentleman looking for such a school in order to get a firsthand impression of what they were like. The Preface also explains that while Dickens was intent on “calling public attention to the system” that perpetrated “atrocities” far worse than any depicted in the novel, he also acknowledges that these schools had been severely reduced by lawsuits brought against them.

The character of Smike, the handicapped, supposedly mentally retarded boy whom Nicholas befriends at the school and later discovers to be his cousin, the abandoned son of Ralph Nickleby, has a crucial role in arousing sympathy for the dispossessed and rejected and for asserting the human connection and social responsibility that these writers valued. Smike is the one who clarifies for Dickens’s readers and for Edgar’s audience the poignancy of the outcast. In part 1, act 1, scene 13, Smike says he was with his friend Dorker when Dorker died. Smike says: “I was with him at the end, he asked for me. Who will I ask for? Who?” While Nicholas does not yet understand the magnitude of Smike’s isolation, Smike is drawing attention to the fact that when he dies, he will have no one in the world to ask for. As if to explain further to Nicholas, Smike continues: “O-U-T-C-A-S-T. A noun. Substantive. Person cast out or rejected. Abject. And forsaken. Homeless. Me.”

For much of the play, Nicholas’s main concern is making enough money to support himself, his widowed mother, and his unmarried sister Kate. But he takes upon himself Smike, takes up his cause immediately in his decision to beat the sadistic Squeers who runs the school, and in the staging, Nicholas literally carries Smike on his back as they escape. That Smike turns out to be the cousin of Nicholas fulfills, on the literal level, an important thematic point: across class and other hierarchies, human beings are connected, are related, are responsible for one another. Additionally, the central refusal of Uncle Ralph to help Nicholas is seriously qualified when it becomes clear that Ralph earlier refused to care for his own son. In all, the revelation of abuse and injustice is intended to call readers and playgoers to a higher vision, one of brotherhood and shared responsibility.

The production uses two devices that allow Edgar to compress large amounts of text and emphasize meaning through juxtaposition: one is narration, either imbedded in the dialogue or delivered like a chorus refrain, and the other is a manner of open staging that allows one scene to melt into another without conventional breaks. The play’s dialogue includes narrative passages rendered in the third person. These summarize action and intention, much as Dickens might have written them. Then, too, Edgar devised a platform for moving furniture up or down stage; thus, scenes could “fade out” without really ending, since, as the room withdraws to the back of the stage space, actors may continue to appear to play out the scene that space defines. Similarly, actors could by their costumes and actions create a sense of place, which can envelope and then be superimposed upon a previous scene. These two techniques, narration and what might be called scene blending, allowed Edgar to compress quickly and highlight meaning in the meandering epic plot of Dickens’s novel. In each of these techniques, Edgar takes the opportunity to render new interpretation through rearrangement and juxtaposition. One example may serve as illustration.

The Crummles theatrical troupe’s production of Romeo and Juliet, a happy-ending adaptation by Nicholas, employs Smike in the role of the apothecary. Dickens and Edgar manipulate the Elizabethan play-within-the-play device for thematic purposes. Smike’s lines include the question, “Who calls so loud?” (part 1, act 2, scene 16), which echoes his earlier question to Nicholas when they are still at Dotheboys Hall. Moreover, Edgar has the presentation of the tragedy alternate with a London scene in which Ralph Nickleby experiences a rare sense of human feeling while he hands his niece, Kate, into her carriage. The Crummles actors engulf Ralph and Kate, act around them. So as Ralph is pondering Kate, Edgar’s audience watches Smike (Ralph’s abandoned son) call out. The juxtaposition of the scenes extends the idea of tragedy from the Shakespeare play to the Nickleby plot, as it parallels Smike’s vulnerability with Kate’s. The ideas that money can disrupt familial ties, that love can connect people across barriers, and that disconnection or connecting across those barriers can extract great cost are thematic for Shakespeare’s play, for Dickens, for Edgar. In Edgar’s play, these thematic issues are underscored again when Smike dies, a scene in which the apothecary lines are used another way, this time to suggest that Smike hears a call from Heaven.

Narration summarizes and interprets. In the London scene with Ralph and Kate, which cooccurs with the Shakespeare production, Edgar has Ralph’s secretary, Newman Noggs, step forward to describe Ralph’s reaction to having these human feelings. Noggs states: “And Ralph Nickleby, who was proof against all appeals of blood and kindred — who was steeled against every tale of sorrow and distress — staggered while he looked, and reeled back into the house, as a man who had seen a spirit from a world beyond the grave.” Like scene directions in a play, like the prose description a novelist uses, Noggs’s words suggest that Ralph has seen a ghost, and they also point to an important, albeit sentimental, idea: even the most hardened person can feel, is capable of moments when point of view shifts and the previously sustained balance with which he holds himself erect becomes precariously endangered.

In his interview with Swain, David Edgar said the novel Nicholas Nickleby is about “a time in which industrialization is breaking down old hierarchies and barriers but is leaving people open and naked and uncertain about how they relate one to another.” Edgar conveys this uncertainty at the end of the play in which, amid a generally happy conclusion, Nicholas spies another child abandoned in the snow, a new Smike. Against the backdrop of family singing, Nicholas picks up the boy and walks toward the audience with a piercing look in his eye. It is as though in the staging David Edgar has allowed for a happy ending (although it may be “pasted on,” as Nicholas’s ending of Romeo and Juliet is), while at the same moment he arranges the happy ending to be upstaged by a challenge about human responsibility in the face of continued suffering. In an effort to describe his role as playwright, David Edgar told Swain, “I’d like to be a secretary for the times through which I’m living.” In doing so, he purposefully joins hands with Dickens, across genres and across the centuries.

Source: Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

What Do I Read Next?

• The original Dickens novel, a meandering behemoth, follows the pattern of the picaresque tale and seems to be based on Tobias Smollett’s picaresque novels, The Adventures of Roderick Random(1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle(1751), both of which Dickens read during his childhood. All of Dickens’s novels discuss social reform of one kind or another, but two of them in particular consider the plight of poor children: Hard Times(1845) and Oliver Twist(1837-1839).
• Like Dickens, David Edgar writes plays of social reform. Notable among his works are Mary Barnes(1977), about an unusual experimental psychiatric treatment of a schizophrenic woman, and The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs(1966), the story of a Jewish South African lawyer imprisoned for defending opponents of apartheid.