Nicholas Nickleby is a novel written by the English author Charles Dickens. The novel criticizes greedy proprietors of private schools, who treated students brutally and taught them nothing. Dickens based his severely critical portrait on a real school he visited in Yorkshire. The novel was published in monthly installments in 1838 and 1839 and in one volume in 1839. Its complete title is The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. See Dickens, Charles. The novel’s exposure of the terrible conditions in numerous English schools led to the reforming or closing of many schools.
The first part of the novel centers on the character of the ignorant and brutal Wackford Squeers, who cruelly runs Dotheboys Hall with his heartless wife. Nicholas Nickleby is a likeable young man of 19. When Nicholas’s father dies, Nicholas, his mother, and his sister Kate are left destitute. They turn to his uncle, Ralph Nickleby, for help. Ralph Nickleby is a miserable moneylender who comes to hate Nicholas and sends him to work at Dotheboys Hall. Here, Nicholas sees the way the boys are ill-treated, especially Smike, a simple-minded boy whom Squeers uses to do lowly, unpleasant jobs.
Nicholas eventually becomes so angry at Squeers’s mistreatment of Smike that he attacks Squeers. Nicholas and Smike run away together, which begins a new phase of the novel in which Dickens makes his first attempt at writing romance. To support himself and Smike, Nicholas becomes an actor in a theater company run by Vincent Crummles. He then works in a counting house for Ned and Charles Cheeryble, brothers who spread happiness to everyone around them. Nicholas rescues his sister Kate from the unwanted attentions of Sir Mulberry Hawk, a friend of their uncle Ralph. Nicholas falls in love with Madeline Bray, a young woman whom Ralph Nickleby intends to marry off to another colleague, the moneylender Gride. Ralph Nickleby also intends to separate Nicholas and Smike. Although he fails to do this, Smike gets consumption (a disease of the lungs now called tuberculosis) and dies. Ralph then discovers that Smike was his own son, and he takes his own life. At the end of the book, Nicholas marries Madeline, and his sister Kate marries Frank, a nephew of the Cheeryble brothers. Squeers is sent abroad as a punishment for theft, and Gride is killed.
