It's almost winter again and I keep thinking the books of Dickens. For many of us, Dickens is an immutable part of this season although I don't think he reached that place just because of his famous Christmas tale. Winter is a melodramatic mix of beauty, fear and hope, just like his stories and the first one that comes to mind is The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
Nickleby is Dickens's third novel and by that time he had his formula down pat. There's the hero, young Nicholas, impetuously ready to take up arms against every unjust cause he meets; there's his impossibly good and patient sister Kate who is just a little too close to her brother for twenty-first century sensibilities and their addle-pated mother. There's a rogue's gallary of baddies to threaten them including the sneering, high-born, louse, Sir Mulberry Hawk (whose picture should be in the dictionary by the term "sexual predator.") For those who favor the emotionally crippled-bad guy, Uncle Ralph Nickleby spends his life and reason plotting for money and vengeance on our hero since people like Nicholas but they don't like him! (Seriously, this guy needed therapy!) There are other not-so-nice guys but for sheer nerve, the Yorkshire schoolmaster, Wackford Squeers is the best of the baddies. He looks hideous (Dickens says "He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two") and he's cheap, malevolent and none too bright. Just the guy you'd want in a schoolmaster.
The school background was another piece of the Dickens formula; where the novel targets social reform. Yorkshire schools weren't really schools at that time, they were storage places for unwanted boys. Illegitimate boys, boys from a previous marriage or brats who wouldn't behave were often shipped to some place in Yorkshire with the word "school" or "academy" in its name and they rarely came home again. (God knows what happened to the girls, probably places like Lowood School in Jane Eyre!). The fees weren't that expensive and the "schoolmasters" made a profit by spending even less on their "students" than they got. Dickens found out about the systematic child neglect and turned a big, white spotlight on it in Nickleby. Committees were formed, investigations started and Yorkshire schools went out of fashion. I've always wondered what happened to the survivors.
Dickens knew how melodramatic this story is (and it is, with amazing coincidences, heart-rending renunciations and retribution galore) and to enhance its theatricality, he added a sub-plot involving a not-so-talented theatrical troupe. Here, overacting is taken to splendid heights and the manager's daughter is continually referred to as "The Infant Phenomena". Not Ninetta (her name) or Miss Crummles (a title she's old enough to use) but "The Infant Phenomena". In one way Miss Crummles suffers maltreatment like a Yorkshire schoolboy as her parents purposely kept her sleepless and drunk in order to keep her short but this episode is strictly for laughs. The Infant is the spoiled darling who gets the best scenes in every production and her parents' treatment is seen as misguided vocational training instead of neglect. So Nickleby has relieving sequences of comedy as well as drama and since this is Dickens, almost everything works out for the best.
Yes, December is a mix of the highs and the lows: bitter weather, warm celebrations, pageantry, anxiety and hope. It's a perfect season for holidays with their attendant melodrama. That makes it a perfect setting for Nicholas Nickleby as well. I hope you enjoy it all.
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