Nicholas and his sister Kate are both young and vulnerable following their father’s death. The traditional picaresque novel featured a one central character ( Lazarillo de Tormes and Tom Jones for example), but Dickens gives this convention a creative twist by having essentially two central characters battling with the vicissitudes of society.

In its original form the picaro was usually a low-life character, and this is perhaps reflected in Fielding’s hero (in Tom Jones) being a foundling, or in Smollett’s heroes Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle being ‘groundlings’ or ordinary characters. That is, the focus of attention in a novel was on an individual who engaged with society and embarked on a series of adventures.

The convention of illustrating novels persisted until the end of the nineteenth century and then disappeared in the early twentieth.ĭickens greatly admired the novelists of the eighteenth century – Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Tobias Smollett – all of whom had inherited the earlier tradition of the novel as a picaresque narrative. In addition, each instalment of the serial was illustrated – in this case by his favourite artist, Hablot Knight Browne, who was also given a pseudonym of ‘Phiz’. And he is not the author but the editor of these recorded adventures – almost as if their existence were due to some other person or source. It is worth noting, in terms of the history of the novel and literature as a cultural medium, that Charles Dickens’ name does not appear on the cover – only his nom de plume, ‘Boz’. He had struck a best-selling formula with his first novel – The Pickwick Papers – an episodic narrative issued in monthly parts, and he stuck to this publishing format, selling 50,000 copies a month of each instalment, which cost one shilling per issue and two shillings for the final double issue. It was Charles Dickens’ third novel, but he wrote it at the same time as he was completing his second novel, Oliver Twist. Nicholas Nickleby first appeared as a serial novel in nineteen monthly instalments between 18, published by Chapman and Hall.

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Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens