Nicholas Nickleby

Nicholas Nickleby

When his father dies leaving the family penniless, Nicholas is packed off to teach at a Yorkshire boarding school run by the grotesque Wackford Squeers, a place where charity children are starved and beaten. Dickens deliberately made him impetuous and flawed rather than saintly, so his righteous rages against cruelty feel like a real young man's rather than a moral emblem's. His refusal to keep his head down, and his impulsive protection of the abused Smike, sets the whole plot in motion and defines the novel's argument that decency must sometimes be loud.

Ralph Nickleby

Ralph lives in faded Golden Square among musicians and foreigners, enjoying a reputation for immense wealth while belonging to no trade or profession anyone can name. He greets the news of his brother's death with a shrug and immediately begins calculating what his widow and children might cost him, then schemes to turn them into instruments of profit. Cold, plausible, and never quite catchable, he is the gravity that pulls Nicholas's story downward, and the reader watches him the way one watches a man handling a knife.

Kate Nickleby

Kate is placed at Madame Mantalini's fashionable dressmaking establishment, where the work is dull, exhausting, and humiliating, and where Miss Knag's flattery is as poisonous as open contempt. Her beauty draws the predatory attention of wealthy men, and her position exposes how little protection a poor gentlewoman has in London. Where Nicholas can storm and flee, Kate must stay and smile, and her patient endurance gives the novel its sharpest picture of what the world does to women without money.

Mrs. Nickleby

Mrs. Nickleby means well and understands almost nothing, greeting every crisis with a story about someone she once knew whose name she has forgotten. She is easily flattered, easily misled, and utterly incapable of seeing the danger her brother-in-law represents, which makes her a burden her children must carry rather than a support. Dickens uses her torrents of inconsequential talk for comedy, but the comedy has an edge: her helplessness is exactly the kind of vulnerability that Ralph and his associates know how to exploit.

Newman Noggs

Newman Noggs scratches out Ralph's correspondence from a butler's pantry, his coat rusty, his nose red, his face twisted into expressions no one can read. He was once a gentleman of some means, and his fall has left him with nothing but a stubborn loyalty to the memory of Ralph's dead brother and a fierce sympathy for the man's children. He is the novel's quiet double agent, passing warnings and small kindnesses under his employer's nose, and his cracked dignity is one of Dickens's most affecting creations.

Smike

Smike has been at Squeers's Yorkshire school so long he cannot remember any other life, and is worked, starved, and mocked as a matter of routine. When Nicholas defies Squeers to protect him, Smike attaches himself to his rescuer with a gratitude so total it becomes the tenderest relationship in the book. He is the human cost of the school system Dickens was attacking, and his helpless devotion forces Nicholas, and the reader, to keep asking what one person owes another.