# Nicholas Nickleby — Character guide

> Key figures in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens.

- [Nicholas Nickleby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/nicholas_nickleby.md): 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 deli
- [Ralph Nickleby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/ralph_nickleby.md): 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 shru
- [Kate Nickleby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/kate_nickleby.md): 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 preda
- [Mrs. Nickleby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mrs_nickleby.md): 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 seein
- [Newman Noggs](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/newman_noggs.md): 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 
- [Smike](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/smike.md): 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 hi
- [Wackford Squeers](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/wackford_squeers.md): Squeers runs a boarding school built on fraud: parents pay, boys vanish into neglect, and he pockets the difference. When Smike disappears, he beats a small boy in his nightshirt to silence any talk of running away, then
- [Mrs. Squeers](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mrs_squeers.md): Mrs. Squeers rules the domestic side of Dotheboys Hall with the same brutality her husband applies in the schoolroom, dosing boys with foul medicine and grudging every crust. When Smike goes missing, she blames the new t
- [Fanny Squeers](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/fanny_squeers.md): Fanny drifts through Dotheboys Hall in a fog of self-regard, convinced that Nicholas's polite smile means something more than it does. She drops her pen, knocks heads with him, and walks away marveling at his legs, all w
- [John Browdie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/john_browdie.md): Browdie is a local man with a loud laugh and a soft spot for anyone being treated unfairly, including the half-starved boys at Dotheboys Hall. He becomes one of the few allies Nicholas finds in Yorkshire, and his plain h
- [Mrs. Browdie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mrs_browdie.md): John Browdie's wife, formerly Tilda Price.
- [Arthur Gride](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/arthur_grinde.md): Gride hoards money in secret and gloats over the prospect of a forced marriage, cackling and rubbing his hands while Ralph Nickleby needles him about his jealousy and his age. When a young man bursts in to warn him off, 
- [Tim Linkinwater](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/tim_linkinwater.md): Tim has kept the Cheerybles' counting-house running for decades, tending the flowers of a sick boy in the window and greeting each morning with the same gentle routine. He is the quiet moral center of the counting-house,
- [Sir Mulberry Hawk](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/sir_mulberry_hawk.md): Sir Mulberry Hawk moves through fashionable London as a man of rank, wit, and no scruples, schooling the foolish Lord Verisopht in the arts of pursuit and self-indulgence. He is the cold eye and the cruel appetite behind
- [Lord Frederick Verisopht](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/lord_frederick_verisopht.md): Lord Frederick Verisopht is rich, idle, and easily led, spending his days in the orbit of Sir Mulberry Hawk, who flatters and steers him for his own amusement. His infatuation with Kate Nickleby is less malice than vanit
- [Madeline Bray](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/madeline_bray.md): Madeline Bray lives in shabby gentility with her ailing father, Walter Bray, whose debts and self-pity make him eager to trade her hand for his own relief. She is dutiful to the point of self-erasure, and her beauty and 
- [Mr. Mantalini](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mantalini.md): A foppish and spendthrift husband of Madame Mantalini.
- [Madame Mantalini](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/madame_mantalini.md): A fashionable dressmaker who employs Kate.
- [Miss La Creevy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/miss_la_creevy.md): Miss La Creevy lets lodgings and paints portraits in her little London house, and she takes the Nicklebys in when they arrive from the country with more grief than money. She is kind, talkative, and a little vain about h
- [Vincent Crummles](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/vincent_crummles.md): Vincent Crummles runs the Portsmouth Theatre as a family business, with his wife, children, and a small corps of actors performing melodramas to sparse and unglamorous houses. He is pompous, good-natured, and utterly sin
- [Mrs. Crummles](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mrs_crummles.md): Vincent Crummles's wife and a member of his acting troupe.
- [Miss Snevellicci](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/miss_snevellicci.md): An actress in Crummles's troupe who takes a liking to Nicholas.
- [Frank Cheeryble](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/frank_cheeryble.md): Frank Cheeryble is generous, impulsive, and free of the calculation that marks so many young men in the novel, and his uncles clearly dote on him. He and Nicholas become fast friends, but their affection is complicated b
- [Charles Cheeryble](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/charles_cheeryble.md): Charles Cheeryble belongs to the benevolent twin partnership that plucks Nicholas from poverty and plants him in a counting-house where kindness is policy. Where his brother Ned bubbles and blurts, Charles presides with 
- [Ned Cheeryble](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/ned_cheeryble.md): Ned Cheeryble shares his brother's fortune, his office, and his conviction that rescuing the deserving is simply good business. He is the more excitable of the pair, quick to forget his own assumed dignity and burst out 
- [Peg Sliderskew](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/peg_sliderskew.md): Arthur Gride's deaf and cunning housekeeper.
- [Miss Knag](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/miss_knag.md): A dressmaker at Madame Mantalini's who is jealous of Kate.
- [Mrs. Wititterly](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mrs_wititterly.md): A hypochondriacal society lady who employs Kate as a companion.
- [Mrs. Kenwigs](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/kenwigs.md): A neighbor of the Nicklebys in London.
- [Mr. Kenwigs](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_kenwigs.md): Mrs. Kenwigs's husband.
- [Morleena Kenwigs](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/morleena_kenwigs.md): The eldest Kenwigs daughter.
- [Mr. Lillyvick](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_lillyvick.md): A water-rate collector and uncle to the Kenwigs family.
- [Henrietta Petowker](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/henrietta_petowker.md): An actress who marries Mr. Lillyvick.
- [Mr. Bray](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_bray.md): Madeline's selfish and invalid father.
- [Tilda Price](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/tilda_price.md): A lively young woman from Yorkshire who marries John Browdie.
- [Mr. Pyke](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_pyke.md): A toadying associate of Sir Mulberry Hawk.
- [Mr. Pluck](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_pluck.md): Another toadying associate of Sir Mulberry Hawk.
- [Mr. Folair](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_folair.md): An actor in Crummles's troupe.
- [Mr. Lenville](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_lenville.md): A tragedian in Crummles's troupe.
- [Mr. Bonney](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_bonney.md): A member of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company.
- [Mr. Brooker](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_brooker.md): A mysterious man with a grudge against Ralph Nickleby.
- [Mrs. Blockson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mrs_blockson.md): A neighbor of the Kenwigs family.
- [Mr. Mortimer Knag](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_mortimer_knag.md): Miss Knag's brother, a bookseller.
- [Mr. Godfrey Nickleby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/mr_godfrey_nickleby.md): Nicholas's deceased father.
- [Master Percy Crummles](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/master_percy_crummles.md): One of the Crummles children.
- [Ninetta Crummles](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters/ninetta_crummles.md): The infant phenomenon of the Crummles troupe.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/nicholas_nickleby_se/characters