“The Best and Purest Link”: The Morality of Memory in Nicholas Nickleby

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

ABSTRACT This article explores Nicholas Nickleby’s conflicting representation of memory, examining how the novel upholds and refutes traditional Victorian notions of memory. Evoking gothic and romantic literature, memory is both a supernatural horror, as the past comes back to haunt characters, and a spiritual restoration connecting them with a better, purer world. However, the story also employs the Victorian theory of associative memory, which relies on linear progress and forgetfulness. The novel contradicts itself as it encourages remembrance as a moral duty while simultaneously espousing a need to move on from the past. This article considers the conventional and exceptional ways in which characters remember, the lessons of memory in “The Five Sisters of York” and “The Baron of Grogzwig,” and the novel’s relationship to Dickens’s own memories. Nicholas Nickleby reflects Dickens’s struggle to comprehend the experiences of grief, memory, and trauma and fit them into a traditional, linear narrative structure.