Nicholas Nickleby Research Articles

Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby: An Annotated Bibliography by Robert C. Hanna (review)

Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby: An Annotated Bibliography by Robert C. Hanna (review)

More Than Fluency: Artificial Stuttering as a Therapy in Drama Education in Palestine

This article explores the use of artificial stuttering as a powerful practice and therapy in higher education in Palestine where the need for applied drama is increasing. It specifically focuses on the artistic and/or performative re-employment of Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby to enhance the academic achievement and social development of dysfluent students throughout and beyond their university education. By using extra-curricular, art-mediated training and in-class performance of chosen passages from Dickens’s narrative, students not only improve their linguistic and intellectual competencies but also develop dynamic confidence to articulate themselves in daily social contexts during self-presentation. This academic practice, which is part of a one-term educational disability programme, focuses on training a selected number of undergraduate students with a severe or mild stutter by relying on the technique of artificial impersonation of the stuttering of Smike, who is one of the most common Victorian dysfluent characters, in different melodramatic acts. In this experience, students show linguistic growth and social command of communication, and thus chart a new subjective identity.

Poverty Narrative in Nicholas Nickleby

Poverty Narrative in Nicholas Nickleby

Review

Review

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Trevor Nunn by Russell Jackson

Reviewed by: Shakespeare in the Theatre: Trevor Nunn by Russell Jackson Cary M. Mazer SHAKESPEARE IN THE THEATRE: TREVOR NUNN. By Russell Jackson. Shakespeare in the Theatre series. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018; pp. 264. In a series of concise and thoroughly documented chapters, Russell Jackson, in his book on Trevor Nunn’s Shakespeare productions in the new Arden “Shakespeare in the Theatre” series, applies his usual powers of vivid description and astute analysis toward making a case for Nunn as among the most important Shakespeare directors since the 1960s. He admits that Nunn usually does not make the final cut on many performance historians’ shortlists. Is this, I wonder, because Nunn has (to date) left no manifesto about theatre or about Shakespeare? Because he rarely resorts to high concepts or easy visual metaphors? Because he usually shirks drawing obvious parallels to contemporary political events? Or is it that, although he wowed with the teeming theatricality of Nicholas Nickleby (1978, co-directed with John Caird), scholars have never forgiven him for the treacly Les Misérables (1985, again with Caird), not to mention the inexplicably successful Cats (1981) and the merely inexplicable Starlight Express (1984)? And yet Nunn is responsible for several productions in the top bracket of my life list. When I arrived in London to research my dissertation in late spring of 1978, Nunn’s production of Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company was in the last two weeks of its extended run at the Young Vic, completely sold out two years after its premiere at The Other Place (TOP) at Stratford. I got to the theatre four hours early to queue for returns and managed to see the show. A few days later I was back in the queue, determined to see it again. Jackson makes his case for Nunn by considering in turn each institutional phase of his career at his long-time creative home, the RSC, where he first directed in his twenties and where he became artistic director in 1968 and then joint artistic director with Terry Hands from 1978 to 1986. During each of these phases, Nunn, like other directors before and since, wrestled with the intractable barn of the RSC’s mainstage, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST). At first he tried to solve the challenges of that space scenically, employing frames that did double and triple duty across the season, to create stunning visual images—what Jackson calls “large-scale theatrical gestures” (84). For the 1972 Romans season he installed cubes and columns that could be raised, lowered, and raked hydraulically. For the 1976 season he installed a quasi-Elizabethan façade with onstage gallery seating. But none of these solutions lasted: the machinery for the Roman plays was abandoned when the plays transferred to the Aldwych the following year. By the mid-1970s, Jackson writes, “a journey had been taken into and out of the theatre of spectacle, at least in so far as the stage’s architecture was concerned” (87). The breakthrough came with the 1976 Macbeth, a play that Nunn had directed in the RST the year before. Staging it afresh at TOP, the Quonset hut only recently put to use by the RSC as a performance venue, Nunn found the intimacy he had been searching for. With a simple set of staging conventions and with spectators able to see the actors up close, [End Page 124] Nunn was able to create a theatre that focused on the characters’ psychological truth. Jackson breaks his otherwise chronological narrative and dedicates a separate chapter to Macbeth and to the half-dozen chamber productions that followed—most notably Othello at TOP in 1991 and The Merchant of Venice at the Cottesloe in 1999—while he was the stopgap artistic director at the National Theatre from 1997 to 2003. Many of the production choices in Macbeth that Jackson describes in detail are the ones I remember from seeing the production at the end of its run: the pared-down conventions (the ensemble’s sitting on cubes, with actors stepping into a circle on the floor to perform their characters as needed), Lady Macbeth (Judi Dench) pulling away in horror at the evil she...

Dickens's ‘School Of Affliction’: Learning from Death inNicholas NicklebyandThe Old Curiosity Shop

This essay reads death scenes in Dickens's early novels as contributions to a wider reformist drive (evidenced in discourses of burial, urban, and sanitary reform) to clean up the nation's ways of thinking about mortality, each of which relied upon the careful policing of sense data surrounding corpses, graves, and deathbeds. In doing so, it seeks to expand our sense of why Dickens adopted a sentimental mode in both Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1), arguing that it derived not just from a desire to provoke emotional responses in readers, but spoke to his interest in association psychology as the mechanism by which both ideas and minds were constructed. It thus argues for Dickens's deathbed scenes as sites of literary experiment: attempts to recruit narrative fiction's affective and psychological power for the causes of aesthetic and social transformation.

Killed or sent to Australia

Killed or sent to Australia Ryan Shek Tom Keneally . The Dickens Boy. Sydney: Penguin Random House Australia, 2020. 392 pp., $33.00. ISBN: 978 1 76089 319 4 Authors of fiction draw on their lives and relationships to mimic the look, touch, and feel of real human experience—so much so that a person who has lived in proximity to an author, maybe as a lover or friend or child, can sometimes find an unexpected and embarrassing audit of their own faults, abilities, and shortcomings in the author's prose. It is an uncomfortable and seldomdiscussed consequence of creating art that so closely parallels lived reality: that real people tend to recognize themselves in it. In many ways, this premise is what propels the plot of Thomas Keneally's 2020 book The Dickens Boy , a work of historical fiction that reimagines the youngest son of the literary icon Charles Dickens and his adventures through the Australian Outback. Readers familiar with Dickens's work may instantly recognize Australia as a farflung place of the British Empire, where wretched and ruined souls converge to find redemption and station in their troubled lives. See Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations, John Edmunds from Pickwick Papers , Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby, and in Dickens's own life, two of his sons, Alfred and Edward. In Dickens's time, Australia ostensibly represented a life better suited to the Dickens boys' skills and interests, but as Keneally's book suggests, it was also a good, faraway place where two underachieving children could avoid tarnishing their father's great reputation. It does not take the son of an immortal literary figure to recognize Australia as a land of banishment and redemption in Dickens's work. This fact is not lost on at least one of the Dickens boys, Alfred, who in Keneally's novel speculates for the first time what his being sent away to Australia truly means in the context of his father's literary work: "Look, if he wants to get rid of someone in his books, he either kills them or sends them to Australia," Alfred, the older of the two Dickens brothers, says. "I wasn't aware of that," Edward replies, adding hopefully, "But it's only his imagination, isn't it?" (208). Charles Dickens's literary legacy casts a long shadow over Keneally's book as well as over the lives of its characters. The book's protagonist, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known in the Dickens family as Plorn, spends much of his time navigating the tension between his father's great celebrity and the unexceptional texture of his own life. Having spent his boyhood largely unfocused and struggling in England, Plorn is sent thousands of miles away to a remote station in New South Wales. His charge in Van Diemen's Land is to become a man amid a cast of Paakantji, colonists, ex-convicts, and soldiers. He is also charged with finding a purpose and sparing his father the shame of an unproductive life. This is a tough expectation for anyone to fulfill, let alone Plorn, who cannot help but measure himself against his father's great achievements. After all, there is simply no escaping them. Dickens's star is so bright that it shines in even the remotest corners of Australia. A charming catch of Keneally's novel is Plorn's surprising unfamiliarity with his father's work. He has never read a single book, let alone any of his father's. (It is the modern equivalent of Michael Jordan's children never watching one of his basketball games.) [End Page 150] This fact is preposterous and infinitely entertaining. It also puts Plorn in a number of uncomfortable social situations in which the cream of his character is forced to rise to the top. In fact, the great strength of this book is its young narrator's charm. Immediately upon arriving in Australia, Plorn applies himself earnestly in a difficult trade and is constantly deflecting his father's greatness. He also has an abiding sense of justice and is wily and entertaining in conversation. Plorn's naivety, goodwill, and earnestness soften the harsh world around him, and he is determined...

Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death by Jeremy Tambling

Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death by Jeremy Tambling

Killed or sent to Australia

Killed or sent to Australia Ryan Shek Tom Keneally . The Dickens Boy. Sydney: Penguin Random House Australia, 2020. 392 pp., $33.00. ISBN: 978 1 76089 319 4 Authors of fiction draw on their lives and relationships to mimic the look, touch, and feel of real human experience—so much so that a person who has lived in proximity to an author, maybe as a lover or friend or child, can sometimes find an unexpected and embarrassing audit of their own faults, abilities, and shortcomings in the author's prose. It is an uncomfortable and seldomdiscussed consequence of creating art that so closely parallels lived reality: that real people tend to recognize themselves in it. In many ways, this premise is what propels the plot of Thomas Keneally's 2020 book The Dickens Boy , a work of historical fiction that reimagines the youngest son of the literary icon Charles Dickens and his adventures through the Australian Outback. Readers familiar with Dickens's work may instantly recognize Australia as a farflung place of the British Empire, where wretched and ruined souls converge to find redemption and station in their troubled lives. See Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations, John Edmunds from Pickwick Papers , Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby, and in Dickens's own life, two of his sons, Alfred and Edward. In Dickens's time, Australia ostensibly represented a life better suited to the Dickens boys' skills and interests, but as Keneally's book suggests, it was also a good, faraway place where two underachieving children could avoid tarnishing their father's great reputation. It does not take the son of an immortal literary figure to recognize Australia as a land of banishment and redemption in Dickens's work. This fact is not lost on at least one of the Dickens boys, Alfred, who in Keneally's novel speculates for the first time what his being sent away to Australia truly means in the context of his father's literary work: "Look, if he wants to get rid of someone in his books, he either kills them or sends them to Australia," Alfred, the older of the two Dickens brothers, says. "I wasn't aware of that," Edward replies, adding hopefully, "But it's only his imagination, isn't it?" (208). Charles Dickens's literary legacy casts a long shadow over Keneally's book as well as over the lives of its characters. The book's protagonist, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known in the Dickens family as Plorn, spends much of his time navigating the tension between his father's great celebrity and the unexceptional texture of his own life. Having spent his boyhood largely unfocused and struggling in England, Plorn is sent thousands of miles away to a remote station in New South Wales. His charge in Van Diemen's Land is to become a man amid a cast of Paakantji, colonists, ex-convicts, and soldiers. He is also charged with finding a purpose and sparing his father the shame of an unproductive life. This is a tough expectation for anyone to fulfill, let alone Plorn, who cannot help but measure himself against his father's great achievements. After all, there is simply no escaping them. Dickens's star is so bright that it shines in even the remotest corners of Australia. A charming catch of Keneally's novel is Plorn's surprising unfamiliarity with his father's work. He has never read a single book, let alone any of his father's. (It is the modern equivalent of Michael Jordan's children never watching one of his basketball games.) [End Page 150] This fact is preposterous and infinitely entertaining. It also puts Plorn in a number of uncomfortable social situations in which the cream of his character is forced to rise to the top. In fact, the great strength of this book is its young narrator's charm. Immediately upon arriving in Australia, Plorn applies himself earnestly in a difficult trade and is constantly deflecting his father's greatness. He also has an abiding sense of justice and is wily and entertaining in conversation. Plorn's naivety, goodwill, and earnestness soften the harsh world around him, and he is determined...

Depiction of Human Tragedy in Literary Works

Nickolas Nickleby is a romantic novel written by Charles Dickens, one of the prominent English writer of Elizabethan era remembered as the greatest novelist with his literary contributions in the form of novels, short stories, poetry and plays. Famous works among his numerous writings include “A Message from the Sea”, “Great Expectations”, “Oliver Twist”, and “A Tale of Two Cities”.Nicholas Nickleby is one of examples of the romantic genre in Charles Dickens works and it is his third novel. This novel explores the life and adventures of a young man named Nicholas Nickleby, who has to support his mother and sister, due to unexpected failure of his father. Nicholas Nickleby’s father loses his entire life savings and this results in his death. The family leaves from the comfortable life style and reaches their relative for support. The work shows real human tragedy which is analysed in this article. Keywords : Human tragedy, sense of moral val

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS A GENRE FEATURE OF COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS BY CH. DICKENS

The article explores autobiography as one of the genre features of the coming-of-age novels in the context of Charles Dickens’ legacy. Dickens’ realistic novels appeared as a result of his own life experience; the writer wanted to bring and share his views, ideas, life lessons with the readers and teach them to what he considered the correct moral behavior. Episodes of the author’s life, as if scattered through all his novels about a young man such as “Nicholas Nickleby”, “Martin Chuzzlewit”, “David Copperfield” and “The Great Expectations”. Autobiographical genre features are revealed in the coming-of-age novels in two ways– through a full depiction of the whole life stages or, alternately, with the help of the episodic retrospective description of life experience. In both cases the author draws up a rational balance of biographical facts, social and historical background of the era combined with artistic fictional reality.

Nonsense on the Margins

The paper charts certain nuances of the diction of two minor characters in Dickens’s early fiction, Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers and Mrs Nickleby from Nicholas Nickleby. The paper focuses on what David Ellis calls Sam’s “extended comic comparisons” and Mrs Nickleby’s typical speech acts, called here, by analogy, extended comic recollections. After examining the role both characters’ verbal comedy plays in the novels, the paper invites Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s critical insight into a Victorian genre contemporary to Dickens: nonsense literature. I approach the underlying structural parallel between Sam’s and MrsNickleby’s comic verbal instances with the aid of the definitive trait of nonsense as established by Lecercle, the paradox of excess and lack on different levels of language. Though not arguing for the novels’ inclusion in a nonsense literary canon, I show that Lecercle’s conceptualisation of nonsense linguistics proves useful in making sense of the two characters’ monologues. Their role in each novel may thus be grasped as functional nonsense.

Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz

Reviewed by: Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz Jonathan Buckmaster John Plotz. Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2018. Pp. xiii + 329. $35.00. ISBN 9781400887850 In this enjoyable and expansive study John Plotz traces the artistic heritage of "semi-detachedness," a condition he characterizes as the "dual experience" (2) of inhabiting both the world of an artwork and the world in which the artwork exists. In his introduction, he offers two illustrative motifs: first, the moment in The Mill on the Floss when the narrator interrupts our observation of Maggie Tulliver to complain about their numb arms leaning on both Dolcote bridge (in the story) and the arms of a chair (from where they narrate the story). Second, we have Ford Madox Ford's description of Impressionism as "real life […] seen through bright glass" (3), whereby one apprehends the world of the painting as if it were real but simultaneously retains an awareness of the distance between [End Page 179] that world and our immediate surroundings. Plotz's primary focus is the novel, and how novelists use the state of semi-detachedness "to make sense of how consciousness, in life as in fiction, can be located in more than one place simultaneously" (13). Drawing on Franco Moretti's description of the "episodic" nature of fiction and Catherine Gallagher's notion of novels as "believable stories that do not solicit belief," Plotz feels that novels not only encourage escapism and "a release into the pleasures of an invented world," but also solicit from their readers "experiential attentiveness to the way the world is" (12). In chapter 1, Plotz reappraises the disregarded form of the mid-Victorian short story as one which "represents and reflects on readerly semi-detachment" (20). He traces short fiction through early experiments in the late Romantic period (such as those of James Hogg and John Galt) and demonstrates how such works were particularly amenable to articulating an experience of semi-detachedness, concerned as they are with "polydoxy" and "shifting frames of believability" (24). Dickens's early sketches build on this "inbetweenness," and counterpoise "detached empirical knowledge of city life" with "the shadowy spaces of individual feeling" (35): for example "Our Next-Door Neighbour" (1836) "toggl[es] between scientific and sentimental forms of knowledge" (36) in a narrative that develops from a comic taxonomy of door knockers and their owners through a world where such facile classifications are exposed as naïve, to end with a narrative of untimely bereavement. For Plotz, the Jamesian "loose, baggy monster" of the novel then began to digest the short story/sketch, first as an interpolated tale (which is digressive, disruptive and disjointed) and later fully integrated as the "pseudo interpolated" tale (which is unifying and complementary). Thus after Pickwick's standalone inset tales Plotz feels that all subsequent tales became absorbed into their "host" novel: Oliver Twist contains stories which initially appear to describe somewhere else, but ultimately "appertain" to the characters of the novel. Monks's narrative of Oliver's genealogy begins as the tale of an unnamed child in a remote place and time, but by the end, his auditor Rose has identified herself as one of its protagonists and Monks's place in the main narrative has been explained. However, Nicholas Nickleby contains both forms of interpolated tale, and one wonders how it might fit Plotz's theory–do they work as unrelated experiences, complement each other, or work against each other? And does the reader's awareness of the difference precipitate a different experience? Post Oliver, tales of family lineage become a popular variant of the pseudo interpolated tale for Dickens; Tulkinghorn relates to Lady Dedlock a thinly-veiled version of her own life story, and Pip becomes the audience for several similar familial narratives. Moreover, Pip himself uses such framing stories [End Page 180] to make (erroneous) sense of the events that shape his life, constructing fantasies around Miss Havisham's plans for him. Dickens reappears in Plotz's first "visual interlude," courtesy of his impassioned polemic against Millais's visual realism, which Plotz calls "a revealing moment" (75) and a...

Heir Conditioning: Dickens Planning Ahead

Heir Conditioning:Dickens Planning Ahead Robert Tracy (bio) The "purposive" man is always trying to secure a spurious delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time: […] by pushing always forward into the future, he strives to secure an immortality. John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." "Everything is some kind of plot, man." Thomas Pyncheon, Gravity's Rainbow. How to end The Pickwick Papers after serial publication in 20 monthly installments (Apr. 1836 – Nov. 1837) "was as little known to [Dickens] as to any of his readers" (Forster 88).1Not until Dombey and Son (1846–48) did he begin preparing careful working plans for each new novel. Before Dombey, how did Dickens end earlier novels without an exit strategy? How would he finally clarify mysterious events that readers had been speculating about for 19 months? His solution was to invent a will, imposing eccentric conditions an heir must meet to inherit, explaining retroactively a story's many mysteries in its final installments. Reporting disputed will cases at Doctors' Commons made him familiar with eccentric bequests: his "POSTSCRIPT in lieu of Preface" for Our Mutual Friend in 1865 tells readers that "[T]here are hundreds of Will Cases […] far more remarkable than that fancied in this book," in the archives at Doctors' [End Page 44] Commons. An eccentric will, invented after serial publication began, provides an exit strategy for Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens's imagined testators think like novelists. They write wills that control heirs as novelists control fictional characters. He prepared working plans for every novel after Dombey, but continued introducing wills to explain the mysteries he had invented. Dickens's 1837 preface to Pickwick explains what he learned about serial publication. A novel's "general design" should be "simple enough" to survive "this detached and desultory form of publication." Each number should be "complete in itself," but "form one tolerably harmonious whole." While Pickwick had not been "artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated," prefaces to later novels emphasize their woven design or pattern – terms Dickens preferred to plot (Little Dorrit, 1857 Preface). Forster met Dickens at Christmas 1836; he soon began urging him to decide how a novel would end before beginning publication. "I was responsible for [the] tragic ending" of The Old Curiosity Shop, he declares, and quotes Dickens's thanks for "your most valued suggestion, to keep my thoughts upon the ending of the tale." Dickens "had not thought of killing [Little Nell], when, about half-way through [publication], I asked him to consider whether it did not necessarily belong even to his own conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy endings, […] All that I meant he seized at once, and never turned aside from it again" (Forster 150–51). Oliver Twist (Bentley's Miscellany, Feb. 1837–Apr. 1839) begins with Oliver's birth in a workhouse, "badged and ticketed, […] a parish child […] humble half-starved drudge." His mother's death, immediately after giving birth, leaves him without identity and caste: "[I]t would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have fixed his station in society" (Oliver Twist I: ch. 1, Feb. 1837, italics mine). Dickens's reference to "station in society" hints that Oliver may not be a typical workhouse child. His language, moral instincts and Cruikshank's illustrations emphasize his difference from Fagin's boys: their "'looks convict 'em when they get into trouble, and I lose 'em all. With this boy, properly managed, […] I could do what I couldn't with twenty of them'" (Twist IX: ch. 19, Dec. 1837). Bentley's readers were well into Oliver Twist before Dickens decided that a will, imposing specific conditions on an heir, could be revealed to explain "More Mysteries Than One" in the final installment: Monks's identity and Fagin's attempts to make Oliver a criminal. Not until the twelfth installment (Bk. II, chap. 26, Mar. 1838), when "a mysterious character," enters, would readers encounter Monks and learn he has already been conspiring with Fagin to involve Oliver in a robbery. Writing to...

The HUGE presence of Lindley Murray

The grammarian Lindley Murray (1745–1826), according to Monaghan (1996), was the author of the best selling English grammar book of all times, calledEnglish Grammarand first published in 1795. Not surprisingly, therefore, his work was subjected to severe criticism by later grammarians as well as by authors of usage guides, who may have thought that Murray's success might negatively influence the sales figures of their own books. As the publication history of the grammar in Alston (1965) suggests, Murray was also the most popular grammarian of the late 18thand perhaps the entire 19thcentury, and this is most clearly reflected in the way in which a wide range of 19th- and even some 20th-century literary authors, from both sides of the Atlantic, mentioned Lindley Murray in their novels. Examples are Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852), George Eliot (Middlemarch, 1871–2), Charles Dickens, in several of his novels (Sketches by Boz, 1836;Nicholas Nickleby, 1838–9;The Old Curiosity Shop1840–1;Dombey & Son, 1846–8); Oscar Wilde (Miner and Minor Poets, 1887) and James Joyce (Ulysses, 1918) (Fens–de Zeeuw, 2011: 170–2). Another example is Edgar Allen Poe, who according to Hayes (2000) grew up with Murray's textbooks and used his writings as a kind of linguistic touchstone, especially in his reviews. Many more writers could be mentioned, and not only literary ones, for in a recent paper in which Crystal (2018) analysed the presence of linguistic elements in issues ofPunchpublished during the 19thcentury, he discovered that ‘[w]heneverPunchdebates grammar, it refers to Lindley Murray’. Murray, according to Crystal, ‘is the only grammarian to receive any mention throughout the period, and his name turns up in 19 articles’ (Crystal, 2018: 86). Murray had become synonymous with grammar prescription, and even in the early 20thcentury, he was still referred to as ‘the father of English Grammar’ (Johnson, 1904: 365).

『니콜러스 니클비』(Nicholas Nickleby) 연구 : 가정의 위기와 돈의 논리학

Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby portrays the world obsessed with economic concerns like money and speculation. Every family including the Kenwigses is shown to follow the logic of money, which overarches the private and the public spheres. Ralph, a representative capitalist, thinks of everything around him in business terms and treats even his niece Kate just as a means of making money. Ralph, together with Squeers, who runs a boarding school called Dotheboys Hall, illustrates the spread of reification attendant upon the development of the capitalist economy. Squeers looks at all the students in his school just as commodities worth 20 pounds per capita. Students divested of personality and individuality exemplify the lives of millions of people in the capitalist society. Despite the writer’s critical mind about the Victorian reality and interesting rendering of some characters like the later Ralph, this work is not so satisfactory because Nicholas Nickleby, the protagonist, attains neither growth nor maturity in his life. That is one of the main reasons why this work is classified as a kind of a picaresque novel.

Positively the Last Appearance: "BOZ" in Advertisements for Dombey and Son

Positively the Last Appearance:"BOZ" in Advertisements for Dombey and Son William F. Long (bio) and Paul Schlicke (bio) In this paper we report that Dickens's famous pseudonym survived for a time in publishers' advertisements in association with material which, by then, was itself attributed solely to "Charles Dickens."1 Attribution of Pickwick Papers In July 1836, "Boz," author of two volumes of selected Sketches with another in preparation and current "editor" of the monthly numbers of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, was revealed to be Charles Dickens.2 By November 1837, as the serial neared its end, Dickens determined that, in volume form, it should carry the authorial name "Charles Dickens." Its publishers, Chapman and Hall, fresh in the trade and evidently happy to accommodate their best-selling author, agreed. Thereafter, with a few minor [End Page 101] exceptions,3 the title pages of all of Dickens's novels carried the words "by Charles Dickens." Both Dickens and his publishers, nevertheless, were clearly conscious of the attention that the famous pseudonym would attract to any product to which it was attached. In November 1836 Dickens, negotiating the editorship of a new magazine with the publisher Richard Bentley, emphasized "the assistance 'Boz's' name just now, would prove to the circulation" (Letters 1: 190). And a year later, Chapman and Hall, notwithstanding the "Charles Dickens" tag they had attached to the title page of Pickwick, advertised the novel as a work "by Boz."4 Attribution of the Novels after Pickwick The publishing arrangement for Pickwick – periodic installments "edited by Boz" later gathered to form a novel "by Charles Dickens" – both exploited the commercial attractiveness of the pseudonym and accommodated Dickens's apparent desire to signal his arrival as a fully-fledged author by the use of his patronym. The arrangement set a precedent. Oliver Twist, published monthly "by Boz" in Bentley's Miscellany (itself edited "by Boz"), eventually appeared in three volumes "by Charles Dickens." Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit, the monthly numbers of both of which bore convoluted titles implying their contents to be assorted material "edited by Boz," were both published in volumes "by Charles Dickens." In between Nickleby and Chuzzlewit, the (various) part forms of Master Humphrey's Clock bore "by Boz" labels, an attribution which, by implying authorship rather than editorship, it has been suggested, is a signal of the "ambiguity of the conception of the Clock – part miscellany, later mainly novel[s]" (Patten 268). The serial resulted in five volumes. Three, appearing in October 1840, April 1841 and December 1841 respectively, contained sections of the Clock itself; two others, also appearing in December 1841, separately comprised the two novels contained in the work – The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. Authorship of all five volumes was credited to "Charles Dickens." Thereafter, from Dombey and Son onwards, installments of Dickens's novels, whether appearing individually or contained in one of the weekly [End Page 102] periodicals he later edited, always bore the authorial name "Charles Dickens."5 During the latter part of the 1840s, too, Dickens stopped referring to himself as "Boz" in his correspondence.6 Attribution in Advertisements for the Novels after Pickwick We now consider the attributions of authorship (or editorship) of Dickens's novels as they were announced in publishers' press advertisements. In the sense that Dickens might be expected to have had influence over the content of these notices, they may be said to be "authorized." In this context it is noteworthy that Dickens was evidently conscious from early in his career of his target markets. On 3 August 1836, he informed the publisher John Macrone that he had agreed to supply sketches (promised to Macrone for a forthcoming volume of a second series of Sketches by Boz) for initial serial appearance in the newly launched Carlton Chronicle: The circulation I believe is a small one. So much the better – Fewer people will see the Sketches before they are collected. It is all among the nobs too – Better still. They'll buy the book (Letters 1: 160). And the terms of his formal agreements with Bentley about editing The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and with Henry Colburn about editing...

Reporting Verbs as a Stylistic Device in the Creation of Fictional Personalities in Literary Texts

This article presents an analysis of how reporting verbs can contribute to the creation of fictional personalities in literary texts. The examination of verbs was carried out using Caldas-Coulthard’s (1987) taxonomy, in which verbs are classified in self-contained categories according to the reporter’s level of mediation on the words glossed. The examples under analysis were all taken from Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839). For the sake of consistency, I focused on one character, Ralph Nickleby, whose words are reported using twenty-six verbs a total of 501 times throughout the story. As will be shown, Dickens’s choice of verbs projects a specific way of speaking that triggers information about the villain’s personality, thereby contributing to shaping his well-known evil character. The analysis will also illustrate how reporting verbs can influence the way in which readers form an impression of characters on the basis of their ways of speaking during the course of a story. Keywords: reporting verbs; fictional personalities; characterisation; Charles Dickens; Nicholas Nickleby; Ralph Nickleby

Dickens, Hogarth, and Artistic Perception: The Case of Nicholas Nickleby

Abstract This essay considers the interest shared by William Hogarth and Charles Dickens in the idea of instrumentality in the art of realism. Taking his cue from eighteenth-century epistemological philosophy, Hogarth developed an idea of beauty and realism as insisting upon the need for human subjectivity or perspective. Naïve realism was a style that troubled both Hogarth and Dickens, and both men developed forms in which caricature, melodrama, and exaggeration are crucial to the development of verisimilitude. Considering the progress pieces and the writings of Hogarth as a preface to the style of Dickens, I argue that Nicholas Nickleby developed an extraordinary self-reflexivity. Both Nicholas and his uncle Ralph form part of a narrative study of the implications of filtering perception through the distorting lens of the individual.

Dickens, Hogarth, and Artistic Perception: The Case of Nicholas Nickleby

Abstract This essay considers the interest shared by William Hogarth and Charles Dickens in the idea of instrumentality in the art of realism. Taking his cue from eighteenth-century epistemological philosophy, Hogarth developed an idea of beauty and realism as insisting upon the need for human subjectivity or perspective. Naïve realism was a style that troubled both Hogarth and Dickens, and both men developed forms in which caricature, melodrama, and exaggeration are crucial to the development of verisimilitude. Considering the progress pieces and the writings of Hogarth as a preface to the style of Dickens, I argue that Nicholas Nickleby developed an extraordinary self-reflexivity. Both Nicholas and his uncle Ralph form part of a narrative study of the implications of filtering perception through the distorting lens of the individual.