He even has Nicholas do so in conversation with the ‘literary gentleman’, that is, the hack plagiarist who has dramatized ‘two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as they had come out – some of them faster than they had come out – and wasa literary gentleman in consequence’: his type, Nicholas complains, ‘vamp up ideas not yet worked out by their original projector, but which have doubtless cost him many thoughtful days and sleepless nights’. In addition, the first volume publication of the book used for its frontispiece an engraving of Daniel Maclise’s so-called ‘Nickleby portrait’, which heroically depicts the 27-year-old author gazing out of the window of his study; both hands are radiantly illuminated, one poised mid-air, the other resting lightly on a sheaf of papers on his desk.
‘We were a very happy little company,’ reflects Crummles to Nicholaswhen they meet again in London, on the eve of the impresario’s departure for the New World. The Crummleses’ banishment from the narrative is in accordance with the overall drive of the book’s last third towards a rather dispiriting normality. In contrast to the theatre troupe, which cherished its members’ differences, the household established by Nicholas and Kate under the aegis of the Cheerybles seems to prize only convention and conformity; brother and sister exhibit little patience for the mad gentleman in smallclothes who woos Mrs Nickleby – or so she thinks – by hurling vegetables over the garden wall, while the sympathy they lavish on Smike simply exacerbates his sense of his own deficiencies.21The ‘poor fellow’, the ‘devoted creature’, survives the ill-treatment of Squeers and the vicissitudes of life on the road, only to succumb to the compassion of his middle-class protectors. Smike is not a visionary in the manner of later Dickensian grotesques such as Barnaby Rudge or Jenny Wren, but he sees pretty clearly the fate awaiting him in the Nickleby ‘home’:
‘Home!’ faltered Smike, drawing timidly back… ‘In the churchyard we are all alike, but here there are none like me. I am a poor creature, but I know that well.’
The languishing demise he suffers seems determined much more by his understanding of his unfitness for middle-class society than by the romantic causes put forward by the narrative – consumption, vaguely related to an impossible love for Kate.
Most of the novel’s other freaks, fools and charlatans are similarly neutralized as the story approaches its conclusion: the joint-cracking, bifocal Newman Noggs is recuperated from his ‘numerous peculiarities’ and alcoholic degradation into the class from which he fell, ending up a ‘quiet harmless gentleman’; the sublimely idiotic Lord Verisopht improbably metamorphoses into a noble defender of Kate’s honour;22Mr Mantalini is sentenced to grind away at a mangle under the beady eye of a termagant laundress, while Squeers and Peg Sliderskew are both transported; and – a betrayal spectacular even by Dickens’s high standards – Mrs Nickleby herself is denatured when face to face with Charles Cheeryble, his kindness ‘so operating upon the good lady’s feelings, that the usual current of her speech was confined within very narrow and circumscribed limits’.
This outlawing of the aberrant seems a symptom of the book’s overall unease with problems of class. Though for much of the time Nicholas embodies the energies of radicalism, confident in his right to challenge social injustice, political inertia and a dissolute, exploitative aristocracy, his ultimate aim – and achievement – is the recovery of his ancestral position in the traditional hierarchy. On becoming a ‘rich and prosperous merchant’, he buys back his father’s estate and attempts to preserve it against the very forces of history he himself earlier represented: the house is enlarged as his family grows, ‘but nothing with which there was any association of bygone days was ever removed or changed’.23
This warmly glowing tableau of security and rootedness is offered at the end of a novel pervaded by Dickens’s awareness of class instability: linking families as disparate as the Kenwigses, the Wititterlys, the Squeerses, the Brays and the Nicklebys themselves is a consciousness of how, as in a game of snakes-and-ladders, one may at any moment rise or fall through the social ranks. ‘The coat of arms of the Squeerses is tore, and their sun is gone down into the ocean wave!’ grieves the disgraced schoolmaster in his cell, echoing the phrase with which the novelist’s father commemorated his incarceration in the Marshalsea some 15 years previously: John Dickens’s last words to the 12-year-old Charles before entering the debtors’ prison, Forster records, were ‘to the effect that the sun was set upon him forever’.