Squeers… suggest that these contentions may arise from the fact, that Mr. Squeers is a monstrous creation, and apparently real enough for several readers to threaten legal action against Dickens for defamation of character: as he notes in the preface: “It has afforded the Author great amusement and satisfaction, during the progress of this work, to learn from country friends and from a variety of ludicrous statements concerning himself in provincial newspapers, that more than one Yorkshire schoolmaster lays claim to being the original of Mr.
But what characters! There is Wackford Squeers, the infamous headmaster of Dotheboys Hall where Nicholas is employed as master and from where he deserts with Smike the maltreated schoolboy (and revealed, near the end of the novel, to be Nicholas’s cousin).
Not one character hangs around for very long. It is more interesting that the villain of the piece is Ralph Nickleby, and made clear from the start.įor reasons that need not explaining, it took me over a month to finish this novel, and the delays in reading it dissipated some of its tensions, but did not overly affect my reading of it – for as a picaresque novel it is subject to shifts in focus, in obsessions and in plot. Charles Dickens’s third novel, Nicholas Nickleby, is a lengthy and picaresque novel detailing the exploits of the Nickleby family – notably Nicholas, his sister Kate, dear Mama, and Uncle Ralph.
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