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Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death

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Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death This study of Nicholas Nickleby takes the Dickens novel, which is perhaps the least critically discussed, though it is very popular, and examines its appeal and its significance, and finds it one of the most rewarding and powerful of Dickens’s texts. Nicholas Nickleby deals with the abduction and destruction of children, often with the collusion of their parents. It concentrates on this theme in a way which continues from Oliver Twist, describing such oppression, and the resistance to it, in the language of melodrama, of parody and comedy. With chapters on the school system that Dickens attacks, its grotesque embodiment in Squeers, and with discussion of how the novel reshapes eighteenth-century literary traditions, and such topics as the novel’s comedy, and the concept of the ‘humorist, and ‘theatricality’ and its debt to Carlyle, the book delves into how the novel explores madness within the city in those whose lives have been fractured, or ruined, as so many have been. It further considers the symptoms of hypocrisy in the lives of the oppressors and the oppressed alike, taking hypocrisy as a Dickensian subject which deserves further examination. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death explores how Dickens draws on medieval and baroque traditions, in analysing death and its grotesquerie, especially drawing on the visual tradition of the ‘dance of death’ which is referred to here and which is prevalent throughout Dickens’s novels. It shows these traditions to be at the heart of London, and aims to illuminate a strand within Dickens’s thinking from first to last. Drawing on the critical the- ory of Walter Benjamin, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, and with close detailed readings of such well-known figures as Mrs Nickleby, Vincent Crummles and his theatrical troupe, and Mr Mantalini, and attention to Dickens’s description, imagery, irony, and sense of the singular, this book is a major study which will help in the revaluation of Dickens’s early novels. Jeremy Tambling was Professor of Literature at Manchester University, and before that, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is author of several books, three of them on Dickens: Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (Macmillan 1995), Going Astray: Dickens and London (Longman, 2008), and Dickens’ Novels as Poetry: All egory and the Literature of the City (Routledge 2014). He edited David Copperfield for Penguin (2004) and has written numerous articles on early modern and nineteenth-century literature, and critical and cultural theory. His most recent book was Histories of the Devil: Marlowe to Mann and the Manichees (Palgrave - Macmillan, 2017). Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature 37 Wilde’s Other Worlds Edited by Michael F. Davis & Petra Dierkes-Thrun 38 Mark X Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father? Yasuhiro Takeuchi 39 Sensational Deviance Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction Heidi Logan 40 Gothic Peregrinations The Unexplored and Re-explored Gothic Territories Edited by Agnieszka Łowczanin, Katarzyna Małecka 41 A Critical Reappraisal of the Writings of Francis Sylvester Mahony Fergus Dunne 42 George Eliot’s Moral Aesthetic Compelling Contradictions Constance M. Fulmer 43 Women’s Emancipation Writing at the Fin de Siècle Edited by Elena V. Shabliy, Dmitry Kurochkin, and Karen O’Donnell 44 Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death Jeremy Tambling For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge .com Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death Jeremy Tambling First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Jeremy Tambling to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-14308-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-03121-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra Contents Preface vii Introduction: Early Dickens 1 1 From Papers to Novel 15 2 Mr Squeers 39 3 Benevolence and Humour 60 4 Pantomime and Melodrama 86 5 Of ‘Conglomeration’ and Hypocrisy 109 6 London and the Dance of Death 132 Conclusion: London’s Squares 154 Abbreviations 159 Bibliography 161 Index 171 Preface In three books on Dickens, I have not written much on Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), the early novel after Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist, and I began wondering why. In Dickens, Violence, and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (1995), much of which reflected early research on Dickens at Nottingham, but which added in Foucault, and his work on discipline and the prison, and on the construction of personal subjectivity; an interest which has remained as second nature, there seemed no need for Nicholas Nickleby. With Going Astray: Dickens and London (2008) on Dickens’s place in writing about urban modernity, Nicholas Nickleby was discussed, but not given prime atten- tion. Perhaps I was deflected by its scenes outside London, Yorkshire, Portsmouth, and Devon. In Dickens’ Novels as Poetry: Allegory and the Literature of the City (2014), the theoretical approach, which was to ask whether Dickens’s writing might be called ‘poetry’, was psycho- analytic and deconstructive, in attending to language, speaking and constructing a split subjectivity: conscious of itself, but also unaware how the unconscious insists within the utterances of the self. It began to dawn on me that Nicholas Nickleby was not foremost for me for textual examples. Perhaps I had resisted drawing upon such purple patches as Mrs Nickleby’s speeches, which are often singled out as the most dis- tinctive parts of the novel and discussed lightly in terms of Dickens’s comedy; perhaps I was over-critical of the novel’s melodrama. It was certainly an inattentiveness. Yet in 1969, still an undergraduate at York, I asked the great critic Dr F.R. Leavis, who thought the ‘great’ Dickens began with Dombey and Son (1846–1848), what attention should be paid to the earlier Dickens, and he replied that it should be read like early Shakespeare. This book pays tribute to that remark, and tries to think about its terms of reference. Now I have finished, I realize how many things in the novel remain undiscussed, and know that there is much more that could be done on it. The book began as a gamble to see what could be said about the novel, with the results that follow, but in between Dickens’s Novels as Poetry and this, I brought out Histories of the Devil (Palgrave, 2017) a book reflecting much of my undergraduate teaching, and deliberately making viii Preface no reference to Dickens; but Old Nick has made his way into Nicholas Nickleby too, and has influenced not a few of its ideas. But I have been influenced by many others, less conversant with the old one, whose talk, or whose answering questions have helped the writing: Malcolm Andrews, Michael Hollington, Louis Lo, Priscilla Martin, Robert Patten, Michael Slater, and Dennis Walder for specific points. Robert Kirkpatrick generously sent me a pdf of his book Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Yorkshire Schools just when I needed it, and before the London Library secured it for me. Louis James invited me to speak to the Dickens fellowship at Canterbury in January 2016, which made for the writing of the first draft of the Squeers chapter. Nathalie Vanfasse and Leon Litvack invited me to an ESSE conference at Galway in 2016, which produced a draft of chapter 5. In 2016, Simon James invited me to the workshops for the Comparative History of Literature in European Languages; the specific project being ‘Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realisms in Global Perspectives’. There, I gave a paper on what has become chapter 4. Late in revision, and as part of the same project I sat in a restaurant opposite Margaret Higonnet, and it dawned on me that I was talking to the person who had translated Jean Paul in her Horn of Oberon, a book I had borrowed from the library for I do not know how long; she sent me a copy of Horn of Oberon to prove a literary friendship and kinship: a nice example of the world’s strange- ness yet familiarity, and life’s coincidences. I am grateful to those who have commented on all these occasions and to Routledge’s anonymous readers of the draft; to Mark Gardner, Sandra Hopkins, Pam Morris and Brian Worthington, and Przemyslaw Uscinski for comments on parts or all of a later draft, and John Sharp for encouraging comments on the novel’s worth. And thanks to Kaspar Loftin for help with the Bibliography. I thank my family for opportune help, and Pauline, who I hope will accept the dedication although it is no reward for her ability to find books missing from shelves, and certainly not of her patience or support. Quotations from Nicholas Nickleby are from the Penguin, edited by Mark Ford (2003), with chapter numbers given for readers using other editions.
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