LEVEL 4 Teacher’s notes Teacher Support Programme Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens Chapters 3–4: Nicholas finds life at Dotheboys hard and is appalled by the cruel treatment given the to boys and to Smike, who runs away. Nicholas has a fistfight with Squeers and leaves the school. On his way back to London, Nicholas finds Smike and agrees to take him with him. Nicholas finds cheap lodgings in London and a job as a private French teacher. When Nicholas visits his mother and sister, he overhears his uncle telling them that he is a thief who has stolen a ring from Squeers and has run away with one of the children. Nicholas argues with Ralph and tries to defend himself from all the accusations but finally decides to leave London once again so as to protect his mother and sister. Summary Chapters 5–6: In London, Kate finds a job as Mrs Wititterly’s companion. Unfortunately, one of Ralph’s best The Nicklebys (Nicholas, his mother, sister Kate) are customers, Sir Mulberry Hawk, likes Kate and insists on penniless after the death of Mr Nickleby. In their poverty spending time with her despite her turning him down. and desperation they seek help from Nicholas’s Uncle Kate asks Ralph for help but he refuses to lose his best Ralph, a mean-spirited, cruel moneylender. Nicholas’s client. Newman Noggs overhears the conversation and independent attitude angers Ralph and Nicholas is sent writes to Nicholas, who decides to come back to London. away to Dotheboys Hall to teach. He is upset by the Nicholas fights Sir Mulberry and orders him to stay away mistreatment of the children there by Headmaster from his sister. He also has his mother and sister move Wackford Squeers, and is disgusted by the cruel treatment out from Ralph’s house and writes a letter to his uncle given to a boy called Smike. Nicholas thrashes the evil rejecting any further help from him. Squeers and escapes to London with Smike, who becomes Chapters 7–8: Ralph and Squeers join up to take revenge his close companion. on Nicholas. Mrs Nickleby and Kate are introduced to In London, Nicholas continues his one-man crusade Smike and they decide to let him stay with them. Nicholas against the ill treatment of his family by Ralph and the meets Mr Cheeryble and his brother and they introduce persecution of his sister by Sir Mulberry Hawk. After him to Mr Linkinwater with whom he will work at the Nicholas finally makes a home for his family. With the help Cheerybles’ counting-house. Nicholas is also invited of Newman Noggs (Ralph’s clerk) and the Cheeryble to move to a small cottage owned by the Cheerybles brothers (benevolent businessmen), Ralph gets his together with his family. Squeers kidnaps Smike and holds him captive at Snawley’s house. Fortunately, Smike is eventual comeuppance. Although Smike (who turns out to helped to escape by friend John Browdie and he finally be Ralph’s long-lost son) dies, there is a general sense of reaches the Nicklebys’ home. justice at the end of the story. Chapters 9–11: Nicholas falls in love with a poor artist, Chapters 1–2: Ralph Nickleby, a moneylender and Madeline, who is supported by the Cheerybles. Nicholas Nicholas’s uncle, receives a letter saying that his brother agrees to pay for some of her paintings without her father has died and that the widow and children have been left knowing that the money comes from the Cheerybles. penniless. Ralph visits them and treats them scornfully. He What Nicholas doesn’t know is that she is to marry one tells Nicholas of a job at Dotheboys Hall, a school for boys of her father’s creditors, Arthur Gride. Ralph and Squeers in Yorkshire, owned by Wackford Squeers, and promises to pretend that their friend Mr Snawley is Smike’s father and provide for the family if Nicholas is given the job. Squeers they almost get away with taking the boy with them. The hires Nicholas as his assistant and they travel together to Nicklebys are increasingly more worried about the boy’s the school. After they arrive at Dotheboys, Nicholas soon character and health. When Nicholas learns that Madeline realises how harsh Squeers’s rules are and how mistreated is about to marry Gride, he tries to persuade her not to the boys are. Nicholas especially pities Smike, a boy who is do so. He finally saves her from the marriage. made to do all the hard work and who is cruelly punished. Chapters 12–14: After her father’s death, Madeline moves in with the Cheerybles. Smike’s health worsens pearsonenglishactivereaders.com © Pearson Education Limited 2017 Nicholas Nickleby – Teacher’s notes 1 of 3 LEVEL 4 Teacher’s notes Teacher Support Programme Nicholas Nickleby and Nicholas takes him to a small farmhouse in Devon to The class system: The members of the establishment rest. However, Smike soon dies. Squeers is imprisoned, with power and/or money, such as Squeers, Sir Mulberry, and when the boys at Dotheboys Hall learn this, they all Ralph, Mrs Wititterly and Gride in the story, are cynical, run away and go back home to their families. Ralph finds vain, cruel, selfish manipulators and exploiters of those out that Smike was his son. The following day Ralph, more disadvantaged than themselves, such as Nicholas, regretting what he had done to his nephew and his own Kate, Madeline and Smike. son – and family – hangs himself. Nicholas and Madeline Poverty: In Dickens’s previous novel, Oliver Twist, poverty get married, and so do Kate and Frank Cheeryble. The dehumanises the characters. In Nicholas Nickleby, however, Nicklebys finally find happiness. the harshness of injustice and poverty is not allowed to vanquish the basic qualities of the human spirit. People About the author such as Kate and Nicholas, Smike, Newman Noggs and Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, a Madeline, retain fundamental decency and kindness, and naval town on the south coast of England. He spent his they are allowed to enjoy, to varying degrees, a sense of childhood in Chatham, to the east of London. His father peace and justice by the end of the story. was imprisoned for unpaid debts, and the twelve-year-old Fate: Chance and fate always seem to play a major part Charles had to work in a blacking factory making shoe in Dickens’s novels. Without the timely intervention of polish. This was a miserable time for young Dickens and the Cheeryble brothers, it is unlikely that the forces of may be the reason why the themes of poverty, injustice good, represented by Nicholas, Kate, Newman Noggs and brutality recur frequently in his novels. In 1827 he and Madeline, would have overcome the forces of evil, worked as a clerk in a law company, but soon realised embodied in Squeers, Ralph, Gride and Sir Mulberry. he hated Law almost as much as he hated making shoe polish. He decided to become a journalist instead. Ultimately, the story is about the search for happiness in a cruel, unjust world. It is an adventure story, sometimes In 1832, Dickens became a reporter. He married tragic, often amusing. It is the mixture of a serious Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the editor of The message with entertainment that makes it as popular and Evening Chronicle newspaper. His big break came when as relevant today as it was nearly 200 years ago. There publishers Chapman and Hall commissioned him to write a have been many film, stage and television adaptations of series of stories based on a fictitious club. The Posthumous the story, most recently a 2002 film by Douglas McGrath Papers of Pickwick Club was published in twenty monthly with Jamie Bell (of Billy Elliot fame) as Smike. papers in 1836–37. By the end, the story had 40,000 readers. Dickens became one of the most popular writers in England. He wrote a large number of novels and stories, Discussion activities including A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Before reading A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. 1 Discuss: Talk about children and poverty. What do you know or imagine society was like in the Dickens loved the theatre. He fell in love with an actress, 1800s? How did poor people live? What happened to Ellen Ternan. His reading tours in the United States were families when the father died and they were penniless? popular. During his second visit there, in 1867, he became 2 Discuss: Talk about children and education. Find out ill. He gave one of his last public readings in 1870 and died what students know about boarding schools. in June the same year, aged 58, leaving an unfinished novel, 3 Write: Tell students to imagine what life was like in a boarding school run by a strict schoolmaster during The Mystery of Edwin Drood. the late 1800s. Write their answers on the board. Background and themes 4 Discuss: Talk about class differences. Education: Dickens visited a school in the north of In groups, students leaf through the book looking for England and was so shocked by the cruel treatment pictures that illustrate class differences. What are these people like? Do you think they all belong given to the pupils by the schoolmaster, William Shaw, to the same social class? Why (not)? Can you tell who is that he used the school as a model for Dotheboys Hall. rich and who is poor? What do you think they do every The description of Dotheboys Hall caused shock and day? How do you think they are treated by others? Why? consternation.