Dispatches from Dickens No. 10: Dickens in 1838
or, Dickens’s letters as he begins Nicholas Nickleby…
*Note: Unless otherwise noted, citations are from The Pilgrim Edition’s The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume One, 1820-1839 (see below). When quoting from John Forster, unless otherwise noted, I am using the unabridged Life rather than the abridged Illustrated edition.
Dickens’s tour of the Yorkshire schools; the “ghost” of Smike
Boze and I just finished our annual rewatch of my favorite thing ever to be put on film: the legendary 8 ½ hour stage production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby from 1982. This has become a tradition between Thanksgiving and Christmas; it is not only a perfect holiday watch, but it is the ultimate Dickensian romp.
In 1980-81, the Royal Shakespeare Company, in desperate financial straits, decided to pull out all the stops and create a theatrical experience like no other—the kind that can change one’s life, even if you’re watching it filmed, decades later. For my full tribute to the great Roger Rees (who played the nineteen-year-old Nicholas at nearly forty years old, so brilliantly), and to this majestic production, here’s a link to our Dickens Club essay.
And at least for now, you can still find the entire production on YouTube.
“Ultimately, this joyous Bildungsroman is a love letter to the theatre itself, to friendship and family, and to the ideal of taking a hand in lifting up those who are suffering; the willingness to bring others into our family and our hearts, even if we suspect it will bring heartbreak and loss. A love letter to the ideal that love always triumphs, and that generosity of heart is always worth the cost.”
~From my essay, “Remembering Roger Rees, and his Nicholas Nickleby”
Why do I lead with this? Mostly, because as Dickens bounds into 1838, he begins that delightful serial novel, Nicholas Nickleby. Boze wrote, in his introduction to Nicholas Nickleby for our Dickens Club readalong of the book in 2022: “in this book he [Dickens] weds the comedy of Pickwick and the pathos and melodrama of Oliver Twist with electrifying results. This is a hefty, hilarious, often very dark book, full of incident and eccentrics.”
How did the conception of Nickleby begin?
By late January of 1838, after a difficult month of several tasks that became a bit tiresome for Dickens (editing the memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, working on the Miscellany, a section of Oliver, and Sketches for Young Gentlemen for Chapman & Hall), he writes to his friend and fellow novelist Harrison Ainsworth, expressing his excitement about an upcoming secret “pilgrimage to the cheap schools of Yorkshire” (359). There were varying degrees of dreadful in these “cheap schools”; but all of them, as the Pilgrim editors write in a footnote, “suffered from CD’s picture of Dotheboys Hall” in Nicholas Nickleby, which this pilgrimage was preparing him for (359). Squeers’s advertisement sounds very similar to those of other schools which Dickens toured; the Pilgrim editors inform us of the almost double cost for “guaranteeing ‘separate beds’” for the boys to be boarded; the phrase “No extras, no vacations” was disturbingly “common” among such advertisements (411).
Peter Ackroyd writes:
“He [Dickens] remained ‘curious’ about these schools, which were in many instances nothing but convenient dustbins for unwanted children, bastards or orphans; the advertisements for them often included the chilling words, ‘No Vacations’, which meant that the children were retained there indefinitely. And the conditions, to judge by contemporary reports, were often as harsh as it is possible to conceive. Clearly Dickens had been encouraged by the success of his topical allusions in Oliver Twist, and determined that he could direct his polemic against new targets: the idea of poor children being almost literally imprisoned in squalid conditions, and of being tyrannised by brutal adults, was one that in any case struck to the centre of his imagination. So once again his childhood reading, and the memories or fantasies of his own childhood, helped to fashion his ideas for a new novel; the inter-animating process had begun. He became ‘bent upon destroying’ the Yorkshire schools, and, with that aim in mind, he concocted a scheme in which he would pose as the friend of a widowed mother who wished to place her child in just such an establishment….a legal colleague of Thomas Mitton knew a lawyer who practised in that Northern neighborhood, and he gave Dickens a letter of introduction” (250).
Under an assumed name, Dickens made his tour. Though he spent only two days there, it was enough.
At the end of December 1838, Dickens answers a letter to the writer and philanthropist Anna Maria Hall, related to the realities behind Dotheboys Hall, which Dickens claims to have downplayed in the novel, as the real horror would have been too much to bear for most readers:
“Depend upon it that the rascalities of those Yorkshire schoolmasters cannot easily be exaggerated, and that I have kept down the strong truth and thrown as much comicality over it as I could, rather than disgust and weary the reader with its fouler aspects. The identical scoundrel you speak of, I saw—curiously enough. His name is Shaw….and if I am not much mistaken, another action was brought against him by the parents of a miserable child, a cancer in whose head he opened with an inky penknife, and so caused his death. The country for miles around was covered, when I was there, with deep snow. There is an old Church near the school, and the first grave-stone I stumbled on that dreary winter afternoon was placed above the grave of a boy, eighteen long years old, who had died—suddenly, the inscription said; I suppose his heart broke….at that wretched place. I think his ghost put Smike into my head, upon the spot” (481-82).
A busy year…
During this time, Dickens still has his moments of fuming at Richard Bentley for shortchanging him. He makes amendments to his Will with Thomas Mitton (413-414). He writes in August to his old schoolmaster, Rev. William Giles, gifting him his completed published works so far—Sketches and Pickwick (429). He begins a written acquaintance with John Wiley and George Putnam, the New York publishers who not only published Hazlitt and Lamb, but will publish, according to the Pilgrim editors, “Pictures from Italy, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Chimes and Dombey and Son” (430). To them Dickens expresses interest in visiting America before long.
Peter Ackroyd drew my attention to the fact that Dickens had, in January of 1838, attempted keeping a diary, though the effort to keep a more detailed one didn’t last long. It barely lasts two weeks, when in mid-January he writes:
I’m thankful the Pilgrim edition has his diary entries in an appendix of the book; I’m also delighted that Dickens does continue to keep it through the year, even if each entry after January fifteenth is little more than one line, or even, one word: “Work.”
