[Literature] Charles Dickens: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby #6/456

Whereas the London of Dickens’s later novels tends to be given focus by a single institution – such as Chancery or the Marshalsea – whose narrative or symbolic significance connects all strata of society, in Nicholas NicklebyDickens evokes a more random, atomized vision of urban living; despite the ‘giant currents of life’¹⁷circulating through its major thoroughfares, the book’s principal locations are oddly disjunct and self-contained, observed with the sketchwriter’s eye for peculiarities rather than the novelist’s concern for overall patterns of meaning.

Golden Square, for instance, where Ralph lives, ‘is not exactly in anybody’s way to or from anywhere’. It is haunted by ‘dark-complexioned man who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards and bushy whiskers’, while musical types inhabit its boarding houses: the notes of their ‘pianos and harps float in the evening time around the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square’. It is suggested that this marginal, inward-looking district, populated by motley transients, is chosen by Ralph because it enables him to disguise the nefarious nature of his business dealings. However, the Cheerybles, the very souls of candour, operate out of an equally remote backwater, ‘a quiet, little-frequented, retired spot, favourable to melancholy and contemplation, and appointments of long waiting’. Dickens even imagines a hypothetical Appointed who saunters round the square ‘idly by the hour together,

wakening the echoes with the monotonous sound of his footsteps on the smooth worn stones, and counting first the windows and then the very bricks of the tall silent houses that hem him round about’. On both sides, power is recessed, difficult to approach or even identify. In chapter 16, Nicholas wanders the streets of London in search of some means of entering the worlds of work and authority. However, the only institution that might assist him, the somnolent ‘General Agency Office’, is a parody of the virtues of industry and intelligence he hopes to market, as is the job of secretary offered him by Mr Gregsbury, MP, which involves doing all the Member’s work for a derisory fifteen shillings a week.

Only his chance encounter with Mr Cheeryble allows Nicholas to escape the precarious, hand-to-mouth existence common among Londoners in the book, the poorest of whom Dickens compares at one point to ill-plumed city fowls who ‘hop from stone to stone in search of some hidden eatable in the mud, and can scarcely raise a crow among them’. On his return from Yorkshire, Nicholas rents for himself and Smike a small back room in the Kenwigses’ house, ‘reclaimed from the leads, and overlooking a soot-bespeckled prospect of tiles and chimney-pots’; he hires furniture from a neighbouring broker, and pays the first week’s instalments ‘out of a small fund raised by the conversion of some spare clothes into ready money’. Such ‘conversions’ figure prominently in the vertiginous affairs of those attempting to live by their wits in the city. Mr Mantalini’s original name is Muntle, ‘but it had been converted, by an easy transition, into Mantalini: the lady rightly considering that an English appellation would be of serious injury to the business’. Later, Mantalini visits Ralph in the hope the money-lender will purchase at discount some credit notes purloined from his wife. Asked by Newman Noggs if the matter is urgent, he insists that it is ‘most demnebly particular. It is to melt some scraps of dirty paper into bright, shining, chinking, tinkling, demd mint sauce.’

Mr Mantalini’s startling conceits might be said to perform a similarly magical kind of conversion, deftly transforming his ruinous behaviour into irresistibly exotic figures of speech that bedazzle his doting wife. ‘Why will it vex itself, and twist its little face into bewitching nutcrackers?’ he pleads, the bailiffs on the threshold. ‘Will she call me, “Sir”!’ he exclaims when she surprises him at Ralph’s. ‘She, who coils her fascinations round me like a pure and angelic rattle-snake!’ These paradoxical endearments – both soothing and inimical, outlandish and pertinent – brilliantly disarm the urge towards moral judgement. His ability to survive depends upon this ability to translate all the disagreeables consequent upon his extravagance into the topsy-turvy world of Mantalini-ese. His suicide threats are particularly

bewildering feats of imagination, word-paintings so vivid Madame Mantalini’s resolve immediately deserts her:

‘I will fill my pockets with change for a sovereign in half-pence, and drown myself in the Thames; but I will not be angry with her even then, for I will put a note in the twopenny-post as I go along, to tell her where the body is. She will be a lovely widow. I shall be a body. Some handsome women will cry; she will laugh demnebly.’

‘Alfred, you cruel, cruel creature,’ said Madame Mantalini, sobbing at the dreadful picture.