Take a photo of a barcode or cover
msand3 's review for:
Nicholas Nickleby
by Charles Dickens
This one was a grind. Dickens is hit-or-miss for me, and Nicholas Nickleby was definitely the latter. At 777 pages, it contains a stunning amount of filler. Dickens pauses the narrative at one point to have a character tell a couple of pointless stories just to have enough material to fill out the rest of his monthly installment. (The endnote even admits this!) Characters have long, pointless conversations. Entire chapters of inessential material interrupt the narrative. Key characters are introduced more than two-thirds of the way through the novel without proper development, as if Dickens just decided to change direction at the last moment. At one point, Dickens forgets that John Browdie encountered Nicholas, not Smike, earlier in the novel, leading to Browdie treating Smike like an old friend, even though they had never met previously. The readers can feel Dickens stretching and stretching to fill out installments like a student desperately trying to reach a word count requirement for a research paper. I’m baffled that so many people, including scholars, think this is credible writing. Mark Ford mentions in the introduction that the “successive episodes unfold almost without reference to each other,” and then connects this to Chesterton’s comment about the novel being “a carnival of liberty.” Why don’t we just give an honest assessment and call this what it is: poor plotting.
The best I can say about Nickleby is that it was a fairly entertaining way to pass a few weeks (I usually don’t take that long to read a novel, even of this length), and I’m sure audiences appreciated it at the time. But by any objective account, this is a long, sloppy mishmash of a novel. It's not as funny as [b:The Pickwick Papers|229432|The Pickwick Papers|Charles Dickens|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360795072l/229432._SY75_.jpg|3315230], nor as socially conscious as Dickens’ later novels, no matter how much people try to read the Squeers chapters as some sort of legitimate social commentary rather than just a comic situation exploited for the sake of easy laughs. Throw in the usual Dickens elements of cartoonish caricatures and ridiculously contrived plot coincidences, and you have all the trappings of a clunker.
The best I can say about Nickleby is that it was a fairly entertaining way to pass a few weeks (I usually don’t take that long to read a novel, even of this length), and I’m sure audiences appreciated it at the time. But by any objective account, this is a long, sloppy mishmash of a novel. It's not as funny as [b:The Pickwick Papers|229432|The Pickwick Papers|Charles Dickens|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360795072l/229432._SY75_.jpg|3315230], nor as socially conscious as Dickens’ later novels, no matter how much people try to read the Squeers chapters as some sort of legitimate social commentary rather than just a comic situation exploited for the sake of easy laughs. Throw in the usual Dickens elements of cartoonish caricatures and ridiculously contrived plot coincidences, and you have all the trappings of a clunker.