Taking up a situation as mentor/teacher without real knowledge of his situation, Nicholas witnesses the unjust treatment, starvation, illness, violent beatings and the shoddy education the headmaster preaches. Sticking to this ‘outrage at cruelty and injustice’, the best example of this is through his punishment of the tyrannical Yorkshire schoolmaster Wackford Squeers. So all that said and done, what did I think after reading it?ġ. Nicholas Nickleby is fired by outrage at cruelty and injustice, but is above all a work filled with riotous, life- affirming comedy.” Let’s look at a summary: “One of Dickens’s most flamboyant and theatrical novels, Nicholas Nickleby is the story of an impulsive young man who, forced to make his way in the world encounters human life in all its variety: the tyrannical headmaster Wackford Squeers, the tragic orphan Smike, the ridiculous Mantalinis, the hilarious thespians Mr and Mrs Crummles and their daughter, ‘the infant phenomenon’. He has a mixture of naivety, innocence, optimism and youthful gallantry- the people’s champion through his indignation towards injustice.

There is something about Nicholas that makes him worthy as Dickens’s male protagonist. Though critics have found the characters “one dimensional and the plot too episodic”, it had immediate success upon publication. Sure it has aspects of the theatrical and flamboyant. But it has remained one of the general public’s favourite. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens is a story critics have until recently, found fault in. “I shall never regret doing as I have-never, if I starve or beg in consequence.”

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