Nicholas Nickleby
by Charles Dickens
Pip is a trial, Copperfield a prig, Twist a whinger. All the Dickens "heroes" are unbearable. Nickleby falls right into the group: a dull, arrogant clubman-in-training. I wonder whether the pasteboard heroes may not account for many young people's dislike of these novels. I certainly couldn't stand Great Expectations as a boy.
People still read the novels; grownups do, anyway. For the plots? I don't think that is it; Dickens possessed craft in plot construction, but many other writers do too. You can admire the way Nickleby's plot threads all join up just in time for the end of the book. The first readers may have thought it was a miracle, like finding Split Silk, Georgia, without a map; Dickens made sure not to rely on miracles, though, and his maps still exist. So it isn't the unique and marvelous plots.
Two things Dickens may have done as well as any writer ever: he watched and he took notes. (Well, Shakespeare, of course.) What I find satisfying in his work today, at an advanced age, is the great skill with which he makes a picture for the reader. To take just one instance from this 800-page book, we not only can walk through Tim Linkinwater's room upstairs from the Cheerybles' counting-house, we know what Tim sees in every direction from his window. (Tim happens to be a sharp observer too.)
Dickens watched not only the material world but also its inhabitants. Much of the fun in his comic novels and much of the depth in the others comes with the secondary characters. Nicholas is a total loss, but his sworn enemy Wackford Squeers has all his dimensions about him. The Cheeryble Brothers are too much to bear (when my wife asked if they didn't make me want to be a better person, I could only answer, "I think they're hiding something"), but they have Tim in the firm and Tim finally brings in Miss La Creevy. A novel as big as Nickleby has room for dozens of such subordinates—Mrs. N, Arthur Gride, John and Tilly Browdie, the whole Crummles outfit, Hawk. They may be caricatures, but unlike Nicholas (and Kate and Madeline and Smike) they are caricatures of imperfect people and they're fun to read about.
The other Dickens novels fall out similarly: hero-poor, plot-neutral and detail-rich. You get geography in Twist, social analysis in Barnaby Rudge, some psychopathology in Great Expectations, and so forth. All of them repay reading, none of them for the sake of the central character.
Maybe what we need, if we want to get the nation's youth hooked on Dickens again, is sanitized versions. Twist without Oliver would be a good start.
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Nicholas Nickleby