Nicholas Nickleby: A Dark Victorian Classic of Cruelty, Corruption, and Family Loyalty - Hardcover

Dickens Charles Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1515424618 ISBN 13: 9781515424611

Publisher: Black Curtain Press, 2018

Synopsis

Nicholas Nickleby is Charles Dickens's fierce and expansive novel of cruelty, exploitation, family loyalty, social corruption, and theatrical survival in Victorian England. After the death of his father, young Nicholas is forced to seek help from his cold and predatory uncle Ralph Nickleby, whose business dealings and moral emptiness draw the family into a world of debt, manipulation, and abuse. Nicholas's employment at Dotheboys Hall, the brutal Yorkshire school run by Wackford Squeers, exposes one of Dickens's most memorable attacks on institutional cruelty and the commercial mistreatment of children.

For Black Curtain, this should not be framed merely as a broad Victorian classic. Beneath the comic abundance and melodrama is a dark social novel of violence, predation, coercion, and moral rot. Ralph Nickleby belongs with Dickens's great figures of financial malice, while Squeers and Dotheboys Hall give the book its most savage indictment of respectable brutality. Around them, Dickens builds a crowded world of actors, schemers, dependents, villains, innocents, and survivors, moving from London counting-houses to provincial schools and theatrical companies with his characteristic energy and moral fury.

For readers of Dickens, Victorian social criticism, literary classics, dark comic fiction, and novels of institutional abuse, Nicholas Nickleby remains one of Dickens's most vigorous early works: funny, angry, sentimental, grotesque, and driven by the belief that cruelty flourishes most easily when society agrees not to look too closely.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English novelist, journalist, editor, social critic, and one of the central figures of Victorian literature. His major works include Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Dickens became famous for his serial storytelling, comic invention, memorable characters, social criticism, and extraordinary ability to combine entertainment with moral urgency.Dickens's fiction repeatedly returns to poverty, childhood, debt, imprisonment, education, labour, hypocrisy, bureaucracy, cruelty, and the failures of respectable society. In Nicholas Nickleby, he attacks abusive schools, predatory finance, family betrayal, and the social ease with which children and the vulnerable can be turned into commodities. For readers of classic English fiction, Victorian literature, social novels, literary realism, and dark comic storytelling, Dickens remains indispensable: popular, theatrical, sentimental, savage, and still one of the most recognisable voices in the English novel.

Edition details

• Publisher: Black Curtain Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1515424618
• ISBN 13: 9781515424611
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 508