Nicholas Nickleby

Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839) was his third novel and the book that proved his fiction could change the world it described. On his father’s death, nineteen-year-old Nicholas comes to London with his mother and his sister Kate, dependent on the charity of his only rich relation — his uncle Ralph, a cold money-lender who despises the boy and packs him off to teach at Dotheboys Hall, a remote Yorkshire school where the brutal Wackford Squeers starves and floggs unwanted children while pocketing their fees.

There Nicholas finds Smike, a broken drudge abandoned years before, and when he can bear Squeers’s cruelty no longer he thrashes the schoolmaster, takes the boy, and flees — into a sprawling adventure that throws him among the cheerfully third-rate players of the Crummles theatrical troupe and at last into the open-handed care of the benevolent Cheeryble brothers. All the while his uncle Ralph, out of avarice and wounded pride, works to ruin them all, and Kate endures an ordeal of her own among the coarse, predatory men of London.

Read as a story, it is one of the warmest and most exuberant of Dickens’s books — comedy and horror side by side, melodrama and farce, a young man’s courage against greed and cruelty. Read more closely, it is a deliberate exposé of the real Yorkshire boarding schools, drawn from what Dickens saw on a journey north, that helped empty and close them within a few years of publication.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.