I really enjoyed this month’s reading. Dickens would probably turn in his grave but I am rather glad Nicholas had dumped the luvvies and returned to London because we get more Kate, more Mrs Nickleby and we have met the endearing Cheerybles. It also feels like the plot , which was stagnating , has moved on.
I am delighted to have Miss La Creevy back. Her threat to stab Ralph is deliciously comic:
‘God forgive me for saying so…’ ‘but I really feel as if I could stick this into him with pleasure’
It was not a very awful weapon that Miss La Creevy held, it being in fact nothing less than a black lead pencil; but discovering her mistake, the little portrait painter exchanged it for a mother of pearl fruit knife, wherewith…she made a lunge as she spoke.
Mr Mantalini continues to divert , his newest term of affection being ‘my essential juice of pineapple’.
Can you not just see and hear these people? Isn’t Dickens just great??
I loved Nicholas’ spirited attack on Sir Mulberry. What a fabulous brother.
I read a thread on Twitter the other day about how euphemistically the British try to eject people from their homes if they have outstayed a welcome. I think Dickens may prove helpful here:
[Ralph] cast a wistful glance at the face of Newman Noggs, which had several times appeared behind a couple of planes of glass in the door; it being a part of Newman’s duty, when unimportant people called, to make various feints of supposing that the bell had rung for him to show them out
And of course the brilliant Mrs Nickleby (about poor benighted Smike) who just ‘turned to her daughter ,and inquired, in an audible whisper, whether the gentleman was going to stop all night’. She’s like one of those really rude deaf grandmas’ (except I bet she’s – what- 45?)
I do think she may be one of Dickens’ greatest comic creations.
Very affecting in this section was Smike’s terrible reaction to the word home : ‘I could not part with you to go to any home on earth… except one, except one. I shall never be an old man ; and if your hand placed me in the grave, and I could think before I died, that you could come and look upon it sometimes with one of your kind smiles… I could go to that home almost without a tear.’
‘In the churchyard, we are all alike, but here there are none like me. I am a poor creature, but I know that’
Nicholas replies ‘ when I speak of home, I speak of the place where … those that I love are gathered together’. Home seems an important theme in this book.
It’s really properly moving how much Smike adores Nicholas and how much Nicholas loves and protects him. Dickens writes so beautifully about friendship and about sibling love (I have said this before) – more than any other writer I can think of.
I was feeling a bit teary and then along came Mrs Nickleby again to mangle Smike’s name, eventually declaring it to be Mr Slammons.
And the story of the bear ? What? Kate’s grandmother’s (apparently irrelevantly handsome) hairdresser had to escape from a bear?? Or possibly , the bear escaped from the hairdresser? Only in Dickens would that level of surreal bonkersness make the edit…