Dickensalong 2023- 2024 : Nicholas Nickleby

[Piggywaspushed]

Come along and join me in the next Dickens readalong.

We have chosen Nicholas Nickleby which was originally published by Dickens in 19 instalments.

I propose condensing this to a nine month read, using Dickens shorter sections as a guide. We begin in October, as follows:

October - Chapters 1 - 7
November - Chapters 8-14
December - Chapters 15-23
January - Chapters 24-29
February - Chapters 30-36
March - Chapters 37-42
April - Chapters 43-51
May - Chapters 52-58
and finishing in
June 2024 - Chapters 59 - end

Summoning old faithfuls and newcomers, one and all!

😦🐻👊

“They’ve got the bear necessities…” Sorry, couldn’t resist!

I’m still following along and enjoying it!

I’ve finished this section now! I’m glad Nicholas is back in London. While entertaining, the theatre troop section always just felt like Dickens filling up his word count rather than advancing the plot in any way. I was expecting the hairdresser/bear anecdote to be longer/more significant after all the comments about it here! I was surprised it was just a couple of throwaway lines and then everybody moved on.

Nothing to do with the book but there’s a National Trust house near me which has a summerhouse in the garden known as The Bear’s Hut because the owners used to keep a bear in it in the 1860s. Keeping bears was obviously fashionable in the 1800s!

Byron had a range of unusual 'pets' didn't he? An elephant?

They were also obsessed with finding mermaids and caging them.

We were dreadful humans.

That just rang a bell with me, @Piggywaspushed, and lo!….

The eccentric poet Lord Byron is reported to have kept a bear while he was a student at Trinity College in the early 1800s. He’s said to have purchased the bear, quite possibly at Stourbridge Fair, in defiance of the rules that banned students from keeping dogs in college.
On 26 October 1807 Byron wrote to his friend Elizabeth Pigot: “I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear. When I brought him here, they asked me what to do with him, and my reply was, ‘he should sit for a fellowship’.

I'll stop talking about bears now. I am very much enjoying NN and especially Nicholas's evolution into more of an action hero, despite the improbability of him wandering into the very high-class hotel in which the dastardly Sir Mulberry and chums are taking the name of the fair Kate in vain.

That dog thing also happened at Cambridge more recently.

The master of Selwyn College speaks of his pet 'very large cat' which roams the college gardens. It is, in fact, a beagle hound.

We are reading up to and including Chapter 42 this month as a reminder.

Currently, cucumbers and marrows are being thrown over walls as some form of mid life Victorian love token.

That’s quite some, er, masculine symbolism!

Oh, that didn't occur to me! Now you mention it...

That surprised me too! Do you think it was deliberate or are we reading unintended meanings into it? It doesn’t feel very Victorian! 🍆😂

I'm just going for the explanation that Victorians grew a lot of marrows and cucumbers. I await phallic developments.

Once more, I found her deeply hilarious.

First bizarre bear stories, now phallic vegetable symbols?! Wonder what Dickens was on when he was writing this! I haven’t started this month’s chapters yet so will look forward to the cucumber chucking.

Finally a good use for cucumbers 😅
This is the highlight of the book.

Happy April everyone!

I enjoyed this section. Last section offered me up a new term of endearment. Thsi section lends us an new insult courtesy of Fanny Squeers

'that viper- that- that - mermaid.'(Miss Squeers brought it out triumphantly at last as if it clinched the business.)

I do find it terribly hard to follow Dickens' bonkers rendition of a Yorkshire accent but am nonetheless loving Browdie's Yorkshire forthrightness - and his love of copious food.

Also highly entertaining were the cucumbers and Mrs Nickleby's eventual diagnosis that her cucumber suitor could not possibly be mad if he fancied her.

Although the Squeers are back and the awful aristos pop up now and again, the tone was light in this section. I expect things will darken. Am also guessing Nicholas' love plot will progress, hopefully with the right woman!

I really enjoyed this section too. That chapter with the vegetable-throwing lover leering at them over the fence was Dickens comedy at its best. I was also very pleased that Smike managed to escape the hideous Squeers.

The chapter where they tried to track down the object of Nicholas’s affections was also funny - I felt sorry for Nicholas when it turned out to be the wrong woman - and also felt sorry for the young woman finding them hiding in her house! I wonder if we’ll come across Cecilia Bobster again?

Isn't Bobster the name of the wrong woman? I thought that was who Smike 'tracked down'? I may be confused...

I really enjoyed this month’s section, some great comic set pieces. I stalled a little when Smike got captured - can’t handle a Smike in peril! - so was very relieved when John Browdie released him in short order.

The rendering of John Browdie’s accent made me wonder if Dickens had met a Geordie once and mistaken him for a Yorkshireman.

As for mermaids, I think the Victorian conception of a mermaid was very different from the cutesy modern one - more of a siren who seduces and devours men, the ‘other’ to the proper domestic ideal. I know this from reading Woman’s Lore last year. (It’s a closely related concept to the female vampire in the gothic tradition - Lucy Westernra et al.)

Yes, that did occur to me but Dickens does make it sound so silly. The idea of either of those two women luring sailors to rocks is amusing.

Good morning all! Happy April!

I really enjoyed this installment as well. It was great fun with two really good comic episodes. The description of Newman Noggs standing at the pump was good. Whether he had looked around the pump in a slanting direction for too long that his sight had become impaired or whether he had fortified himself with something stronger than what the pump could offer wasn't clear, but he got it wrong. It made me laugh. I wonder if Cecilia Bobster will turn up again. Why give her a name if she is only going to make one appearance?

I was so glad that Smike broke free from the Squeers. John Browdie is a hero. I couldn't have coped if the Squeers mistreated him again.

I was a bit taken aback that Nicholas was so against the idea of his mother remarrying. It's not very magnanimous of him is it? Maybe not to the cucumber suitor although who is to say that it might not have been a match made in heaven?!

Piggy - yes Bobster is the name of the wrong woman that Smike tracked down, but as Fuzzy said the fact that she had a name makes me wonder if she will turn out to be more significant in some way.

Ah!

I can't remember Smike going off to search for anyone!

I was also thinking about the Tiny Tim equivalent who pops up briefly. These boys with various wasting diseases do seem to be a motif in so many Dickens' works.

I enjoyed this section but it did feel slightly as though Dickens was padding a little bit - the thwarted rendezvous with the mysterious lady; the cucumber-throwing elderly neighbour (who actually seemed a bit of a melancholy figure to me, as he’s clearly mentally unwell - dementia, presumably, though of course it wouldn’t have been called that at the time). The plot hasn’t greatly advanced; I wonder whether Dickens realised he needed to slow it down so his instalments came out right?

I completely agree about John Browdie’s very peculiar Yorkshire accent!

Oops yes Fuzzy it was Noggs who tracked down the woman, not Smike!