Dickens's ‘School Of Affliction’: Learning from Death in Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop

This essay reads death scenes in Dickens's early novels as contributions to a wider reformist drive (evidenced in discourses of burial, urban, and sanitary reform) to clean up the nation's ways of thinking about mortality, each of which relied upon the careful policing of sense data surrounding corpses, graves, and deathbeds. In doing so, it seeks to expand our sense of why Dickens adopted a sentimental mode in both Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1), arguing that it derived not just from a desire to provoke emotional responses in readers, but spoke to his interest in association psychology as the mechanism by which both ideas and minds were constructed. It thus argues for Dickens's deathbed scenes as sites of literary experiment: attempts to recruit narrative fiction's affective and psychological power for the causes of aesthetic and social transformation.

Depiction of Human Tragedy in Literary Works

Nickolas Nickleby is a romantic novel written by Charles Dickens, one of the prominent English writer of Elizabethan era remembered as the greatest novelist with his literary contributions in the form of novels, short stories, poetry and plays. Famous works among his numerous writings include “A Message from the Sea”, “Great Expectations”, “Oliver Twist”, and “A Tale of Two Cities”.Nicholas Nickleby is one of examples of the romantic genre in Charles Dickens works and it is his third novel. This novel explores the life and adventures of a young man named Nicholas Nickleby, who has to support his mother and sister, due to unexpected failure of his father. Nicholas Nickleby’s father loses his entire life savings and this results in his death. The family leaves from the comfortable life style and reaches their relative for support. The work shows real human tragedy which is analysed in this article. Keywords : Human tragedy, sense of moral val

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS A GENRE FEATURE OF COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS BY CH. DICKENS

The article explores autobiography as one of the genre features of the coming-of-age novels in the context of Charles Dickens’ legacy. Dickens’ realistic novels appeared as a result of his own life experience; the writer wanted to bring and share his views, ideas, life lessons with the readers and teach them to what he considered the correct moral behavior. Episodes of the author’s life, as if scattered through all his novels about a young man such as “Nicholas Nickleby”, “Martin Chuzzlewit”, “David Copperfield” and “The Great Expectations”. Autobiographical genre features are revealed in the coming-of-age novels in two ways– through a full depiction of the whole life stages or, alternately, with the help of the episodic retrospective description of life experience. In both cases the author draws up a rational balance of biographical facts, social and historical background of the era combined with artistic fictional reality.

Nonsense on the Margins

The paper charts certain nuances of the diction of two minor characters in Dickens’s early fiction, Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers and Mrs Nickleby from Nicholas Nickleby. The paper focuses on what David Ellis calls Sam’s “extended comic comparisons” and Mrs Nickleby’s typical speech acts, called here, by analogy, extended comic recollections. After examining the role both characters’ verbal comedy plays in the novels, the paper invites Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s critical insight into a Victorian genre contemporary to Dickens: nonsense literature. I approach the underlying structural parallel between Sam’s and MrsNickleby’s comic verbal instances with the aid of the definitive trait of nonsense as established by Lecercle, the paradox of excess and lack on different levels of language. Though not arguing for the novels’ inclusion in a nonsense literary canon, I show that Lecercle’s conceptualisation of nonsense linguistics proves useful in making sense of the two characters’ monologues. Their role in each novel may thus be grasped as functional nonsense.

The HUGE presence of Lindley Murray

The grammarian Lindley Murray (1745–1826), according to Monaghan (1996), was the author of the best selling English grammar book of all times, calledEnglish Grammarand first published in 1795. Not surprisingly, therefore, his work was subjected to severe criticism by later grammarians as well as by authors of usage guides, who may have thought that Murray's success might negatively influence the sales figures of their own books. As the publication history of the grammar in Alston (1965) suggests, Murray was also the most popular grammarian of the late 18thand perhaps the entire 19thcentury, and this is most clearly reflected in the way in which a wide range of 19th- and even some 20th-century literary authors, from both sides of the Atlantic, mentioned Lindley Murray in their novels. Examples are Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852), George Eliot (Middlemarch, 1871–2), Charles Dickens, in several of his novels (Sketches by Boz, 1836;Nicholas Nickleby, 1838–9;The Old Curiosity Shop1840–1;Dombey & Son, 1846–8); Oscar Wilde (Miner and Minor Poets, 1887) and James Joyce (Ulysses, 1918) (Fens–de Zeeuw, 2011: 170–2). Another example is Edgar Allen Poe, who according to Hayes (2000) grew up with Murray's textbooks and used his writings as a kind of linguistic touchstone, especially in his reviews. Many more writers could be mentioned, and not only literary ones, for in a recent paper in which Crystal (2018) analysed the presence of linguistic elements in issues ofPunchpublished during the 19thcentury, he discovered that ‘[w]heneverPunchdebates grammar, it refers to Lindley Murray’. Murray, according to Crystal, ‘is the only grammarian to receive any mention throughout the period, and his name turns up in 19 articles’ (Crystal, 2018: 86). Murray had become synonymous with grammar prescription, and even in the early 20thcentury, he was still referred to as ‘the father of English Grammar’ (Johnson, 1904: 365).

Nicholas Nickleby

This chapter examines the importance of Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) in the place of Dickens’s early canon by looking into the nature of contractual relationships both inside and outside the novel. The book itself expresses extreme anxiety over exactly what constitutes a contract, and this anxiety becomes only more complicated and pronounced when read alongside the extra-textual material that surrounds the novel’s composition. The concept of equity and contractual fairness, for example, which dominates the first half of the novel, cannot be fully understood unless placed in direct conversation with Dickens’s own correspondence and publishing agreements. The ‘this versus that’ approach that emerges from such an examination is something that Dickens constantly grappled with during the first years of his career.