Rating: 
Summary: Nicholas Nickleby
Review: "Nicholas Nickleby" is one of the best works of Charles Dickens overall. This novel is about the brave adventures of Nicholas, his sister Kate and their mother. The story begins at about the time Nicholas's father dies and the family has to encounter the struggle of life with no imminent prospects of fortune. At this time they make an appeal to the brother of Nicholas's father, Mr.Ralph Nickleby. From this point on, the parallel developments of the honest Nickleby family and their villanous uncle begin to unfold. With many twists and turns the story is as captivating as any of the author's best books. The tale is characteristically filled with the Dickinsian people such as Mr.Vincent Crummles and his family, in particular the "phenomenon", Arthur Gride, Newman Noggs and others. Overall, this book is a pleasure to read and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in good story-telling.
Rating:
Summary: Nicholas Nickleby
Review: "Nicholas Nickleby" is one of the best works of Charles Dickens overall. This novel is about the brave adventures of Nicholas, his sister Kate and their mother. The story begins at about the time Nicholas's father dies and the family has to encounter the struggle of life with no imminent prospects of fortune. At this time they make an appeal to the brother of Nicholas's father, Mr.Ralph Nickleby. From this point on, the parallel developments of the honest Nickleby family and their villanous uncle begin to unfold. With many twists and turns the story is as captivating as any of the author's best books. The tale is characteristically filled with the Dickinsian people such as Mr.Vincent Crummles and his family, in particular the "phenomenon", Arthur Gride, Newman Noggs and others. Overall, this book is a pleasure to read and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in good story-telling.
Rating: 
Summary: funny book
Review: "Nicholas Nickleby" was Dickens' third serialized novel and was complete by the time he was 27 years old. It is a spacious and interesting coming-of-age tale, but really tells the story of the Nickleby family as a whole rather than just the honorable young gentleman. Once his father dies of a "broken heart" after going bankrupt in the stock market, Nicholas must find a way to provide for his beautiful and virtuous sister Kate, and his kind-hearted, self-absorbed martyr of a mother (think a less outrageous version of Elizabeth Bennett's mother in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"). Their lives could all be made comfortable instantly if the dead Mr. Nickleby's brother Ralph weren't such a bitter, pitiless and hatefully cruel creature, but then Nicholas wouldn't have such a strong nemesis.Nicholas takes jobs as an assistant schoolmaster, a traveling actor and a bookkeeper, all the while looking out for the honor of his family: biting his tongue when he has to and kicking some ungentlemanly derriere when he feels he absolutely must. The speeches Dickens gives his characters when they have to stick up for themselves are particularly moving, even gripping, even if the circumstances are sometimes too melodramatic for the modern taste. I didn't mind the melodrama myself, but rather enjoyed the way Dickens moves from sentence to long sentence as he was still developing his style which would reach greater heights in books like "Great Expectations," one of only three other Dickens novels I have read. As long and relaxingly enjoyable as it is, "Nicholas Nickleby" becomes something of a living, breathing friend to the reader, guaranteeing it won't be the last of what Dickens called his "children" that I will come to know.
Rating:
Summary: A Long But Pleasant Journey
Review: "Nicholas Nickleby" was Dickens' third serialized novel and was complete by the time he was 27 years old. It is a spacious and interesting coming-of-age tale, but really tells the story of the Nickleby family as a whole rather than just the honorable young gentleman. Once his father dies of a "broken heart" after going bankrupt in the stock market, Nicholas must find a way to provide for his beautiful and virtuous sister Kate, and his kind-hearted, self-absorbed martyr of a mother (think a less outrageous version of Elizabeth Bennett's mother in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"). Their lives could all be made comfortable instantly if the dead Mr. Nickleby's brother Ralph weren't such a bitter, pitiless and hatefully cruel creature, but then Nicholas wouldn't have such a strong nemesis. Nicholas takes jobs as an assistant schoolmaster, a traveling actor and a bookkeeper, all the while looking out for the honor of his family: biting his tongue when he has to and kicking some ungentlemanly derriere when he feels he absolutely must. The speeches Dickens gives his characters when they have to stick up for themselves are particularly moving, even gripping, even if the circumstances are sometimes too melodramatic for the modern taste. I didn't mind the melodrama myself, but rather enjoyed the way Dickens moves from sentence to long sentence as he was still developing his style which would reach greater heights in books like "Great Expectations," one of only three other Dickens novels I have read. As long and relaxingly enjoyable as it is, "Nicholas Nickleby" becomes something of a living, breathing friend to the reader, guaranteeing it won't be the last of what Dickens called his "children" that I will come to know.
Rating:
Summary: An earlier triumph by a great author.
Review: A lot of people think that "Nicholas Nickleby" is a bit of disorganized confusion, but I think it's a pretty good effort. It is one of Dickens' earlier works, and he certainly did get better as time went on, but there is greatness here too. Dickens is noted for his social commentaries with his books, and with this one he took shots at an actual private school - Dotheby's Hall and it's master Wackford Squeer - and the book actually did cause reforms to be implemented in the infamous school. The hero Nicholas is the handsome, warm-hearted son of a widow whose husband's death left her and her two children impoverished. With the help of a shrewd, miserly uncle, Nicholas obtains a post at Dotheby's Hall. Nicholas finds conditions at the school impossible to tolerate, so he thrashes his employer and quits in disgust. The rest of the book outlines Nicholas' life in London. There are a lot of characters in this book, and it's difficult to keep them all straight, but Dickens' skill for characterization shows itself even in this early work, and the reader gets to know and love each one. The plot is a bit melodramatic and complicated, but the characters almost carry that failing through. Certainly worth a read.
Rating:
Summary: Flamboyant performance by resourceful young novelist
Review: Again and again I had the sense of a young writer reveling in his powers -- his creation of a teeming multitude of characters and their antics and adventures, his magical use of classic rhetorical tropes (such as metonymy, irony of various types, etc.), his ringing of many emotional notes. One feels that Dickens must have been amazed and delighted by his own profuse gifts. I'd hope that many people would read this book while they themselves are young! As has been said by someone before, I believe, one doesn't learn much that is new from Dickens, but one encounters a prodigious range of events and persons that relate to the universal experiences of human life -- of being bullied or being a bully, of being too trusting or not trusting enough, of having to resolve conflicting duties, and much more. I started reading Dickens about 25 years ago & only recently got to this one, and found it even better than I expected it to be.
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for Dickensian fanatics. . .
Review: Before being bogged down with maturity, competition, and comic asperity, Charles Dickens let his imagination run a brilliant race. Nicholas Nickleby is at the center of this pageant. Through this novel, Dickens creates a universe that is unfair, and yet maintains the purest workings of justice. Sure, the characters are a tad slip-shod (except for Miss La Creevy, who has to be one of Dickens' finest female creations), and yes, the plot is a boarder-line monstrosity of reality. Yet Dickens emotionally goads us into entertainment with a rush of creativity that perhaps remains unsurpassed throughout the Dickensian canon. In essence, we fall in love with the ridiculousness, even when we can't fully accept it.
Rating:
Summary: The good, the bad, and the extremely ugly
Review: Dickens is as much a social critic as a storyteller in "Nicholas Nickleby," which basically pits the noble young man who gives the novel its title against his wickedly scheming rich uncle Ralph in a grand canvas of London and English society. At the beginning of the novel, Nicholas's father has just died, leaving his family destitute, and Uncle Ralph, a moneylender (specifically, a usurer) and a venture capitalist of sorts, greedy and callous by the requirements of the story, reluctantly feels obligated to help them, and does so by securing for Nicholas a position as headmaster's assistant at a school for boys in Yorkshire, and for Nicholas's sister Kate a job as a dressmaker for a foppish clown named Mr. Mantalini, while Nicholas and Kate's scatterbrained mother is left in her room to mutter incoherent reminiscences about random events in her life. This Yorkshire school, called Dotheboys Hall, turns out to be little more than a prison in the way it is run by its headmaster, an improbably cruel cyclops named Wackford Squeers who badly mistreats and miseducates the students. Now, historical records indicate that while Squeers may be an exaggeration, his school is definitely not, Dickens intending to warn his readers of the day that some such places were indeed that bad. The duration at Dotheboys Hall constitutes only a small portion of the novel, but Squeers and his grotesque family reappear throughout the rest of the story like gremlins who are always causing bad things to happen to our hero. Nicholas's fortunes after escaping from Dotheboys Hall with Smike, a particularly abused older boy whom Squeers had worked like a slave, revolve largely around the circumstances of Kate and Uncle Ralph, who is starting to view the young man as a nuisance inclined to interfere in his machinations. Having been vilified by Squeers for his brash conduct at the Hall, Nicholas takes to the road with Smike in tow, where in Portsmouth they meet a thespian named Vincent Crummles who persuades the fugitives to become actors in his theatrical troupe; this episode, the strangest of Nicholas's adventures, seems more than anything else to reflect Dickens's own interest in the theater. Eventually Nicholas returns to London and gets a job as a clerk at a counting-house owned by a pair of merchants, the cheery Cheeryble brothers, where he encounters a beautiful girl in distress who will become a major factor in the final showdown between Nicholas and his uncle. The supporting characters are numerous and extremely colorful to the point of cartoonishness, such as Miss La Creevy, a talkative spinster and amateur painter; John Browdie, the gruff Yorkshireman whose dialect is so severe he needs a translator; Sir Mulberry Hawk, the arrogant suitor whom Kates tries to rebuff; Newman Noggs, Uncle Ralph's benevolent clerk who helps our hero when he can. In fact, the most curious thing about the characterization in this novel is that its main characters are almost completely devoid of personality; Nicholas and Kate, perhaps being by necessity innocuous paragons of virtue, are practically mere mannequins to whom people talk and things happen. Even the sickly and wretchedly humble Smike, the mystery of whose parentage becomes a part of the plot, does not induce as much pity as Dickens probably intended because he seems trapped in a story that doesn't really want him except as a device to expose even more of Uncle Ralph's villainy. There is much to like in "Nicholas Nickleby": The prose is finely detailed, the satire of various types of characters is on target, the humor is sharp -- there is a particularly funny and suspenseful scene with an unexpected outcome in which Nicholas dispatches Newman to discover the identity of the mysterious beautiful girl. And there is much not to like: The plot coincidences are ridiculously contrived in typical Dickensian fashion; the drama is manipulative, designed to cheer the reader all the more when the author comes to rescue the heroes from their despair and hopelessness; the sentimentality is overwhelming -- by the end "Nicholas Nickleby" becomes so saccharine it makes "David Copperfield" look like "Blood Meridian." But Dickens remains eminently readable because of his flair for portraying and celebrating human oddity in all its varieties, his knowledge that life is all about taking the bad with the good, and his sense that fiction is all about maximizing the contrast.
Rating:
Summary: The good, the bad, and the extremely ugly
Review: Dickens is as much a social critic as a storyteller in "Nicholas Nickleby," which basically pits the noble young man who gives the novel its title against his wickedly scheming rich uncle Ralph in a grand canvas of London and English society. At the beginning of the novel, Nicholas's father has just died, leaving his family destitute, and Uncle Ralph, a moneylender (specifically, a usurer) and a venture capitalist of sorts, greedy and callous by the requirements of the story, reluctantly feels obligated to help them, and does so by securing for Nicholas a position as headmaster's assistant at a school for boys in Yorkshire, and for Nicholas's sister Kate a job as a dressmaker for a foppish clown named Mr. Mantalini, while Nicholas and Kate's scatterbrained mother is left in her room to mutter incoherent reminiscences about random events in her life. This Yorkshire school, called Dotheboys Hall, turns out to be little more than a prison in the way it is run by its headmaster, an improbably cruel cyclops named Wackford Squeers who badly mistreats and miseducates the students. Now, historical records indicate that while Squeers may be an exaggeration, his school is definitely not, Dickens intending to warn his readers of the day that some such places were indeed that bad. The duration at Dotheboys Hall constitutes only a small portion of the novel, but Squeers and his grotesque family reappear throughout the rest of the story like gremlins who are always causing bad things to happen to our hero. Nicholas's fortunes after escaping from Dotheboys Hall with Smike, a particularly abused older boy whom Squeers had worked like a slave, revolve largely around the circumstances of Kate and Uncle Ralph, who is starting to view the young man as a nuisance inclined to interfere in his machinations. Having been vilified by Squeers for his brash conduct at the Hall, Nicholas takes to the road with Smike in tow, where in Portsmouth they meet a thespian named Vincent Crummles who persuades the fugitives to become actors in his theatrical troupe; this episode, the strangest of Nicholas's adventures, seems more than anything else to reflect Dickens's own interest in the theater. Eventually Nicholas returns to London and gets a job as a clerk at a counting-house owned by a pair of merchants, the cheery Cheeryble brothers, where he encounters a beautiful girl in distress who will become a major factor in the final showdown between Nicholas and his uncle. The supporting characters are numerous and extremely colorful to the point of cartoonishness, such as Miss La Creevy, a talkative spinster and amateur painter; John Browdie, the gruff Yorkshireman whose dialect is so severe he needs a translator; Sir Mulberry Hawk, the arrogant suitor whom Kates tries to rebuff; Newman Noggs, Uncle Ralph's benevolent clerk who helps our hero when he can. In fact, the most curious thing about the characterization in this novel is that its main characters are almost completely devoid of personality; Nicholas and Kate, perhaps being by necessity innocuous paragons of virtue, are practically mere mannequins to whom people talk and things happen. Even the sickly and wretchedly humble Smike, the mystery of whose parentage becomes a part of the plot, does not induce as much pity as Dickens probably intended because he seems trapped in a story that doesn't really want him except as a device to expose even more of Uncle Ralph's villainy. There is much to like in "Nicholas Nickleby": The prose is finely detailed, the satire of various types of characters is on target, the humor is sharp -- there is a particularly funny and suspenseful scene with an unexpected outcome in which Nicholas dispatches Newman to discover the identity of the mysterious beautiful girl. And there is much not to like: The plot coincidences are ridiculously contrived in typical Dickensian fashion; the drama is manipulative, designed to cheer the reader all the more when the author comes to rescue the heroes from their despair and hopelessness; the sentimentality is overwhelming -- by the end "Nicholas Nickleby" becomes so saccharine it makes "David Copperfield" look like "Blood Meridian." But Dickens remains eminently readable because of his flair for portraying and celebrating human oddity in all its varieties, his knowledge that life is all about taking the bad with the good, and his sense that fiction is all about maximizing the contrast.
Rating: 
Summary: A book with great societal impact
Review: I don't want to say much about the quality of the novel itself. I find it the most two-dimensional of all his novels (and I've read the Old Curiousity Shop, which is full of grotesqueries!). But I do want to provide some perspective as to the background of this novel. Before Dickens wrote this novel, some friends of his brought to his notice of horrid boarding schools in the Yorkshire area. Dickens traveled the countryside incognito, visiting the schools and some people in the area. He found that these schools were being run under the principle of being storehouses for unwanted boys. "Natural" children, inconvenient children from a first marriage, children of widowers who didn't have time to bring up their boys were shipped off to these schools, never to come home for the holidays, and under most circumstances the boy wouldn't make it to the age of 18 at which time he would be ejected from the school with no useful learning. Part of the motivation of this novel was to bring this practice to light -- many of the people in Yorkshire did not know what was going on the schools and those who did know did not see what they could do about it. Then Nicholas Nickleby started to be published. Like all of his novels, this book came out in 3-chapter installments. Well before the book was halfway over, people spontaneously gathered around some of these schools, ejected children and masters alike, and set the buildings to torch. By the end of publication, the infamous Yorkshire schools were totally gone. So keep this in mind while reading this book, which seems juvenile and flat compared even his previous two novels, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. This is the only of Dickens' novels to have an immediate and profound impact in his society. When was the last time you heard of a novel creating effective activism in a community?
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