The life and adventures of nicholas nickleby by Charles Dickens (1812- 1870)

Nicholas Nickleby (1838- 1839) belongs to Dickens’s earlier work. The novel tells about the career of Nicholas Nickleby, the son of an impoverished country gentleman. To provide for his mother and sister, Nicholas takes up different kinds of job: he becomes a tutor at a private school, an actor in a strolling company, a clerk, etc. Following the ups and downs of Nicholas’s fortune, the reader is made to observe scenes of the English life of the 1830s. He learns of the monstrous neglect of public education placed in the hands of brutal and ignorant men, of a faulty parliamentary system, of the corrupted and idle aristocrats and the greedy, mercenary bourgeoisie. The picture of London given below is one of the powerful descriptions contained in the book, which brings to light the sharp contrasts between wealth and poverty characteristic of England in those days.

This extract deals with Nicholas’s return to London after he has traveled about the country in search of work.

… They* rattled on through the noisy, bustling, crowded streets of London, now displaying long double rows of brightly-burning lamps, dotted here and there with chemists’ glaring lights, and illuminated besides with the brilliant flood, that streamed from the windows of the shops, where sparkling jewelry, silks and velvets of the richest colours, the most inviting delicacies, and most sumptuous articles of luxurious ornaments, succeeded each other in rich and glittering profusion. Streams of people apparently without end poured on and on, jostling each other in the crowd and hurrying forward, scarcely seeming to notice the riches that surrounded them on every side; while vehicles of all shapes and makes, mingled up together in one moving mass like running water, lent their ceaseless roar to swell the noise and tumult.

As they dashed by the quickly-changing and ever-varying objects, it was curious to observe in what a strange procession they passed before the eye. Emporiums of splendid dresses, the materials brought from every quarter of the world: tempting stores of everything to stimulate and pamper the sated appetite, and give new relish to the oft-repeated feast; vessels of burnished gold and silver, wrought into every exquisite form of

* they – Nicholas Nickleby, the hero of the novel, and his fellow-travelers who were coming to London in the same mail-coach

vase, and dish, and goblet; guns, swords, pistols and patent engines of destruction; screws and irons for the crooked, clothes for the newly-born, drugs for the sick, coffins for the dead, churchyards for the buried – all these jumbled each with the other and flocking side by side, seemed to flit by in motley dance like the fantastic groups of the old Dutch painter, and with the same stern moral for the unheeding restless crowd.

Nor were there wanting objects in the crowd itself to give new point and purpose to the shifting scene. The rags of the squalid ballad-singer fluttered in the rich light that showed the goldsmiths’ treasures; pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food; hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass – an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India. There was a christening

party at the largest coffin-maker’s, and a funeral hatchment* had stopped some great improvements in the bravest mansion. Life and death went hand in hand; wealth and poverty stood side by side; repletion and starvation laid them down together.