[Literature] Charles Dickens: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby #5/456

She leaps into a discussion of Shakespeare at the opera by recalling a trip she made to Stratford in a post-chaise:

‘Was it a post-chaise though!’ said Mrs Nickleby, considering; ‘yes, it must have been a post-chaise, because I recollect remarking at the time that the driver had a green shade over his left eye; – in a post-chaise from Birmingham, and after we had seen Shakespeare’s tomb and birth-place, we went back to the inn there, where we slept that night, and I recollect that all night long I dreamt of nothing but a black gentleman, at full length, in plaster-of-Paris, with a lay down collar tied with two tassels, leaning against a post and thinking; and when I woke in the morning and described him to Mr Nickleby, he said it was Shakespeare just as he had been when he was alive, which was very curious indeed.’

Mrs Nickleby’s streams of anecdote emerge from a teeming inner life incapable of formulating itself in terms of the established hierarchies of experience. Her inconsecutive reasoning fractures each incident into a multitude of arresting details – the drowning earwigs, the driver’s green eye-patch, the dream Shakespeare’s ‘lay down collar tied with two tassels’ – that overwhelm whatever point she may be attempting to make. Yet her greatest speeches seem also charged with a sublimely unselfconscious power to amalgamate the fundamental imperatives of existence that are kept, in other parts of the narrative, so strictly separate from each other: food, sex, birth, death, class and financial insecurities are all inextricably bound up together in her discourse on roast pig inspired by the warm summer day. Her reflections on her haunting dream of Shakespeare’s corpse-like effigy – which occurred while she was pregnant with Nicholas – again oppose life and death in a single involute: ‘In fact, it was quite a mercy, ma’am,’ she tells Mrs Wititterly, ‘that my son didn’t turn out to be a Shakespeare, and what a dreadful thing that would have been!’

Mrs Nickleby’s self-delighting digressions are much resented by Nicholas, and patiently endured by Kate. For both, she is the source of acute social embarrassment. Further, her impervious, consummately adaptive egotism blinds her to the danger posed to her daughter by Sir Mulberry Hawk, and aligns her with the other bad parent figures of the novel: Mr Bray, Mr Snawley, Ralph Nickleby, the Squeerses (‘You will have a father in me, my dear, and a mother in Mrs Squeers,’ the schoolmaster is fond of declaring loudly in public to prospective pupils when on his recruitment drives) and, of course, all the heartless maternal aunts and step-mothers who pack off surplus sons or wards to Dotheboys Hall. In a related manner, Sir Mulberry Hawk and Arthur Gride are both dedicated to defrauding the defenceless young, while Mrs Wititterly and Miss Knag exploit Kate as a mere foil for their own vanity.

Exuberant animosity towards these selfishly scheming members of the older generation drives much of the book’s plot, but Mrs Nickleby is never quite subsumed within this overarching pattern of conflict. Though briefly entangled in Sir Mulberry’s machinations, for the most part she manages to remain outside the book’s narrative, and her brilliantly individualistic responses to her son’s feats of knight-errantry offer a welcome respite from the pathos and sentiment that gush from such episodes. Introduced to Smike, she at once dissolves into tears:

‘What is the matter?’ exclaimed Nicholas, running to support her.

‘It’s so like Pyke,’ cried Mrs Nickleby; ‘so exactly like Pyke, that’s all. Oh!, don’t speak to me – I shall be better presently.’

Dinner over, she rallies and politely asks the ‘unfortunate outcast’, as Nicholas dubs him, whether he happened ‘ever to have dined with the Grimbles of Grimble Hall, somewhere in the North Riding… A very proud man, Sir Thomas Grimble, with six grown-up and most lovely daughters, and the finest park in the county.’

The unruly, dizzying energies of Mrs Nickleby’s imagination find an analogue, moreover, in the novel’s presentation of city life. The London of Nicholas Nicklebyis experienced as a bewildering, fragmentary jumble, a chaos of diversely obsessive activity that defies interpretation, or even definition. Certainly this is how it appears to Nicholas and Smike on their arrival from Portsmouth at the beginning of chapter 32:

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.

The city lacks, like Mrs Nickleby’s discourse, a coherent point or centre, but shares her capacity for ceaseless flow and constantly surprising detail.