Nicholas Nickleby: or, There’s More to a Story Than the Plot

Nicholas Nickleby is a relatively early novel by Charles Dickens. The book doesn’t have a well-oiled plot, unlike many of the author’s creations. In a work such as Great Expectations, published twenty-two years later, Dickens creates suspense right from the very first chapter, and then the reader is swept along in the fast-flowing river of the story all the way to the end. Nicholas Nickleby lacks that current of suspense. I think it’s fair to say that the reader’s emotional investment in the outcome of the plot doesn’t become much of a factor until a couple of hundred pages into the book.

Charles Dickens in 1839, around the time he wrote Nicholas Nickleby

Most of the numerous characters in Nicholas Nickleby also lack the complexity of Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations, for example, who starts out as the scariest and creepiest figure in the book, and evolves into perhaps the most sympathetic. The characters in Nicholas Nickleby are relatively flat, either all good or all bad, and they change little over time. The handsome and beautiful characters are universally good, and the ugly ones are all bad—very predictable

And yet…the book held my interest throughout. When I ask myself why, I think it’s partly because Nicholas Nickleby is Dickens’s funniest novel. The satire is so daggered, the narrator always means the exact opposite of what he says, using comically grandiose diction. It is laugh-out-loud funny in so many places, and there are chuckles throughout. Here is Dickens’s initial description of the evil miser, Ralph Nickleby, older brother of the protagonist’s father:

Ralph, the elder, deduced from the often-repeated tale the two great morals that riches are the only true source of happiness and power, and that it is lawful and just to compass their acquisition by all means short of felony.

Dickens’s portrayal of almost limitless greed of some businessmen in 19th century London feels all-too contemporary today.

Even the names of the characters are sometimes hilarious, including the self-important actress Miss Snevellicci. Every time Nicholas Nickleby’s mother opens her mouth, the reader has to laugh at the strange meanderings of her mind (apparently based on Dickens’s own mater familias). Mrs. Nickleby always seems to get distracted by irrelevant details and to miss the main point of her own remarks. Here is Mrs. Nickleby’s attempt to explain why she believes her daughter, Kate, is very intelligent:

I recollect when she was only two years and a half old, that a gentleman who used to visit very much at our house—Mr. Watkins, you know, Kate, my dear, that your poor papa went bail for, who afterwards ran away to the United States, and sent us a pair of snow shoes, with such an affectionate letter that it made your poor dear father cry for a week. You remember the letter? In which he said that he was very sorry he couldn’t repay the fifty pounds just then, because his capital was all out at interest, and he was very busy making his fortune, but that he didn’t forget you were his god-daughter, and he should take it very unkind if we didn’t buy you a silver coral and put it down to his old account?

None of this has anything to do with whether her daughter Kate is intelligent, and not only that, Mrs. Nickleby seems completely unaware that Kate’s so-called godfather is a con man. The book is peppered with wonderful comic bits like this, and those moments are part of what sustains the reader until the plot finally kicks in.

The other affecting part of Nicholas Nickleby is Dickens’s exposé of corrupt Yorkshire boarding schools where unwanted boys were dumped, forgotten, and abused. 

This part of the novel is linked to the most interesting character, Smike. The young man Smike has been so brutally treated in the boarding school where he works almost as a slave that he has lost much of his ability to think and feel for himself. And yet he is doggedly loyal to Nicholas and his sister, and has an instinct for the good despite his lack of mental acuity. The cleverest part of Dickens’s plot is the way he makes Smike seem as if he is a completely peripheral and minor character, but eventually Smike becomes the trigger of the book’s climax.

The takeaway for me as a writer, reading Nicholas Nickleby, is that there is more to a story than the plot. There is the voice of the author, the writer’s sense of humor and satiric wit, and the heart of the writer as s/he sympathizes with the characters and analyzes society’s flaws. All of those, while not enough to make a long novel work by themselves, are more than enough to keep the reader going at moments when the plot lags, especially if that writer is Charles Dickens.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

A Plot or the Unfolding of the Characters’ Fates: Two Ways of Writing a Story

Several types of literary works have a narrative structure involving a fictional story: novels, plays, short stories, and screenplays, to name a few. I’ve noticed that these narratives tend to fall into two strikingly different categories, which I’ll call a plot and the unfolding of the characters’ fates.

Maggie Shipstead, author of Astonish Me

A plot has the quality of an actual plot, as in a scheme to accomplish something, not always honest. I’m thinking of a plot to commit a crime, for instance. In a plot, there is a deliberate plan to accomplish a certain aim, with multiple steps that must take place in sequence. The element of suspense is crucial—will the intrigue work out as calculated or not? The goal is known, at least to the conspirators, but the outcome is in doubt. A plot in fiction is also vaguely dishonest, though not in a harmful way—it’s an attempt to deceive the reader, or at least to create an ending the reader can’t completely guess.

The types of fiction that most obviously have a plot of this sort are mystery novels and films that involve suspense. Will the bad guys triumph, or will the good guys win out? Will the events that the audience or readers have been clued to expect take place as anticipated, or will a different result transpire? The author carefully plants clues in the mind of the readers/audience so they eagerly anticipate certain possible outcomes. The motto of this sort of story might be Janet Burroway’s dictum in her book Writing Fiction that, “only trouble is interesting,” since getting into and out of trouble is the engine of the plot.

On the other hand, there is the type of story where there isn’t a strong element of suspense. Then how does the reader/audience get interested and stay engaged? From the involvement with the characters, for one thing. It’s not so much that you’re waiting to see if things turn out the way you expect. You just want to spend time with those characters and watch them develop and realize their fates. And you also want to spend time with the author, to hear that voice describe certain moments in the story. The little moments themselves flavor the narrative, and those little moments are crucial in a storyline of this sort.

To clarify, here are some examples of both types of stories.

In Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations the author prompts the reader to anticipate certain outcomes, or to guess certain outcomes. Will the escaped convict Abel Magwitch return to seek vengeance on Pip, the main character? Will Pip escape his sister’s tyrannical rule? Who is Pip’s benefactor and when will Pip find that out? Will making his fortune ruin Pip’s likeable character? Who will Pip marry—Estella, Biddy, or no one? Will Compeyson succeed in getting his revenge on Magwitch? There are so many ways in which Dickens successful whets the appetite of the reader to know what is going to happen next. To a great extent, that is what keeps the reader turning the pages of Great Expectations. Dickens is a classic example of plot-driven fiction.

On the other hand, think of a book like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Certainly, Mrs. Dalloway is no less great a novel than Great Expectations. For my taste, much greater. But there is very little plot to Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party in London on a particular day in June 1923. Try reading a summary of the plot of this novel, such as this one, for instance. Not much happens. A character commits suicide, but it’s someone who is peripheral to the main action of the story, and the title character doesn’t really know the person who takes his life.

What we do want to know in Mrs. Dalloway is how the fates of the characters unfold. Will Peter Walsh find happiness in his love life, or will he be forever discontent and restless? Will Clarissa settle back into her married life? But these are not urgent, life-or-death questions. They are just puzzles that Clarissa Dalloway, and through her, the reader, muses on. It’s that extraordinary musing that makes the novel so engaging: “She [Mrs. Dalloway] sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”

What makes Mrs. Dalloway an engaging book is quite different from what makes a Dickens novel a good read. A Virginia Woolf novel is propelled by the reader’s interest in realistic characters, and the small moments that contain larger truths. Is that enough to sustain a reader through hundreds of pages? If the author is really good, yes. Look at Marcel Proust, who sustains this for a thousand pages.

I just listened to the audiobook of Maggie Shipstead’s terrific novel about ballet, Astonish Me. There is very little suspense in that book, though it does end up having a fairly intricate story. But there is much to think about and savor along the way. Maggie Shipstead uses metaphor in a way that most poets would envy, and she understands her characters' hearts.

Neither method of engaging a reader/audience in a story is easy to do well. To make a plot grab you right from the start and hold onto your anticipation takes a gifted and skilled literary writer. To continually deliver twists that are surprising but not so unpredictable they seem unlikely or impossible to guess, is even harder.

It’s equally difficult to create characters who are lifelike enough to make the reader want to know more about their fates, and how those fates resemble and throw light on our own destiny or the fate of those we know, and to enliven each turn of phrase so that it lifts the reader forward.

These two methods of storytelling are actually related. A good suspense novel lacks color if we are not engaged with the characters and how their fates unfold. A strong novel of character and style becomes a bore if there is no suspense, no unresolved question that we want to know the answer to. But it’s interesting to see where a story falls on the continuum where one side is suspense, and the other side is the pleasure of the small moments in the prose.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Rereading Dickens's Great Expectations Half a Century Later

I first read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens in 1966, in my first semester at the Bronx High School of Science. Almost half a century later, I listened to the audiobook of the novel, and entirely different facets of the book stood out for me.

Charles Dickens

When I was fourteen years old, I was so put off by the artificial aspects of Great Expectations. I wasn’t used to nineteenth century novels, and the exaggerated speech of Dickens’s working class characters such as Joe Gargery felt unreal to me. I was particularly troubled by the plot’s many coincidences, which seemed less than nitty gritty to me, and didn’t pass the test of strict authenticity that my adolescent self applied to everything that an adult tried to present to me as authoritative.

It’s true that novelists in the 1800s had an almost occult reliance on coincidences. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned how writers of that century serialized their novels in newspapers or magazines, publishing one chapter at a time. Once a novelist had painted a character into a corner with a particular plot device, the writer couldn't go back and correct the story—the earlier installments were already public. A good coincidence was a clever way out of a tight squeeze, but beyond that, some writers have a predilection for coincidence, maybe even an affection for it. 

Dickens is certainly one of them. In Great Expectations, for instance, it’s not necessary to the plot for Pip to find out who both of Estella’s parents are, but Dickens can’t resist including those details, even though they involve improbable serendipities. Those coincidences do add irony, since Estella is at first very haughty for a young woman whose forebears turn out to be of such humble origin.

Somehow the coincidences hardly bothered me at all this time. They seemed almost like gewgaws in a Victorian parlor, charming in their outmoded and elaborate way.

A Pre-Raphaelite frontispiece for Great Expectations

What did strike me about the book this time was how complex some of the characters are. Abel Magwitch was particularly fascinating to me. At the midpoint of the novel, I think the reader would probably identify Magwitch as the least likeable and most threatening character in the book, and there’s plenty of competition for that niche. By the end of the story, it might be fair to say that Magwitch is one of the most sympathetic, and perhaps the most compelling character. That turnabout in the reader's perceptions of Magwitch is one of the novel's many triumphs.

My favorite section in the novel is Chapter XLII, where Magwitch narrates his life story in his own words. It’s an incredibly poetic dramatic monologue, full of amazing metaphors that are perfectly suited to Magwitch’s rough-and-tumble existence, in and out of jail starting at a young age: “I’ve been done everything to, pretty well—except hanged. I’ve been locked up as much as a silver tea-kittle.…I’ve no more notion where I was born that you have—if so much.”

One character I changed my opinion of since my teenage reading of the book is Joe Gargery, the brother-in-law and dear companion of the protagonist, Pip, during the main character’s youth. Joe’s wildly uneducated speech just seemed clownish to me when I was a teenager. .Now it makes me laugh. At one point, Pip is attempting to teach Joe the alphabet, and Pip tries to get him to write his last name.

“How do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him…

“I don’t spell it at all,” said Joe.

This time, Joe came across as a nuanced character. He is a big, strong guy—a blacksmith—but in some ways he’s weak, at times to Pip’s detriment. Joe is too self-effacing to protect Pip from the physical and emotional abuse of his wife, Pip’s sister. And yet, it’s hard to fault Joe. He’s loyal to Pip till the end, even though he deals Pip one of his worst disappointments, inadvertently.

I also didn’t realize as a teenager that Dickens actually wrote two different endings to Great Expectations. Dickens declined to publish the original ending that he wrote, on the advice of his friend, the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I think Bulwer-Lytton's counsel was suspect. The ending that Dickens initially penned seems to me more poignant and more faithful to the direction of the book than the version that Dickens chose to include. But maybe that's the uncompromising teenager in me surfacing again.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry