Nicholas Nickleby, the book

I recently finished reading Charles Dickens' 'Nicholas Nickleby'. My wife and I watched a movie adaptation of the book a while back and it was so good! It inspired me to want to read some of Dickens' work ... and what better way to start than with the story that first impressed me?

Portrait of Charles Dickens

The book was great and I found the movie was pretty faithful to the original - about as faithful as time constraints would allow. The story is a moral tale about, among other things, the effect of character and the tendency of good character to yield happiness and bad character to yield misery. Dickens may be stretching plausibility now and then by putting circumstances together that link the cause and effect so closely in time, but I like his emphasis on the inevitability of such an outcome. I agree with his moral conclusions and I think his storytelling is masterful! He may be the greatest genius of an author of the English language I have ever read.

It's interesting that the very thing I appreciated about his novel seems to be the thing he later reconsidered and revised. Maybe not revised ... expanded. 'Nicholas Nickleby' focuses on two main characters, Nicholas (the good guy) and his uncle Ralph (the bad guy). Ralph is a man whose sole aim in life is the acquisition of wealth. He is clever and ruthless and quite successful in carrying out his objective. This morning, I read a talk by Elder Richard G. Scott in which he says something that reminded me of Ralph. He says, "A clever individual without foundation principles can at times acquire, temporarily, impressive accomplishments. Yet that attainment is like a sand castle. When the test of character comes, it crumbles, often taking others with it."

Ralph has no guiding principles other than wealth accumulation. Anything it takes to achieve that end is well within his moral sphere. His end is a miserable one. I won't ruin the story for you by telling you how it ends, but Ralph 'gets what he deserves,' I guess. Unfortunately, we don't get much of a glimpse into what made Ralph the kind of man he is. We get a little hint of a cause, but it's not sufficient for us to really enter into Ralph's character and feel sympathy for him. This is what I believe Dickens later revised or expanded upon in his novel four or five years later called 'A Christmas Carol'.

I don't know what Dickens was thinking, but I imagine he looked at the novel he had written (and possibly others - I don't know) and wondered whether there was any redemption for a man like Ralph. In a spirit of greater liberality, he explores that question in the character of Ebeneezer Scrooge, an equally ruthless man bent upon acquiring wealth at the expense of anything else of value in life. I love that Dickens revisited this type of miserly character and found redemption by allowing such a man to recognize his own depravity, explore his past to find the cause of his current state, and rekindle whatever virtue he had as a child and a young man to become a beneficent, liberal man. His ending is much happier than it would have been if he had not altered his character for the better.

Dickens doesn't step away from the correlation between joy and a virtuous life, but in his later work, he acknowledges the possibility for an evil character to change. Considering that we're all a mix of good and evil, it's a good thing we have the ability to change. We usually can't undo the evil we have inflicted on others, but there seems to be sufficient grace from heaven to compensate if we'll just change our hearts and our actions. I really enjoyed 'Nickleby,' but I also appreciate the more liberal message of 'A Christmas Carol' and its application for me personally.