Why this book

Dickens wrote this in monthly parts, a furious young reporter with a cause. His pen exposed real Yorkshire schools where unwanted children were starved and beaten, and shamed them out of existence. Fiction here became a weapon.

The Story

Nicholas's father, a gentle country gentleman, staked the family's small fortune on wild speculation and lost every penny of it. Therefore, when he died soon after of grief and fever, he left his wife, his son Nicholas, and his daughter Kate utterly destitute.

With nothing left, the grieving widow gathered her children and travelled to London to beg help from her late husband's only brother. But Ralph Nickleby proved a cold, calculating moneylender, a man who weighed every human soul purely by its worth in coins.

Ralph looked upon the ragged family with contempt, yet his sharp mind saw uses for them. Therefore he found Nicholas a distant post as assistant to a Yorkshire schoolmaster, Wackford Squeers, glad to pack the proud, penniless young man far out of his sight.

Squeers kept Dotheboys Hall, a place where London's unwanted boys were sent and forgotten. He advertised learning, but in truth he starved the children, worked them like beasts, and pocketed the fees their families paid. Needing wages, Nicholas travelled north into the cold.

At the school Nicholas found no lessons, only misery — hollow-eyed boys shivering in rags. But one soul pierced his heart above the rest: Smike, a lame, half-broken drudge, kept as an unpaid slave for the crime of having been abandoned and unclaimed.

Squeers and his hard wife beat the boys for amusement and fed them scraps a dog would refuse. Nicholas choked down his fury week after week, keeping his hated post, because his mother and sister in London leaned on every shilling he could send them.

Then Smike, driven past endurance, fled across the moors. But Squeers hunted the boy down, dragged him back in chains, and prepared to flog him bloody before the assembled school. And at that sight, something long straining inside Nicholas finally snapped.

Nicholas tore the cane from the schoolmaster's grip and thrashed Squeers to the floor with it, while the starved boys shrieked their joy. Therefore there could be no going back. He strode out of Dotheboys Hall into the falling snow, free but wholly ruined.

Smike would not be left behind, and Nicholas could not abandon the poor creature who had known nothing but blows. Therefore the two set out together for London on foot — the fierce young man and the limping, grateful boy who now worshipped him.

Meanwhile in London, Ralph had not forgotten his niece. He planted Kate as a seamstress in Madame Mantalini's fashionable dress-shop, where she stitched silks for cruel, careless ladies from before dawn until long after dark, for almost no wage at all.

That house was lorded over by Mr. Mantalini, a perfumed, preening spendthrift who smothered his wife in flattery while quietly bleeding her business into ruin. His endless extravagance would one day sink them both — a small, patient justice awaiting its hour.

Soon Ralph discovered a darker use for Kate's gentle beauty. He summoned her to a dinner among his wealthy clients and paraded her before the very men whose heavy debts filled his coffers. Therefore he served up his own innocent niece as bait.

Chief among those guests sat Sir Mulberry Hawk, a vicious, idle rake who hunted women purely for cruel sport. He fastened on Kate at once, pressing her with insults disguised as compliments, certain her poverty had left her helpless to resist him.

Trailing at Hawk's elbow came a foolish, spendthrift young nobleman, Lord Frederick Verisopht, whose fortune Hawk was steadily gambling away. Yet even this weak and silly lord felt a flicker of shame at how his friend tormented the frightened girl.

Kate fled that dinner in tears and threw herself on her uncle's mercy, begging him to shield her. But Ralph cared only that Hawk still owed him a great deal of money. Therefore he coldly told her to endure it, and turned away.

Far to the north, Nicholas and Smike trudged south and, down to their last coins, fell in with Vincent Crummles, the booming manager of a wandering theatre company. Crummles took one look at the handsome young man and hired him as actor and playwright.

For one bright season the pair tasted something like happiness among the players, with their painted canvas castles, a performing pony, and the much-advertised Infant Phenomenon. Smike, handed a small silent role, was fed, sheltered, and, for the first time in his life, content.

But a hasty letter from Newman Noggs, Ralph's ragged, half-mad clerk, wrenched Nicholas from that refuge. Noggs, who secretly despised his master, warned that Kate was in real danger in London. Therefore Nicholas thanked Crummles, gathered Smike, and hurried south at once.

Newman Noggs had once been a gentleman of means, until Ralph's ruinous dealings stripped him bare and reduced him to a shabby clerk. Yet Noggs kept a warm, loyal heart beneath his cracked knuckles, and quietly worked to thwart his master's every cruelty.

In a crowded London tavern Nicholas overheard Sir Mulberry Hawk lazily sneering at a young lady's name to amuse his companions — and the name upon those lips was Kate's. Not knowing the furious stranger was her brother, Hawk laughed. Therefore Nicholas struck him.

He demanded the villain's name; Hawk answered with a slash of his whip across Nicholas's face. But as the rake spurred his carriage away, the maddened horse bolted and hurled him bleeding to the stones. Nicholas had drawn first blood for his sister.

Nicholas gathered his trembling mother and sister and swept them out of Ralph's shadow into humble, honest lodgings of their own. Then he faced his uncle one last time and renounced him utterly, flinging the old man's cold, corrupting charity back into his face.

Searching for honest work, Nicholas caught the eye of two elderly twin brothers, Charles and Ned Cheeryble — merchants as warm and open-handed as Ralph was frozen and grasping. Charmed by the young man's spirit and plain honesty, they gave him a clerkship on the spot.

In their snug counting-house Nicholas flourished under old Tim Linkinwater, the brothers' fiercely devoted head clerk. Therefore, for the first time in years, his family had steady bread, safety, and a future to hope for. But Nicholas's heart had already been quietly captured elsewhere.

The brothers quietly furnished the Nicklebys a cheerful cottage and pressed small gifts upon them at every turn, asking nothing in return. Therefore the family that Ralph had cast out in contempt was gathered up and cherished by strangers who had known real goodness.

He had once glimpsed a beautiful, grave young woman, Madeline Bray, humbly pleading for any work that might feed her ailing father. Her sorrowful face had haunted him ever since. Therefore he begged the Cheerybles to help her, not knowing they already secretly did.

Madeline's father, Walter Bray, was a selfish, ruined gentleman kept breathing only by his daughter's endless devotion. He lay buried under crushing debts — and those debts, by dark chance, were held jointly by Ralph Nickleby and by a withered old miser named Arthur Gride.

Now Gride had ferreted out a hidden secret: Madeline was, in truth, the unknowing heiress to a concealed fortune she had never dreamed of. Therefore the ancient miser resolved to marry the girl himself and pocket her inheritance before she could ever learn it existed.

Ralph eagerly joined the plot for his cut of the spoils. Together the two grasping men bore down upon Walter Bray, vowing to erase all his debts if only he would order his daughter to wed Gride — a husband old enough to be her grandsire.

Remember who wants what: Gride wants Madeline's secret fortune, Ralph wants his share, and Bray wants only release from his debts. To free her dying father from a debtor's cell, Madeline bowed her head and agreed to the loathsome marriage.

She would sell herself to buy her father's peace. Therefore the wedding was fixed. Nicholas learned of it with horror and rushed to Gride's gloomy house, pleading with Madeline to refuse — offering himself, offering flight, offering anything but this. Still her sense of duty held.

Then, on the very morning appointed for the wedding, fate itself intervened. Walter Bray, climbing the stairs to give his daughter away, staggered, cried out, and dropped dead upon the instant. Therefore the marriage his debt had forced could no longer take place.

The cruel bargain shattered with him. Free at last, and now revealed by the Cheerybles' patient inquiries to be the true heiress after all, Madeline was carried out of that house of misers by Nicholas himself. Gride's whole scheme had crumbled in his clutching hands.

With her father buried and her fortune restored, Madeline was free at last to love where her heart had always leaned. Therefore the affection she and Nicholas had guarded through danger and grief could finally bloom openly, in the warm shelter of the Cheerybles' care.

But the buried past struck back without warning. Squeers, down in London upon Ralph's secret business, spotted Smike alone in a busy street and seized him, dragging the terrified boy off to be caged and broken once again. Therefore Nicholas's gentle friend was torn away.

Yet John Browdie, a big, hearty Yorkshireman who had befriended Nicholas up north, chanced to be visiting the city. Learning of the capture, Browdie broke Smike loose by night and sent him laughing back to safety, cheating Squeers of his miserable prey once more.

Smike was safe among the Nicklebys now, but he was fading fast before their eyes. He had given his whole starved, faithful heart to Kate, loving her hopelessly and in silence. And a slow sickness of the lungs, bred in Dotheboys' cold, was consuming him.

Nicholas carried his friend to the green country where he himself had once been a boy, and nursed him there tenderly, like a true brother. But the frail, worn creature could not be saved. Therefore Smike died in Nicholas's arms, at peace, blessing the only friend he had ever known.

Smike went down to his quiet grave never once knowing his own true story. But a haggard, broken man named Brooker, who had long ago served Ralph in secret, still carried a terrible truth about that abandoned, unloved boy — a truth that would ruin his old master.

Meanwhile Sir Mulberry Hawk's endless cruelties came due. His weak companion, Lord Verisopht, sickened at last of the man and dared to defend Kate's honour aloud against him. Therefore the two rakes quarrelled bitterly, and their bad blood came, at cold dawn, to a duel.

In that grey morning field Hawk shot Lord Verisopht dead, then fled across the Channel to hide from the law. The foolish young lord's single decent act had cost him his life, and Hawk vanished forever into disgrace, exile, and shame.

Old Arthur Gride, cheated of his heiress bride, was far from finished being punished. His grim housekeeper, Peg Sliderskew, stole away the very deeds that concealed Madeline's fortune, and the miser's own boundless greed began to unravel tightly around his throat.

Desperate, Ralph and Squeers schemed together to recover those stolen papers and keep Madeline poor. But the Cheerybles' watchful agents caught Squeers red-handed in the act. Therefore the schoolmaster was seized, convicted, and transported, and Dotheboys Hall's dark reign was numbered at last.

When news of Squeers's downfall at last reached Yorkshire, the starved and beaten boys of Dotheboys rose in open revolt. They ducked hard Mrs. Squeers in the washing-trough, overturned the tyrant's table, and fled in a joyful mob across the open moors. Therefore the wicked school broke apart forever.

Now every last thread drew tight around Ralph Nickleby. His schemes lay in wreckage, his debtors had slipped free, his cruel allies had fallen one by one. At last the Cheerybles summoned the moneylender and set before him the secret Brooker had carried across the silent years.

Long ago, it emerged, Ralph had secretly married and fathered a single son, then hidden the sickly child away and let the world believe him dead. That cast-off boy, raised in nameless misery and finally shipped to Dotheboys Hall, had been none other than Smike.

The wretched drudge that Ralph had hunted, mocked, and helped to torture was his own living flesh and blood. And Smike was already dead — dead loathing the very name of Nickleby. Therefore this blow struck far deeper than any ruin of mere money ever could.

Ralph reeled home through the black streets, his fortune wholly gone, his crimes laid bare, his one and only child dead through his own long neglect and hatred. There was no coin left anywhere to comfort him, and not one living soul to mourn his passing.

Alone in the topmost room of his cold, silent house, staring up at an iron hook where his lost boy might once have played, Ralph Nickleby fixed a rope about his own neck. Therefore the moneylender ended his life by his own hand, ruined utterly, hated by all.

The lesser villains reaped their bitter harvests too. Mr. Mantalini, having squandered every fortune he could marry, flatter, or borrow his way toward, sank at last into rags — reduced, it is said, to grinding a laundry mangle by the hour for a coarse new mistress.

And Arthur Gride, the shrivelled miser, still hoarding his gold behind bolted doors and shuttered windows, was murdered in the dead of night by robbers who broke in to plunder his hidden treasure. His lifelong greed had bought him nothing but a lonely, violent end.

But for the good and the faithful, the sun at last broke gloriously through. Nicholas married his beloved Madeline, the very heiress he had loved dearly when she seemed penniless. Their union crowned a love that had never once bent its knee to money or to fear.

And Kate, who had borne Hawk's insults with such wounded grace, married Frank Cheeryble, the brothers' warm and open-hearted nephew. Therefore the two Nickleby children found, in plain and honest affection, every single thing their uncle's cold-counted gold had never once been able to buy.

The good Cheerybles blessed both marriages and made Nicholas a full partner in their thriving house. Mrs. Nickleby, forever rambling, muddled, and fond, grew old amid a crowd of grandchildren, and faithful Newman Noggs, freed forever of Ralph, at last stood tall and proud among true friends.

Only one gentle shadow still lingered upon all that hard-won happiness. Each returning spring the children were led out to a quiet country grave, and there taught to speak with tenderness and love of poor Smike — the lost, unwanted boy who, in the end, had found a family.

What it means

Here stands Dickens's plain verdict: cruelty and greed devour themselves from within, while simple kindness quietly compounds into everything truly worth having. Ralph counted men in coins and died alone by a rope; Nicholas spent himself freely on the helpless, and inherited a whole living world of love.

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