Around the central story of
Nicholas Nickleby and the misfortunes of his family Dickens created some of his
most wonderful characters: the muddle-headed Mrs. Nickleby, the gloriously
theatrical Crummles, their protegee Miss Petowker, the pretentious Mantalinis,
and the mindlessly cruel Squeers and his wife. Nicholas Nickleby's loose,
haphazard progress harks back to the picaresque novels of the eighteenth
century -- particularly those of Smollett and Fielding -- yet the novel's
exuberant atmosphere of romance, adventure, and freedom is overshadowed by
Dickens' awareness of social ills and financial and class insecurity. However,
as Mark Ford writes in his Introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition,
it is precisely these anxieties that "Nicholas Nickleby so often succeeds
in transfiguring... into the wildest, most exhilarating forms of comedy."”
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