A variety of attractive Readings might readily have been culled from Nicholas Nickleby’s Life and Adventures. His comical experiences as a strolling-player in the Company of the immortal Crummleses his desperate encounter with Sir Mulberry Hawk on the footboard of the cabriolet his exciting rescue of Madeline from an unholy alliance with Gride, the miser, on the very morning fixed for the revolting marriage his grotesque association for a while with the Kenwigses and their uncle Lilliyick his cordial relations with the Brothers Cheeryble and old Tim Linkinwater any one of these incidents in the career of the most high spirited of all the young heroes of our Novelist, would have far more than simply justified its selection as the theme of one of these illustrative entertainments. Instead of choosing any one of those later episodes in the fictitious history of Nicholas Nickleby, however, the author of that enthralling romance of everyday life, picked out, by preference, the earliest of all his young hero’s experiences those in which, at nineteen years of age, he was brought into temporary entanglement with the domestic economy of Dotheboys Hall, and at the last into personal conflict with its one-eyed principal, the rascally Yorkshire school-master.

The Gadshill collection of thin octavos, comprising the whole series of Readings, includes within it two copies of “Mrs. Gamp” and two copies of “Nicholas Nickleby.” Whereas, on comparing the duplicates of Mrs. Gamp, the two versions appear to be so slightly different that they are all but identical, a marked contrast is observable at a glance between the two Nicklebys. Each Reading is descriptive, it is true, of his sayings and doings at the Yorkshire school. But, even externally, one of the two copies is marked “Short Time,” the love-passages with Miss Squeers bemg entirely struck out, and no mention whatever being made of John Browdie, the corn-factor. The wretched school, the sordid rascal who keeps it, Mrs. Squeers, poor, forlorn Smike, and a few of his scarecrow companions these, in the short-time version, and these alone, constitute the young usher’s surroundings. In here recalling to recollection the “Nicholas Nickleby” Reading at all, however, we select, as a matter of course, the completer version, the one for which the generality of hearers had an evident preference: the abbreviated version being always regarded as capital, so far as it went; but even at the best, with all the go and dash of its rapid delivery, insufficient.

Everything, even, we should imagine, to one un-acquainted with the novel, was ingeniously explained by the Reader in a sentence or two at starting. Nicholas Nickleby was described as arriving early one November morning, at the Saracen’s Head, to join, in his new capacity (stripling though he was) as scholastic assistant, Mr. Squeers, “the cheap the terribly cheap” Yorkshire schoolmaster. The words just given in inverted commas are those written in blue ink in the Novelist’s handwriting on the margin of his longer Reading copy. As also are the following words, epitomising in a breath the position of the young hero when the story commences “Inexperienced, sanguine, and thrown upon the world with no adviser, and his bread to win,” the manuscript interpolation thus intimates: the letterpress then relating in its integrity that Nicholas had engaged himself as tutor at Mr. Wackford Squeers’s academy, on the strength of the memorable advertisement in the London newspapers. The advertisement, that is, comprising within it the long series of accomplishments imparted to the students at Dotheboys Hall, including “single-stick” (if required), together with “fortification, and every other branch of classical literature.” The Reader laying particular stress, among other items in the announcement, upon “No extras, no vacations, and diet unparalleled;” and upon the finishing touch (having especial reference to the subject in hand), “An able assistant wanted: annual salary, L5! A master of arts would be preferred!” Immediately after this, in the Reading, came the description of Mr. Squeers, several of the particulars in regard to whose villainous appearance always told wonderfully: as, where it was said “he had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two;” or, again, where in reference to his attire it having been mentioned that his coat-sleeves were a great deal too-long and his trousers a great deal too short it was added that “he appeared ill at ease in his clothes, and as if he were in a perpetual state of astonishment at finding himself so respectable.” Listening to the Reader, we were there, in the coffee-room of the Saracen’s Head the rascal Squeers in the full enjoyment of his repast of hot toast and cold round of beef, the while five little boys sat opposite hungrily and thirstily expectant of their share in a miserable meal of two-penn’orth of milk and thick bread and butter for three. “Just fill that mug up with lukewarm water, William, will you?” “To the wery top, sir? Why the milk will be drownded!” “Serve it right for being so dear!” Squeers adding with a chuckle, as he pounded away at his own coffee and viands, “Conquer your passions, boys, and don’t be eager after wittles.” To see the Reader as Squeers, stirring the mug of lukewarm milk and water, and then smacking his lips with an affected relish after tasting a spoonful of it, before reverting to his own fare of buttered toast and beef, was to be there with Nicholas, a spectator on that wintry morning in the Snow Hill Tavern, watching the guttling pedagogue and the five little famished expectants. Only when Squeers, immediately before the signal for the coach starting, wiped his mouth, with a self-satisfied “Thank God for a good breakfast,” was the mug rapidly passed from mouth to mouth at once ravenously and tantalizingly. The long and bitter journey on the north road, through the snow, was barely referred to in the Reading; due mention, however, being made, and always tellingly, of Mr. S queers’s habit of getting down at nearly every stage “to stretch his legs, he said, and as he always came back with a very red nose, and composed himself to sleep directly, the stretching seemed to answer.” Immediately on the wayfarers’ arrival at Dotheboys, Mrs. Squeers, arrayed in a dimity night-jacket, herself a head taller than Mr. Squeers, was always introduced with great effect, as seizing her Squeery by the throat and giving him two loud kisses in rapid succession, like a postman’s knock. The audience then scarcely had time to laugh over the interchange of questions and answers between the happy couple, as to the condition of the cows and pigs, and, last of all, the boys, ending with Madame’s intimation that “young Pitcher’s had a fever,” followed up by Squeers’s characteristic exclamation, “No! damn that chap, he’s always at something of that sort” when there came the first glimpse of poor Smike, in a skeleton suit, and large boots originally made for tops, too patched and ragged now for a beggar; around his throat “a tattered child’s frill only half concealed by a coarse man’s neckerchief.” Anxiously observing Squeers, as he emptied his overcoat of letters and papers, the boy did this, we were told, with an air so dispirited and hopeless, that Nicholas could hardly bear to watch him. “Have you did anybody has nothing been heard about me?” were then (in the faintest, frightened voice!) the first stammered utterances of the wretched drudge. Bullied into silence by the brutal schoolmaster, Smike limped away with a vacant smile, when we heard the female scoundrel in the dimity night-jacket saying, “I’ll tell you what, Squeers, I think that young chap’s turning silly.”

Inducted into the loathsome school-room on the following morning by Squeers himself, Nicholas, first of all, we were informed, witnessed the manner in which that arrant rogue presided over “the first class in English spelling and philosophy,” practically illustrating his mode of tuition by setting the scholars to clean the w-i-n win, d-e-r-s ders, winders to weed the garden to rub down the horse, or get rubbed down themselves if they didnt do it well. Nicholas assisted in the afternoon, moreover, at the report given by Mr. Squeers on his return homewards after his half-yearly visit to the metropolis. Beginning, though this last-mentioned part of the Reading did, with Squeerss ferocious slash on the desk with his cane, and his announcement, in the midst of a death-like silence

“Let any boy speak a word without leave, and I’ll take the skin off that boy’s back!” many of the particulars given immediately afterwards by the Reader were, in spite of the surrounding misery, irresistibly provocative of laughter. Ample justification for this, in truth, is very readily adduceable. Mr. Squeers having, through his one eye, made a mental abstract of Cobbey’s letter, for example, Cobbey and the whole school were thus feelingly informed of its contents “Oh! Cobbey’s grandmother is dead, and his uncle John has took to drinking. Which is all the news his sister sends, except eighteen-pence which will just pay for that broken square of glass! Mrs. Squeers, my dear, will you take the money?” Another while, Graymarsh’s maternal aunt, who “thinks Mrs. Squeers must be a angel,” and that Mr. Squeers is too good for this world, “would have sent the two pairs of stockings, as desired, but is short of money, so forwards a tract instead,” and so on; “Ah-! a delightful letter very affecting, indeed!” quoth Squeers. “It was affecting in one sense!” observed the Reader; “for Graymarsh’s maternal aunt was strongly supposed by her more intimate friends to be his maternal parent!” Perhaps the epistle from Mobbs’s mother-in-law was the best of all, however the old lady who “took to her bed on hearing that he wouldn’t eat fat;” and who “wishes to know by an early post where he expects to go to, if he quarrels with his vittles?” adding, “This was told her in the London newspapers not by Mr. Squeers, for he is too kind and too good to set anybody against anybody!”

As an interlude, overflowing with fun, came Miss Squeers’s tea-drinking the result of her suddenly falling in love with the new usher, and that chiefly by reason of the straightness of his legs, “the general run of legs at Dotheboys Hall being crooked.” How John Browdie (with his hair damp from washing) appeared upon the occasion in a clean shirt “whereof thecollars might have belonged to some giant ancestor,” and greeted the assembled company, including his intended, Tilda Price, “with a grin that even the collars could not conceal,” the creator of the worthy Yorkshireman went on to describe, with a gusto akin to the relish with which every utterance of John Browdie’s was caught up by the listeners. Whether he spoke in good humour or in ill humour, the burly cornfactor was equally delightful. One while saying, laughingly, to Nicholas, across the bread-and-butter plate which they had just been emptying between them, “Ye wean’t get bread-and-butther ev’ry neight, I expect, mun. Ecod, they dean’t put too much intif ’em. Ye’ll be nowt but skeen and boans if you stop here long eneaf. Ho! ho! ho!” all this to Nicholas’s unspeakable indignation. Or, another while, after chafing in jealousy for a long time over the coquetries going on between Tilda Price and Nicholas the Yorkshireman flattening his own nose with his clenched fist again and again, “as if to keep his hand in till he had an opportunity of exercising it on the nose of some other gentleman,” until asked merrily by his betrothed to keep his glum silence no longer, but to say something: “Say summat?” roared John Browdie, with a mighty blow on the table; “Weal, then! what I say ’s this Dang my boans and boddy, if I stan’ this ony longer! Do ye gang whoam wi’ me; and do yon loight and toight young whipster look sharp out for a brokken head next time he cums under my hond. Cum whoam, tell’e, cum whoam!” After Smike’s running away, and his being brought back again, had been rapidly recounted, what nearly every individual member of every audience in attendance at this Reading was eagerly on the watch for all along, at last, in the fullness of time, arrived, the execrable Squeers receiving, instead of administering, a frightful beating, in the presence of the whole school; having carefully provided himself beforehand, as all were rejoiced to remember, with “a fearful instrument of flagellation, strong, supple, wax-ended, and new!”

So real are the characters described by Charles Dickens in his life-like fictions, and so exactly do the incidents he relates as having befallen them resemble actual occurrences, that we recall to recollection at this moment the delight with which the late accomplished Lady Napier once related an exact case in point, appealing, as she did so, to her husband, the author of the “Peninsular War,” to corroborate the-accuracy of her retrospect! Telling how she perfectly well remembered, when the fourth green number of “Nicholas Nickleby” was just out, one of her home group, who had a moment before caught sight of the picture of the flogging in a shop-window, rushed in with the startling announcement as though he were bringing with him the news of some great victory “What do you think? Nicholas has thrashed Squeers!” As the Novelist read this chapter, or rather the condensation of this chapter, it was for all the world like assisting in person at that sacred and refreshing rite!

“Is every boy here?”

Yes, every boy was there, and so was every observant listener, in eager and knowing what was coming in delighted expectation. As Squeers was represented as “glaring along the lines,” to assure himself that every boy really was there, what time “every eye drooped and every head cowered down,” the Reader, instead of uttering one word of what the ruffianly schoolmaster ought then to have added: “Each boy keep to his place. Nickleby! you go to your desk, sir!” instead of saying one syllable of this, contented himself with obeying his own manuscript marginal direction, in one word Pointing! The effect of this simple gesture was startling particularly when, after the momentary hush with which it was always accompanied, he observed quietly, “There was a curious expression in the usher’s face, but he took his seat without opening his lips in reply.” Then, when the schoolmaster had dragged in the wretched Smike by the collar, “or rather by that fragment of his jacket which was nearest the place where his collar ought to have been,” there was a horrible relish in his saying, over his shoulder for a moment, “Stand a little out of the way, Mrs. Squeers, my dear; I’ve hardly got room enough!” The instant one cruel blow had fallen “Stop!” was cried in a voice that made the rafters ring even the lofty rafters of St. James’s Hall.

Squeers, with the glare and snarl of a wild beast. “Who cried stop?”

Nicholas. “I did! This must not go on!”

Squeers, again, with a frightful look. “Must not go on?”

Nicholas. “Must not! Shall not! I will prevent it!”

Then came Nicholas Nickleby’s manly denunciation of the scoundrel, interrupted one while for an instant by Squeers screaming out, “Sit down, you beggar!” and followed at its close by the last and crowning outrage, consequent on a violent outbreak of wrath on the part of Squeers, who spat at him and struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture: when Nicholas, springing upon him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat don’t we all exult in the remembrance of it? “beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.”

After that climax has been attained, two other particulars are alone worthy of being recalled to recollection in regard to this Reading. First, the indescribable heartiness of John Browdie’s cordial shake-of-the-hand with Nicholas Nickleby on their encountering each other by accident upon the high road. “Shake honds? Ah! that I weel!” coupled with his ecstatic shout (so ecstatic that his horse shyed at it), “Beatten schoolmeasther! Ho! ho! ho! Beatten schoolmeasther! Who ever heard o’ the loike o’ that, noo? Give us thee hond agean, yoongster! Beatten schoolmeasther! Dang it, I loove thee for ’t!” Finally, and as the perfecting touch of tenderness between the two cousins, then unknown to each other as such, in the early morning light at Boroughbridge, we caught a glimpse of Nicholas and Smike passing, hand in hand, out of the old barn together.