affirmative. ‘Are they very theatrical people here?’ he asks Crummles of the folk of Portsmouth. ‘Far from it,’ reports Crummles, moodily. ‘I pity them,’ says Mrs Crummles. ‘So do I,’ Nicholas concurs, ‘if they have no relish for theatrical entertainment, properly conducted.’
As an actor, Nicholas responds vividly, as Dickens did, to the heroic act of performance, to rising above your situation, getting on stage and giving it your all, which was essentially, of course, Dickens’s own approach to life. It is generous and dangerous and not like normal life. The artificiality of the theatrical environment makes it, paradoxically, more real: it is actually happening before your eyes, people are making it happen for you. The moment of performance, the coming together of the elements, the power of impersonation, are all practical mysteries that heighten experience and charge life with an electrical current of excitement. To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination. ‘Is this a theatre?’ doubts Smike one morning when Nicholas slips him onto the stage where Crummles and co. will be playing that night. ‘I thought it was a blaze of light and finery,’ to which Nicholas gives the superb reply, revealing the measure of Dickens’s understanding of the essential nature of the theatre: ‘Why, so it is … but not by day, Smike, not by day.’ Dickens is not so stage-struck, though, as to be unaware of the practical realities of the business, drily noting the ‘remarkable fact in theatrical history, but one long since established beyond dispute, that it is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get into it.’
His view of the stage is not unsatirical, but his affection for its denizens and their activities is deep. Crummles’s theatre, bordering as it does on vaudeville, and with more than a nod in the direction of the end of the pier, is not exactly, as Paul Schlicke remarks, the Royal Shakespeare Company, but it is – like most theatre companies – a broad church, able to encompass not only the tumblers, the dancers, and Miss Ninetta Crummles, the Infant Phenomenon herself, but also the ‘First Tragedy Man’ who, when he played Othello, ‘used to black himself all over’. Vincent Crummles is rather in awe of this pioneering Method actor: ‘that’s feeling a part and going into it as if you meant it. It isn’t usual – more’s the pity,’ he adds, mournfully echoing the general view, frequently expressed in the novel’s theatre sections, of the sad decline of the English stage. Everyone in Crummles’s group is a readily identifiable theatre type and has his or her counterpart in any modern company. Perhaps the most startling portrait is that of Folair, who dances the part of The Savage. Dickens paints him unmistakably as a bitchy theatre queen, spreading poison wherever he goes; the spirit of Folair, alas, lives still. The theatre is, as has perhaps been too often observed, a family, and all families, as Dickens more than most had cause to know, have their problem children (and problem parents). But a feeling of family was central to the Eden from which he had once been exiled, and for a return of which he ardently hoped, and the theatre supplied it.
Beyond his sense of the theatre-as-world was his sense of the world-as-theatre, of the charivari, the endless parade, each man in his time playing many parts, absurd, grotesque, battered, damaged, ridiculous, briefly glorious. It is a carnival view of life, in which we are all, like members of a theatre company, dependent on each other, all limbs of one body, all human, and therefore all flawed, all beautiful. There are, too, as part of this more or less medieval view of the great theatre of the world, devils and angels, playing havoc with the endless parade, creating a pressing and permanent tension between Nicholas Nickleby’s carnival spirit and its morbid sentimentality, a tension highly characteristic of the nascent Victorian era in which it was written, and one which was central to Dickens himself; he never quite resolved it to the end. But for the most part the book is a kind of corybantic frieze of all-too-human mankind, its characters parading unforgettably past us, insinuating themselves permanently into our imaginations, populating our mental landscapes. Its spirit seems to hark back, past Shakespeare to Chaucer, enabling Dickens to embody something quintessentially and irrepressibly English.
Nickleby was of course, adapted for the stage, too, long before the final instalment was written, notably by the prolific William Moncrieff. Dickens struck back in the later pages of the novel itself, speaking of ‘a literary gentleman who had dramatised in his time 247 novels as fast as they had come out – some of them faster than they had come out’. Taking this as a personal taunt, Moncrieff (still before Nickleby’s serialization was finished) issued an aggrieved statement challenging Dickens to end the book ‘better than I have done’ after which he promised to ‘sink into the primitive mire from which I have for a moment attempted to emerge by catching at the hem of his garment’. Punching below the belt, Moncrieff, alluding to the plays the very young Dickens had written, adds:
having himself unsuccessfully tried the drama, there is some excuse for his petulance towards its professors; but it is somewhat illiberal and ungrateful that, being indebted to the stage for so many of his best characters – Sam Weller from Beasley’s Boarding House, for instance – he should deny it a few in return.
Beasley and his boarding house have disappeared from view, so it is impossible to know what debt the immortal Sam owed them for his existence, but in general terms Moncrieff was not wrong: Dickens owed a great deal to current theatrical conceptions in his creation of character. But he transformed those prototypes out of all recognition, giving them – as in the case of Sam Weller – immortality in exchange for the shallow, cardboard lives they had known before. In any event, despite Moncrieff’s hope that Dickens would indulge ‘in a little more generosity of feeling towards his humbler brethren of the quill’, there was no reply. Pirate adaptation was, after all, a very minor corner of his ever-expanding kingdom of art.
He was increasingly stepping outside of the parameters of his art. Not content with fearlessly addressing, in his novels, the injustices of the day – especially those perpetrated against the young – he was starting to speak on the burning issues of his time in his own person. More and more, he sought the most direct possible contact with his readers, whom he took to be no less than the entire population of the British Isles; to them were soon added the rest of the English-speaking peoples. Not much later, his readership would encompass all of Europe, and beyond. Translation into German and French started in 1838: the same year some episodes of Pickwick were rendered into Russian. He was immediately embraced by that huge constituency as a uniquely vivid spokesman for the disadvantaged. His first public speech, to the Literary Fund Anniversary Dinner, did not concern itself with the woes of suffering mankind, however, but with the inequities of his own profession, on whose behalf he now publicly took up cudgels. Throughout his life as a writer, he strove to increase both the financial rewards and the status of his fellow professionals: self-respect was one of the cornerstones of his view of life, and he felt keenly the factors that militated against it. He campaigned tirelessly against the disadvantages under which writers laboured; he also felt deep compassion for those who, like Walter Scott, had fallen on hard times. His speech to the Fund was gracious and modest (‘the flattering encouragement he had received from his literary brethren had nerved him to future exertions, smoothed his path to the station he had gained, and animated his endeavour not to do other than justice to their kind praise’).
Like every speech he ever made in his life, it was extempore, with no reference to notes. He very soon acquired the reputation of being the best public speaker of his time. He had taken pains to master the art, approaching it with scientific precision. On the morning of a day on which he was giving a speech, he once told Wilkie Collins, he would take a long walk during which he would establish the various headings to be dealt with. Then, in his mind’s eye, he would arrange them as on a cart wheel, with himself as the hub and each heading a spoke. As he dealt with a subject, the relevant imaginary spoke would drop out. When there were no more spokes, the speech was at an end. Close observers of Dickens noticed that while he was speaking he would make a quick action of the finger at the end of each topic, as if he were knocking the spoke away. When he listened to the speakers that preceded him, he could be seen following their words with an almost imperceptible action, as if he were taking them down in shorthand.
