Its publication schedule is revealing of Dickens’s early career as a novelist. Nicholas Nickleby was published between March 1838 to September 1939 in serial form by Chapman and Hall. Nevertheless, both Nicholas and Kate accept the positions their uncle helps them acquire. For a family of the social status of the Nicklebys, this is a terrible come-down. When he is approached for help, he suggests Nicholas apply for a low-paying job as a teacher in Dotheboys School, where orphans and unfortunate children of second marriages tend to end up at an alarming rate, and that Kate, Nicholas’s sister, should take on seamstress work. Nicholas’s uncle, Ralph, is a successful businessman, but he has little interest in anything beyond finance, is contemptuous of his brother’s business failings and lacks empathy for his brother’s family. Nicholas Nickleby, on the other hand, is nineteen years old, and is forced to consider his family’s future when his father, Godfrey, a poor business man, dies, leaving the family in financially straitened circumstances. Oliver Twist was a young orphan boy who, thanks to the benevolence of Mr Brownlow and those in his sphere, was reinstated with a family and a modest fortune, like a fairy tale come true. Mr Pickwick of The Pickwick Papers (hereafter Pickwick) had been a portly middle-aged gentleman thrust into a picaresque adventure, perhaps against his better judgment. Nickolas Nickleby was Dickens’s third novel, and his first featuring a young man as the eponymous protagonist.
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