"Nicholas Nickleby" (1839) by Charles Dickens

Where the penniless young Nicholas goes up to the wilds of Yorkshire to begin a teaching career and finds himself with am schoolmaster who’s extravagantly and ruthlessly exploiting and mistreating his pupils there, then flees down south after a dramatic show-down to join a roving band of actors and to get involved in many more pages of rousing and often thoroughly comical adventures peopled by a quite extraordinary number of quite wonderful "Dickensian" secondary personages.

Coming on the heels of the hard-hitting Oliver Twist [1] at the height of Dickens’s celebrity, this book had one of the greatest sociological impacts on its times of any novel, as the scandalously self-serving, incompetent and brutal «Yorkshire schools» that it so effectively denounced had been abolished by the time the second edition of the book was published only 10 years later, as Dickens himself proudly announced in his preface to that edition, shown here.

One of Dickens’s best books, with all of the original 39 captioned illustrations by Phiz (the pen-name of Hablot Browne, who had previously illustrated The Pickwick Papers) that first appeared in the 19 monthly magazine instalments that were published between September 1838 and September 1839.

(324,500 words)

An e-book, with all of the illustrations, is available for downloading below.

Nicholas Nickleby (e-book)