"Nicholas Starts for Yorkshire," Phiz's third illustration for "Nicholas Nickleby"

May 1838) (original) (raw)

Passage Illustrated: The Picaresque Hero off to seek his Fortune — as a Teacher

With these hasty adieux, Nicholas mounted nimbly to his seat, and waved his hand as gallantly as if his heart went with it.

At this moment, when the coachman and guard were comparing notes for the last time before starting, on the subject of the way-bill; when porters were screwing out the last reluctant sixpences, itinerant newsmen making the last offer of a morning paper, and the horses giving the last impatient rattle to their harness; Nicholas felt somebody pulling softly at his leg. He looked down, and there stood Newman Noggs, who pushed up into his hand a dirty letter.

"What’s this?" inquired Nicholas.

"Hush!" rejoined Noggs, pointing to Mr. Ralph Nickleby, who was saying a few earnest words to Squeers, a short distance off: "Take it. Read it. Nobody knows. That’s all."

"Stop!" cried Nicholas.

"No," replied Noggs.

Nicholas cried stop, again, but Newman Noggs was gone. [Chapter V, "Nicholas starts for Yorkshire. Of his Leave-taking and his Fellow-Travellers, and what befell them on the Road," 75]

Commentary: Nicholas boards a stage coach bound for Greta Bridge, Yorkshire

Technological revolutions were transforming the north of England, particularly Yorkshire, from remote hinterland to a regional easily accessed by rail and Royal mail. These transportation and telecommunications innovations were being introduced at the very time Dickens was writing his third novel, even though he has set the action of the story to the mid-1820s. When he and his illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne, undertook on-site investigative research for this novel-with-a-purpose, in February 1838, they took a coach along the very route that the fictional eiron takes, describing the actual journey in Chapters 5 and 6. Their point of departure, like Nichiolas's, was the old Saracen's Head Inn in the vicinity of St. Paul's Cathedral. This coaching inn had been the London terminus for north-bound coaches from at least the sixteenth century. At the outset of Britain's Railway Age, Dickens merely used that passing reality as the start of the journey to Greta Bridge for Headmaster Squeers and his newly-acquired charges, and, of course, for his new teacher. The inn later became a police station. After such a long and distinguished history (for here Samuel Pepys and Jonathan Swift drank regularly), The Saracen’s Head could not survive into the new transportation era, and was finally demolished two years before Dickens's death.

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1839.

Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Ed. Andrew Lang. Illustrated by 'Phiz' (Hablot Knight Browne). The Gadshill Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897. 2 vols.

Steig, Michael. Chapter 2. "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. 24-50.

Vann, J. Don. "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, April 1838-October 1839." New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Page 63.

Created 9 April 2002

Last modified 4 April 2021