Such direct methods serve him less well in his struggles with his Uncle Ralph, who represents a more nebulous evil that Dickens finds more difficult to define and confront. As Nicholas is the first of Dickens’s earnest young heroes, Ralph is the first in a long line of unyielding capitalists who sacrifice all family feeling to their obsession with business. At the book’s opening Dickens presents Ralph as a leading player in the world of stock market speculation, a shrewd operator in the febrile atmosphere of boom and bust that Dickens probably based on the financial mania of the years 1825/26.12In chapter 2he helps set up the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company, whose very name, Mr Bonney declares, ‘will get the shares up to a premium in ten days’:
‘And when they areat a premium,’ said Mr Ralph Nickleby, smiling.
‘When they are, you know what to do with them as well as any man alive, and how to back quietly out at the right time,’ said Mr Bonney, slapping the capitalist familiarly on the shoulder.
It was in just one of these speculative ventures that his brother (Nicholas’s father) invested and lost his entire capital, and the suggestion of Ralph’s complicity in the destitution of the Nicklebys, though not developed as it might have been in later Dickens, adds an intriguing dimension to the immediate mutual dislike of uncle and nephew.
After meeting his ruined relations, however, Ralph is figured pretty much in terms derived from the age-old convention of the devious, miserly usurer who fiendishly plots the downfall of any who stand in his way. His wars of words with Nicholas are conducted in exactly the brand of high fustian (‘Away! What brings you here – liar – scoundrel – dastard – thief!’) that Dickens so gleefully parodies when describing the melodramas staged by the Crummleses’ theatre troupe. Although Dickens briefly raises the possibility of Ralph’s softening under the influence of his niece, the plot requires him to pursue the role of Nicholas’s unrepentant antagonist to the bitter end. Just before reaching that end, however, he suddenly becomes a vehicle for the free-floating, uncannily observant Dickensian consciousness that registers the world in a manner at once dreamlike and precise. On the way back from the Cheerybles to his ‘last appointment’, he passes a graveyard in which, he remembers, a man who cut his own throat lies buried. Ralph stops, and ‘clasping the iron railings with his hands, looked eagerly in, wondering which might be his grave’. A group of revellers approach, and one of them, ‘a little, weazen, hump-backed man’, begins to dance. Ralph joins in the merriment, and when they leave he resumes ‘his speculation with a new kind of interest’, conjuring up ‘a strong and vivid idea of the man himself, and how he looked, and what had led him to do it, all of which he recalled with ease’. Though the iconography of the scene is far from original, Ralph’s detached, almost impersonal curiosity is compellingly rendered. His obsession with the suicide reminds him how, when a child, he ‘had frequently before him the figure of some goblin he had once seen chalked upon a door’.
That Ralph should come to life in this way only when the storyline no longer needs him is typical of the imaginative economy of Nicholas Nicklebyas a whole. Chesterton once observed that ‘Dickens’s characters are perfect as long as he can keep them out of his stories’.13Of no novel is this truer than Nicholas Nickleby. The opposition of Nicholas and Ralph is too schematic to develop into anything more than a series of increasingly lurid flytings, though one senses beneath it the violent energies of Oedipal strife. It was perhaps as a means of ducking the more radical implications of this conflict that Dickens suddenly decided to award Nicholas not one but two fairy godfathers, and with the arrival on the scene of the Cheerybles – whom Aldous Huxley memorably likened to a couple of ‘gruesome old Peter Pans’14– the book’s central struggle between the forces of good and evil becomes more simplistic still.
Yet swarming irresponsibly and indifferently in the margins of this stiffly creaking narrative are many of the early Dickens’s most hilarious and ungovernable creations. Mrs Nickleby, Mr Mantalini and the Crummleses and company inspire some of Dickens’s greatest comic writing, and their reckless imaginative powers continually call into question the values propagated in the main story.