Nicholas Nickleby : With Original And Classic Illustrate

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Nicholas Nickleby : With Original And Classic Illustrate

Product Description Though only the third novel Dickens wrote, "Nicholas Nickleby" is a well-crafted and significant precursor to his other great works. The tale follows the fortunes of the young man Nicholas, the son of an imprudent gentleman who leaves his family without resources. Fiercely devoted to his mother and sisters, as well as his true friends, Nicholas is occasionally emotional and even violent, yet always idealistic. He seeks the aid of his villainous uncle, Ralph Nickleby, who comes to hate his nephew and wish him serious harm. Nicholas goes through more than one attempt at employment, being first disgusted by the abuse of the schoolmaster Squeers, later surprised by the acting and antics of Vincent Crummles, and finally assisted by the merchant Cheeryble brothers. Dickens employs a cast of characters, both good and unsavory, in this adventurous story of Nicholas Nickleby, who helps those in need, despises wickedness, grows in self-awareness, and even experiences falling in love in a plot that is by turns melodramatic and comedic. An uplifting tale full of poignant indictments on Victorian society, Dickens' work has all the best characteristics of his classics. From Library Journal Nicholas Nickleby, a gentleman's son fallen upon hard times, must set out to make his way in the world. Along the way various older, money-grubbing villains attempt to injure him. Eventually, with the assistance of kind patrons, he and his family achieve economic security and a happy home. Sounds rather trite, doesn't it? Not with characters written by Dickens (Hard Times, Audio Reviews, LJ 5/1/98). Schoolmaster Squeers would make a fine poster boy for child abusers. Ralph Nickleby's initial desire to injure Nicholas gradually develops into a full-blown obsession. Then there are the kind Cheeryble brothers, the gentle, much-abused Smike, and a host of other friends who provide comic relief. Martin Jarvis does an outstanding job of reading this book. His ingenues sound young (a frequent problem area for male readers) while his villains are deliciously evil. The only problems are with the abridgment. In several places, choppy editing has left brief, disconnected scenes and/or character cameos without relevance to the abridged tale. Still, this is a charming presentation and a wonderful bridge to a classic book. Recommended for public and academic libraries.AI. Pour-El, Iowa State Univ., Ames Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Publisher The classic, definitive, world-famous Nonesuch Press edition of 1937, finally available again and bound in leather and linen. The text in these stunning volumes is taken from the 1867 Chapman and Hall edition, which became known as the Charles Dickens edition and was the last edition to be corrected by the author himself. The Nonesuch edition contains full-color illustrations selected by Dickens himself, by artists including Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"), George Cruikshank, John Leech, Robert Seymour, and George Cattermole. The Nonesuch Dickens reproduces the original elegance of these beautiful editions. Books are printed on natural cream-shade high quality stock, quarter bound in bonded leather with cloth sides, include a ribbon marker, and feature special printed endpapers. Each volume is wrapped in a protective, clear acetate jacket. The books are available as individual volumes, or as sets. The six-volume set contains Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Christmas Books, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations together with Hard Times. The three-volume set contains A Tale of Two Cities, Little Dorrit, and The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Review Two hundred years after his birth on February 7, 1812, Naxos AudioBooks complete their marathon tribute of publishing all 16 of the major novels in abridged and unabridged form, available as CDs and downloads. If you listen to one CD a day for the next year, you will have heard all of them, and given yourself a fine regular dose of laughter, to say nothing of occasional tears. The latest to appear is an unabridged narration of Nicholas Nickleby, a novel best known for its exposé of the appalling Yorkshire boarding schools, typified by Dotheboys Hall and the ghastly Wackford Squeers. But there is much, much more to it. With the Crummles theatre troupe, Dickens celebrates the acting life he so nearly turned to; with the cold-hearted Ralph Nickleby and his degenerate associates he satirises grasping financiers and vicious men-about-town. David Horovitch gives the performance of his life, unhurried, savouring every character and incident to the full. --Christina Hardyment - The TimesNaxos AudioBooks is putting out new readings to celebrate the classic writings of Charles Dickens. This is one volume in their series. And what a celebration it is! Nicholas Nickleby is Dickens in all his glory. There are characters that are positively Dickensian - the miserly lender Ralph Nickleby, the cruel schoolmaster Mr Squeers and his wretched family, the lecherous Sir Mulberry Hawke and his sidekick, Lord Verysoft, the absurd sweatshop owners Mr and Mrs Mantolini and their vicious foreman, Ms Knag. These are balanced by the many kindly and generous characters who innumerable times come to the rescue when all seems hopeless - Nicholas himself, his lovely sister Kate, the kindly Cheeryible brothers and their many loyal friends and allies. Dickens's writing brings all of them to life against a vivid backdrop of 19th-century England. The plot has many twists and turns, and a satisfying conclusion. Distinguished British stage, film and television actor David Horovitch's theatrical, fully voiced reading of this classic is no less than superb. He has vivid and believable voices for each of Dickens's colourful characters and his voice is rich, his intonation clear and his timing impeccable. This long audiobook will provide hours of enjoyment for a wide audience. --Susan Offner, SoundCommentaryThis unabridged audio edition of Dickens's classic novel of poverty, effort, and persistence puts the emphasis on unabridged, clocking in at nearly 40 hours - but dedicated listeners will be rewarded with an engaging and entertaining reading from narrator David Horovitch. In Victorian England, Nicholas Nickleby finds himself penniless after the death of his father. Assisted by his cold and parsimonious uncle, Ralph, Nicholas undergoes an array of trials and adventures - working as a teacher and actor - before finally succeeding in providing for his family. Horovitch wisely doesn't attempt to update or revise the author's familiar world. Instead, he reads with a careful tenor and subtly shaded array of voices that perfectly capture Dickens's prose and characters. Harrumphing and stuttering and tittering, Horovitch turns in a winning performance that fans of the author are sure to enjoy. --Publishers Weekly From AudioFile Anton Lesser is a one-man theater troupe composed of excellent actors. Dickens was a novelist par excellence. And Perry Keenlyside is a sensitive abridger. Between them, they've created a terrific listening experience. This abridgment of one of Dickens's longer and best-loved works is long enough to feel commodious and short enough to keep one listening. It's also seamless. All the plot points and major characters, from noble Nicholas Nickleby to odious Mr. Squeers, are here. Speaking of characters, Anton Lesser voices them so well that it can be unnerving. Surely, one thinks, that decorous female is read by a different actor than the drawling male aristocrat, but it's all Lesser. And he links the dialogue with interesting, well-paced narration. In between sections, a fine selection of classical quartets. Do listen. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine From the Inside Flap Introduction by John Carey From the Back Cover Charles Dickens had an understanding of mid-Victorian society second to none, and genius and energy massive enough to make the absurdities and terrors of that society come alive on the page. Nicholas Nickleby, with its episodes of chicanery in finance and education, and the dramatic intensity with which it tells the story of its open-hearted protagonists - a young brother and sister at sea in a dangerous world - and its frightening villain, the magnificently rendered Ralph Nickleby, represents Dickens at his clear-eyed, indignant and mesmerizing best. About the Author Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Jill Muller’s Introduction to Nicholas NicklebyAppropriately dedicated to actor-manager William Macready, Nicholas Nickleby is the most theatrical of Dickens’s novels. The members of the Crummles troupe of provincial players are only the most honest actors in a huge cast of performers: comedians, tragedians, villains and heroes of melodrama, monologists and mimes. Yet the show business exuberance of the novel is shadowed by a constant awareness of the injustice and cruelty of the world offstage. Dickens knew very well that the clown’s tomfoolery is sometimes a brittle defense against despair. Indeed while working on the early episodes of Nicholas Nickleby, he was also engaged in editing the memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, the most celebrated clown in early Victorian England. Dickens and Grimaldi had much in common: Both men were driven and insecure, obsessively punctual and neat, and haunted by childhood misery. In Nicholas Nickleby, the writer’s two sides, comedian and social reformer, coexist in an exhilarating but sometimes uneasy partnership. Scenes of shocking abuse slide into slapstick and farce. Acts of violence and exploitation are performed by hilarious grotesques. Victims and villains are dogged by their comic doubles.Dickens derives the central plot of Nicholas Nickleby from his own primal scene of childhood abandonment. As in Oliver Twist, the victim-hero is less interesting than many of the characters he encounters, and the sum of incidents and episodes far more entertaining and memorable than the underlying plot. However, the author has plainly learned from the main fault of Oliver Twist, the passivity and colorlessness of the hero, because this time he divides his experience of childhood suffering between two characters, Nicholas and Smike. Oliver’s passivity is bestowed upon Smike, freeing Dickens to place the more dynamic figure of Nicholas at the center of his narrative. Smike, the pitiful, mentally retarded son of Nicholas Nickleby’s chief villain, Ralph Nickleby, is abandoned in infancy to the tender mercies of the Squeers family at their Yorkshire boarding school, Dotheboys Hall. Although eventually rescued by Nicholas, he is too damaged to survive. He dies of a combination of tuberculosis and unrequited love. The novel’s closing scenes of marriages and pastoral contentment yield to a final contemplation of Smike’s grave. The dead boy represents the child victim that Dickens always carried within him, and to whom he would return with still more self-indulgent pathos in the figure of Little Nell in his next novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. Smike’s fate is the fate Dickens believed could have been his if he had lacked the energy and talent that propelled him out of poverty to early fame.In Nicholas, Smike’s cousin and doppelganger, Dickens presents a more robust victim-hero who succeeds, like his creator, in triumphing over humiliation and misfortune. The eponymous protagonist of Nicholas Nickleby is a genteel Victorian version of Tom Jones or Roderick Random, the picaresque heroes of Fielding and Smollett, whose stories were Dickens’s favorite childhood reading. Young, handsome, and brave, forced by his parents’ financial mismanagement to fend for himself in a hostile world, he is also a rather flattering portrait of the artist as a young man. Like Dickens himself, and unlike Smike, Nicholas plays an active role in improving his fortunes; he is clever, resourceful, and quick to defend himself and those he loves from insult or injury. Yet, for all his intelligence and vigor, Nicholas is unable to win back his lost birthright, his identity as a gentleman, without the help of an unconvincing pair of fairy godfathers, the merchant-philanthropists Ned and Charles Cheeryble.Although Dickens himself knew all too well that worldly success is seldom achieved without the exercise of aggressive and competitive instincts, he was at first reluctant to bestow any but noble and generous impulses on his protagonists. Hence his early heroes are no match for the relentless and gleeful malevolence of his villains. For one thing, they are inevitably associated with the values of a romanticized pre-industrial society. In the pre-history of Nicholas Nickleby, the hero’s grandfather, Godfrey Nickleby, marries imprudently for love and is saved from poverty only by a well-timed legacy. His fiscally naive younger son, Nicholas Senior, who chooses to “shun the great world and attach himself to the quiet routine of a country life,” loses his inheritance through risky speculation undertaken on the advice of his wife. The family estate is sold to strangers, Nickleby dies of grief, and his wife and children are left to struggle for subsistence in early Victorian London. When this man’s son, our Nicholas Nickleby, finally becomes “a rich and prosperous merchant,” he turns his back on the thriving city in which his fortune was made in order to “buy his father’s old house” in which “nothing with which there was any association of bygone days was ever removed or changed.” His deepest longings are melancholy and nostalgic; his future is an idealized past. In contrast, Nicholas’s wicked uncle, Ralph Nickleby, throws himself wholeheartedly into capitalism from an early age, progressing from making small-scale loans to his schoolfellows to becoming a director of the blatantly crooked United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company, and a usurer with half of fashionable London in his debt. It is Ralph Nickleby, and not his nephew Nicholas, who embodies the raw, driven energy of the Victorian age, an energy that found voice and expression in Dickens himself. Nicholas Nickleby may represent Dickens’s ideals, but the restless and unscrupulous Ralph, who attributes his avarice to the early shock of his parents’ financial imprudence, also contains more than a trace of his creator.