Nicholas Nickleby

"It’s deeply frightening. It’s on my list because I am old enough to have been brought up at a time when, at schools, children were quite often frightened of teachers and had good reason to be frightened of teachers, not least because teachers sometimes with very little pretext would physically chastise pupils. What I did not encounter as a pupil or when I was a young teacher were members of staff who beat people sadistically. As I mentioned, I came to hate corporal punishment. But it was very occasionally practised at the first school at which I taught. And, at that time, as a young teacher, I was not horrified. No, they are grotesques. They are not just Dickensian grotesques. They reduce children to chattels, to objects of economic betterment or gratification. I don’t think we can ever seriously imagine that Squeers’s brutal and routine flogging of pupils is anything other than a highly perverse form of exploitation and gratification. He’s getting off on it. When I first read Nicholas Nickleby I had not experienced a severe beating, but I had seen others being severely beaten, and it left a very visceral fear and fascination, as it inevitably does. If you see such a thing it is rooted in your psyche. I think that’s what made me particularly interested in Dickens’ work . I had a wonderful English teacher at prep school when I was about nine who was very keen on Dickens and got us reading parts of it. There are longueurs in Nicholas Nickleby – it’s hardly a perfect book – and the later parts, as in so many of Dickens’s books, are rather anticlimactic, and disappointing, but there are some perceptions in Nicholas Nickleby which are astonishing. “I came to hate corporal punishment. But it was occasionally practised at the first school at which I taught. And, at that time, I was not horrified” If I can allude to just one, there is the moment after Nicholas has taken on Squeers and flogged him in front of his pupils when he was flogging Smike. Nicholas realises it is over. He sets off to London — only to encounter Smike, who has also fled. Smike kneels at Nicholas’ feet and says words to the effect of: ‘take me with you.’ Nicholas says: ‘Why do you kneel to me?’ And Smike says: ‘I will go with you and I will be your loyal servant.’ I think of this as the climax of the whole book. You see in Nicholas’s eyes terror, because it is the ultimate moral test for him. You can hear him thinking: ‘am I going to live my life in service to another? Or am I going to be a young man and recover my life as it was before with my sister and mother?’ Dickens captures something here that is absolutely essential about our choices and our obligations in the world."