ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. There are comparatively few monographs on a single Dickens novel and fewer on any of the early novels. Writing one on Nicholas Nickleby convinces me that the text already has its sense of what it wants to do: Dickens does not have to learn to write a novel while he is using everything he knew. Opposition to the ‘unities’ makes light fun of literary pretentiousness, but it is also a principled refusal of form. London squares, and fashion, and the snobbery which thinks of the ‘birthplace’ as an access to understanding Shakespeare, and so makes a fetish of the seen and the factual, are implicitly rejected in the creation of the grotesque, as the ‘absolute comic’ creating what could never have been seen before. In Gradgrind’s classroom, the orthodoxy is that ‘what is called taste is only another name for fact’.
