ABSTRACT
About two-thirds of the way through Charles Dickens's last picaresque novel, Nicholas Nickleby, the titular hero comes home. Not quite a return, because he has never felt himself to be at hom e in London, this journey is nonetheless a family reunion, central to the novel's imagination of domesticity. Since his exile by his uncle to the north of England and to the contingent employment and tragicom ic wanderings th a t place the novel w ith in the picaresque tradition, Nicholas's one thought has been to provide a hom e for his m other and sister. W ith the help of the avuncular Cheeryble brothers, whom he meets at an employment office and who offer him both a job and a cottage, Nicholas is able to realize his - and, seemingly, the novel's - domestic ideal. Not only is Nicholas finally reunited with his relatives; he is able to bring with him and into the household his friend and fellow traveler Smike, whose abuse at the hands of Nicholas's first employer has turned him into one of the psychologically damaged schoolboys for whose depictions Dickens is famous. Smike's inclusion in the Nickleby household simultaneously celebrates the capaciousness of family and what I will call the family idiom - those words with w hich our culture is so rich th a t designate familial relations - while pointing to the fundamental exclusiveness at the heart of the definition of family itself. It is the tension in novels by Dickens between the inclusiveness of his families and their problematic relationship to sexuality, gender, and law that will be the topic of this chapter.
