ABSTRACT
None of Dickens’s novels is innocent of topical appeal. His naturally keen eyes were sharpened by a journalist’s training to render his account of contemporary men and manners, and his sympathies were trained in the same school to detect social abuses. In the early novels he followed the practice of his master Smollett and kept shifting his scene to permit the light to play on a wide diversity of experiences. Thus in the first number of Nicholas Nickleby we are prepared, by meeting Squeers, for a visit to Dotheboys Hall; but we have already attended a public meeting held ‘to take into consideration the propriety of petitioning Parliament in favour of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company’; and later in the novel we are to learn what life is like in a strolling players’ troupe. There is no connexion between Squeers’s slum and Crummles’s more genial slum except that Nicholas Nickleby lives for a time in each—the Company Meeting he did not even attend—and there might have been even greater diversity of scene, if Dickens had acted upon an impulse, after a visit to Manchester, of striking a blow for the cotton-mill operatives. 319
