ABSTRACT
Plenty of Dickens’s readers, fewer academic scholars, have written on Nicholas Nickleby. There has been plentiful good amateur interest in Squeers and the Yorkshire schools and on Mr Crummles and his theatrical troupe, much of it enlightening, even essential. In scholarly journals, an impressive examination by Tore Rem, in two separate articles, takes the melodrama of the Crummles and much else in the novel as a cue for discussing the novel’s subtleties, and not as cause for dismissal. In thinking of 'the Dance of Death', as something double, non-isometric, split, indescribable literally, the author considers how Dickens has an insight, as in the Dotheboys Hall quotation, of something new and impossible emerging, whose shocking effect necessitates the antithesis of 'writing well'.
