ABSTRACT
Nicholas Nickleby, unlike Pickwick Papers, contains comparatively little on either religion or the law, though Ralph Nickleby threatens that ‘the protracted and wearing anxiety and expense of the law in its most oppressive for its torture from hour to hour, its weary days and sleepless nights’ will be inflicted on Nicholas, making him, under its sheer repetitive force, mad and a debtor. He assumes that the law, as the expression of society’s ‘symbolic order’, will be on his side. And Dickens comments on the strike in Lancashire of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, saying the men 'have fallen into an unlucky way of trusting their affairs to contentious men who work them up into a state of conglomeration and irritation'. The same fictions, pretending not to know the same hypocrisy the same power of 'conglomeration' maintain Dotheboys' Hall.
