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| Originally published: 1838-39 Acquired: December 2012 Read: January 2021 |
This is Dickens's fourth book (after Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers) but second proper novel (after Oliver Twist). I think it shows. It feels very eighteenth century, even though Dickens had already written the much more modern feeling Oliver Twist. There are two parallel narratives: one comes across as a sort of picaresque, a young lad traveling through the world getting into scrape, like Tom Jones (though not nearly so bawdy!), and the other is one of those novels where a young lady's virtue is under threat from conniving men, like Belinda.
The first one, the story of Nicholas, starts off roughly, with a long family history infodumped right on you, and then there's some stuff about Nicholas taking a job at a terrible school, which is decent, but the kind of thing I feel like later Dickens could make funnier and more horrifying, and then he gets a job writing plays for a theatre troupe, which is hugely entertaining, the theatre troupe being a ridiculous family only Dickens could write, but after that the book becomes sheer tedium. I would happily go the rest of my life never reading another word about Uncle Ralph.
Meanwhile, the story of his sister starts dull and ends worse.
This was an 800-page slog, my least favorite Dickens yet.
I read a Charles Dickens novel every year. Next up in sequence: Little Dorrit
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