Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby” Gets New Edition Co-Edited by Joel Brattin
May 23 2024 - 3:01PM
Business Wire
WPI Dickens Scholar Revisits Author’s Third
Novel
“The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” may be one of
Charles Dickens’s lesser-known works, but it is well-represented in
WPI’s Fellman Dickens Collection, one of the richest collections of
Dickens’s work and a premier resource for the region.
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An engraved steel plate used to print an
illustration in "Nicholas Nickleby." (Photo: Business Wire)
In fact, “Nicholas Nickleby” has its own shelf in the Fellman
Dickens Reading Room at the university’s Gordon Library, and the
collection includes the novel as it first appeared in serial form,
along with an engraved steel plate used to print one of the
original illustrations.
So when Joel J. Brattin, professor of Humanities & Arts at
WPI and resident Dickens scholar, was invited to co-edit a recently
published two-volume edition of “Nicholas Nickleby” for Oxford
University Press, he had a good place to start.
The novel follows the adventures of its namesake, a young hero
who finds himself working at a school notorious for the cruel
treatment of its pupils. Brattin said Dickens was truly finding his
voice when he wrote “Nickleby,” which, like many of Dickens’s
works, was initially published in serial form in 32-page
installments.
“His social conscience is fully engaged, and his criticisms of
personal and institutional cruelties are powerful,” Brattin said.
“This is also his first novel to have a young man who must work for
a living as his hero.”
Brattin’s work with Oxford University Press on the novel
stretches back eight years, and one of his co-editors, Elizabeth
James, had been working on “Nicholas Nickleby” years before that.
He said the process involves poring over manuscripts and other
original documents to look for clues about how Dickens originally
intended the novel to be understood. The new volumes will serve as
the gold standard Dickens scholars will turn to when examining the
work.
“Essentially you’re presenting how Dickens would have wanted the
novel to appear to his original readers–what Dickens understood the
novel to be when he wrote it in 1839,” Brattin said. “It feels a
bit like you’re peeking over his shoulder—you see he’s trying to
sharpen this bit here, and over there he’s making a joke, and
refining it if he thinks it doesn’t work.”
Brattin said Dickens’s sense of inventiveness and his keen
observations run throughout “Nicholas Nickleby,” and that the
novel’s appeal lasts to this day.
“The novel is, first of all, very funny,” Brattin said. “But,
also, we are still the same sorts of human beings among whom
Dickens lived, and about whom he so brilliantly wrote. Dickens sees
the world clearly, loves it, and wants to make it, himself, and us,
better.”
Brattin, who has helped guide the Project Boz initiative at WPI
to digitize Dickens’s novels in the serial format in which they
were originally released, said the new Oxford University Press
volumes are aimed primarily for an academic audience, but noted
that a paperback edition for casual reading is also planned.
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