Nature in Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby

Abstract

The speed and intricacy of this growth is immediately apparent in the two novels after Pickwick, especially in the way Dickens makes imaginative capital out of an increasingly disordered sense of life. The triumph of Pickwick clearly had all kinds of effects on Dickens’s mind. It undoubtedly released immense reserves of confidence in his powers of immediate invention. On the spur of the moment he ‘thought of Mr Pickwick’; now with greater audacity he commits himself first to Oliver Twist while Pickwick is still running, then to Nicholas Nickleby before Oliver has finished. At this time he writes to G. H. Lewes about a passage in Oliver, ‘It came like all my other ideas, such as they are, ready made to the point of the pen — and down it went’ (Letters i 403). Dickens has not yet learnt to make a shibboleth of the effort of creativity (amusingly, his most Flaubertian outburst is written in order to ward off an unwanted visitor in 1855),¹ and neither have his critics: ‘So far as a single epithet can convey an impression of the operation of his genius, it may be said that Mr. Dickens is an instinctive writer’, commented R. H. Horne, in the first large-scale survey of Dickens’s achievement. ‘His best things are suddenly revealed to him; he does not search for them in his mind….