Please feel free to comment below this post for the first week’s chapters, or to use the hashtag #DickensClub if you’re commenting on twitter. If you’re counting, today is Day 148–and Week 22–in our #DickensClub! It will be Week One of Nicholas Nickleby, our fourth read of the group. If you’d like to begin the story completely unspoiled, skip down to the reading schedule at the bottom.

We’ll try not to give away any major spoilers in this post, though there will be discussion of important themes and motifs in the novel. This is a hefty, hilarious, often very dark book, full of incident and eccentrics. If nothing else it’s the first book to demonstrate the full scope of his promise as a novelist, for in this book he weds the comedy of Pickwick and the pathos and melodrama of Oliver Twist with electrifying results. We meet again, friends, on our first day of reading Nicholas Nickleby! This is an exciting place in our journey because many critics consider Nicholas Nickleby to be Dickens’ first real masterpiece (though lovers of Pickwick might balk at that). “As he was toiling over the more solemn adventures of poor Oliver Twist, all the humour of the recently completed Pickwick is reaffirmed in Nicholas Nickleby, which has some title to being the funniest novel Dickens ever wrote it is perhaps the funniest novel in the English language.” Frontispiece to Nicholas Nickleby, based on the original “green wrapper”

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