Around the central story of Nicholas Nickleby and the misfortunes of his family, Dickens created some of his most wonderful characters: the muddle-headed Mrs Nickleby, the gloriously theatrical Crummles, their protegee Miss Petowker, the pretentious Mantalinis and the mindlessly cruel Squeers and his wife. Nickolas Nickleby's loose, haphazard progress harks back to the picaresque novels of the eighteenth-century particularly those of Smollet and Fielding. Yet the novel's exuberant atmosphere of romance, adventure and freedom is overshadowed by Dicken's awareness of social ills and financial and class insecurity. But, as Mark Ford writes in his introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition, it is precisely these anxieties which 'Nicholas Nickleby so often succeeds in transfiguring ...into the wildest, most exhilarating forms of comedy.'
