Nicholas Nickleby

"Nicholas Nickleby" combined the comic and the sensational elements for the first time, and is still the type of Dickens's longer books, in which the strain of violent pathos or sinister mystery is incessantly relieved by farce, either of incident or description. In this novel, too, the easy-going, old-fashioned air of "Pickwick" is abandoned in favour of a humanitarian attitude more in keeping wi...