"Nicholas Nickleby" and the Discourse of Lent

This essay discusses Nicholas Nickleby in terms of the discourse of Lent, which is regarded not as the opposite of the discourse carnival but as its second self: both stage the blurring of borderlines between the individual and his or her environment—carnival on the basis of excess and Lent on the basis of lack. The body language of Lent is that of hunger and fasting. Literary works tend to deal with corruptions of Lent, such as the enforced starvation in Squeers's school in Nicholas Nickleby. The novel reveals Dickens's intuitive insight into the structures of meaning around the corruption of Lent. This emerges from a number of parallels between Nicholas Nickleby and concentration camp memoirs, a corpus of work in which the corruptions of Lent are dealt with massively. As in these works, in Dickens's novel a partial answer to hunger is fasting, literal (the novel abounds in motifs of hunger, deferral of its satisfaction, loss of hunger, and the breaking of the fast), or figurative—a young protagonist endorses trials and privation for the sake of making it in the world. Though in the latter case the goal of the fast is pragmatic rather than spiritual, it also involves rejection of whatever interferes with one's moral integrity. The breaking of the fast (the meal that is most frequently mentioned in this novel, by contrast to Dickens's later fiction, is breakfast) is usually a convivial occasion associated with personal benevolence which is, in its limited way, responsible for the poetic justice in the novel.