Dickens's irresistible compulsion to create whole parades of unforgettable grotesques and his magnificent crusading rage against injustice all keep the pages turning. The stage management of events is pretty shameless, but it's as enjoyable as a 1930s Hollywood movie. Despite the bleak and terrible realities Dickens describes – the savagery of the regime at Dotheboys Hall, the depravities of Sir Mulberry Hawk and the implacable destructiveness of Ralph Nickleby – it has the sweep and gusto of a great melodrama. I was initially attracted to the book for obvious reasons: I was an actor, and the glorious celebration of the theatre, not just in the episodes concerning Vincent Crummles and his troupe of down-at-heel showpeople but in the whole form and structure of the book, exhilarated me, and it still does. Dickens started writing Nicholas Nickleby only a year after Pickwick, as part of that astonishing trio of novels (of which the middle one was Oliver Twist) that he knocked off in a breathless 18 months, and it partakes of the same ebullient energy and free-wheeling inventiveness as the earlier book.
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