MICHOLAS NICKLEBY (FILM)

Nicholas Nickleby''s loose, haphazard progress harks back to the picturesque novels of the eighteenth century—particularly those of Smollett and Fielding. Yet the novel''s exuberant atmosphere of romance, adventure and freedom is overshadowed by Dickens''s awareness of social ills and financial and class insecurity. But, as Mark Ford writes in his Introduction to the 1999 Penguin Classics edition, it is precisely these anxieties which ''Nicholas Nickleby so often succeeds in transfiguring... into the wildest, most exhilarating forms of comedy''.