Madeline Bray
Nicholas falls in love with Madeline Bray after seeing her at an employment agency. Not knowing her name, Nicholas despairs of ever meeting her until he discovers she is having secret evening meetings with the Brothers Cheeryble. Like Nicholas, she is from the gentler classes but has fallen on hard times and must now support herself and her family. Much drama ensues, including Nicholas’s ingenious and heroic plot to save her from a forced marriage to elderly miser Arthur Gride, yet another association brokered by Ralph for his own financial gain. Unbeknownst to Madeline, she will get an inheritance upon marrying, which will then become Gride’s, as a wife’s property becomes her husband’s. Ralph plans to force Gride to give it to him to pay Ralph back for Madeline’s father’s debts.
Walter Bray
Walter Bray is Madeline’s father. Once a dashing man who swept Madeline’s mother off her feet, he is now a selfish invalid who forces his daughter to support him financially. He agrees to Ralph’s plan to force Madeline to marry Gride. Dickens’s portrayal of this narcissistic, self-deluded man is one of the most subtle depictions of evil in all of his works.
John Browdie
John Browdie is a jovial giant of a man who lives in the vicinity of Dotheboys Hall. He is the only kind inhabitant of the area, it seems, and he helps Nicholas and Smike get free of Squeers’s clutches on two separate occasions. As the book progresses Nicholas come to regard him as a good friend.
The Brothers Cheeryble
The jolly and rotund Brothers Cheeryble, Charles and Ned, are mirror images of one another. They represent the first example of unselfish kindness Nicholas has seen. The two brothers, twins made wealthy after years of honest hard work, adopt Nicholas after hearing of his troubles, installing his entire family in a lovely cottage and giving Nicholas a full-time job at their happy place of business. Their primary work, however, seems to be giving away money, and Nicholas is soon drawn into that as well. The obese brothers are as freakish in their own way as any of the evil characters, and Dickens has been faulted by critics for making them caricatures as he did with so many of his ‘‘good’’ characters.
Frank Cheeryble
Frank Cheeryble is the nephew of the Brothers Cheeryble, recently returned to London from representing the interests of their firm abroad. Frank soon falls in love with Kate, and in doing so he presents a dilemma for the Nicklebys. Although Kate loves him too, she realizes that she cannot marry him both because she is poor and because it would represent a conflict of interest with Nicholas’s employers, the Brothers Cheeryble.
Mr. Vincent Crummles
Mr. Vincent Crummles runs the theatrical company Nicholas and Smike join while escaping from Squeers. Crummles and his troupe embody exactly the type of melodramatic posturing expected from actors in the era. Dickens is often faulted for creating unnaturally dramatic characters, but with the Crummles’ theater family he has license to go all out.
Arthur Gride
Arthur Gride is a repulsive old miser whom the beautiful young Madeline Bray is almost forced by her father and Ralph Nickleby to marry.
Sir Mulberry Hawk
Sir Mulberry Hawk is a villain: a lecherous, greedy money-lender who forces himself on Nicholas’s sister, Kate. Nicholas beats him, and Hawk vows revenge.
The Kenwigses
The Kenwigs family lives in the same lodging house as Newman Noggs, where Nicholas and Smike come to stay upon their escape from Dotheboys Hall. The Kenwigses mainly provide comic diversion, but their obsession with inheriting money from their one wealthy relative so that their many daughters can catch wealthy husbands illustrates one of the novel’s central themes of the family being primarily a financial unit.
Tim Linkinwater
Tim Linkinwater has been the employee of the Brothers Cheeryble for over forty years. The kindly brothers fuss over him and praise him, demonstrating in the process how thoroughly they can take others into their happy family circle, as they soon do with Nicholas and his relatives.
Mr. Mantalini
Mr. Mantalini is the unemployed husband of Kate’s employer at the millinery shop. He makes lewd advances toward her.
Madame Mantalini
Madame Mantalini owns the millinery shop where Ralph first secures employment for Kate. Although not as dangerous as Dotheboys Hall, the factory is a grim place for Kate to work, demanding twelve-hour days and subjecting her to the envy of the other women who work there.
Kate Nickleby
Kate Nickleby, the sister of Nicholas, is the second hero of the novel. She is in every way a female version of her brother—noble and selfsacrificing, a second moral compass for the reader in the unstable world of the novel. She is hard-working and always proper to the point of refusing to marry the man she loves because his family has more money than hers.
Mrs. Nickleby
Mrs. Nickleby is Nicholas and Kate’s mother. She is quite different from her sensible and smart children, and is given to long rambling monologues that wander wildly from one topic to another. Dickens’s portrayal of the workings of Mrs. Nickleby’s romance-muddled and utterly disorganized mind is considered to be one of the greatest achievements of Nicholas Nickleby. She is a precursor to similar characters in later literature, including Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses.
Nicholas Nickleby
Nicholas Nickleby, the hero of the novel, is a handsome, capable, and intelligent young man. He has been raised in a genteel manner in the countryside, and is often referred to as the son of a gentleman (valuable currency in the world of the novel), but he has no employment experience yet. He is, like many of Dickens’s ‘‘good’’ characters, rather featureless. Nicholas excels, however, at every job he turns his hand to, and throughout the novel he matures noticeably, becoming able to acknowledge not only good but evil in the actions of those around him, losing his innocence as he grows from a boy into a man able to provide for and protect his family.
Ralph Nickleby
Ralph Nickleby, the uncle of Nicholas and Kate and brother of their deceased father, is a rich miser and money-lender. He is the dark villain of Nicholas Nickleby. Infinitely more complex as a literary creation than any of the ‘‘good’’ characters in the novel, Ralph is fully three dimensional in his evil. Dickens shows the reader, without any moralizing, how Ralph came to be the way he is and fleshes out his thought processes more fully than any of the book’s other characters. Ralph is unremittingly vile in his actions, but the reader occasionally gets a momentary glimpse of him softening emotionally, especially toward his niece, Kate, although these impulses are quickly submerged. Ralph judges others solely on their ability to earn money and scoffs at any imputation of good deed-doing, or any motive other than purely selfish gain. Ralph’s unraveling into madness at the novel’s conclusion is as complex as any psychological depiction Dickens ever attempted.
Newman Noggs
Newman Noggs is Ralph’s employee, a formerly well-to-do fellow who was ruined by causes unspecified but probably including alcohol and gambling. Ashamed of his fallen condition, Newman works for Ralph so that he can hide from the world. Newman takes an immediate interest in young Nicholas, and helps him in ways both large and small throughout the novel.
Smike
Smike is an unfortunate inmate of Dotheboys Hall, where he has grown from a small boy into a physically stunted and feebleminded young man of nineteen. He is used as the unpaid servant of the Squeers family. Nicholas takes pity on the boy and takes him with him to London when he leaves Dotheboys Hall. Smike is adopted by Nicholas, Kate, and their mother. In the book’s tragic conclusion Smike is revealed to be none other than Ralph’s only son, whom Ralph had long presumed dead.
Snawley
Snawley is a weak-willed lackey of both Squeers and Ralph. He is first seen delivering boys into Squeers’s possession. Later he pretends to be the father of Smike to wrest him away from Nicholas and Kate.
Mr. Wackford Squeers
Wackford Squeers is the proprietor of Dotheboys Hall, the school for poor boys at which Ralph secures employment for Nicholas. He is a sadistic buffoon with one eye who will stop at nothing to maximize the profit he can gain from his charges, including stealing from them, beating them, starving them, and neglecting every aspect of their welfare. His is a provisional evil rather than the kind of total evil embodied by Ralph; when circumstances change, Squeers pursues another, less criminal path.
Lord Frederick Verisopht
Lord Frederick Verisopht, while younger than his mentor, Sir Mulberry Hawk, appears to be that man’s equal in venality in his immoral behavior toward Kate. However, he has a change of heart toward the novel’s conclusion, proving himself to be honorable despite his previous conduct.
Source Credits:
Sara Constantakis, Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels, Volume 33, Gale-Cengage Learning, 2010