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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Dickens's writing style in Nicholas Nickleby is verbose and meandering, containing long passages reminiscent of philosophical texts. A heavy use of imagery and detailed scene/character description accompany this philosophic writing style. Often, Dickens includes these meandering passages at the beginning of chapters, using long-winded scene descriptions or philosophical contemplation as a bridge to smooth the narrative transition between different scenes and place settings.
Such a noteworthy pattern in Dickens's use of writing style in Nicholas Nickleby speaks not only to the author's personal artistic taste and choices, but to the novel's method of publication and formatting. Nicholas Nickleby was originally published as a serial work, similar to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries. While contemporary readers usually digest the novel in its full narrative form, readers during Dickens's time would have had to wait some time between chapters. As a consequence, Dickens had to write each chapter with the goal of maintaining audience interest from week to week. This gave way to an episodic writing style, in which many chapters are miniature stories in and of themselves. Dickens begins many chapters with an imagery-dense scene description or philosophical passage in order to ease readers back into the story, allowing for narrative continuity and cohesion within the serial format.
