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Introduction

As Actor

As Playwright

As Public Reader

Dickens Onstage

Shorter Works

The Novels

The Pickwick Papers

Oliver Twist

Nicholas Nickleby

The Old Curiosity Shop

David Copperfield

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations

The Mystery of Edwin Drood
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Nicholas Nickleby

  
Window card announcing the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Nicholas Nickleby. Plymouth Theatre, New York, October 1981.
Dickens’s third novel, Nicholas Nickleby, is remembered for its artful blend of the tragic and the comic. Piratical playwrights often focused specifically on one or the other – either the hilarity of the bumbling Crummles and his travelling actors or the wretchedness of the ill-fated Smike. The popularity of Nicholas Nickleby gained unexpected momentum in the 1980s with the success of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s eight-and-a-half-hour stage production.