How different is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s eight-and-a-half-hour version of Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby from the last “theatrical event of the decade,” the Living Theater’s Paradise Now of a dozen years ago. In those days the players demanded audience participation with a vengeance, aiming—by means of hostility mixed with earnest eroticism—to liberate viewers from the unfeeling armor of social life and so restore them, figuratively and literally stripped, to man’s original openness and amity, all by 11 P.M. By contrast, in this decade’s equally-heralded theatrical event, the actors personally touch the audience in the spirit of a diametrically opposed ideology, as they mingle with them at intermission, shaking hands and trading compliments in a show of ready civility that Dickens would wholeheartedly have endorsed. If the Living Theater celebrated two millennia of stage tradition by flinging down dramatic conventions one after another and dancing upon them, the Royal Shakespeare Company for its part affectionately claims that tradition as a rich inheritance. And here too it sounds an authentically Dickensian note, for the power of convention—especially theatrical convention—is second only to the power of civility among the central constructive forces of Nicholas Nickleby.

Dramatizations of Nickleby are nothing new: the first one opened even before the final serial installment of the novel was published late in 1839. But none can have been so loving and skillful as this. The wonderfully inclusive script compresses the novel’s 900 pages with intelligence, sometimes with brilliance, as in the scene that intercuts snippets of the conspiracy for a distressed heroine’s happiness on one side of the stage with snippets of the more plausible conspiracy seeking her downfall on the other. Of the acting, no praise can be excessive. Most of the cast have caught with uncanny precision the spirit of the characters they play. Still more remarkable are those actors who handle two big roles with equal virtuosity, none more impressively than Lila Kaye as Mrs. Squeers and Mrs. Crummies. So consistently high a standard of performance, together with inventive and efficient staging, has the effect of transmitting intact Dickens’s own keen pleasure in the endless, surprising variety of human character and the energetic spectacle of urban life.

But just as the first dramatization of Nickleby, which Dickens liked, introduced some lines so contrary to the work’s world view that the actress who spoke them remembered the novelist snarling, “Cut them out,” so this adaptation contains several obtuse additions, none more distorting than those tending to make the novel into a radical tract. Take, for instance, the scene where Nicholas, the young hero, appears for a job interview as private secretary to a windbag Member of Parliament, just when the MP is receiving a deputation of disgruntled constituents. All this the novel renders with heavy-handed jocularity: the MP has broken his promises to astonish the government and play the devil with everything; Nicholas turns down the job because the MP wants to put all his own duties on an underpaid secretary’s shoulders; Parliament is dismissed as an inane collection of sanctimonious, self-interested nobodies. But in David Edgar’s dramatization, the dignified voters charge their MP with betraying a pledge to take specific early-Victorian left-wing positions, and the scene closes with the MP shrilly accusing Nicholas of being a Chartist (a radical working-class political group of the 1830’s and 40’s which Dickens distrusted), while Nicholas calls him a “politician,” in a tone and a context that seem to make that term the sneering equivalent of “class oppressor.” Then, too, there is the play’s closing tableau, with Nicholas sheltering in his arms a ragged, miserable Dotheboys Hall pupil, indignantly held up, one can only suppose, as testimony to systematic social injustice. In the novel, these, abused boys have a quite different significance; but the impression the play gives of its hero as a crusader against social oppression is further underscored by the picture on the program and in the advertisements of an angry Nicholas raising his clenched fist in an apparently political gesture. All this, unfortunately, is not just a veneer. For by omitting certain key passages that add up to Dickens’s own explanation of what Nickleby is about, the play ends up offering these radical gestures as its primary interpretation of the novel.

To be sure, the clenched fist is centrally important in Dickens’s book, so much so that the villainous Squeerses mistakenly keep calling Nicholas “Mr. Knuckle-boy.” It is important, however, not as a political symbol but because Nicholas Nickleby is a novel not just “about” but indeed obsessed with aggression as an overwhelming human problem for which the book, try as it may, can find no wholly satisfactory solution. On almost every page of the novel, some act of violence occurs or threatens, and the play is appropriately punctuated by the thud of blows. People are quick to hate in Nickleby, and a random, spontaneous aggressiveness pervades both play and novel, from the shower of muffins that pelts the stockholders’ meeting at the play’s very start, through the young aristocrats who pull off door knockers and beat up policemen for fun, to the more menacing image of the champagne bottle turned into a lethal weapon at Lord Frederick’s party. Out of the blue, a vile creature like the toad-eating Mr. Pyke slaps a clumsy opera usher, but even such pacific characters as Mr. Lillyvick the water-rate collector or Mr. Lenville the tragedian start fights over nothing. And the dramatic recitation that enlivens Mr. Kenwigs’s party is—what else?—The Blood Drinker’s Burial.

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But what no viewer or reader of Nickleby can ever forget is the aggression of the two villains, Wackford Squeers and Ralph Nickleby, whose malevolent energy turns the wheels of the plot. Mr. Squeers is proprietor of one of those infamous Yorkshire schools, squalid warehouses for unwanted children—the illegitimate, the crippled, the retarded—schools whose advertisements assure parents or guardians in large letters of “No Vacations” for pupils. Ever since his own childhood, Dickens relates in the novel’s preface, these schools had always exemplified to him a degree of sadism and violence almost unimaginable but nevertheless occurring constantly, and an investigatory expedition to Yorkshire just before he sat down to write Nickleby confirmed for him the painful truth of that early impression. The schools are such dens of “neglect, cruelty, and disease, as no writer of fiction would have the boldness to imagine.” (One pleasant effect of Dickens’s novel was to shame these institutions out of business in short order.)

If anything, the play intensifies the sordid brutality of this concentration camp for boys simply by making the novel’s vague, undifferentiated crowd into a collection of recognizably individual human victims with palpable flesh to hurt. From the moment Squeers enters the play, cuffing a weepy new pupil of Dotheboys Hall, he is a dynamo of violence, administering blows and whippings with hardly an intermission. Waiting for the crippled, slow-witted Smike to be neatly trussed for flogging by his schoolmates, Squeers vows that he’ll “stop just short of flaying him alive,” and by then the audience knows as well as the Dotheboys pupils that the ogre-like, one-eyed schoolmaster will be as good as his word, if not better. There’s nothing he likes more. And when he’s not actively hurting what Dickens calls his collection of “infant misery,” then the cold, the dirt, the spoiled and insufficient rations, the fear, the lovelessness, the lack of humanizing nurture are all doing the job for him—sometimes lethally. He makes grimly explicit that the boys, who pass their listless days doing his household’s menial chores, are not so much his pupils as his slaves.

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Of Nickleby’S two principal embodiments of aggression, the second and more complex is Nicholas’s uncle Ralph, the usurer. Unlike his colleague Arthur Gride, a lean, pinched, cringing goblin, constantly cackling over the ledgers he keeps locked in a massive trunk, Ralph Nickleby is no ordinary, miserly usurer. Avarice is by no means the ruling passion of this strangely impressive character, whose chief actions in the story consist of persecuting his unoffending niece and nephew, Kate and Nicholas, and maliciously hounding to his death his own long-lost son, the pathetic Smike. He is a man the novel describes as capable of elevating “his quiet and stealthy malignity to such a pitch, that there was scarcely anything he would not have hazarded to gratify it.” Hatred is his paramount emotion, and he loves money because he knows it’s the best weapon malice can have.

“How people dupe themselves!” sneers Ralph in the play, summing up the world view that is inseparable from his cosmic aggression and that makes him so psychologically interesting and weighty a villain. Pretending to unflinching self-knowledge and unique truthfulness, he despises the world of self-deceivers, and his boast of authenticity further reinforces his aggression by confirming his refusal to accommodate himself to the concerns of others. Stifling all social emotions—for even to feel the wants and values of others would be to dilute the self-subsistent authenticity of his inner life—he is left only with feelings of hostility and belligerence. His suicide in the novel is an act of aggression against the whole universe; and having said he believes the reality of any pretty face is the grinning skull beneath it, he ends by choosing for himself the ultimate authenticity of death. Not understanding this, the play’s adaptor puts into Ralph’s mouth some nonsensical last words about being “an outcast” (words also jarringly given to Smike) and so denatures his powerful final scene, in spite of John Woodvine’s fine acting.

All this violence is terrible and Dickens, whose hatred of cruelty and injustice is palpable throughout Nickleby, deplores it—but not because it’s political oppression, as the play’s audience is led to conclude. Picking up this cue, the New York Times reviewer, for example, saw in Smike “the perfect apotheosis of those oppressed souls Dickens championed.” But, on reflection, surely a crippled half-wit would be a contemptuous symbol for the oppressed; and surely a school for repudiated middle-class boys, a school whose annual fee amounted to a laborer’s yearly wage, makes an unconvincing allegory for an oppressive social order.

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Far from being the result of unjust social arrangements, violence in Nickleby is a consequence of the original, inborn nature of man, in which aggression forms a constituent instinct. The novel makes this clear in the brilliantly funny and sinister scene, substantially cut in the play, in which the conspirators Ralph, Squeers, and Snawley burst into Nicholas’s house to tear Smike away from his new friend and protector. They fraudulently claim that Snawley is Smike’s long-lost father and is entitled to his custody. There follows an outrageous “philosophical discourse,” largely missing in the play, between Squeers and Snawley. What was it, asks Snawley, that made me interested in Smike when I first saw him? What was it “that made me burn all over with a wish to chastise him severely” for escaping from Dotheboys Hall?

“It was parental instinct, sir,” observed Squeers.

“That’s what it was, sir,” rejoined Snawley; “the elevated feeling . . . of the ancient Romans and Grecians, and of the beasts of the field and birds of the air, with the exception of rabbits and tomcats, which sometimes devour their offspring. My heart yearned towards him. I could have—I don’t know what I couldn’t have done to him in the anger of a father.”

“It only shows what Natur is, sir,” said Mr. Squeers. . . .

“She is a holy thing, sir,” remarked Snawley.

“I believe you,” added Mr. Squeers, with a moral sigh. . . . “Oh what a blessed thing, sir, to be in a state of natur!”

The cannibal cats, the anger of a father, the wish to chastise—at every moment this “discourse” hilariously subverts the notion that nature endows all creatures only with innocent and praiseworthy impulses. For Dickens, the state of nature is not holy but Hobbesian, the war of all against all. As for parental instinct: presiding over this persecution of Smike, which really helps kill him, is his oblivious father, Ralph Nickleby.

Certainly this isn’t to say that men are without an endowment of finer feelings. But as Charles Cheeryble, Nicholas’s Pickwickian fairy-godfather, explains in the novel but not in the play, these feelings “must be reared and fostered, or it is as natural that they should be wholly obscured, and that new feelings should usurp their place, as it is that the sweetest productions of the earth, left untended, should be choked with weeds and briars.”

Only fragments of this explanatory framework are left standing in the play—as when the predacious Sir Mulberry Hawk, who shows that even sex can become merely another mode of aggression, flings the resisting Kate Nickleby down before him on a sofa while derisively counseling her to “be more natural—my dear Miss Nickleby, be more natural—do.” Or there is Squeers instructing his famished pupils, with brutal humor, to “subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conqured human natur.” These pointers, along of course with the whole dramatic situation, leave Dickens’s meaning still discernible, but regrettably more dimly so in the play than in the novel.

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What is to be done in the face of this primary aggressiveness of human beings that always threatens man’s life with anarchy and violence? For Nickleby does offer a range of antidotes, none so convincing, however, as the description of the problem itself. First, one can fight fire with fire and oppose the wicked with force, like Nicholas, who with his clenched fist seems an impetuous embodiment of the corollary to Locke’s Law of Nature, giving every man a right to punish an offender. Frank Cheeryble, who makes his entrance in the midst of a fist fight, is a similar scourge of offenders; while poor Newman Noggs, righteous but weak, is reduced to punishing the egregious Ralph in pantomime, hidden behind a door.

Or else one can counter human nature’s dark promptings by taking seriously Squeers’s zany advice to subdue your appetites and conquer human nature. Such is the purpose of Nicholas and Kate in refusing (very temporarily) to marry the people they love for fear of appearing predatory. Victorians will sometimes be Victorian, after all.

Or there are the Cheeryble brothers, those plump, elderly patrons of Nicholas who are Dickens’s simplest answer to the problem of aggression. For these profoundly civil, inexhaustibly benevolent twins have escaped its taint altogether, having been rendered, one supposes, almost genetically incapable of any radically individualist impulse by virtue of being parts of an inseparable pair, like andirons. Dickens emphasizes this by affording them the luxury of endlessly counterfeiting angry violence, as when, shouting “Damn your obstinacy” at their loyal old clerk while regarding him with faces “radiant with attachment” and “without the faintest spark of anger,” they generously announce plans to make him a partner—threatening that “if he won’t submit to it peaceably, we must have recourse to violence.” Wittily highlighting this trait even further, the play has the Cheerybles vehemently punctuate their roaring colloquies with crashing blows to the table. And surely the directors, Trevor Nunn and John Caird, are right in making the brothers figures out of a fairy tale. For they ring false in Dickens’s novel, not just because they run a business whose only activity seems to be corporate philanthropy, but because in the book’s own terms their lack of aggression makes them too good to be true.

The same cannot be said of the Kenwigses, a lower-middle-class family (like Dickens’s own) who provide, under the comedy with which Nickleby treats their thirst for gentility, the story’s most convincing answer to aggression. For they are determined to make over human nature, to refine and civilize it, to retailor it by means of dancing lessons, French lessons, genteel manners, pretty dresses, and so on, all according to the latest middle-class pattern. Anxiously attuned to the opinions and needs of others, before whom they yearn to sparkle, they redeem aggression and make its energy creative by enlisting their competitiveness wholly in the service of civilization and its values. No less civil and ceremonious than the Gheerybles, they are punctilious guardians of what Dickens calls, with a combination of amusement and conviction, the “polite forms and ceremonies which must be observed in civilized life, or mankind relapse into [its] original barbarism”—the barbarism of Hobbesian nature. Omitting this passage, along with some of the comic obsession with gentility, the play flattens the Kenwigses: some reviewers, judging the adaptation unnecessarily long, have complained that “extraneous” characters like these could easily go. But in the novel, their version of middle-class life, with all its ordinariness, silliness, and pretension, is no mean thing.

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For retailoring human nature, who can compare with the Crummleses, that shabby troupe of strolling provincial actors who are the comic triumph of novel and play alike? Taming aggression is their stock-in-trade, in creaky melodramas like The Mortal Struggle or their hilarious pantomime of The Indian Savage and the Maiden, in which the civilizing power of love subdues wild ferocity. Nothing, though, can top the play Nicholas translates for them, involving a man who stabs his son, throws his wife and child out of the house, and relents in the end, when a clock striking ten interrupts his suicide by reminding him of a similar clock in his infancy, making him burst into tears, drop his gun, and become an exemplary citizen forever after. The Crummleses, in other words, can retailor even the villainy of a character like Ralph Nickleby. (Edgar’s adaptation has them go on to give Romeo and Juliet a happy ending, in a hilarious and appropriate addition, partly deriving from Mr. Wopsle’s travesty of Hamlet in Great Expectations, but owing infinitely more to the skill of the adaptor and the company, and to their consummate understanding of the tradition of their craft. Indeed, though all through the play the look and feel of England at the accession of the youthful Queen Victoria is perfect, bringing the young Dickens’s world vividly to life, the verisimilitude gets almost uncanny in the Crummies company, who appear magically conjured out of the prints, the toy theaters, and the caricatures of the period, with all their freshness restored. But then the Royal Shakespeare Company loves these characters almost as much as the theater-loving Dickens did.)

Vincent Crummies, manager of this troupe, explains the principle of its theater when Nicholas, watching a swordfight in rehearsal, suggests the performance might be better if one actor weren’t so much taller than the other. Nonsense, says Crummies: “Why, it’s the very essence of the combat that there should be a foot or two between them. How are you to get up the sympathies of the audience in a legitimate manner, if there isn’t a little man contending against a great one—unless there’s at least five to one? . . .” All the conventions of this theater, and melodrama is made up of nothing but conventions, go to insure the triumph of justice over aggression, of right over brute force—like the conventions of society, but more dependable. And like the whole effort of human culture, the Crummies theater strives to hold up an ideal, however simple or fustian, of what life should be to be fully human. Surely these conventions and ideals retain their power undiminished; watching Nicholas Nickleby, itself a melodrama of the higher kind, the New York audience vehemently hisses the cruelty of Squeers and greets his downfall with tumultuous applause.

And how far Nickleby’s notion of a truly human existence is from Ralph Nickleby’s grim authenticity. A fully human identity is necessarily stagy and contrived: how can it not be, if we live in a society and are continually playing to others? No wonder, from Nicholas disguised as “Mr. Johnson” to Mr. Mantallini with his kisses and poison bottle, everyone in Nickleby is always acting. And no wonder so theatrical a novel works so well on the stage.

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All this is as full an answer to the problem of aggression as Dickens could frame in Nickleby, his third novel, finished when he was only twenty-seven, and still bearing marks of immaturity for all its comic genius. But five years later, he had worked out an answer that satisfied him completely. For in writing Barnaby Rudge— his fifth novel, centering on the occurrence of an anti-Catholic pogrom in London in 1780—he had meditated on an instance when mankind really had “relapsed into [its] original barbarism,” and he had elaborated in response a somber and deeply-considered political philosophy that explained, in the tradition of Hobbes and Burke, how society, as its primary function, restrains and defuses man’s inherent aggressiveness.

Shortly after finishing that novel, Dickens sailed for a long tour of America, where he rather disconcertedly found massive confirmation of his new theory by observing (as he thought) the state of nature in full swing—all emphatically, indeed luridly, reported in his American travel book and in Martin Chuzzlewit. This sixth novel brought to a close the phase of Dickens’s career that began with Nicholas Nickleby’s concentration on aggression. The lessons of this phase, not surprisingly, stayed with him always; however critical his later novels may be of the specific failings of Victorian society, and however much weariness they may express with the burdensome weight of the social condition, they never forget that only in society can man’s life be not brutish but human.