Mentions in Popular Culture
- In Roald Dahl's story of The BFG, the Big Friendly Giant learns to write by reading the Dickens novel "hundreds of times".
- Another character of Roald Dahl's, the headmistress Miss Trunchbull from Matilda, advocates Wackford Squeers' method of teaching as one that should be admired.
- In Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Nicholas Nickleby is one of several Dickens novels Tony Last is forced to read to the psychotic Mr. Todd as compensation for Todd saving his life.
- Ray Bradbury's Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby is a Friend of Mine features a man who pretends to be Dickens.
- Laurel McKelva Hand, the main character in Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, reads Nicholas Nickleby to her father as he recuperates from eye surgery.
- In Star Trek: Enterprise, a 4th season 3-episode arc dealt with Dr. Arik Soong and his augmented test tube "children" that were remnants from the 1990s Eugenics War. An augment named Udar was shunned by his "siblings" because he didn't possess all of the same superior abilities that the rest were engineered with. He was nicknamed Smike by his "siblings" because of his perceived shortcomings and was eventually killed by his "brother" Malik in the episode Cold Station 12. Udar was played by actor Kaj-Erik Eriksen, and Dr. Arik Soong was played by Special Guest Star Brent Spiner.
- The title is parodied as "Knickerless Knickleby" in Monty Python's Bookshop sketch.
- Paul McCartney, who is a fan of Dickens, has named Nicholas Nickleby as his favorite novel.
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Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)