Cheeryble Brothers

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

The (Charles and Edwin), a firm of London merchants in Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby . They are twin brothers, warmhearted, simpleminded, cheerful old gentlemen, friends of the Nicklebys. It is said that Dickens found the originals of these characters in the Grant brothers, cotton-spinners of Manchester. Dickens follows a not uncommon fashion of his own in selecting a name for these brothers, which, by its sound, conveys some impression of the owner's personality. Dickens' prefaces to various volumes of his works are often interesting. The following quotation in regard to the Cheeryble Brothers is from the preface to the first edition of Nicholas Nickleby: Those who take an interest in this tale will be glad to learn that the Brothers Cheeryble live; that their liberal charity, their singleness of heart, their noble nature, and their unbounded benevolence, are no creations of the author's brain; but are prompting every day (and oftenest by stealth) some munificent and generous deed in that town of which they are the pride and honor. In the preface to a later edition of the same work, the above paragraph is quoted, with the following addition: If I were to attempt to sum up the hundreds upon hundreds of letters, from all sorts of people in all sorts of latitudes and climates, to which this unlucky paragraph has since given rise, I should get into an arithmetical difficulty from which I could not easily extricate myself. Suffice it to say, that I believe the applications for loans, gifts, and offices of profit which I have been requested to forward to the originals of the Brothers Cheeryble (with whom I never interchanged any communication in my life), would have exhausted the combined patronage of all the Lord Chancellors since the accession of the House of Brunswick, and would have broken the rest of the Bank of England . See Nicholas Nickleby