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"Nicholas Nickleby" combined the comic and the sensational elements for the first time, and is still the type of Dickens's longer books, in which the strain of violent pathos or sinister mystery is incessantly relieved by farce, either of incident or description. In this novel, too, the easy-going, old-fashioned air of "Pickwick" is abandoned in favour of a humanitarian attitude more in keeping with the access of Puritanism which the new reign had brought with it, and from this time forth a certain squeemishness in dealing with moral problems and a certain "gush" of unreal sentiment obscured the finer qualities of the novelist's genius.