The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (play) reception was enthusiastic, critical reception was mixed. Frank Rich in "New York Times" reported dull passages piling up as "dead weight", while John Simon in the "New York Magazine" felt that the work was a "middlebrow enterprise" doing "scant justice" to the novel. In contrast Mel Gussow, again in "The New York Times", noted that ""Nicholas Nickleby" remains true to Dickens – many of the lines are taken directly from the novel, dialogue as well as narration – and to first principles of theater" when describing the RSC's recast production in 1986. Playwright and reviewer Thomas Hischak, writing in retrospect
Devil's Punch Bowl the northern end of the Devil's Punch Bowl, was the home of children's novelist Monica Edwards from 1947 until 1998. In her books she renamed the farm Punchbowl Farm. Edwards also wrote about the area, including her years of observation of badger families, in her various volumes of memoirs. In Charles Dickens' novel "Nicholas Nickleby", Nicholas and Smike visit it on their journey to Portsmouth. The third novel in the Horatio Hornblower series, "Flying Colours" by C.S. Forester, makes a one-line reference to the Devil's Punch Bowl in chapter eighteen as Hornblower is returning to London: "Even the marvellous beauty