Charles Dickens’s
The Old Curiosity Shop
In ‘Night Walks’, an article published in his periodical All the Year Round in 1860, Charles Dickens describes how, in the aftermath of his father’s death in 1851, he took to the streets at night. He went out in order not to have to lie in bed suffering, as he puts it in understated tones, from an ‘inability to sleep’. This ‘disorder’, he reflects, ‘might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise’.1
In this sentence from the article’s opening paragraph, Dickens gently mocks the bracing regime of exercise he prescribed himself. He hints that, in an ironic inversion, his nighttimes acquired the routine character of life in the city in the daytime. Getting up from bed, going out, coming home. It is a comically abbreviated description of a day’s commute – one that is roughly contemporaneous with perhaps ‘the first commuter in literature’, Mr Wemmick in Great Expectations (1860–61).2 Except that it doesn’t simply invert the logic of the diurnal routine (‘getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise’). It redoubles it; making it seem even more desperate, in spite of the light mood, because it leaves no room at all for sleep, for the restorative pleasures of home so cherished by Wemmick. The image of Dickens getting up directly after lying down at night evokes a daily existence of unsustainable alienation, its comedy darkened by the relentless grind of labour in an industrial society.
Dickens’s nightwalking after his father’s death, when he suffered from surfacing anxieties about his finances as well as from grief and a sense of filial guilt, is both a prescription and a neurotic compulsion. Cure and poison. For, if it is therapeutic, it also reinforces an almost psychotic sense of solitude. Nightwalking is a ghastly, sometimes horrifying parody of the comforting, regular life that, in the opening paragraph of ‘Night Walks’, he pretends that it simply mimics; albeit an oddly liberating one.
In the somnambulant conditions of the nightwalk, the city cannot be dissociated from the individual’s imagination. The metropolis and mental life collapse in on one another. Initially, in the couple of hours after midnight, Dickens’s own restlessness, his inability to rest, is mirrored by what he calls ‘the restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep’ (71). This restlessness, a collective restlessness, eventually fades, and London does indeed ‘sink to rest’, as he puts it (72). But he remains terminally restless. ‘Walking the streets under the pattering rain,’ he reports, he ‘would walk and walk and walk, seeing nothing but the interminable tangle of streets’ (72). In this state of confused, repetitive solitude, which has the logic of a nightmare, everything is tainted. Everything becomes part of some gigantic pathetic, or neurotic, fallacy. The world is restless even when it is at rest. ‘The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed’ (73).
Dickens, in spite of his respectability in the early 1850s (or because of it, since he cannot escape the memories of his financially bankrupt father’s lack of respectability), is an archetypal nightwalker.
What is a nightwalker? The singular, solitary individual who more or less aimlessly traverses the city on foot at night, or loiters in its darkened precincts, has from at least the seventeenth century figured in the popular imagination as a social renegade (in this sense, he is the direct descendant of the so-called ‘common nightwalker’ who, because he infringed the mediaeval city’s curfew, was criminalized by statute in the late thirteenth century).3 Consciously or unconsciously, the nightwalker refuses the logic of the diurnal city, the ceaseless traffic of its commodities and its commuters.
The nightwalker feels at home instead, partly at least, in the state of homelessness afforded by emptied, darkened streets. Dickens, after all, discovered a lonely sense of community in the cold depths of the London night, among men defined by ‘a tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without intelligible reason’ (75). ‘My principal object being to get through the night,’ he wrote, ‘the pursuit of it brought me into sympathetic relations with people who have no other object every night of the year’ (71). Getting through the night …
It must of course be added, though, that the nightwalker only feels at home in the nocturnal city, if indeed he does feel at home in it, because he is a man. As my deliberate use of the male pronoun has already implied, the archetypal nightwalker is a man, since men are free, or comparatively free, from the moral opprobrium and physical danger to which women who walk the city at night are exposed. Apart from prostitutes, or streetwalkers, forced onto the pavements at night in order to commodify their bodies, there are for this reason few female nightwalkers in the nineteenth century.
But if female nightwalkers are completely unacceptable in bourgeois society, male nightwalkers are seen as distinctly disreputable. To walk at night is to yield to, or embrace, an outlaw status. It is an outlaw status, however, of the most quotidian kind; one to which any man, given the requisite circumstances, might capitulate, or to which any man might aspire. Night in the city, like the urban crowd, according to Walter Benjamin, is ‘the newest asylum for outlaws’ and ‘the latest narcotic for those abandoned’.4
In contradistinction to those who, from necessity, find themselves travelling from one place to another after dark, perhaps because they are compelled either to make a journey or to perform some professional duty (to travail, that is, in two distinct senses), walking at night is a kind of vocation. The nightwalker’s ambition is to lose and find himself in the labyrinth of the city. Like Thomas de Quincey, one of the great Romantic nightwalkers, he experiences the city as a form of phantasmagoria. In its tenebrous spaces he confronts the limits of his subjectivity. Every nightwalk is thus a fugue or psychogenic flight; an escape from the self and, at the same time, a plunge into its depths.
In ‘Night Walks’, Dickens recalls wandering near Bethlehem Hospital and pursuing a ‘night fancy’ in sight of its walls: ‘And the fancy was this: Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?’ (76). At night in the city, according to Dickens, there is a democracy of dreamers, one in which there is almost no distinction between the thoughts of people asleep in bed and those of the semi-somnambulant nightwalkers who haunt the darkened streets like the undead.
Nightwalking, it might be said, takes place in the realm of the unnight, a liminal zone between the waking and sleeping city, and between the waking and sleeping state of mind. In the final paragraph of ‘Night Walks’, Dickens refers to ‘the real desert region of the night’ in which, to his persistent surprise, the ‘houseless wanderer’ finds himself almost completely alone (80). The time of night that most accommodates the nightwalker, ‘houseless’ as he is, and restless, is when respectable people are not only curtained off from the city in their more or less comfortable domestic interiors, their sitting rooms or bedrooms, but when they are helplessly deep in sleep. It is the time of night when the city is almost entirely deserted.
In ‘The Heart of London’, an article printed in Master Humphrey’s Clock in 1843, Dickens discriminates between two phases of the night. The first of these, the social night as it might be called, is the night of ‘lights and pleasures’; the second, the asocial or anti-social night, is one of ‘guilt and darkness’.5 It is with the second of these phases that Dickens associates nightwalking. In the night of guilt and darkness, the night that refuses to be domesticated, the nightwalker, loitering in the streets, incarnates the unconscious drives shaping the dreams of those that sleep.
It is in this night, to echo the title of an article Dickens once wrote about getting lost in London as a child, that one is at risk of going astray.6
At the beginning of the article on ‘Night Walks’, as I have already noted, Dickens jokily characterizes nightwalking as a ‘brisk treatment’ for his inability to sleep.
In this context, ‘brisk’ primarily means fresh, stimulating, tonic in its effect. But it also, secondarily, applies to the action of nightwalking itself. We know that in general Dickens did walk at an extremely rapid pace, often covering twenty miles at a time, to the consternation of people who accompanied him on outings; so at one level this is probably an objective description. On another level, however, it seems to function ironically, since although he admits in ‘Night Walks’ to traversing ‘miles upon miles of streets’ (80), his prose implies that he moves at a relatively dilatory pace, in a desultory way. He gives the impression, most strongly, of wandering.
What is wandering? To wander, according to the OED, means ‘to move hither and thither without fixed course or certain aim; to be (in motion) without control or direction; to roam, ramble, go idly or restlessly about; to have no fixed abode or station’. This more aleatory form of ambulation, comparatively aimless, and open to chance happenings, is characteristic of the nightwalking tradition. So, it is almost as if Dickens is half-ashamed to admit how quickly he navigated through the city at night, in case this disqualifies him from his renegade status as a nightwalker.
Briskness is incompatible with wandering. One cannot wander briskly, just as one cannot saunter and hurry at the same time (though it might be claimed that this is precisely the paradoxical form of perambulation that Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, a character self-evidently indebted to Dickensian precedents, achieved – he both imitates the ‘abrupt movements’ of machines and the broader economic processes they enact, as Benjamin remarks of the figure of the clown, and artfully parodies and resists them).7
‘Brisk’, a word which first crops up at the end of the fourteenth century in the Old Welsh form brysg, ‘used of briskness of foot’, as the OED states, implies industriousness, purposefulness, busy-ness. In short, it means business. George Eliot, for example, refers in her historical novel Romola (1862–63) to ‘the brisk pace of men who had errands before them’.8 In the nineteenth century, as industrial capitalism increasingly remoulded people’s everyday experiences and perceptions, the apparently natural, spontaneous action of walking came to seem more and more culturally determined, more and more alienated.
For expanding numbers of people, the simple activity of travelling from A to B, from home to work, was subjected to the mechanical rhythms of factory production. The logic of capitalism, its profit motive, valorised ‘briskness of foot’. Lounging, by contrast, became unacceptable. The slogan ‘Down with dawdling!’ sponsored in the factories of the late nineteenth century by F. W. Taylor, the American apostle of ‘scientific management’, surely echoed through the factories of the mid-nineteenth century, too.9 People’s most ordinary mode of perambulation was reshaped by the discipline of capitalism. Business required busy-ness, briskness.
In one of the founding texts of capitalist theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith argued that the division of labour, the parcelling out of the tasks of production to different workers, or groups of workers, helped to prevent the pernicious habit of ‘sauntering’. According to Smith, sauntering was typical of a rural economy, in which the labourer ambled in his or her own time between several tasks, all of which he or she was responsible for executing:
The habit of sauntering and of indolent careless application, which is naturally, or rather necessarily acquired by every country workman who is obliged to change his work and his tools every half hour, and to apply his hand in twenty different ways almost every day of his life; renders him almost always slothful and lazy, and incapable of any vigorous application even on the most pressing occasions.10
In an emergent capitalist economy, where profit levels might be affected by the frittering of time, sauntering was by definition unproductive. Lounging, by the same token, was a positively flamboyant rebuke to the principle of productivity. Only briskness of foot was acceptable.
In his Principles of Political Economy (1848), John Stuart Mill cited Smith’s critique of sauntering, and declared that, in the intervening seventy years, this habit had in effect become an anachronism. Building on Smith’s argument, he claimed that factory workers would feel positively refreshed by walking swiftly between the tasks they had to perform.11 Hurrying was good for the individual’s state of physical and moral health, not merely for the state of the economy. According to this logic, those who had no reason to hurry, the unemployed for example, felt disqualified from a system that prioritized purposeful, purposive movement. Here is ‘the horror of not being in a hurry’ that, in a haunting formulation, the philosopher Theodor Adorno once evoked.12
To a hitherto unprecedented extent, walking became a self-conscious activity in the nineteenth century. Honoré de Balzac registered this shift when in his Theory of Walking (1833) he observed: ‘Isn’t it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first steps, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking?’ He insisted that these questions were ‘tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world’.13 And, it might be added, its economical systems. In the conditions of capitalist society, walking acquired a kind of political economy. The way one walked, as well as when and where one walked, took on socially significant meanings. People’s gaits became legible in terms of their position within the division of labour. Hurried or brisk walking, to polarize rather crudely, marked one’s subordination to the industrial system; sauntering or wandering represented an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to escape its labour habits and its time-discipline.14
Dickens sketches both these kinds of walking, in the guise of Boz, in articles printed in 1835. In ‘The Streets – Morning’, he describes clerks commuting through London on foot who have no time to shake hands with the friends they happen to meet, because ‘it is not included in their salary.’15 And in ‘The Prisoner’s Van’, by contrast, he celebrates a more dilatory pace of life: ‘We have a most extraordinary partiality for lounging about the streets,’ he boasts. ‘Whenever we have an hour or two to spare, there is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy.’16
The character of Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) provides an additional sense of this vagrant disposition. His name is of course evocative of evasive movement (though it also implies a certain nervous rapidity). And it is this that Thomas Hood emphasized when he discussed him in a mainly positive review of the novel for the Athenaeum in 1840. Hood characterizes Swiveller as a quintessential drifter:
There are thousands of Swivellers growing, or grown up, about town; neglected, ill-conditioned profligates, who owe their misconduct not to a bad bringing up but to having had no bringing up at all. Human hulks, cast loose on the world with no more pilotage than belongs to mere brute intelligence – like the abandoned hulls that are found adrift at sea, with only a monkey on board.
Hood identifies him, furthermore, as ‘an estray’, or someone who has strayed like an animal – ‘lax, lounging, and low, in morals and habits, and living on from day to day by a series of shifts and shabbiness’.17 A ‘swiveller’, from this perspective, is a slippery, spivish sort of saunterer. And he thus resists what Paul Carter, in a different context, has called ‘the ideology of the straight line’.18
Dickens was acutely conscious of the emblematic distinction between hurrying and sauntering in industrial society when, in his journalistic sketches of the 1860s, he adopted the persona of the Uncommercial Traveller. As he explains in the introductory piece, the Uncommercial Traveller ‘travel[s] for the great house of Human Interest Brothers’, ‘figuratively speaking’, and has ‘rather a large connection in the fancy goods way’.19 He is a collector of human curiosities, who accumulates not in order to sell but solely out of interest (the idea of ‘curiosity’, here and in The Old Curiosity Shop, is in part an attempt to de-commercialize the concept of ‘interest’). He celebrates use-value over exchange-value. He therefore constitutes an innate challenge to the culture of what, after Thomas Carlyle, was called the ‘cash nexus’.20
This is evident in the Uncommercial Traveller’s means of movement, his mode of transport. Even though the steam train has rendered many pedestrian journeys outmoded, he walks almost everywhere. ‘As a country traveller,’ he confesses, ‘I am rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be encountered by a pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a branch station.’ More importantly, perhaps, his manner of walking is scandalous. For if he sometimes feels obliged to hurry purposefully, he far prefers to saunter purposelessly, ‘wandering here and there’.21
As the Uncommercial Traveller observes: ‘My walking is of two kinds: one, straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace; one objectless, loitering and purely vagabond.’ ‘In the latter state,’ he adds, ‘no gipsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself; it is so natural with me, and strong with me, that I think I must be the descendent, at no great distance, of some irreclaimable tramp.’22 Nightwalking is walking of this objectless, loitering, vagabond kind.
It is in the light of these reflections on the semiotics of walking that I want to re-examine The Old Curiosity Shop. This is a novel that ‘almost universally’ continues to be thought of as ‘a text of notorious sentimentality, morbid and uncontrolled, embarrassing and absurd by turns’, as John Bowen has authoritatively stated; and it is in consequence still relatively overlooked by critics.23
Published as a weekly serial in Master Humphrey’s Clock, The Old Curiosity Shop was initially conceived as nothing more than a sketch, in a single issue of the miscellany, of the narrator Master Humphrey’s encounter with Little Nell, a thirteen-year old girl, in a London street at night. The periodical proving both unpopular and unprofitable, Dickens feared that its ‘desultory character’, as he put it in the Preface to the ‘Cheap Edition’ of the novel in 1848, risked undermining his hitherto intimate relationship with his readers.24
He therefore extended and reshaped this story, developing Nell’s narrative to the point at which it subsumed the weekly publication completely, thus saving it from financial collapse. Daringly, and a little desperately, Dickens also discarded his first-person narrator – in spite of the fact that ‘Personal Adventures of Master Humphrey: The Old Curiosity Shop’ was one of the titles he had recently considered for this tale.25 Master Humphrey is unceremoniously expelled from the narrative at the end of Chapter 3, when he announces, abruptly and a little confusingly, that he is leaving the other characters to ‘speak and act for themselves’ (33). (Improbably, Dickens eventually reintroduces Master Humphrey to the narrative in the form of the Single Gentleman, who is the brother of the Old Man.)
The picaresque plot of The Old Curiosity Shop is motivated by the fact that Nell’s grandfather, the Old Man, has been gambling in order to support her, and has consequently become indebted to Daniel Quilp, a violent, dwarfish usurer. It is in order to escape Quilp that Nell and her grandfather steal out of London early one morning, in sunshine that transfigures ‘places that had shewn ugly and distrustful all night long’ and ‘chase[s] away the shadows of the night’ (119), and commence their journey to some resting place in the countryside where they can forget about their past, and about the city:
The two pilgrims, often pressing each other’s hands, or exchanging a smile or cheerful look, pursued their way in silence. Bright and happy as it was, there was something solemn in the long, deserted streets, from which, like bodies without souls, all habitual character and expression had departed, leaving but one dead uniform repose, that made them all alike. (120)
This flight from a dead city, which famously ends in Nell’s death, is structured as a pilgrimage. Later in this chapter, in fact, Nell explicitly compares herself and her grandfather to John Bunyan’s Christian (122). So this is a pilgrim’s progress; and walking thus serves a spiritually as well as socially symbolic function in The Old Curiosity Shop.
In spite of the eventual success of The Old Curiosity Shop, the intensive demands of producing a weekly publication had a corrosive effect on Dickens. In the late autumn and winter of 1840, depressed by his relative unproductiveness, he took ‘long walks at night through the streets of London to restore his spirits’.26 The composition of this novel was itself, then, shaped by nightwalking. This compulsive activity appears however not to have provided much relief. As an antidote, it had a positively toxic effect. ‘All night I have been pursued by the child,’ he told his friend John Forster on one occasion in November, alluding to Little Nell; ‘and this morning I am unrefreshed and miserable. I don’t know what to do with myself.’27
The Old Curiosity Shop is all about pursuing the child. Almost every character in the novel, it transpires, pursues the child (and she ‘provides a vehicle for the fantasies of each character that desires, or is curious about her’, in Audrey Jaffe’s formulation28). And the reader, too, pursues her. But, from the reverse perspective opened up by Dickens’s comment to Forster, the innocent Little Nell acquires a slightly demonic character. She seems more like ‘the implacable and dreaded attendant’ that haunts Barton in Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘The Familiar’ (1872), to cite a slightly later instance of a narrative with a plot centred on pursuit at night.29
Master Humphrey is one of those individuals who, albeit not in especially obvious ways, pursues the child. He is a character whose oddness has often been overlooked, perhaps because he is superficially less peculiar than so many of Dickens’s characters. Scholars of Victorian fiction have tended either to ignore him or to take him at face value as a benign, if rather eccentric, geriatric.30 He is a far darker character, though, and not least because he is a nightwalker. In a double sense, he is the novel’s most curious character.
Some critics have implicitly recognized this. Bowen, for example, has pointed out that he ‘links the archaic and the modern in his nocturnal city strolling’.31 I intend to unravel his identity a little more intensively. In so doing, I hope to provide an alternative introduction to the novel; and, in a sense, the introduction to an alternative novel. This alternative novel might be called ‘The Old Cupiosity Shape’ – for such is the phrase with which, in Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce casually and deftly excavates the book’s hidden channels of desire.32 Master Humphrey is the old cupiosity shape at the heart of The Old Curiosity Shop. Its libidinal secret.
At the start of The Old Curiosity Shop, Master Humphrey reflects on ‘that constant pacing to and fro, that never-ending restlessness, that incessant tread of feet wearing the rough stones smooth and glossy’ that typifies life in the metropolis (9). He paints the city as a sort of secular purgatory:
Think of a sick man in such a place as Saint Martin’s Court, listening to the footsteps, and in the midst of pain and weariness obliged, despite himself (as though it were a task he must perform) to detect the child’s step from the man’s, the slipshod beggar from the booted exquisite, the lounging from the busy, the dull heel of the sauntering outcast from the quick tread of an expectant pleasure-seeker – think of the hum and noise always being present to his sense, and of the stream of life that will not stop, pouring on, on, on, through all his restless dreams, as if he were condemned to lie, dead but conscious, in a noisy churchyard, and had no hope of rest for centuries to come. (9)
For the sick man, the activity of physiognomizing people’s footsteps, as it might be called, of identifying their relationship to the city, whether it is ‘lounging’ or ‘busy’, lazily sauntering or briskly hurrying, becomes a sort of urban mania. The restlessness of London, embodied in the constant, repetitive movement of feet on pavements, shapes the sick man’s ‘restless dreams’, troubling the distinction between the sane and the insane that Dickens subsequently, more deliberately, deconstructs in ‘Night Walks’ when he describes wandering by the walls of Bedlam.
Indeed, it seems plausible that the nameless man in St Martin’s Court is sick precisely because of his obsession with the sound of footsteps; that this febrile attempt exhaustively to classify passing feet is not some palliative response to the sickness, nor even a symptom of it, but the sickness itself. Perhaps, then, it is a mental state rather than a physical one. The man in St Martin’s Court is at rest, but he is no less restless for all that; in fact, he is probably more restless as a result of his immobility. Like the nightwalker, he is one of the urban undead, for it is ‘as if he were condemned to lie, dead but conscious, in a noisy churchyard, and had no hope of rest for centuries to come’.
This is the urban mania that Alfred Tennyson subsequently explores in his poem Maud (1855). In the fifth section of the poet’s extraordinary ‘monodrama’, ‘the mad scene’ as Tennyson called it, the speaker pictures himself dead and buried ‘a yard beneath the street’, listening to the horses’ hooves and the footsteps above him: ‘With never an end to the stream of passing feet, / Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying …’33 This is a poem freely scattered with invective against the corrupt practices of mid-nineteenth-century capitalism, so in the gerunds that end the line I have cited, which reproduce what Dickens calls the ‘hum and noise’ of passing feet, it is possible to detect an implicit association of hurrying and marrying, and indeed burying, with busy-ness. With business. And, by extension, with buying – a word buried in the word ‘burying’.
Both the speaker of Maud and the man in St Martin’s Court, immobilized and entombed as they are, embody a protest, conscious or unconscious, against the rhythms of commerce that drive the life of the metropolis. If sauntering and lounging constitute a muted form of social protest in the conditions of industrial capitalism, then the state of physical paralysis imagined by the speaker of Maud represents a pathological refusal of its logic.
As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, another important, contemporaneous representation of this urban mania, or one closely related to it, is the convalescent narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840).
Recall the plot of Poe’s mysterious short story. Recovering from an illness, the narrator sits beside the window of a coffee shop in London and watches the passers-by, regarding ‘with minute interest’, as Poe writes, ‘the innumerable varieties of details, dress, air, gait, visage and expression of countenance’.34 In spite of his sedentariness, he is at this point still a slightly feverish physiognomist of life in the city. Then he suddenly sees a man who fascinates him, because he seems completely unreadable, resistant to physiognomic assessment, and he rushes out into the street, tailing him through the labyrinthine streets of London, throughout the night. As Benjamin puts it, ‘Poe purposely blurs the difference between the asocial person and the flâneur.’35 The narrator has become a nightwalker – that is, the neurotic as opposed to neurasthenic incarnation of this urban mania – obsessed with people’s perpetual transit through the spaces of the metropolis.
The curiosity that drives the narrative of The Old Curiosity Shop, the interest that Master Humphrey takes in Little Nell when he meets her in the streets of London at night, is itself the consequence of a kind of convalescent state. If he distances himself from the ‘sick man’ about whom he fantasises, he does so because of an uncomfortable proximity to him. For Humphrey is himself a cripple, one who has suffered from some unnamed ‘infirmity’ since childhood, as he testifies in the first chapter of Master Humphrey’s Clock. It is presumably partly for this reason that for many years he has ‘led a lonely, solitary life’.36
Humphrey lives, so he informs us, in an old house in a ‘venerable suburb’ of London that was once a celebrated resort for ‘merry roysterers and peerless ladies, long since departed’:
It is a silent, shady place, with a paved courtyard so full of echoes, that sometimes I am tempted to believe that faint responses to the noises of old times linger there yet, and that these ghosts of sound haunt my footsteps as I pace it up and down. (5)
This courtyard full of the echoes of older footfalls is of course sequestered in a quiet suburb. And the elderly narrator seems quite sane, albeit a little quaint. But Humphrey’s footsteps, in this urbane sentence, and the footsteps that haunt them, are indelible symptoms of an urban mania – as the unsettling image of him perpetually pacing this confined space implies. There is evidently some kind of secret kinship, perhaps even an identity, between Humphrey and the sick man he subsequently mentions, who inhabits another courtyard, St Martin’s Court, although the former’s obsessiveness is far less intense than the latter’s, and his infirmity more chronic than acute.
For the frail Humphrey, as for Baudelaire’s convalescent, ‘curiosity has become a compelling, irresistible passion.’37 It impels him into the city’s streets. In fact, the ‘Curiosity Shop’ of the title refers not merely to Nell’s grandfather’s home, stuffed with ‘heaps of fantastic things’, but to the city itself (19). In Master Humphrey’s Clock, the eponymous narrator announces that he has lived there ‘for a long time without any friend or acquaintance’. He goes on:
In the course of my wanderings by night and day, at all hours and seasons, in city streets and quiet country parts, I came to be familiar with certain faces, and to take it to heart as quite a heavy disappointment if they failed to present themselves each at its accustomed spot. (10)
For him, implicitly, faces are curiosities, just as ‘the inanimate objects that people [his] chamber’ have acquired anthropomorphic qualities (9).
But if he likes to amble around the lumber-room that is the city, Humphrey manifestly isn’t completely comfortable in it. Embattled because of his disability, he does not feel at home in the crowd. He is no flâneur. In contrast to the hero of the Physiologies of the 1840s, who revels in being ‘at the very centre of the world’ but at the same time ‘unseen of the world’, Humphrey is, unenviably, in the inverse position: he is a socially marginal figure who is nonetheless the object of public fascination.38
Humphrey is, in fact, ‘a misshapen, deformed old man’, as he himself puts it in Master Humphrey’s Clock (7). And when he first moved to the venerable suburb he presently inhabits, he informs us, he was variously regarded as ‘a spy, an infidel, a conjuror, a kidnapper of children, a refugee, a priest, a monster’: ‘I was the object of suspicion and distrust – ay, of downright hatred too’ (6). We are told that at that time he was known as ‘Ugly Humphrey’ (7). So, according to his neighbours, who identify him with the feudal, the foreign and the folkloric, he is outside the pale of modernity.
The identities initially ascribed to Humphrey by his suspicious-minded neighbours – spy, infidel, conjuror, kidnapper of children, refugee, priest, monster – might be the consequence of his eccentric nocturnal habits as much as of his peculiar physical condition. He is the victim of popular prejudices about men of slightly odd appearance who walk about the metropolis at night because they do not feel at home in it during the day. He is a ‘sauntering outcast’, like one of the archetypes whose footsteps the sick man in St Martin’s Court hears outside his window.
But Humphrey feels half at home at least in the city at night, when there is nobody around to monitor his ‘objectless, loitering, purely vagabond’ mode of walking, as the Uncommercial Traveller had put it.
In Master Humphrey’s Clock Humphrey claims to walk in both the country and the city, during both the day and the night. But in the opening sentence of The Old Curiosity Shop he admits to a preference for the nocturnal city: ‘Night is generally my time for walking’ (7).
He adds that he ‘seldom go[es] out until after dark’, except in the countryside (where he likes to ‘roam about fields and lanes all day’); and continues:
I have fallen insensibly into this habit, both because it favours my infirmity and because it affords me greater opportunity of speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets. The glare and hurry of broad noon are not adapted to idle pursuits like mine; a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street-lamp or a shop window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the daylight; and, if I must add the truth, night is kinder in this respect than day, which too often destroys an air-built castle at the moment of its completion, without the least ceremony or remorse. (7–8)
Refusing the ‘hurry of broad noon’ and the brisk rhythms of business, Humphrey prefers ‘idle pursuits’, like rambling, and speculating about ‘those who fill the streets’, even when they aren’t filled. The city at night, a place and time in which there are fewer people about to police a loitering mode of perambulation, permits him to wander and wonder at the same time. Master Humphrey is most comfortable walking in the time of ‘guilt and darkness’, the asocial phase of the night identified by Dickens in ‘The Heart of London’ a couple of years later. It is a space of fantasy, where – in contrast to the daytime city – ‘air-built castles’ can be erected and maintained.
Humphrey’s narrative begins, then, with an anecdotal account of his encounter with Little Nell, the incident that constitutes the novel’s primal scene:
One night I had roamed into the city, and was walking slowly on in my usual way, musing upon a great many things, when I was arrested by an inquiry, the purport of which did not reach me, but which seemed to be addressed to myself, and was preferred in a soft sweet voice that struck me very pleasantly. I turned hastily round and found at my elbow a pretty little girl, who begged to be directed to a certain street at a considerable distance, and indeed in quite another quarter of the town. (9)
After this paragraph, Dickens delays a fraction before reassuring us of the innocence of Nell’s inquiry, and of her innate goodness, and we have to suppress an impulse to mistrust her soft sweet voice. We momentarily suspect that Little Nell has attempted to hustle Master Humphrey. As Catherine Robson notes in her perceptive reading of the novel, ‘Nell is alone walking the streets, perilously close to Covent Garden, London’s traditional red-light district, when she “solicits” Master Humphrey.’39
Is this adolescent girl in the street at night a child prostitute? One of the most visible forms of prostitution in the nineteenth century, as Judith Walkowitz has reminded us, was that of ‘the isolated activity of the lone streetwalker, a solitary figure in the urban landscape, outside home and hearth, emblematic of urban alienation and the dehumanization of the cash nexus’.40
No doubt it is because of the risk his readers might make precisely this association that Dickens decided to amend his first draft of the story. Originally, he specified that, when she meets the narrator, Nell is a ‘young female, apparently in some agitation’, and that she is ‘looking archly’. He also indicated that she has diamonds to sell. In the amended text she is simply a ‘pretty little girl’ who, in spite of the secret that compels her onto the streets at night, is smiling.41 In this manuscript version, the opening of The Old Curiosity Shop remains disconcertingly close to a depiction of the encounter between an old male nightwalker and a young female streetwalker.
But Dickens does not fully erase the traces of such an encounter even in the final version of the novel. ‘I have lost my road,’ Nell announces in the ensuing dialogue, in a sentence that – like the phrase going or gone astray – is freighted with moral associations (9). It is designed gently to hint once again that she might be a fallen child, or at the least a potentially corruptible one – perhaps in order to transmit an added frisson of excitement to the reader. For if young girls walking alone in the city’s streets were not necessarily prostitutes, they were, in the popular imagination at least, potential prostitutes, vulnerable to predatory pimps.
Dickens had himself reflected on the criminalization of young girls in an article for Bell’s Life in London of November 1835. There, he watches two sisters being placed in a prisoner’s van on the street, and sermonizes as follows: ‘Step by step, how many wretched females, within the sphere of every man’s observation, have become involved in a career of vice, frightful to contemplate; hopeless at its commencement, loathsome and repulsive in its course; friendless, forlorn, and unpitied, at its miserable conclusion.’42 Nell, parented by a grandfather who is deeply in debt and fatally addicted to gambling, is perhaps taking her first steps along this path.
Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851), to give another, slightly later example, included a quotation from the opening address of ‘The London Society for the Protection of Young Females, and Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution’, founded in 1835. The lecture at one point discusses those who trap, or ‘trepan’, girls of between eleven and fifteen in order to prostitute them:
When an innocent child appears in the streets without a protector, she is insidiously watched by one of these merciless wretches and decoyed under some plausible pretext to an abode of infamy and degradation. No sooner is the unsuspecting helpless one within their grasp than, by a preconcerted measure, she becomes a victim of their inhuman designs.43
An association with criminalized or victimized young girls on the city’s streets, then, and with the contemptible, rapacious men who exploit them, flickers uneasily at the corners of our consciousness as we read of Humphrey’s encounter with Nell at the start of The Old Curiosity Shop.
Dickens does not directly identify Nell and Master Humphrey with the social outcasts that people Mayhew’s taxonomies and his own journalistic sketches. But at the beginning of The Old Curiosity Shop we can nonetheless briefly glimpse an alternative London – the dystopian London, perhaps, that he will explore more fully in mature novels such as Bleak House (1852–53) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), with their persistent concern for repressed secrets. We can consequently glimpse an alternative novel, too. The one invoked by Joyce when he rechristens it The Old Cupiosity Shape.
After all, when Humphrey agrees to take Nell back to her grandfather, he grows fearful that, if she herself recognizes the way home, she will take her leave of him. So, he leads her there by a curiously circuitous route: ‘I avoided the most frequented ways and took the most intricate, and thus it was not until we arrived in the street itself that she knew where we were’ (10). This is at the very least an odd, slightly sadistic way of proceeding. In a strict etymological sense, it is a seduction, a leading away.
I am not proposing that Master Humphrey is a paedophile (the ‘kidnapper of children’ or ‘monster’ for which his neighbours once took him), simply that he might not be what he seems. He too is a collector of curiosities, of human ones, as I have observed; and he too, it seems, is reluctant to relinquish his hold on such curiosities. In Joycean terms, he assumes the shape of ‘cupiosity’, a curiosity darkened by libidinal desire.
An insidious, subtle sense of moral and psychological danger is therefore squandered when Humphrey suddenly disappears from The Old Curiosity Shop. Like the clock with which he is associated, Humphrey himself contains a deep, dark, silent interior in which secrets are concealed – as his roaming in the streets of the capital at night in the seminal scene of The Old Curiosity Shop seems to imply. Perhaps this is the reason Dickens dismisses him from his role as the narrator of Nell’s story. Perhaps it is Humphrey’s darkness, rather than his cumbersomeness, that prompts Dickens to expel him.
We have to wait until sixteen years after Dickens’s death for a revision of the opening chapter of the Old Curiosity Shop that teases out the disquieting subtext of the novel to which I have adverted. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the latter is introduced in the following description of a violent nocturnal encounter between a man and a young girl:
All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground.
Here, in the shape of Mr Hyde, who is ‘pale and dwarfish’ and gives an ‘impression of deformity’, Humphrey is transformed into Quilp.44
Stevenson’s reinterpretation of the primal scene of The Old Curiosity Shop reveals that Humphrey and Quilp have been doubles all along, like Jekyll and Hyde. Quilp, according to this reading, is Humphrey’s evil conscience, his unconscious.45 In his description of the first appearance of Hyde in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson replays the opening sequence of The Old Curiosity Shop at an accelerated speed, as if he is turning a phenakistoscope, and the repressed sexual energies of Dickens’s novel explode into violence as a result.
These energies bubble back up, irrepressibly, in two of the most significant and challenging late modernist novels, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). In these experimental fictions, the obscene unconscious of Dickens’s novel becomes visible. The protagonist of Finnegans Wake is another Humphrey – Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. But if his first name echoes that of Master Humphrey, his second and third names bear traces of Quilp’s character. For Quilp, who is more than once identified by Dickens with a monkey,46 is a compulsive eavesdropper, or earwigger (as in Chapter 9, where he spies on Nell and her grandfather, who are having the conversation during the course of which they decide to leave the city and ‘walk through country places’ [79]).
These distant associations become more meaningful in the context of a novel that centres on a mysterious moment of obscenity visited by Humphrey on his daughter in a park. For Joyce’s Humphrey does indeed appear to have paedophile tendencies. In the ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ section of Finnegans Wake, two washerwomen analyse the stains on Humphrey’s underwear and decide that they are evidence of sexual impropriety, in particular his desire for young girls. Later on, Humphrey calls out in Danish, ‘I so love those beautiful young girls.’47 Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker thus threatens to expose or ‘out’ Dickens’s Humphrey. In Joyce’s own words, ‘to anyone who knew and loved the christlikeness’ of the ‘cleanminded’ Humphrey, ‘the mere suggestion of him as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble’ seems preposterous. But, once the suspicion has been raised in relation to The Old Curiosity Shop, this is precisely the suggestion that lingers around the narrator.48
In Lolita, the ultimate novel about illicit relations between an ageing man and a young girl, Nabokov too seems to invoke The Old Curiosity Shop, leaving Dickens’s Humphrey even more exposed by the company he is forced to keep in subsequent literary history. This connection is in part mediated through Finnegans Wake, for Humbert Humbert’s name echoes that of Joyce’s Humphrey, who is also known as ‘Mr Humhum’.49 Nabokov’s Humbert at one point refers to himself as ‘a humble hunchback abusing [him]self in the dark’ – a formulation which might even serve as a cynical description of Master Humphrey in the opening chapter of The Old Curiosity Shop.50
More specifically still, the mystery of Master Humphrey seems to haunt the passage in which Humbert describes arriving in Briceland, where he plans to seduce or rape Lolita in an inn called ‘The Enchanted Hunters’. Only moments before their arrival, he has kissed her ‘in the neck’, a gesture that stings her into calling him a ‘dirty man’:
Dusk was beginning to saturate pretty little Briceland, its phony colonial architecture, curiosity shops and imported shade trees, when we drove through the weakly lighted streets in search of The Enchanted Hunters. The air, despite a steady drizzle beading it, was warm and green, and a queue of people, mainly children and old men, had already formed before the box office of a movie house, dripping jewel-fires.51
A queue of children and old men in a town containing curiosity shops … In the United States in the 1950s Humphrey and Nell end up outside a cinema ‘dripping jewel-fires’; or, like Humbert and Lolita, inside the Enchanted Hunters.
If Dickens’s Humphrey can be identified with the sick man in St Martin’s Court mentioned in The Old Curiosity Shop, who is mesmerized by the ‘hum and noise’ of feet pacing the streets of the metropolis, then he too is a Mr Humhum. He is the ancestor of both Joyce’s Humphrey and Nabokov’s Humbert. A ‘lustsleuth’. These are the vermiculations of Master Humphrey, whose mysterious character becomes modified in the guts of Stevenson, Joyce and Nabokov. From the perspective of the nightwalking scene with which The Old Curiosity Shop starts, the ‘cupiosity shape’ secreted in Dickens’s supposedly sentimental novel eventually resolves itself into the even darker visions of their experimental fictions.