Nell and I
In West Philadelphia’s Clark Park, a shabby collection of trees and benches in a once-grand neighborhood—and across the street from a city public health clinic—looms a life-sized bronze statue of Charles Dickens, comfortably seated in a large armchair atop a five-foot red granite base. Below the author is another figure, a just-adolescent girl who steadfastly looks up at him, one arm resting on his pedestal, the other at her side. The girl is “Little Nell,” the celebrated heroine of Dickens’ 1840–41 serial novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. She is gracefully poised on delicate feet, with long hair, a sturdy body, a simple dress, and a face expressing calm devotion to the writer who looks serenely down at her. For nine years in the seventies and eighties, I lived just a few blocks from Dickens and Little Nell, taking daily walks along or in Clark Park. Yet in all that time I never paused to look carefully at either the girl or her creator.
For most of those years, “Little Nell” was just a name to me, a vague and somewhat distasteful name, evoking images of saccharine sweetness and sentimentality. I didn’t know her story and, I told myself, I didn’t want to know it—though I remembered having heard that readers loved her so much that church bells rang throughout England when the installment detailing her death was published. In New York, the dock had been crowded with readers waiting for the latest number: “Is Nell dead?” they clamored. Although I was a passionate student of nineteenth-century British literature, Nell was one cultural icon I wanted to ignore. The oddity of a statue representing an author and his character as equally tangible mortal beings merely served to underscore the naiveté of the Victorians. Resolutely, I turned away.
Now, more than a decade after having left Philadelphia, I find myself yearning for that statue in its obscure corner on South Forty-third Street. Now, I’d like to get up close to it, study it well, perhaps even touch it. Nell figures in my dreams and meditations, my conversations and my teaching. I want to understand her, to know how and why she captured the imagination of her time, to know what it was about this fictional child that made grown men weep at her fictional death. I want to know why she was so popular in her day and why she has been so forgotten in ours; I want to know what Dickens was doing in this novel and what happened to the people who read it. Nell’s story is suddenly important to me because I know now that she has always been important to me. I’ve discovered that she has been lodged in my unconscious for nearly forty years, and thus to know her is to know a central aspect of myself. And, because I’m convinced that the outline if not the detail of my own story is not unique, I suspect that Nell—or someone very like her—figures in the imaginations of many other readers as well.
When I was ten, living with my parents, my younger brother, and my paternal grandmother in a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, I had an experience of reading that has resonated ever since as my most complete immersion in a fictional world. Although for many years I could recall neither the characters nor the plot of the novel that gave me this experience, I remembered with hallucinatory intensity finding the book at the Bath Beach Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I discovered it wedged on a shelf in the lower-left corner of the adult fiction section. At ten or so, was I already allowed to check out adult books? Or was the librarian, knowing my love for reading, letting me pass? I can’t say. The book was illustrated with old engravings, I know that, and the volume I took home was thick and yellowed, with well-rubbed, velvety-soft pages bound in a nubby hard cover.
What happened when I began to read was something that had never happened before, and that hasn’t happened in quite the same way since: I was possessed, entering the book without reserve and allowing it to enter me. It was as if the novel provided a seamless, completely unselfconsious passage into its world; I left my ordinary reality behind and lived utterly in that of its characters. I was both lost and found in its pages, alive with an intensity unavailable in my day-to-day life, safe in the sure progress of its narration. I read without stopping, transported, absorbed.
For years afterward, I was haunted by this memory of passionate, deep reading. I told myself I wanted to read the book again, but because I knew neither author nor title, I also told myself it would be impossible to find. I never went back to the little library on Bath Avenue to discover what books were shelved in the lower-left-hand section. Nor did I reason that the author’s last name must start with a letter at the beginning of the alphabet. I simply dreamed, and occasionally picked up a book with old engravings, looking for a picture of an antiques store. I remembered that much: the book had something to do with an antiques store. I also vaguely remembered a girl and gambling. Yet for all my desire to re-experience the novel, I never asked anyone if they knew of such a book, nor did I engage in any systematic exploration.
I realize now that in fact I was quite happy to keep the identity of my great book a mystery, a numinous archetype of reading, mythic and unattainable. For what would I have done if I had found The Old Curiosity Shop too soon, how would I have come to terms with its intensity of emotion? Even today, I am often in tears as I write this essay, my breath suddenly stopped as I realize one and then another way in which Nell’s story is mine. What would I have done if I had found her too soon?
Laughed at her, probably, as in fact I did when, in graduate school, I deduced that The Old Curiosity Shop must be the book that haunted me. I had been reading about Dickens while taking a course in nineteenth-century British fiction. Some description of the novel struck me—I recognized the young girl, an old man, the antiques store—and I realized that this must be the book that had so deeply affected me as a child. I borrowed a copy from the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania and took a look. What I found, to my dismay, was a vapidly sentimental and mawkish tale. Yes, this was the book of my childhood, and what a pathetic book it was. What an absurd plot! What an idealized, victimized heroine! Scornfully, with all the superiority of a Ph.D. candidate, I dismissed the novel—and my child-self.
Ten years passed, bringing me to New Orleans, a city as dark as Dickens’ London, as crammed with curiosities as the shop that is Nell’s home. Talking one afternoon with a therapist, I recalled the book that had offered the most complete escape from the pain of my childhood home. “Going away” was what I called my propensity to abandon reality for the consolations of an ideal realm of dream and fantasy. “Dissociation,” Eileen said to me, “splitting.” We were talking about when and how this tendency began and what I might do now to counteract it. And I remembered The Old Curiosity Shop. “So,” Eileen asked, “have you read it lately?” “I read it a few years ago,” I muttered, “and it’s really dumb.” “Well,” she blandly replied, “I guess you need to read it again.” And she insisted that, this time, I buy myself a copy. Two days later I purchased the illustrated paperback that in its turn is now well-worn and tattered.
The Old Curiosity Shop is a classic early Dickens novel, featuring an innocent orphan, grotesque and predatory adults, a frightening city, an idyllic countryside, and a variety of wildly comic incidents that flesh out a grandly tragic story. Little Nell, the heroine, is introduced as a “pretty little girl,” a “child” of indeterminate age who lives alone in London with her grandfather. In the second chapter, readers learn that Nell “will be a woman soon” and that an “elderly” dwarf of “remarkably hard features and forbidding aspect” hopes to make her his “little cherry-cheeked, red-lipped wife.” In the seventh chapter, it is at last revealed that Nell is “nearly fourteen”—a “fine girl of her age, but small”—though she continues to be called a child throughout the novel.
From the first, Nell is a focus for other people’s fantasies—most of which center around her status as an attractive virgin who will inherit her grandfather’s supposed wealth. Poised on the verge of an adulthood she will never reach, Nell evokes the pecuniary and sexual desires of men who visualize her as simultaneously younger and older than she is. Nell will “become the sole inheritor of the wealth of this rich old hunks” affirms her brother Fred to the friend he hopes will marry her and split the wealth with him. “Such a fresh, blooming, modest little bud,” leers the dwarf Quilp, “such a chubby, rosy, cosy, little Nell.”
Even Nell’s grandfather, her guardian, sees her only through the lens of his own desire. Wanting her to become a “fine lady,” safe from the “rough mercies of the world,” he spends his nights feverishly gambling, compulsively borrowing money from Quilp in the hope of winning a fortune for his granddaughter. “She shall be rich one of these days, and a fine lady,” he insists, even as he slips more completely into Quilp’s eager grasp.
Very late in the novel, the grandfather’s younger brother reveals the background of the old man’s destructive obsession. In their youth, the two brothers loved the same woman. The younger brother, feeling beholden to the elder, left town without revealing his feelings so that the elder might marry. This he did, but his wife died shortly after bearing a daughter. Raised by him, this child in whom “the mother lived again,” grows up to marry an abusive and shiftless man; after his early death, she dies as well, leaving two orphaned children—the infant Nell, who resembles her mother and grandmother, and her brother Fred. When Fred gets into financial trouble and goes to sea, his grandfather becomes haunted by fears of “poverty and want” for Nell. He decides that he can make a fortune gambling, and so he becomes obsessed, increasingly out of touch with everything else—including the child he purports to love.
When the elderly narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop first meets Nell at the beginning of the novel, he is walking through London late at night. She is returning from Quilp’s house, where she has been sent by her grandfather to borrow more money. Before describing their encounter, the narrator analyzes his habit of solitary nocturnal walks. He then evokes the desolation of Covent Garden Market at dawn, a place notorious in mid-Victorian London for prostitution, and he laments the exploitation of young women, “shrinking from the hot hands of drunken purchasers.” When Nell approaches him, he is struck by her exposure and vulnerability. His “curiosity” aroused, he accompanies her home instead of simply giving directions. As he does so, he tells himself that his intentions are honorable, though he suggests the possibility that they might not be. “As I had felt pleased at first by her confidence,” he asserts, “I determined to deserve it.”
The narrator is horrified to find where Nell lives—“one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town.” A jumble of “fantastic carvings” and “distorted figures,” it houses “strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.” The narrator’s description of the shop is an apt description of the novel itself: it is a book designed in dreams and apprehended by the reader’s dream-consciousness. Perhaps this is why I could remember so little of it from my first reading: “designed in dreams,” the book entered directly into my own, passing through my conscious self with little evident trace.
Disturbed to learn that Nell lives alone in the curiosity shop with her “haggard” grandfather, the narrator becomes haunted by images of the “old dark murky rooms—the gaunt suits of mail with their ghostly silent air—the faces all awry, grinning from wood and stone.” Fearing that some harm will come to the child, but unable to intervene, he returns to his own cozy fireside, where he dreams all night of “the beautiful child” sleeping in such an “uncongenial place.”
The first illustration in the novel, of Nell asleep in her tiny room at the shop, perfectly figures forth what many have taken to be the allegorical shape of this novel: of youthful feminine innocence threatened by decaying masculine corruption. It is the determining image, the central picture I retained without knowing it during the years when I remembered nothing of the novel’s plot or characters. “A girl and an antiques shop,” I knew that—and when, finally, I held the book in my hands again, it was by this picture that I knew it.
In the drawing by Samuel Williams, one of four illustrators of the first edition, Nell sleeps peacefully on a high bedstead in a small room crowded with misshapen and mismatched objects: a crucifix, a suit of armor, leering masks, contorted statues, clocks, broken columns, pictures, architectural fragments, a huge candlestick, a mirror. Nell is at the center of a threatening vortex: many of the objects appear to be alive, focusing their malevolent energy against her. The engraving is dark, composed of closely spaced fine lines; much of it is simply black. The only clear space is Nell’s face and pillow and the wall just above her head.
From age seven to fourteen, I shared a room with my father’s mother, my grandmother known to us as “Nona”—a personage as grotesque to me then as any of the curiosities in Nell’s life. Born in Aleppo in a large Jewish family and raised in Cairo, Nona had married young and borne three boys to her merchant husband. (Her second child had been a girl, dead in infancy.) When her husband died suddenly during a typhoid epidemic, she was emotionally and financially devastated. She went to live with her mother-in-law and devoted herself to raising the children who must have reminded her of her dead spouse. When these sons grew up, the elder and the younger moved away: Isaac to work in a bank in Upper Egypt, Ezra to found a kibbutz in Israel. Felix, the middle son, remained at home in Cairo, taking a civil service post in the court system.
When Felix—the man who would become my father—married at thirty, Nona accompanied him and my mother on their honeymoon, demanding that she be given a trousseau to match the young bride’s. When the couple set up housekeeping, Nona moved in with them, possessively guarding her son. My mother, taught by her mother that she must accept her fate with good grace, acquiesced in what was to become an increasingly destructive arrangement. I have been told that in the early months of my parents’ marriage, Nona would sit every night on the floor outside their bedroom door and moan, crying that she had been abandoned by her two other sons, that she was desolate. She would continue until my father opened the door and came out to console her. When my mother—against all odds—became pregnant with me and had to spend the pregnancy off her feet, Nona tormented her with foods she knew she did not like.
In 1951, afraid of increasing anti-Semitism, my parents immigrated to the U.S., leaving Nona behind in Cairo with Isaac and his family. In 1956, the rest of the family arrived in the States; Felix once again took Nona in, and with my parents she remained until one year before her death in 1976.
The room that Nona and I shared was small. Our single beds were no more than four feet apart, and the only window looked out on a brick wall. During those years Nona was in her late sixties and early seventies, a pale, ungainly woman who never left the house alone. Every day she would sit on the living room couch and weep to the accompaniment of Middle Eastern music, lamenting the losses she had endured: her husband, her two sons, her daughter, her homeland. When she wasn’t crying, she would sit, steadily and silently watching the activity around her. I grew to fear her eyes, to feel them on me wherever I went and no matter what I did. Because I was a girl and not a boy, because I resembled my mother and not my father, because I was filled with the excitement of growing up in America, I was anathema to this immobile, angry woman, who longed for a past to which she could not return.
Yet even as I cringed from Nona’s disapproving and angry gaze, I also found myself fascinated and horrified by what I saw of her—unable to turn my eyes away. Every night, before sleep, she removed a flesh-colored foam pad she had stuffed into the left side of her large brassiere. The pad covered the flat surface where her breast had been; on the other side, a loose breast sagged. Next, she would take from her mouth a set of false teeth, dropping them into a dented metal cup filled with water and placed on a shaky folding table beside her bed. The teeth would clatter against the metal, then come to rest, glistening an eerie pink and white beneath the water. These were her nightly rituals, performed always when I was in the room; in the morning, transfixed, I would watch again as the parts were returned to their places.
During these years, I had one frequently recurring dream:
I am being pursued by a lion across a wide, barren plain. I come to the plain’s edge; it is as if this were the edge of the world, for there is only a vertical drop of terrifying height. I can see no bottom. And I am confronted with a choice: either stop and be mauled by the lion or jump and meet my death. I am paralyzed with fear, unable to choose.
Most nights I would wake in the midst of a fall: I never faced the lion.
In a painted wooden toy chest on my side of the room, I kept a rubber witch’s mask, green and wrinkled, with a long nose and curly black hair. This witch’s face terrorized me: I would cry when I saw it, cowering in fear. I tried to keep it buried beneath my other toys—board games and building blocks—but occasionally it would surface, grinning at me grotesquely from the top of the pile. My brother would often tease me with the mask, pulling it out to shake in my face. Once, he put it on and chased me around the apartment; he had to be stopped by my parents while I cried uncontrollably. Yet despite my horror of it, I never threw this mask away. It served as a necessary focus for my fears—an objective correlative that allowed me to cry. If I could not run shrieking from Nona, I could at least run from my mask. Every day I shuddered to remember it lying in wait for me within the toy chest—even as I strove not to think about the false breast, the false teeth, and the grotesque, decaying body on the other side of the room from me.
Nell too is a child surrounded by fears, simultaneously frightened of and fascinated by a grotesquely menacing world. Although the idealizing narrator imagines that she has “light and sunny dreams” amidst the “fantastic things huddled together” in the curiosity shop, Nell’s reality is quite different. Looking out her window at dusk, she fancies “ugly faces that were frowning over at her and trying to peer into the room”; these “hideous faces” mingle “with her dreams,” and she lives in constant dread of some dark catastrophe. Quilp is “a perpetual nightmare” to Nell, who is “constantly haunted by a vision of his ugly face and stunted figure.” Thinking about her grandfather, whom she sees sinking into the “despondent madness” caused by his gambling and indebtedness, she wonders:
If he were to die—if sudden illness had happened to him, and he were never to come home again, alive—if, one night, he should come home, and kiss and bless her as usual, and after she had gone to bed and had fallen asleep and was perhaps dreaming pleasantly, and smiling in her sleep, he should kill himself and his blood come creeping, creeping on the ground to her own bed-room door—
The catastrophe Nell anticipates appears to come when Quilp takes possession of the shop, “coil[s] himself” into Nell’s “little bed,” and evicts her and her grandfather. Yet this is not the disaster it seems. “Let us wander barefoot through the world, rather than linger here,” Nell urges, and the old man, reduced to a state of childish dependency, agrees. Departing London without plan or provision, the “two poor adventurers” set forth, determined to escape Quilp. Once on the road, they encounter living curiosities more intriguing than those in the shop, and sometimes more menacing. This, the picaresque and largely comic segment of the novel, serves as a necessary, albeit brief, counterpoint to the nightmarish scenes in London, providing images of a resourceful, hopeful, even cheerful Nell. Dickens’ imagination has full play here, as he conjures up characters and incidents that make life on the road seductively appealing. Eventually, Nell and her grandfather come upon the “comfortable” Mrs. Jarley, the proud possessor of Jarley’s Wax-Work Show. This accommodating “lady of the caravan” employs them in the wax-work exhibition—he dusting the figures at night, Nell advertising the show by day. For a time they thrive, until one evening during a relaxed walk in the country, they enter an inn to take shelter from a storm.
To Nell’s dismay, a game of cards is in progress, and the grandfather feverishly joins in. After he has lost the contents of Nell’s “little purse” (“A very pretty little purse. Rather a light purse . . . but enough to amuse a gentleman for half an hour or so,” leers one of his companions), Nell reasons that she can use her reserve—a gold piece she had sewn into her dress before leaving London—to pay for supper and two rooms, for the storm is still raging. “If I had only known of it a few minutes ago!” complains the old man when Nell says she has a little more money. Nell ignores him and privately conducts her transaction with the innkeeper, taking the gold coin from its hiding place and changing it to pay for their lodging. She has the sense that she is being watched, but decides it is her imagination.
Alone in her room, Nell fears that one of the rough men downstairs might come to rob or murder her. She sleeps fitfully only to dream of “falling from high towers,” then wakes suddenly to find a “figure in the room”:
A figure was there. Yes, . . . there, between the foot of the bed and the dark casement, it crouched and slunk along, groping its way with noiseless hands, and stealing round the bed. She had no voice to cry for help, no power to move, but lay still, watching it.
Moving “silently and stealthily,” the figure, with “wandering hands,” takes Nell’s clothes from the bed and searches through them. Once it has the money, it replaces the clothes and “drop[s] upon its hands and knees and crawl[s] away.”
In silent shock and terror, Nell’s first impulse after the figure leaves her room is “not to be alone,” to “have somebody by,” so that her “power of speech would be restored.” She rises and goes to the door, following the figure down the stairs, hoping to reach safety in her grandfather’s room. When the figure stops at her grandfather’s door, she fears for the old man. When it goes in, she is dumbfounded. Resolved to “preserve” her grandfather or “be killed” herself, she “stagger[s]” to the door and discovers “the old man himself . . . counting the money of which his hands had robbed her.”
Nell’s response, once she is back in her room, is one of complete devastation. “No strange robber,” she thinks, “could have awakened in her bosom half the dread which the recognition of her silent visitor inspired.” The reality of the “grey-headed old man . . . acting the thief while he supposed her fast asleep, then bearing off his prize and hanging over it with . . . ghastly exultation” is “worse—immeasurably worse, and far more dreadful, for the moment, to reflect upon—than anything her wildest fancy could have suggested.” She fears her grandfather’s return and imagines a footstep on the stairs, the opening of her door:
It was but imagination, yet imagination had all the terrors of reality; nay, it was worse, for the reality would have come and gone, and there an end, but in imagination it was always coming, and never went away.
When I first reread this passage a few years ago, I was as paralyzed and dumbstruck to discover it as Nell is to discover her grandfather counting her money. I understood, in an instant, why the novel would have meant so much to me at the age of ten—and also why I would so thoroughly have repressed it. For although I was never physically harmed by my grandmother, I was subjected nightly to a palpable “robbery” of my spirit—what Leonard Shengold1 chillingly calls “soul-murder.” It was an experience magnified by my imagination and made greater because it could never be named. Yet here, in this novel discovered by chance at the local library, I found a scene setting forth an image of my own life—a girl violated by a grandparent. No wonder I experienced the book as a refuge, reading it with hunger and abandon.
Dickens’ description of the robbery is vivid and precise, an example of his writing at its best. Yet very few critics have analyzed or called attention to this pivotal moment in the novel, the scene that epitomizes its plot and theme. In an extensive survey of the criticism, I have found only one article, by Gareth Cordery,2 that uses it as a central part of its argument. Cordery, in a provocative Freudian reading, calls the theft a “symbolic rape,” a “symbolic violation,” diagnosing the grandfather as a “compulsive or pathological gambler whose repressed sexual desires for Nell . . . manifest themselves in gambling.”
While Cordery’s interpretation is more classically Freudian than the text seems to warrant, Dickens certainly suggests that the grandfather’s feeling for Nell reenacts his feeling for his wife. Described in terms that evoke a specifically sexual attack, the robbery may be as close as Dickens, writing for a Victorian family audience, could come in depicting an actual rape. Given his emphasis on Nell’s vulnerable sexuality early in the novel, it is hard to believe he did not want adult readers to understand the scene as having overtones of violation and exploitation.
Just as arresting as the sexuality of the scene is its violence. If, as many feminists have argued, the essence of rape is not sex but power, then Dickens has, in another sense, written a terrifying rape scene. More than desire for his granddaughter, the robbery enacts his rage against the women (his wife and daughter) who abandoned him in death—and perhaps even before death. I think again of my grandmother, at what must have been her rage after her daughter’s death, and then at her husband’s sudden death from typhoid fever. And I know that my mother and I became the focus for that rage. While agreeing with Cordery, then, I would go further: this “symbolic rape” is an actual assault; the violation of a child need not be sexual, or even physical, to be devastating.
While Dickens’ portrayal of the old man’s violation of Nell seems unmistakable, critics have usually focused on Quilp, that “gargoyle perversion of cruelty” whom Edgar Johnson3 calls “the supreme grotesque creation of the book,” and whom Paul Schlicke4 describes as the “embodiment” of the “frightening and hostile world” in which Nell finds herself. To Schlicke, Quilp is an “archetypal image,” the “fantastic projection of all of Nell’s fears,” giving “anxiety a mythic dimension.” Yet because Dickens creates such a powerful symbol in Quilp, readers are likely to forget that the immediate threat to Nell comes not from him but from her grandfather.
I too have succumbed to the fascination with the “archetypal image.” Not long after my recent rereading of the novel, and when I had already begun to plan this essay, I dreamt that I killed Quilp:
I am spending the day in a large library, in a city that is a cross between New York and New Orleans. I have been working late, absorbed in my reading. I leave to go home and turn down a street, intending to catch a bus. Suddenly I have entered a nightmare city: the street is dark and deserted; and although I know that I am just around the corner from familiarity and safety, the way back appears long and dangerous. Now I sense a man coming towards me from behind; I feel that he wants to harm me, and I think he is about to begin chasing me. Because I know that he is faster than I am, I realize that my only hope is to face and confront him. So I turn, seeing in him a vision of concentrated ugliness, of deliberate evil, of the desire to annihilate me. He is across the street, coming steadily towards me. There is no one else around, and my only choice is either to fight or be killed. Instead of letting him get to me, I kill him. I use what is at hand, a folding shopping cart I find on the street, which I hook over his head, twist, and use to break his neck. I am extraordinarily pleased with myself, delighted to have survived intact.
I woke thinking “I just killed Quilp” and feeling an enormous sense of triumph.
But now I wonder about my triumph in killing Quilp. For Quilp is a dramatic displacement, a distraction from the central source of danger to Nell. Like the mask in my toy chest, the lion in my dream, he is a safe focus for Nell’s and the reader’s anxieties. In creating such a richly symbolic figure, Dickens colludes with his readers’ desires to deny the dark message embedded in his novel: that the greatest damage children sustain comes not from external predators but from the adults with whom they live. Today I long for a dream in which I turn to face, not Quilp or a lion or a witch’s mask, but my grandmother herself.
For Nell, the inability to confront her violator proves deadly. Her first response to the discovery that her grandfather has robbed her is the classic response of the rape victim and particularly of the child victim of incest. She is silent, terrified, immobilized—and ashamed. In a scene set on the morning after the theft, Dickens uncannily externalizes Nell’s sense of humiliation. She has been sent by Mrs. Jarley to advertise the wax-works at “Miss Monflathers’ Boarding and Day Establishment.” Nell arrives at the door just as Miss Monflathers and her “young ladies” are leaving, and Miss Monflathers seizes the occasion to chastise Nell, the “wax-work child” for being “a very wicked little child,” “naughty and unfeminine,” because she is not engaged in productive work. Bursting into tears, Nell feels herself the center of attention and cannot speak. When one of the girls picks up and gives back to Nell the handkerchief she has dropped in her distress, Miss Monflathers reprimands her for being “vulgar-minded” and indecorous.
In the days that follow, Nell keeps her terrible secret, unable to confront her grandfather or to tell anyone else. She withdraws completely into herself, coming to live in a devastating isolation:
the colour forsook her cheek, her eye grew dim, and her heart was oppressed and heavy. All her old sorrows had come back upon her, augmented by new fears and doubts; by day they were ever present to her mind; by night they hovered round her pillow, and haunted her in dreams.
She takes to following the girl who had picked up her handkerchief. This girl shares a warm relationship with a sister. As Nell watches the two from a distance, she imagines having a friend to whom she might tell her troubles. Yet she is too timid to approach the girl.
When, a few weeks later, Nell overhears her grandfather plotting to rob Mrs. Jarley, she insists that they must leave—claiming to have had dreams of an old man who robs his friends while they sleep. Back on the road, they spend a miserable day in the rain, then arrive at a dark, polluted, and depressed industrial city. Nell suffers from “cold, wet, hunger, want of rest,” becoming “ill in body, and sick to death at heart.” Although the desperate pair are rescued by a kindly schoolmaster whom they had befriended earlier, it is too late for Nell. Brought to a peaceful village where she is at last safe and surrounded by genuine love and care, she gives herself over to death—tending flowers in a graveyard and dreaming of being welcomed into heaven. Her saintly dying occupies the final 200 pages of this nearly 700-page novel.
And it is this death, drawn out and apparently savored by Dickens, that has prompted the most extreme reactions to The Old Curiosity Shop—from the tears of the Victorian men who broke down and cried when they came to the novel’s concluding pages, to the guffaws of succeeding generations who affirmed with Oscar Wilde that “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” For 150 years, critical opinion about the novel has swerved between these two extremes. The high charge associated with the novel, either for praise or blame, suggests that it touches a territory of taboo. The Old Curiosity Shop causes us to laugh or to cry but rarely to look steadily at the phenomenon at its center: the neglect and abuse of children.
In a recent article, Robert Polhemus5 argues that Nell functions as a “Protestant, Victorian version of the Virgin Mary,” a sacrificial Madonna/Christ who could “focus and purge cultural, collective, and personal guilt—particularly conscious and unconscious male guilt towards girls and women.” Polhemus’ is one of the few essays I know that gets at what appears to have been a major function of The Old Curiosity Shop for its nineteenth-century audience, accounting for both the tears and the laughter, and not flinching from an examination of the pain at the novel’s core. Yet Polhemus’ focus is on adult male readers who need Nell’s sacrificial death in order to “revive the spiritual potency of the old dying patriarchal faith.” But what if one wants not to shore up old ruins but to create a vital new religion? What if the reader is, not an adult male, but a female child?
The final illustration of The Old Curiosity Shop shows Nell being lifted up to heaven by angels; it is an image that echoes Renaissance portrayals of the Assumption of Mary. This Nell is an embodied female divinity who dies to save a fallen world, a goddess who provides her age and ours with a figure of redemptive feminine power in a culture that has, until recently, forgotten the goddesses that warmed the ancient world. Yet Nell is a divinity without sexuality—a child-goddess who never achieves adulthood, who is never in full possession of herself. Polhemus argues that Nell dies a virgin, and that this is essential to her apotheosis. I am not so sure, for if the robbery represents a rape, then Nell—in Victorian terms—is a fallen woman (and thus also destined to die). But in either case, untouched virgin or rape victim, Nell dies a child. Despite her grandfather’s lament that she “would be a woman soon,” Nell turns away from her own womanhood, and Dickens’ unorthodox goddess suffers from—and inculcates—the same deprivations as does Christianity’s orthodox female icon, the Virgin Mary.
Dickens retreats from the radical potential of his devastating analysis of abuse and exploitation into a sentimentalized version of sacrifice and redemption. This is why Oscar Wilde was right in laughing at the novel’s conclusion. Dickens’ vision of the dying child ultimately betrays her and the truth his novel has so carefully unfolded. That the novelist could imagine other endings to his story is evident in his portrayal of the Marchioness in this novel—a horribly abused girl who manages, through wit and perseverance and luck, to triumph quite nicely over adverse circumstances. Nell remains, however, the center of The Old Curiosity Shop, the suffering and silent victim whose death became a Victorian media event.
Reading and rereading The Old Curiosity Shop today and recognizing the extent to which I identified with Nell as a child, I know that it is time to let her go—even though I cannot now imagine what my childhood would have been like if I had not found her. She was my witness, my alter ego, the self who existed in language and gave me a home there as well. Nell dies, it is true, but not before she has been given the kind of attention abused or neglected children rarely receive; with a fervor born of his own early pain, Dickens lavishes on Nell the care all children deserve. That I felt safe in Dickens’ world but not my own is hardly surprising: for, in its acknowledgment of Nell’s vulnerability, the narrative itself gives Nell the love she needs. While reading The Old Curiosity Shop, I could relax into the shelter of its printed words, words that took seriously my own circumstances, that gave shape to my own fantasies and fears. If the domain of written language became, then, my primary place of survival, it is no wonder. It is where I live most truly still today, and where, after all these years, I have sought to resurrect this lonely child of dream and vision.
Yet as I bring Nell into consciousness, I can see her as the construction of a culture that has glorified its innocent victims to purge its guilt even while it continues to commit its crimes. I also see her as a construction of my own dreaming self, seeking vindication rather than transformation. For Nell is the sacrificed child in all of us, the uncorrupted embodiment of innocence destroyed, the fantasized redemption we all seek in our lost Edens. Giving up identification with her involves giving up a schematized vision of good and evil, victims and perpetrators: I come to see my grandmother not as a witch but as a broken woman, my parents as themselves bewildered children trying to balance their loyalties and responsibilities. I can, in this moment, forgive them—not with the forgiveness of perfect self-sacrifice that Nell embodies, but with the forgiveness of a troubled and incomplete compassion. For I too am both good and evil, victim and perpetrator, caught in the same tangled web of circumstance. Saying good-bye to Nell, the child who sustained me for so long, I can at last begin to live—in the world of reality as well as dreams.
That statue of Dickens and Little Nell in Clark Park makes sense to me now in a way I could never have anticipated during those years when I was busy earning my Ph.D. Completed by Frank Edwin Elwell in 1890, it was commissioned by Washington newspaper publisher Stilson Hutchins. When Hutchins failed to pay for it, Elwell took his sculpture to England hoping to find it a home—and learned that in his will, Dickens had requested that no “monument, memorial or testimonial whatever” be constructed. The British honored Dickens’ request. Back in the States, Elwell exhibited Dickens and Little Nell at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where it won two gold medals and attracted the interest of the Fairmount Park Art Association, which purchased it in 1900.
Over the years, Dickens and Little Nell has become a favorite haunt of neighborhood children. Annually on Dickens’ birthday, the Philadelphia chapter of the Dickens Fellowship lays a wreath of holly at Nell’s feet; periodically, neighborhood associations rouse themselves against efforts to move the statue to a more prominent location in Center City Philadelphia. In November 1989, vandals damaged the statue, ripping Nell from the base and leaving her face down on the ground. “Terrible news: Little Nell has been ravaged,” wrote Martha Rosso of the Dickens Fellowship to London headquarters. A series of articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer decried the desecration; Charles Dickens’ great-grandson in London was notified; and the Friends of Clark Park launched a campaign to raise funds to restore the statue. By October 1990, one hundred years after its completion, $6,500 had been raised and the statue was restored and rededicated. Today Nell is again a powerful presence in Clark Park. On my next trip to Philadelphia, I intend not merely to pause before this remarkable tribute to a fictional character and her creator, but to bring this wreath of my own.
1. Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
2. Gareth Cordery, “The Gambling Grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop,” Literature and Psychology, 33, no. 1 (1987): 43–61.
3. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952), volume 1.
4. Paul Schlicke, “The True Pathos of The Old Curiosity Shop,” Dickens Quarterly, 7, no. 1 (March 1990): 189–99.
5. Robert M. Polhemus, “Comic and Erotic Faith Meet in the Child: Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (‘The Old Cupiosity Shape’),” Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, ed. Robert M. Polhemus and Roger B. Henkle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 71–89.