THE DEATH OF LITTLE NELL

 

The Old Curiosity Shop is often reckoned to be Dickens’ worst book: sometimes by those who loathe it too much ever to have read it – to have heard about it is enough   This may seem a harsh verdict on a work that contains the comic richness of Quilp, Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness; and that combines a dreamlike evocation of a vanishing rural England with the brutal realism of the Black Country.  But if you weigh in the critical scales the undisputed substance and quality of the grotesque, this – so the novel’s detractors have it – fails to counterbalance the sheer deadweight sentimentality of the death of Little Nell.

          All Dickens’ novels are made up of multiple strands and sub-plots, and it is most unlikely that all of these will, or ever did,  appeal equally to all readers.  For myself, Little Nell has always bored me, apart from the veiled nature of the interest Quilp takes in her.  When reading The Old Curiosity Shop I have always found myself focusing on the comic bits and skimming over anything to do with Nell, including her death. On my first encounter with the book, as a teenager, I was much more upset by the demise of Quilp. 

          I can see, however, where Dickens and his contemporary readers were coming from.  Dickens’ beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, had died in his arms.  Childhood deaths – as equally testified in Mrs Gaskell or the Brontës – were a feature of Victorian life.  It was probably psychologically necessary for Dickens to write things out of his system, cathartic in the same sort of way that it evidently was for his audience to read about them: the sort of spirit, too, that led Queen Victoria to describe In Memoriam as her consolation.  With the death of Nell, I have always felt a bit like being caught up in the funeral of some one I don’t know: respecting other people’s grief without sharing it.   But there are those who feel the need to boo the coffin, or dance on the grave.

 

As one who admires the wit of Oscar Wilde, I have always found his quip –  that one must have a heart of stone to read the death of  Little Nell without laughing – my least favourite of his sayings.  For sentimentality is a tricky thing:  just ask a dozen people who say they know what it means actually to define it.  Consensus is a bit like what I think T S Eliot meant about the objective correlative: that the emotions are in excess of the subject that gives rise to them.  Excessive grief over the death of animals is sometimes cited as an example.    But even the death of a budgie need not be clear cut.  What if other humans, or physical pain, had made life intolerable for its owner, and the bird had been the only consolation?  And in Nell we have an innocent worn out by suffering and dying young: themes for at least three forms of legitimate grief.  What’s excessive?

          Wilde’s comment is strange for one who was himself a Victorian.  What was he actually mocking?  The language of the death scene itself?  Or its sentiments?  Or was he subconsciously ridiculing the family solidarity of Dickens’ readers, perhaps sensing that the solidarity of his own family was due to disintegrate in the future?   

          In Shakespeare’s history plays, the danger of usurping a throne is that it will give the same idea to others to try for themselves.  Inviting people to mock at grief seems to me both contemptible, and a dangerous precedent.  Let us take Wilde’s own Ballad of Reading Gaol, after he hears that “that fellow’s got to swing”:

 

                   Dear Christ! The very prison walls

                      Suddenly seemed to reel,

                   And the sky above my head became

                      Like a casque of scorching steel;

 

          Isn’t one, following Wilde’s own lead, entitled to say, “Good God, man, get a grip!   He was only a criminal, after all.  Plenty more where he came from.  You’d know about that, Oscar, wouldn’t you?”  And so on. 

 

Probably the next-most famous attack on Dickens is in Aldous Huxley’s essay Vulgarity in Literature, to the effect that indeed Dickens’ heart overflowed, but it overflowed with “such repellent secretions.”    Huxley speculates that D H Lawrence would have found The Old Curiosity Shop obscene, an attempt “to do dirt on life”.    And more in the same vein. 

          Now this is a deal stronger than Wilde.  This goes beyond mockery into real hatred.  I am reminded of Orwell’s essay Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool.   Trying to account for the pamphlet in which Tolstoy savaged Shakespeare, Orwell speculates that in the character of Lear, Tolstoy saw himself.   Rubbishing Shakespeare was Tolstoy’s revenge.   In Little Nell, was Huxley  reminded uncomfortably of human mortality?

          It is instructive to compare the death of Nell with the death of Linda, the Savage’s mother, in Brave New World.  Linda has aged naturally; she looks old in a way that those outside the savage reservations do not.  Her presence in the hospital is upsetting to the visiting party of schoolchildren, who are being conditioned to accept death as simply the final stage in the biological process that is a human life.   Nell’s death, by contrast, is rendered bearable by the prospect of Heaven.  Is Huxley reacting to a perceived vulgarity not – or nor only– of style, or of sentiment, but of belief?

That, I think, is the main reason for the violence with which post-Victorian readers react to – or perhaps against – the death of Nell.  The Victorians spoke freely about death, but were reticent about sex.  Moderns talk freely about sex, but are reticent about death.  For if life is a series of sense experiences, then sex is a part of those experiences, but death terminates them.  Our entitlement  – our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – should be to have them for as long as possible: part of the modern worship of the child, I suspect, is that children have a longer lifespan ahead of them than adults do, and hence more time in which to experience.  Is that what moderns dislike so much about the death of Little Nell: the reminder that we are beings who die, and that any of us can die at any time?

          The last picture in The Old Curiosity Shop – the physical drawing, I mean – is of Nell being taken up to Heaven by angels.  Remove that belief, and her story – a child worn out prematurely by an attempt to protect her grandfather from himself – becomes painfully pointless.

          Dickens ends his novel with an echo of Psalm 90, “like a tale that is told”;  but  secularly-minded moderns may be uncomfortably reminded of a speech in Macbeth, and another sort of tale.

 A tale told by an idiot: signifying nothing.