Dickens's ‘School Of Affliction’: Learning from Death inNicholas NicklebyandThe Old Curiosity Shop

Abstract

This essay reads death scenes in Dickens's early novels as contributions to a wider reformist drive (evidenced in discourses of burial, urban, and sanitary reform) to clean up the nation's ways of thinking about mortality, each of which relied upon the careful policing of sense data surrounding corpses, graves, and deathbeds. In doing so, it seeks to expand our sense of why Dickens adopted a sentimental mode in both Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1), arguing that it derived not just from a desire to provoke emotional responses in readers, but spoke to his interest in association psychology as the mechanism by which both ideas and minds were constructed. It thus argues for Dickens's deathbed scenes as sites of literary experiment: attempts to recruit narrative fiction's affective and psychological power for the causes of aesthetic and social transformation.