Spirit and the Allegorical Child: Little Nell’s Mortal Aesthetic

Abstract

The Old Curiosity Shop is a story about a child, one of that extraordinary group of novels that appear in the 1830s and 1840s, beginning with Oliver Twist, which give the lives and consciousness of children an unprecedented centrality — Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, texts which are clearly informed by Romantic conceptions of childhood but which also break markedly from them.1 Of this group, it is perhaps The Old Curiosity Shop with which the majority of critics and readers today are most uneasy. Few are curious about the Curiosity Shop or care (which is another word for curiosity) about or for Little Nell.2 It is, almost universally, thought to be a text of notorious sentimentality, morbid and uncontrolled, embarrassing and absurd by turns. Oscar Wilde said it would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing3 and even those like Chesterton prepared to forgive Nell’s death, cannot forgive the life that precedes it (p. 54). In many studies of Dickens, Nell is an early candidate for the critical chop, sacrificed on an early page to demonstrate the seriousness of the criticism that will follow. For F.R. Leavis, for example, ‘to suggest taking Little Nell seriously would be absurd: there’s nothing there.