The Mystery of Master Humphrey: Dickens, Nightwalking and The Old Curiosity Shop

Abstract

The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), as John Bowen has stated, is a novel that continues to be thought of as 'a text of notorious sentimentality, morbid and uncontrolled, embarrassing and absurd by turns'. This article re-examines Dickens' novel through a close reading of its opening scene, in which the narrator, Master Humphrey, encounters Little Nell in the streets of London at night. To illuminate it, the article sets this scene within two frames. In the first section, it discusses the significance of Dickens' own experience of nightwalking, as recorded in his essay 'Night Walks' (1860), and relates this to an emergent semiotics of walking in the nineteenth century. In the second, it scrutinizes the role and character of Humphrey, especially in the context of Master Humphrey's Clock. In the third section, it analyzes the novel's opening scene itself, proposing that Humphrey is a far darker character than is usually assumed, before finally suggesting that its mysterious undercurrents resurface in later novels by Stevenson, Joyce and Nabokov. © 2013 The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press 2013; all rights reserved.