Book Review: Charles Dickens 5 - "The Old Curiosity Shop"

 Dickens drawn by Count D'Orsay in Dec. 1841

The death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s fourth novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, is one of English literature’s great cause célèbres. 

Lord Jeffrey, a literary critic and friend of Dickens, was found in tears after reading her death scene. And the Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell threw the book out of a train window declaring, “He should not have killed her.” 

Oscar Wilde’s response? “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without dissolving into tears … of laughter.” And the poet Algernon Swinburne called Nell “a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads.”

As the fate of Little Nell hung in the balance in the final few issues of the novel (printed in weekly-parts), American crowds at the harbour-front in New York City were reported to have yelled at the sailors on board of boats coming in from Britain: “Is Little Nell dead?” 

The novel, from the very beginning, has generated an intense and very mixed response. Modern sensibilities seem to agree more often with Oscar Wilde. The book is seen now primarily as a good example of the Victorian penchant for over-the-top sentiment.

The Old Curiosity Shop was Dickens’ fourth novel. It was published in 88 weekly parts in Dickens’s new magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock. He had conceived of establishing his own weekly periodical whilst in the final stages of writing Nicholas Nickleby. Apparently, the bad experience he’d had editing Bentley’s Miscellany for publisher Richard Bentley did not deter him from giving magazine-editing another try. His concept for the new periodical was a club of characters who would take turns telling stories.

Cover of Master Humphrey's Clock

Master Humphrey’s Clock was published by Chapman & Hall. They agreed not only to pay Dickens a weekly salary for editing it; they also picked up the tab for all of his expenses and shared the profits. The first issue appeared in April, 1840 and cost threepence a week. It was a handsome-looking publication – larger than the usual periodicals of the time, and printed on good quality, creamy-white paper. Each issue consisted of twelve pages of text and two engravings “dropped” strategically into the text, instead of placed at the beginning and end.

Charles Dickens was 28 years old and at the height of his fame. The first issue of the new magazine sold 70,000 copies. But interest soon began to drop. He realized that he needed to write a new novel in order to revive the flagging sales. Serialisation of The Old Curiosity Shop began in the fourth issue. By the end of its run, in November 1841, each instalment of the story was selling about 100,000 copies. Dickens’s usually wrote his novels in monthly instalments; this one was written in weekly parts and the episodes, therefore, are less expansive and the story proceeds at a more sprightly pace.

At the beginning of the novel’s weekly publication, Dickens was only two weeks ahead of the printer – a rather risky situation. But he was used to that sort of pressure. All of his novels were written like that. He seemed to thrive on the pressure of writing to strict deadlines. He wrote 16 pages each week. His routine was to start work at about 8.30 in the morning and work through until about 2.00 in the afternoon. As usual, he began the novel with a general idea of theme and style, but only a vague notion of where he was going. The details of plot and situations came as he went along – often adapting things according to the responses he was getting from friends, family, and the general public.

The framing device Dickens began with in this novel was that of an old man, Master Humphrey, describing the experience of seeing an old man accompanied by a young girl during one of his late-night strolls in the city of London. He stalks them for a while, and begins to imagine their situation. So the book actually begins with a first-person narrator in the first three chapters. But Dickens found the technique difficult, and he soon abandoned it – switching to third-person narrative in Chapter Four.

Nell and her grandfather on the road

Dickens conceived of the character of Little Nell whilst staying with Walter Savage Landor in Bath. Landor was a poet and essayist. The two writers had only recently met, but were already good friends. Dickens would name his second son after Landor. The character of Daniel Quilp in the new novel was also inspired by an incident in Bath – Dickens had seen “a frightful little dwarf named Prior, who let donkeys out on hire” in the city. Prior was known to beat his animals and his wife - in equal measure.

The structure of The Old Curiosity Shop is a blend of alternating sections dealing, on the one hand, with the sentimental story of an innocent, angelic young girl caring for a physically-frail and morally-weak old grandfather, and, on the other, comic and satiric scenes featuring eccentric and, often, low-life characters. And Dickens engages throughout in a lot of moralizing commentary, meant to take the edge off some of the more unsavoury aspects of the story.

It has to be said that much of the story dealing with Little Nell and the grandfather becomes tedious in its repetitious description of Nell’s struggles to care for the old man. And the eventual demise of this little angel is telegraphed to the reader over and over. In several scenes, for example, she is meditating about life and death in the cemetery of a country church. Much of the criticism of the sentimentality in this novel has been focused primarily on the infamous death-scene. But, as some critics have pointed out, Dickens actually handles the scene with much restraint. The death is not described directly - much to the surprise of many only familiar with its notoriety – an account is given of it after the fact not by the narrator, but by one of the novel’s characters. Regardless, the book is still cited as a major example of its author’s maudlin sentimentality, his obsession with death, and his manipulation of the readers' feelings.

Dick Swiveller and "the Marchioness"

And it’s true that over-the-top sentiment involving Nell can be found throughout the book. But there is also a lot of genuine feeling and compassion found in the situations of other characters in the book. Dickens often is most successful in touching a nerve in his readers when he is not consciously trying. A good example here is the relationship between Dick Swiveller and “the Marchioness”. Swiveller enters the story first as a rather minor stock character – a ne’er-do-well clerk looking for the main chance. But in his compassion for the much-abused servant in the Brass household – whom he comes to dub “the Marchioness” – he morphs into an admirable fellow. 

As is often the case with Dickens’s novels, the central characters here are not the real interest and moral-centre of the book. They are engaged in a series of adventures, often given allegorical overtones. It’s the motley collection of supporting characters who imbue the novel with interest and energy: Mrs. Jarley, the benevolent and earthy proprietor of a waxworks exhibition; Miss Monflathers, the cruel headmistress of a girls’ school; Codlin and Trotters, the squabbling entrepeneurs running a Punch-and-Judy show; and, of course, the grotesque and depraved money-lender Daniel Quilp.

The fate of Daniel Quilp

The contrast between the sweet innocence of Nell and the malevolent cruelty of Quilp presents the classic antitheses found in Charles Dickens’s view of existence: good and evil; angel and devil; female and male; masochist and sadist; asexual and lascivious. The sadistic delight which Quilp revels in, and the physical deformity he exhibits often repel and embarrass the modern reader. But this tactic of giving his most morally-twisted characters a corresponding physical deformity emerged clearly in his previous book. He takes it even further here, and Quilp is, perhaps, his most grotesque and repulsive creation.

Other strategies that had become familiar to Dickens’s readers recur here: Nell and her grandfather’s picaresque on-the-road adventures reminds us of the constant travels of The Pickwick Papers and the early experiences of Nicholas Nickleby with the Crummles’ acting troupe; the life-changing benevolence of the Maylie family in Oliver Twist and the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby recurs here in the Garland clan’s care for Nell’s friend Kit; and the element of mystery in the parentage of Oliver and Smike in two previous books occurs here in the background provided for Nell’s family – Dickens is unable to name the character chapter after chapter, instead he calls him the Single Gentleman. It’s awkward and formulaic.

The Old Curiosity Shop, then, despite a fair amount of tedium in the sections dealing with Nell’s and grandfather’s flight from the clutches of Daniel Quilp, and despite some occasional tear-jerking moments, is still an entertaining and diverting read. It’s full of the usual comic characters and satiric scenes of low-life in the city of London. When he’s not trying so hard to manipulate the emotions of his readers, Dickens writes with vigour and passion and creates scenes with intense atmosphere and presence. Problems of plot-coherence and narrative structure remain, but, with Dickens, it's the immersion into his created world, teeming with character and comic exuberance, that carries the reader forward. Not one of his best - but still worth a read!



[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Charles Dickens was to start again, read through all 14 of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. I'll give it a try, anyway! So this is the fifth of a series.]



Next: Barnaby Rudge

[Resources used: "Introduction" to The Old Curiosity Shop by Peter Washington (1995); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990); "Portraits of Charles Dickens (1812-1870)", an excellent web-page collection of Dickens pictures.  Dickens Portraits ]

Book Review: Charles Dickens 4 - "Nicholas Nickleby"

A woodcut engraving of Dickens in 1838 

Charles Dickens still had about a dozen monthly instalments left to write of Oliver Twist when he began work on Nicholas Nickleby in February, 1838. He was twenty-five years old and riding the crest of a wave. This new book - his fourth - would be his third novel. It proved to be hugely successful and confirmed his status as the most popular novelist of his generation. The first issue of his Pickwick Papers, published two years previously, had consisted of just 400 copies. Nicholas Nickleby sold almost 50,000 copies on the very first day of its publication (April 1st., 1838).

Dickens had signed a contract with his publisher, Chapman & Hall, to write the new novel back in November, 1837 – so it took him several months to decide on a subject, a theme and a style for the new work. His general idea was to combine the best elements of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, but also to add something new. He wanted some of the humour and picaresque adventure found in Pickwick Papers; but he also intended to provide more of the hard-hitting social satire he’d used in Oliver Twist. His vision extended even further than that - he planned to focus these disparate elements around a plotline that would become essentially his first romance. The novel would tell the story of young Nicholas Nickleby, an aspiring young gentleman, much like himself, struggling against the vicissitudes of the world.

Cover wrapper for the new novel

Like most of his novels, Nicholas Nickleby was written in 20 monthly instalments. Each issue consisted of 32 pages of text and two illustrations done by Hablot Browne (“Phiz”). They cost one shilling. The first issue was published in March 1838; the final instalment (a double-issue priced at two shillings) came out in September, 1839. So, like the ten-month period in 1837, when Dickens was writing both an instalment of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist each month, from April 1838 to April 1839 Dickens was writing Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby simultaneously. He seemed to thrive on the pressure of meeting constant deadlines.

The initial idea that fired up Dickens’s imagination was to write a polemical satire - in fictional form - of the so-called “Yorkshire schools”. Following the success of Oliver Twist in bringing the issue of child abuse in parish workhouses to the general public’s attention, Dickens decided to court public opinion again – this time in regard to certain disreputable boarding schools in Yorkshire which were used as dumping grounds for illegitimate and unwanted children. Really, these schools were little more than juvenile prisons. The children were abandoned to horrible situations – suffering near-starvation diets and deplorable health conditions. Dickens had heard and read about these establishments in his childhood and they had been in the news again recently. He decided to investigate. He took his illustrator, Hablot Browne, up North with him and visited the Bowes Academy in Greta Bridge – near Barnard Castle in West Yorkshire. The place was run by a certain William Shaw. His apparent cruelty became the model for the vicious and dishonest Wackford Squeers – the entrepreneurial headmaster of the fictional Dotheboys Hall. Dickens succeeded in his plan; thanks to the lurid description of Dotheboys Hall in his new book, the twenty-or-so Yorkshire boarding schools were gone within a generation, victims of an outraged public.

The "internal economy" of Dotheboys Hall: brimstone and treacle served by Mrs. Squeers

A new element in Dickens’s technique in this new book was to create characters with physical deformities – used to embody their moral depravity and then exaggerated for comic effect. These characterizations often tend towards the grotesque, but Dickens is not essentially providing realistic portraits; the characters’ deformities are worn much like a mask – they represent an attitude, or a state of mind. The one-eyed Wackford Squeers, for example, is blind to his own wickedness. His obnoxious son is obese – and busy tormenting the half-starved waifs in his father’s “school”. But it’s not just the evil characters that are physically deformed – some of the good ones are too: Smike, the pathetic youth who has been oppressed by Squeers for many years in Dotheboys Hall, is lame and half-witted. Newman Noggs, Ralph Nickleby’s servant/assistant, is a bundle of deformities. The physical weaknesses here serve as a sharp contrast to their inner benevolence – emphasizing the cruelty they have suffered. 

Nicholas Nickleby is an uneasy blend of satire, picaresque comedy, romance and melodrama. As such, Dickens continues to exploit techniques and situations that had proved successful in his previous books. And the public seemed to love these epic stories in which Dickens mixes genres and alternates styles. After the early polemic against the Yorkshire schools, Dickens puts Nicholas on the road to Portsmouth, where he encounters a travelling acting-troupe under the jovial leadership of Vincent Crummles. This long episode, in which the young Nickleby takes on the role of playwright and leading-actor [Dickens had toyed with the idea of the theatre as a vocation], is a comic interlude in a story that is primarily a romantic melodrama. The romance involves Nicholas’s struggle to vindicate his self-image as a young gentleman in search of love, career prospects, and a fortune. He works to save his “princess” (the lovely Madeline Bray) from a forced marriage to a despicable old money-lender. Nicholas also struggles against the wicked machinations of his main antagonist - his depraved uncle, Ralph Nickleby. His uncle works throughout the novel to thwart his nephew's plans and to ruin the lives of his widowed sister-in-law and her two children, Nicholas and Kate.  

Fanny Squeers tries to interest Nicholas

It’s the character of Ralph Nickleby that keeps the book alive, because mid-way through the book, Nicholas comes under the paternal care of the unbelievably benevolent Cheeryble brothers, who run a successful business in the city of London and shower love and largesse on whomever catches their fancy. There is no more financial struggle for Nicholas and, like Oliver Twist before it (where Oliver lands safe, mid-novel, in the bosom of the Maylie family), the plot falters and the book goes soft. In another similarity with the previous book - which stretched out a convoluted plot-line to explain the mystery of Oliver’s parentage - this novel also creates a mystery about the secret parentage of Smike, and the people who abandoned the child to the cruel care of the Squeers family.

In a melodrama there is scant little character development - things happen, coincidences occur. And the author gets busy announcing what has happened, telling us what the characters think and feel, and moving his heroes and villains through each plot-point, and on to the inevitable conclusion, with young couples pairing up and ensconcing themselves safely in their comfy homes at the happy conclusion.

What saves Nicholas Nickleby from being mere melodrama - as usual with Dickens - are some interesting and delightful characters. There is the foppish Mr. Mantalini, who is forever disappointing his practical and business-minded wife and blustering his way along with a stream of vapid endearments and alibis. There is the put-upon man-servant Newman Noggs, who seems weak and pathetic, but always turns up at key moments to save the day and thwart his evil employer. There is the vile Sir Mulberry Hawk, who engages in a long campaign of attempting to seduce Nicholas’s sister Kate - assisted by their uncle Ralph. And there is Ralph, himself – a relentlessly malevolent figure devoted to the pursuit of money and the exploitation of everyone within his sphere of influence. In some ways, the driving ambition of this character reveals unwittingly, perhaps, the inner disposition of his author – who wants us to identify him with the ardent and sensitive young Nicholas struggling to make his way in a corrupt world. But there is a lot of the relentless ambition and need for financial security in Ralph Nickleby’s character to be found in the secret world of Dickens’s troubled heart.

And, then, there is Mrs. Nickleby, Nicholas’s and Kate’s mother. She is a feckless woman and, at every key moment, comes to the wrong conclusion and makes a poor judgment about people. It is thought that there is a lot of Elizabeth Dickens, Charles Dickens’ mother, in this portrait of Mrs. Nickleby. She annoys us with her lack of insight and her gullibility at the hands of scoundrels. And she is forever rambling on about some memory from the past – and gets lost in a strange and tortuous string of associations, in which she always forgets what she is supposed to be remembering. But some of these long, rambling speeches of hers are droll and diverting – early examples, really, of stream-of-consciousness-thinking put into monologue form. 

In its day Nicholas Nickleby was immensely popular and consolidated Dickens’s hold on the public’s imagination and heart. If the book strikes us today as rather unshapely and overly-melodramatic, it still manages to compel us with its vigorous description, grotesque and comic characters, funny set-pieces, and drawn-out story-lines. And despite the transparencies seen in some of his techniques and stylistic flourishes, Dickens still draws you in, and leads you on, with the sheer exuberance of his imaginative power. But what is it that stays with you, once the book is back on the shelf? For me, it's those early chapters set in the Yorkshire school at Dotheboys Hall: Nicholas thrashing Wackford Squeers with his own cane and taking poor Smike to safety. He might veer too often towards pathos and sentiment, but Dickens truly knew how to touch the human heart and stir his readers’ sense of compassion.

Nicholas thrashes Squeers with his own school cane

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Charles Dickens was to start again, read through all 14 of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. I'll give it a try, anyway! So this is the fourth of a series.]



Next: The Old Curiosity Shop

[Resources used: "Introduction" to Nicholas Nickleby by John Carey (1993); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990) ]