The Old curiosity shop
The Old Curiosity Shop, somewhat surprisingly, has almost nothing to do with an old curiosity shop.
Half of the novel chronicles the adventures and misadventures of a fourteen year old girl and her hapless grandfather after they skip out on the unrepayable debt that led to the foreclosure of their home and business. With no one to turn to, and nowhere to go, they flee at random across London and through a comprehensive Rogue’s Gallery of Victorian society; of puppeteers and gamblers, circus showmen, sadistic schoolmarms, swindlers. At one point Nell, the young girl, is befriended and briefly employed by the alcoholic curator of a wax museum; at another (after they become lost in a smoky industrial hinterland during a storm) a foundryman lets them doss down on an ashpile before his roaring furnace. In the morning, they set out again, as hopelessly as ever, until they run into a nebbishy but compassionate teacher they had lodged with at an earlier stage of their journey. He is being relocated, he tells them, to a small school in the country, and invites them to join him. And so their life of vagabondage is brought to an end: Nell and her grandfather are put up in the broken-down but cosy wing of an old church-house and become the village factotums for a small but sufficient salary. The other half of the novel, interlaced with the first, follows the relentless machinations of an evil dwarf named Daniel Quilp to relocate his wayward debtors and extract his pound of flesh. Actually, to call Quilp simply “evil” is to do him an injustice: He is a vicious sadist, a sociopath, an exuberantly, implausibly, but hilariously vile little gargoyle. At night, plotting the demise of innocent souls, he grins satanically into his crackling woodfire and knocks back porringers of boiling-hot alcoholic punch in one impossible draught. He torments his pretty wife and, seeing her tears, flies into infantile ecstasies of delight. He’s wonderfully entertaining, really, especially in the company of his bootlicking pettifogger, Mr. Brass, who, for monetary reasons, is forced to suppress his chagrin and play off his client’s cruel mockery of him as so much hilarious banter, with cries of, “Oh, very good jest, Sir! What an amazing flow of spirits!” and, “Oh capital, capital! You’re a most remarkable man, indeed—so extremely whimsical!” But not even Quilp’s diabolical enthusiasm for evil can overcome the moral bias of the omnipotent author, and so all the plans must come to nothing, and the dwarf himself end up floating face-down in the harbour on a cold and foggy London night. Even at this late stage of the narrative, with Quilp dead, and just a few chapters to go, there is good reason to feel doubtful of a happy ending. It’s true that Nell and her grandfather have several allies in London who have already thwarted the dwarf and been searching for them; it’s true that these allies have located the pair and dispatched a carriage to bring them back to London where (surprise, surprise) a formerly-estranged and now-wealthy relative has popped up to dispose of their financial troubles forever. But we have also been informed that the prolonged hardscrabble ramble through London has taken a heavy toll on Nell’s health. And lately, she has been given to spells of metaphysical abstraction and precocious spiritual meditation—as sometimes happens to those who have a secret foreknowledge of their own impending death. The Old Curiosity Shop was first published in serial form in 1840, and the novel, and particularly the ending, caused quite a sensation at the time. [1] It is said that New York readers stormed the wharf when the ship carrying the final instalment arrived. “Is little Nell alive?” they shouted to the sailors, who might have already read the final chapters in the United Kingdom. Daniel O’Connell famously burst into tears at the finale, and threw the book out of the window of the train in which he was travelling, while Norwegian author Ingeborg Hagen buried her copy, since “nobody deserved to read about Nell, because nobody would ever understand her pain.” On others, the book had an equal but opposite effect. “One would have to have a heart of stone,” said Wilde, “to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears… of laughter.” Swinburne, discussing the unalloyed and therefore unrealistic selflessness of the child, called Nell, “a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads.” After reading the novel for myself, I understand both reactions but find that mine is closer to O’Connell’s than to Wilde’s. And it is not because, despite scenes in which the sentimentality is admittedly troweled on, it remains a vastly entertaining and sometimes moving work of art (though it does) but because I think that the negative criticism proceeds from a false understanding of artistic intent. No mind as intelligent and prolific as Charles Dickens’ clearly was could believe in the existence of Nell: a child who faces destitution and death without a single instance of petulance or fear; or in a man like Quilp, whose immorality attains such refinement that it is undiluted by a single drop of doubt or pang of conscience—and who can, what is still more unbelievable, swallow boiling liquid with impunity. The point is that Dickens was not a Dostoyevsky or a Joyce; that he was not aiming for gritty realism or psychological verisimilitude and we should not seek it from him; that he intentionally created a morally simplified, morally stylised world, that it was a part of his artistic design, and to accuse him of schmaltz is a little like accusing Modigliani of an ignorance of human anatomy. To enjoy Dickens the reader is required to enter into the same mindset that allows them to enjoy musicals and fairy tales; to suspend their disbelief in another world, recognisably like ours, but intentionally distinct from it in several obvious respects. And like a fairy tale, or an Aesopian fable, the lens through which Dickens presents his universe simplifies reality in order to more clearly reveal certain moral truths. Even accepting all this, I guess you could still criticise the value of the message delivered through the sentimental medium of Dickens' art—his indictment of cruelty to children, for example, or his advocacy of charity and compassion for the poor. But then again, you’d have to be a Quilp to do that. [1] In this paragraph I am paraphrasing the Wikipedia article. |