Abstract
This chapter argues that Dickens sought to develop a new aesthetic of representing the dead in The Old Curiosity Shop: one that was based on associationist psychological theories, rooted in his admiration of Wordsworth, and intricately linked to the rise of new cemetery spaces in Britain’s cities. The death of Little Nell has routinely been condemned as an example of everything that’s bad about Victorian culture’s tendency towards sentimentalism. This chapter contributes to recent scholarly attempts to reconsider the novel’s aesthetic, and argues that Dickens’s representation of death in the novel was an attempt both to reflect the association of ideas at work within his narrative and to bring about a psychological transformation in his readers. Dickens claimed that he wanted to fill the minds of his young readers with ‘better thoughts of death’: an ambition that he shared with the designers of the new garden cemeteries that had emerged in Britain in the years before he began writing The Old Curiosity Shop. These spaces were carefully managed to eliminate anything that might cause feelings of shock or terror in the minds of visitors, in an attempt to transform the widespread cultural association of death with horror. This chapter reads Little Nell’s death as an attempt to translate this anti-realist, cemeterial aesthetic into the novel form, and argues that it represents a culmination of the project to reimagine the dead in ways described in this book.
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Notes
- 1.
Wilkie to Mrs. Ricketts, 4 October 1839, in The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey vol. 1, 1820–1839 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), 642.
- 2.
Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 20.
- 3.
Letters of Charles Dickens, 1, 642.
- 4.
See Lauren Cameron, ‘Interiors and Interiorities: Architectural Understandings of the Mind in Hard Times,’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 35.1 (2013): 65–79; Lawrence Frank, ‘In Hamlet’s Shadow: Mourning and Melancholia in Little Dorrit,’ SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 52.4 (2012), 861–96; David McAllister, ‘“Subject to the sceptre of imagination”: Sleep, Dreams, and Unconsciousness in Oliver Twist,’ Dickens Studies Annual 38 (2007), 1–15; Athena Vrettos, ‘Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition,’ Victorian Studies 42.3 (1999), 399–426; Sarah Winter, The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read With Charles Dickens (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); Tyson Stolte, ‘“And Graves Give Up their Dead”: The Old Curiosity Shop, Victorian Psychology, and the Nature of the Future Life,’ Victorian Literature and Culture 42 (2014), 187–207; Tyson Stolte, ‘“What is Natural in Me”: David Copperfield, Faculty Psychology, and the Association of Ideas,’ Victorian Review 36.1 (2010), 55–71.
- 5.
William Burdon, Materials for Thinking (Newcastle: 1806), 194.
- 6.
Isaac D’Israeli, ‘The Book of Death,’ 290; ‘History of the Skeleton of Death’, 302–3; 303. D’Israeli’s book appears in an inventory of Dickens’s library taken in 1844. See The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens ed. Kathleen Tillotson vol. 4, 1844–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 711–25.
- 7.
Irving’s text provided Dickens with a model for much of his early writing, not least in Irving’s evocative portrayal of an old-fashioned English Christmas. The two men would go on to become friends, and in a speech in New York, in February 1842, Dickens claimed, in Irving’s presence, that ‘I do not go to bed two nights out of the seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm’. Dickens speech was recorded in the New World 26 February 1842, 144.
- 8.
Letters of Charles Dickens, 1, 642.
- 9.
Dickens to Georgina Hogarth, 26 October, 1837. Letters 1, 323.
- 10.
See Chap. 3, above.
- 11.
‘Banquet in his Honour: Edinburgh’, The Speeches of Charles Dickens ed. by K. J. Fielding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 10.
- 12.
Maia McAleavey, ‘The Discipline of Tears in The Old Curiosity Shop,’ Dickens Studies Annual 42 (2011), 123–141.
- 13.
Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 159.
- 14.
Steven Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 145.
- 15.
John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination (London: Faber, 1973), 135–6. Carey is not alone in discerning the influence of ‘We Are Seven’ on the depiction of Little Nell (see, e.g., Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (New York: Viking, 1970), 144; Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)).
- 16.
Nicola Bown, for example, has argued persuasively that we need to view sentimentalism critically yet sympathetically, and that it ‘should be central to our understanding of Victorian literature and art’. Nicola Bown, ‘Introduction: Crying Over Little Nell,’ 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century 4 (2007), 3. In another helpful article, Bethan Carney historicises not sentimentalism itself, but the reaction against it, identifying its roots in reactionary mid-Victorian politics. Bethan Carney, ‘Introduction: “Mr Popular Sentiment”: Dickens and Feeling,’ 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 14 (2012).
- 17.
William Wordsworth, ‘Essays Upon Epitaphs,’ 56.
- 18.
F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 298.
- 19.
Tyson Stolte, ‘“And Graves Give Up their Dead”: The Old Curiosity Shop, Victorian Psychology, and the Nature of the Future Life.’ Victorian Literature and Culture, 42 (2014), 187–207.
- 20.
Wordsworth, Essays Upon Epitaphs, 55.
- 21.
Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London: 1838), vol. 3, 275. This was another book that could be found on Dickens’s shelves in the 1840s. See The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Kathleen Tillotson vol. 4, 1844–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
- 22.
James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), 268.
- 23.
See, for example, the Prospectus issued by the General Burial grounds Association in 1825, which called for the construction of a British Père Lachaise. Its forerunner, the Economic Funeral Society, had been widely condemned for issuing an earlier prospectus offering returns to investors of 15 per cent. George Frederick Carden, founder of Kensal Green, was involved in both ventures. For more, see the savage write-up both received in ‘The General Cemetery Company’, The Royal Ladies Magazine, Aug. 1831, 98–103. For more on Carden’s business model, see A. J. Arnold and J. M. Bidmead, ‘Going “to Paradise by way of Kensal Green”: A Most Unfit Subject for Trading Profit?,’ Business History 50.3 (2008), 328–50.
- 24.
Edwin Chadwick, A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (London: 1843), 133.
- 25.
The secondary literature is vast, but see, for example, and in addition to the texts cited elsewhere in this chapter, Julie Rugg, ‘The Victorian Cemetery,’ Mortality 15.4 (2010), 342–343; Julie Rugg, Fiona Stirling, and Andy Clayden, ‘Churchyard and Cemetery in an English Industrial City: Sheffield, 1740–1900,’ Urban History, 41 (2014), 627–663; Peter Thorsheim, ‘The Corpse in the Garden: Burial, Health and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century London,’ Environmental History 16.1 (2011), 38–68.
- 26.
John Evelyn, Silva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions 4th ed. (London, 1706), 167–8.
- 27.
James Stevens Curl, A Celebration of Death (London: B. T. Batsford, 1993), 136.
- 28.
Chadwick, Supplementary Report, 27.
- 29.
For more on the rise of the garden cemetery see Julie Rugg, ‘The Origins and Progress of Cemetery Establishment in Britain,’ in P.C. Jupp & G. Howarth (Eds.), The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, 105–119). For a useful account of their business model, see Arnold and Bidmead (2008).
- 30.
James Stevens Curl, Kensal Green Cemetery: The Origins & Development of the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, London, 1824–2001 (Chichester: Philimore, 2001), 21–48; Lee Jackson, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 106–114.
- 31.
[Charles Molloy Westmacott] The English Spy vol. 2 (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1826), 2: 115.
- 32.
Samuel Laman Blanchard, The Cemetery at Kensal Green (London: Cunningham & Mortimer, 1843), 1.
- 33.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 1996), 180.
- 34.
Wordsworth, ‘Essays Upon Epitaphs’, 56.
- 35.
See, for example, the speech’s appearance in the work of George Collison, who was the Secretary of the Abney Park Cemetery Company and the cemetery’s de facto founder. Collison reprints the speech in full in his Cemetery Interment (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans,1840), 92 ff. Mount Auburn was the model for Abney Park, and both cemeteries had links to congregationalism. Story was Mount Auburn’s first President, and his dedicatory address was widely reprinted throughout the rest of the century.
- 36.
Ibid., 122.
- 37.
Joseph Story, ‘Phi Beta Kappa Discourse’ in The Miscellaneous Writings: Literary, Critical, Juridical, Political, of Joseph Story LL.D (Boston, 1835), 16.
- 38.
John Strang, Necropolis Glasguensis (Glasgow: Atkinson & Co., 1831), 49; 59.
- 39.
Sarah Hoglund, ‘Hidden Agendas: The Secret to Early Nineteenth-Century British Burial Reform’ in Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment ed. by Albert D Pionke and Denise Tischler Millstein (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 15–28.
- 40.
George Alfred Walker, Gatherings from Graveyards (London: 1839), 192.
- 41.
Ibid., 2.
- 42.
George Alfred Walker, Burial-Ground Incendiarism: the Last Fire at the Bone-House in the Spa-Fields Golgotha (London: 1846), iii.
- 43.
Walker, Burial-Ground Incendiarism, 3.
- 44.
UCL Chadwick Papers, Box 48.
- 45.
Mary Elizabeth Hotz, Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 19.
- 46.
Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981), xvi.
- 47.
As his reaction to Kensal Green shows, Mudford was a conservative figure. He is now best remembered for ‘The Iron Shroud’, a tale of terror that appeared in Blackwood’s in 1830, and profoundly influenced Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’.
- 48.
William Mudford, ‘Cemeteries and Churchyards—A Visit to Kensal Green,’ Bentley’s Miscellany 9 (Jan, 1841), 92.
- 49.
John Bowen, ‘Spirit and the Allegorical Child: Little Nell’s Mortal Aesthetic,’ in Dickens and the Children of Empire ed. by Wendy S. Jacobson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 13.
- 50.
Aldous Huxley, Vulgarity in Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), 57. For more on this, see Howard W. Fulweiler, ‘Here a Captive Heart Busted’: Studies in the Sentimental Journey of Modern Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993); and Valerie Purton, Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb (London: Anthem Press, 2012).
- 51.
Gill Ballinger, ‘The Old Curiosity Shop,’ in A Companion to Charles Dickens ed. by David Paroissien (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 331.
- 52.
Marcia Muelder Eaton, Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 124.
- 53.
Ibid., 125.
- 54.
Curl, Kensal Green Cemetery, 103.
- 55.
Ibid., 104.
- 56.
John Claudius Loudon, On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman’s, 1843), 39.
- 57.
William M. Taylor, The Vital Landscape: Nature and the Built Environment in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 183; 192.
- 58.
Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: the Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 79–80.
- 59.
Catherine Robson, ‘Girls Underground, Boys Overseas: Some Graveyard Vignettes,’ in Dickens and the Children of Empire, ed. Wendy S. Jacobson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 120.
- 60.
Charlotte Mathieson, Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 28.
- 61.
Lauren Byler, ‘Dickens’s Little Women; or, Cute as the Dickens,’ Victorian Literature and Culture, 41 (2013), 235.
- 62.
Dickens, Letters of Charles Dickens, 1. 642.
- 63.
John Bowen, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 156.
- 64.
Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 259.
- 65.
Jonathan H. Grossman, Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 150.
- 66.
Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 69.
- 67.
Patten, Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’, 277.
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McAllister, D. (2018). Dickens’s ‘Better Thoughts of Death’: Psychology, Sentimentalism, and the Garden-Cemetery Aesthetic of The Old Curiosity Shop. In: Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790–1848. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97731-7_5
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