One Reader Reading: the Reader in The Old Curiosity Shop

Abstract

It is in the nature of the case that because a Dickens novel is so long and so full of detail and so full of different modes of presentation, readers can actualise that text in a number of very different ways, inevitably reducing its potential complexities and multiplicities of meaning. Nearly all critics of The Old Curiosity Shop begin with a perception of some radical disharmony in the novel. J. Hillis Miller notes the ‘ironic identification of rural escape and death’.² Dickens talks in his rhetoric in the novel about the desirability and restfulness of the country, but what Nell and Trent find there is death. James Kincaid notes that ‘for all the travelling and frantic rushing about that goes on, no one really moves anywhere or finally escapes from the pursuers’.³ Steven Marcus notes that although Nell ‘has moved through space she has travelled nowhere’,⁴ and suggests that the idyllic vision of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby begins to seem remote in The Old Curiosity Shop, and to become ambiguous and sentimental. Geoffrey Tillotson finds perhaps the most simple way of making any of the contradictions in a Dickens novel disappear: ‘Dickens’s amalgam of widely separate things has been made harmonious by their having issued from a mind that for each novel limited itself to one inexhaustible range of details — things of one complex colour — different as different continents differ for a geographer.’⁵

More than any other novel Dickens wrote, this one has tended to be rewritten in critical mythology and has become grossly oversimplified in the process.¹