The Old Curiosity Shop

Abstract

In December 1840 Dickens invited his actor friend Harley to see the old year out ‘with some charades and other frolics’. If Harley were playing on New Year’s Eve he was to come after the performance. As it happened, Harley was acting Bottom at Covent Garden. And presumably Harley’s performance and all the New Year junketings at Devonshire Terrace were somehow mixed up in Dickens’s mind when he began to write chapters 71–2 (Nell’s death) on 7 January 1841. Certainly to read the Pilgrim Letters through this period is to get a different view of Dickens’s relationship with Nell from the traditional one (‘I am breaking my heart over this story’). As well as reading a comparison between Gallows and Guillotine as instruments of execution, and thinking radical thoughts about Wat Tyler in preparation for Barnaby Rudge, Dickens is arranging charades, celebrating his son’s birthday, drinking and dancing. ‘Oh Evins how misty I am,’ he writes; on another occasion he describes himself as ‘inflamed with wine and “the Mazy”’. To complete the novel through this festivity he has to arrange to be ‘laid up with a broken heart’. Even the most emotional letter of the period (which only survives from Forster’s Life and may have been retouched) ends, ‘I am afraid of disturbing the state I have been trying to get into, and having to fetch it all back again’.

‘Happier than tongue can tell, or heart of man conceive’ (ch. 71). ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart report what my dream was!’

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream iv i 208–11)