by Jane Smiley
Although he had miscalculated the costs of the handsome weekly numbers, thereby reducing his profits to some degree, Dickens himself was very pleased with the novel and wrote in March 1841 (around the time of completion) that he expected to always like it best. Certainly he was deeply involved with Nell and deeply affected by her death.
The Old Curiosity Shop was in Dickens’s Oliver Twist mode rather than his Nicholas Nickleby mode. As in Oliver Twist, his protagonist is an innocent child lost in one of the crueler byways of adult commerce, beset by human predators whose features are both mechanical and demonic. Those whose job it is to protect her are powerless to do so. The villain of the novel, the dwarf moneylender Daniel Quilp, gains control of Nell and her grandfather through the grandfather’s attempts to win sustenance for Nell by gambling. In a related plot, Dick Swiveller, a young law clerk who is covetous of Nell, is redeemed through coming to understand the true nature of his employers, Sampson Brass and his sister Sally, and through the love of their oppressed maidservant. Kit finds marital redemption, but Nell dies, pure and uncorrupted.
The Old Curiosity Shop is Dickens’s most interesting novel in terms of the extremes of reaction it elicits in readers. Legendarily popular and lucrative in its day, it is now impossible for many to read, even those who are devoted Dickensians. Oscar Wilde remarked, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Nell without laughing,” and others have been at least as critical. The kindest thing most modern readers think of it is that it vividly shows the differences between the sensibility of the mid-nineteenth century and our own. Critics and social historians point out that the progress of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic was marked by the steadily increasing suppression of public displays of emotion among men, as the image of proper manhood was modified by the influences of colonialism, industrialism, militarism, and financial speculation. After the marriage of Victoria and Albert, in 1840, gender roles became more sharply divided, with women exaggerating the putative qualities of femininity (privacy, tender feeling, fragility) and men the putative qualities of masculinity (public action, stoicism, strength). The theory goes that the effect of The Old Curiosity Shop, which relies upon the reader’s readiness to feel the extreme pathos of the sufferings and innocence of Little Nell, would be blunted for the post-Victorian reader, who filters his or her sense of pathos through more layers of irony than Dickens’s contemporaries did.
The Old Curiosity Shop defines an outer boundary of one of Dickens’s modes of imagining his world, and it is a world peopled by unrealistic, fairy-tale figures of ogres and princesses and fools. Dickens often told his friends that he had loved fairy tales as a child and that he still approved of them as an adult for their antidote to the dead, commercial, mechanical life that seemed to be taking over all around him. Among the many risks Dickens takes in The Old Curiosity Shop is setting the stark fairy-tale world of Nell and her grandfather right next to the somewhat more comic and realistic world of Dick Swiveller. Nell’s life-and-death journey continually breaks into and overwhelms the much less desperate psychological journey that Dick takes, but they are meant to coexist and to comment on each other, mimicking the ways in which different lives have different tonal and mythic qualities. That Dickens can’t quite balance them at this point in his career is not especially surprising. In part we see the temptation and the pressure of improvisation—Dickens was writing in short weekly parts, and he was acutely aware of what the selling points of the serial were. The novel surely felt like a high-wire act that was succeeding magnificently, encouraging him to write from instinct even more than he had in the past. Nell’s fate also certainly drew upon his still fresh sense of grief at the death of Mary Hogarth.
Dickens’s own sense of pleasure and accomplishment at the completion of the novel indicates that its extremes felt right to him and that its sales proved to him that they were right in fact. The tone of the novel is almost a denial of the tone of Nickleby, with its broad and cheery qualities. Certain Nickleby figures return, especially the figure of the moneylender, but now the recognizably human Ralph Nickleby (who even has a few softer notions and second thoughts) has become Daniel Quilp, deformed and inhuman, a monster with a sense of wit and huge energy. Nell herself is similar to the young women in Nickleby, in that she must go into the world unprotected, but now her very purity forbids contact with it—there is no young man, like Nicholas, pure enough to protect her, and death is the only option.
Without engaging in excessive Freudian second-guessing of the author, it is interesting to accept the invitation offered by the quickness and ease of the novel’s gestation, and ask what light it sheds upon Dickens’s sense of himself and of his life’s possibilities at this point, a time when to all appearances he was hugely successful. Clearly, he saw innocence itself as something possessed in its purest form by certain presexual women. The ideal of domesticity that he had written about and attempted to live now came second, morally, and was good enough for the redeemed (Dick and Kit), but not for those who had never fallen (Nell). Nell’s particular brand of innocence had specific qualities—endurance, forgiveness, martyrdom—that were to be seen in contrast with the dark, manic forces all around it. Quilp is not the only frenzied character—to a greater or lesser degree, the contrast between all of the other characters and Nell is in their greater expression of liveliness, or life. It is as if Nell must die because the energy of life is in itself tainted and destructive. Every novel is a logical argument—an assertion of the author’s sense of what life is, embodied in characters, plots, and images. Some of these arguments have wide appeal, some don’t; some have an appeal bolstered by intense emotional energy, some appeal essentially to reason and shared experience. The argument of The Old Curiosity Shop strikes many readers as a strange and unbelievable one.
On June 19, 1841, the Dickenses took a trip to Scotland. The high point, and a turning point in Dickens’s sense of his own position in public life, came in Edinburgh on June 25, when the city threw for him a public dinner, a sort of occasion unfamiliar to us, but rather like a cross between the Academy Awards and getting the key to the city. Weekly serialization of The Old Curiosity Shop had given way, in the late winter, to weekly serialization of Barnaby Rudge, which was also quite popular. Walter, child number four and boy number two, had been born in February, the day after Dickens’s twenty-ninth birthday. Dickens was used to fame, adulation, and importance, but somehow this public dinner, with 250 male guests eating and 200 women coming in after dinner to listen to the speeches from galleries above, impressed upon him that he was more than famous and more than a literary man, but something on the order of a national treasure (if it is possible for someone to think of himself as such a thing). He had achieved not simply literary success, but something else, a separate status. His voice and his vision had become beloved; as Ackroyd puts it, he was “public property.” His first reaction was very typical of the public Dickens—when he stood to make his own speech, he was poised, articulate, modest, cool, and, most of all, charming. When he later wrote to Forster about it, the tone of his letter was exultant, pleased, and, at least to some degree, amazed. He seems to have been especially struck by the fact that he was so young and the men who came to celebrate him were old and established.
In his Charles Dickens: A Literary Life, Grahame Smith points out that in the twelve years between the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s last book, Redgauntlet, and the publication of The Pickwick Papers, novel writing in England had been going through something of a lull. Publishing itself changed in those twelve years, as periodicals found their way to a more numerous and socially broader audience, taking their place beside the expensively bound three-volume novel, which cost just over a pound and a half, equivalent to something like $52 today. The Romantic period was long over, and the Victorian era had not begun. Interesting novels were being published in France by Balzac, Stendhal, and others, and in the United States by Washington Irving, but in England only Tennyson’s lyrics, De Qu
incey’s memoirs, and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus were of any note. When Chapman and Hall began publishing the novels of Charles Dickens, the idea that a company would publish only books and profit from them, rather than printing books and newspapers and selling them along with stationery, was a very new one.
The new thing, in every way, was for an author to support himself or herself through sales of his or her work, and in this Dickens was pioneer and exemplar. The form of serial monthly or weekly publication not only helped him find a wide audience (every issue sold, it has been estimated, found fifteen readers), it also helped him keep that audience interested. The analogy, of course, is to weekly television or soap opera–type serials. Dickens’s exquisite natural responsiveness, combined with his amazing inventiveness, meant that a form other authors found onerous was perfectly suited to him.
Another thing that made Dickens a national treasure, though, had nothing to do with publishing and everything to do with Dickens’s class origins or, rather, the fluidity of his class origins. Carried upward and downward by the vagaries of his father’s career and poor money management, and then by his own hard work and genius, Dickens found himself in a unique position to observe all facets of English society. He was unconstrained by a classical education, untrained, as it were, to look at English society in the traditional way. His first thirty years were, in a fashion that contrasted with that of almost everyone around him, a training in freedom—in forming his own opinions, in judging for himself, in observing the effects of one group upon another, one class upon another, of institutions upon individuals and individuals upon institutions. He differed from all of his contemporaries in that he represented no group, therefore he came to represent all. His medium, the novel, enhanced his freedom, since the novel can never work except through freedom—the author is free to write, and the reader is free to read. Dickens understood as well as anyone ever that the reader can always close the cover, and his art always responded to the fact that the reader can choose to buy or not to buy the next number. The very oddities of both the man and his work further promoted his freedom, since his mind ranged freely over all sorts of characters, ideas, and settings. And he frequently took pains to speak out against abridgments of freedom, such as the closing of shops on Sunday, the only day when working people were able to buy, and other laws restricting the lives of the poor, as well as narrow and joyless religious and charitable institutions. By temperament, by training, and by intention, Dickens was a modern man, whose essential quality was the desire for freedom of thought and action.
The lull in the production of English novels between 1824 and 1836 marks the birth of modernity. Austen and Scott, whose novels are set in the countryside, give way to Dickens, a man of the city. The tissue of relationships and obligations that mark traditional society give way to the casual meetings and commercial connections that mark modern society. For me, the moment where literature enters the modern world is very particular. In Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose,” published in St. Petersburg Stories in 1835, the protagonist searches all over St. Petersburg for his vagrant nose. He pauses in his search to look at an advertisement in a shop window for ladies’ stockings. He is struck by the picture of the woman’s leg slipping into the stocking. He moves on, but he has just had a thoroughly modern moment—sex and graphics have combined to turn him into a potential customer. The other features of modernity—rapid transportation, industrial production, financial speculation, the wholesale dissemination of information, the rise of the middle class, the elevation of materialism, general education—all of these are still to come, but advertising is the singing canary, alerting us to what is in store. The power of advertising and its capacity to connect him to and enlarge his audience was something Dickens comprehended at once and completely. He was at home in his milieu.
Dickens in Edinburgh in the middle of his thirtieth year is an original without a progenitor. Most other great innovators owe something to someone—even Shakespeare was preceded by Christopher Marlowe, and he did not create the theaters in which his plays were performed or the companies that performed them. Dickens, however, spoke in a new voice, in a new form, to a new audience, of a new world, about several old ideas reconsidered for the new system of capitalism—that care and respect are owed to the weakest and meekest in society, rather than to the strongest; that the ways in which class and money divide humans from one another are artificial and dangerous; that pleasure and physical comfort are positive goods; that the spiritual lives of the powerful have social and economic ramifications. We might today call this an ecological perspective, an intuitive understanding of the social world as a web rather than a hierarchy—the quintessential modern mode of seeing the world. Dickens grasped this idea from the earliest stages of his career and demonstrated his increasingly sophisticated grasp of it in the plots, characterizations, themes, and style of every single novel he wrote. This is the root source of his greatness. That he did so in English at the very moment when England was establishing herself as a worldwide force is the root source of his importance. That he combined his artistic vision with social action in an outpouring of energy and hard work is the root source of his uniqueness.
Charles and Catherine returned to London from Scotland in mid-July, then went to Broadstairs in Kent for the rest of the summer. Dickens had begun to think of traveling to the United States, no doubt encouraged by a letter from Washington Irving, who promised, in the wake of the success of The Old Curiosity Shop, that a Dickens tour of America would be an unprecedented triumph—and certainly for Dickens this meant not only fame, but money. In addition, the themes of Barnaby Rudge, which takes place during the American Revolutionary era, had inflamed his desire to see the land of newness for himself. Notes and memoirs by European travelers to America abounded in the 1830s and 1840s—it was practically a cottage industry, and surely Dickens knew that he had something original to contribute. He broached the topic to his friend Forster in mid-September and had already made up his mind a week later. Unfortunately, Catherine, mother of four, including a seven-month-old baby, did not want to go. Ackroyd notes that she wept every time he mentioned his plans, but as usual, he was not to be denied, and within weeks plans for the journey, to be made by steamship (and the first steamship had crossed the Atlantic only four years before), were in full swing. Of course, it was to be a lengthy journey, almost six months, and the children were to be left behind in the care of Dickens’s brother Fred. Dickens was undaunted, as well, by an operation he elected to undergo in the autumn—the repair of a fistula in his rectal wall, without anesthetic, so painful in the retelling, according to his friend Macready, that Macready could hardly force himself to sit still to listen to Dickens’s recounting it. Nevertheless, Dickens completed the last installments of Barnaby Rudge while recuperating.
On January 2, Charles and Catherine boarded the Britannia and set sail for America. The journey was not quite as it had been advertised—the couple’s stateroom was so tiny that he likened stowing their trunks to forcing a giraffe into a flowerpot. But he took his usual lively interest in everything there was to see, writing later in American Notes that “one party of men were ‘taking in the milk,’ or, in other words, getting the cow on board; and another were filling the ice-houses to the very throat with fresh provisions; with butcher’s meat and garden stuff, pale sucking pigs, calves’ heads in scores, beef, veal, and pork, and poultry out of all proportion. . . .” The captain later arrived in a small boat, and he was just what Dickens hoped for, “a well-made, tight-built, dapper little fellow; with a ruddy face, which is a letter of invitation to shake him by both hands at once, and a clear blue, honest eye that it does one good to see one’s sparkling image in.” What boded well did not go well—the eighteen-day journey was an arduous labor of heavy seas, dazed seasickness, cold, and fear. Even so, even though both Charles and Catherine were nearly overcome by anxiety, Dickens, as always, was able to enjoy certain things and to evoke them for his readers—after days at sea, he writes,
“the captain (who never goes to bed and is never out of humor) turns up his coat collar for the deck again; shakes hands all around; and goes laughing out into the weather as merrily as to a birthday party.”
Dickens was thrilled to get to America, and not only to terra firma. His popularity there, combined with his critique of English society, had convinced him that he and the citizens of the United States would feel an instant and abiding sense of kinship and would recognize themselves in each other. There was also an assumption on both sides that too much celebrity was not possible—the Americans had prepared to make the most of Dickens’s visit, with balls and parties and receptions and every sort of opportunity to view the author. Dickens, used to fame of a familiar sort, public events interspersed with private time to work and spend with his family, was unprepared for what was expected of him (though it looks perfectly familiar to us). In Boston, Hartford, New Haven, New York, and Philadelphia, there were just too many occasions, too many expectations, and Dickens’s mood soured. We can recognize it as a nightmare book tour, the author and his wife unprotected by publicists or any sort of previous experience. All the features of modern American celebrity leap forth, full grown—the public’s sense that they have the right to gaze upon the Dickenses at will, the gossip in the press about their every characteristic, the sense the Dickenses have of being objectified and hounded and intruded upon, the resentment of the public at any sort of behavior on the part of the author other than gratitude and good cheer, and, above all, the assumption that all fame, all the time, must be a good thing.
Dickens quickly offended his hosts. He had not reckoned with the New England conservatism and provincial snobbishness of those he met in Boston, who were eager to see his mode of dressing and speaking as evidence of ungentlemanly origins. He was short, he had big ears, he talked quickly—he was not the titan Americans expected. In addition, he mentioned several times his indignation that American newspapers and periodicals were in the habit of reprinting his works without paying for them, that this was, in fact, standard publishing procedure. Over this issue, he did something that every media-savvy man or woman knows, after fifty years of television, is exactly the wrong thing to do—he lost his temper. The response in the press was immediate and, to us, predictable. He was attacked, denigrated, ridiculed. Everyone, including Dickens, realized at once and completely that Dickens was an Englishman, with characteristic English ways of doing and perceiving things, and more important, that he was a man and not an ideal figure, not the amazing, soothing, genial, and visionary voice of the narrators of his books, coming into the home with every new number of each novel, taking his place at the fireside and in the reader’s consciousness, but a specific male human being, not always lovable or wise or admirable. Thus the perennial disappointment of celebrity was played out at once, with the first great media celebrity. His works had made promises of a personal nature that the man himself was bound to renege upon, no matter how much energy and goodwill he possessed.
