The Most Famous Literary Death Scene of the Victorian Age: Charles Dickens signed autograph quotation of the death of his Little Nell, who became a cultural icon

Charles Dickens’s literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. In 1839 he added Oliver Twist, and his fame grew. The Old Curiosity Shop was his fourth novel, and Dickens first published it along with some short stories in his short-lived periodical, Master Humphrey’s Clock, which lasted from 1840 to 1841. This fourth novel was so popular that New York readers stormed the wharf when the ship bearing the final installment arrived. The Old Curiosity Shop was printed in book form in 1841.

In the preface to The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens wrote, “I had it always in my fancy to surround the lonely figure of the child with grotesque and wild, but not impossible companions, and to gather about her innocent face and pure intentions, associates as strange and uncongenial as the grim objects that are about her bed when her history is first foreshadowed.”

He carried out his fancy in the work, which tells the story of Nell Trent, a beautiful and virtuous young girl of “not quite fourteen.” An orphan, she lives with her maternal grandfather in his shop of odds and ends. Her only friend is Kit, an honest boy employed at the shop, whom she is teaching to write. Obsessed with ensuring that Nell does not die in poverty as her parents did, her grandfather attempts to provide Nell with a good inheritance through gambling at cards. He borrows heavily from the evil Daniel Quilp, a malicious, grotesque, and hunchbacked moneylender. In the end, he gambles away what little money they have, and Quilp seizes the opportunity to take possession of the shop and evict Nell and her grandfather. Convinced that the old man has stored up a large fortune for Nell, her older brother Frederick convinces the good-natured but easily led Dick Swiveller to help him track Nell down, so that Swiveller can marry Nell and share her supposed inheritance with Frederick. To this end, they join forces with Quilp and pursue the girl and her grandfather. Nell, having fallen in with a number of characters, some villainous and some kind, succeeds in leading her grandfather to safety in a far-off village, but this comes at a considerable cost to Nell’s health.

Kit, having lost his job at the curiosity shop, has found new employment with the kind Mr. and Mrs. Garland. Here he is contacted by a mysterious ‘single gentleman’ who is looking for news of Nell and her grandfather. The ‘single gentleman’ and Kit’s mother go after them unsuccessfully, and encounter Quilp, who is also hunting for the runaways. Quilp forms a grudge against Kit and has him framed as a thief. Kit is sentenced to transportation. However, Dick Swiveller proves Kit’s innocence, and Quilp is hunted down and dies trying to escape his pursuers. At the same time, a coincidence leads Mr. Garland to knowledge of Nell’s whereabouts, and he, Kit, and the single gentleman (who turns out to be the younger brother of Nell’s grandfather) go to find her. Sadly, by the time they arrive, Nell has died as a result of her arduous journey. Her grandfather, already mentally infirm, refuses to admit she is dead and sits every day by her grave waiting for her to come back until, a few months later, he dies himself

“No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death.”

Dickens himself was traumatized by her death, saying he felt writing it as though he were experiencing the death of one of his children; he also wrote of it, “Old wounds bleed afresh when I think of this sad story.” It certainly brought back painful memories of the death of his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, and indeed that death played a key role in Dickens’s formulation of the character.

Little Nell became a cultural symbol with a long-lasting impact. As author David Frum wrote, “The death of Little Nell may be the most famous of Victorian death scenes”. There is a statue of Dickens and Little Nell in Philadelphia, one of only two statues of him in existence. And when motion pictures first began to be made commercially just over a century ago, the silver screen was replete with characters based on Nell. Screen icon Mary Pickford played Little Nell in 1910.

On January 3, 1842 Dickens, a month shy of his 30th birthday, accompanied by his wife, sailed from Liverpool bound for the United States. He was determined to visit the young nation to see for himself this haven for the oppressed that had righted all the wrongs of the Old World. He arrived in Boston on January 22, where he received a hero’s welcome from common readers and the Boston intelligentsia alike.

Autograph quotation signed, from The Old Curiosity Shop, Tremont House, Boston, January 29, 1842, just a week after arriving in America, describing the death of Nell: “She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death.”

A search of public sale records going back 25 years finds only five autograph quotations signed by Dickens from his works having reached that market, and just three from novels of this importance. Describing the most famous literary death scene of the Victorian Age, perhaps only Tiny Tim’s evocation of God’s blessings would be comparable.