¹ See, e.g., Michael Steig, “The Central Action of Old Curiosity Shop, or, Little Nell Revisited Again,” Literature and Psychology, 15 (1965), 163–70.

² See, e.g., Alexander Welsh, “Two Angels of Death,” The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 180–95. Welsh concludes that Christianized heroines in Dickens are endowed with the power to save the heroes from death and to deliver them directly to salvation.

³ Paul de Man makes a text's inevitable assertion of freedom from the very restrictions it defines the basis of his study Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971).

⁴ De Man, p. 9. Derrida's attack on the concept of “presence” in Western metaphysics is, of course, central to all his work.

⁵ For a detailed account of this and other Victorian excesses, see John Morley, Death, Heaven, and the Victorians (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1971).

⁶ Both attitudes are expressed by Morley and by James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (London: David and Charles, 1972).

⁷ See Curl, p. 20.

⁸ See esp. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans, and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 33–45. Freud says explicitly, “It is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of … civilization” (p. 33).

⁹ Most criticism of the novel vacillates on fixing Dickens' attitude toward death and points to a fundamental confusion in Dickens' mind. Steven Marcus, in Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Basic, 1965), calls the novel a “celebration of death” (p. 143) but adds, “These affirmations [of death] are made, however, in a context which already contains their repudiation” (p. 161). Garrett Stewart, in Dickens and the Trials of Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), asserts that “[Nell] is not merely ‘half in love with easeful death’; she is, by her own frail standards, as passionately devoted to it as Quilp is to life” (p. 90). but he then claims that the novel as a whole revolts from death: “The description of Nell's languid daydreams of green fields and songbirds, her unmistakable death-drifts, is pretty dull going, but the prose of her nightmares is riveting” (p. 91). Welsh writes confusingly that Nell and her grandfather may be traveling toward death but only because the city they flee represents death in a more terrible aspect (p. 59). These opposing judgments are synthesized in an interesting way by Philip Rogers, “The Dynamic of Time in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 28 (1973), 127–44. Rogers takes the position that the novel is a progress through fear toward Nell's “acceptance” of death. But Rogers isolates Nell's terror and her resolution in early and late parts of the novel, respectively, in a way that is perhaps too neat. Rogers also founds Nell's acceptance on a weak consolation: the hope that her life and death might be a model for others. This “triumph of virtue over the grave” (p. 140) does not locate a quality that is inherent in the experience of death; it proposes an optimism contrary to the fact of death.

In fact, what the novel leaves us with is an irreducible experience of all conceivable responses to death. Even the narrator's own resolution about Nell's death, his sense that she has led us to a “universal Truth” (Ch. lxxii) about immortality, is immediately fractured by her grandfather's whispered “Oh! Let her come tomorrow!” (Unless otherwise noted, all references are to Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, Gadshill Edition [New York: Scribners, 1899]. Chapter numbers are given in parentheses.) I hope to show that it is precisely this irreducibility about death that is the novel's affirmation.

¹⁰ This association has been made by Rachel Bennett, “Punch vs. Christian in The Old Curiosity Shop,” Review of English Studies, 22 (1971), 423–34.

¹¹ It should be noted here that Dickens was a persistent supporter of the lower classes' need for entertainment as a relief from labor. In particular, his pamphlet Sunday under Three Heads attacked a bill then before Parliament that would have prohibited all recreation on Sunday, thereby discriminating against the poor, who had only Sunday to themselves.

¹² See Konrad Lorenz' account of his reliance on Freud to escape the problem, in his introduction to On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, 1966), p. x.

¹³ Georges Bataille, in Death and Sensuality (New York: Walker, 1962), p. 5, defines eroticism as assenting to life up to the point of death.

¹⁴ “And now the instincts that we believe in divide themselves into two groups—the erotic instincts, which seek to combine more and more living substance into ever greater unities, and the death instincts, which oppose these efforts and lead what is living back into an inorganic state” (Freud, The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans, and ed. James Strachey [New York: Norton, 1966], p. 571).

¹⁵ I am thinking here principally of the work of Ernest Becker, esp. The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973); of Norman O. Brown, who proposes, in Love's Body (New York: Vintage, 1966), that “Personality is persona, a mask … a social fiction” (pp. 90–108); and of Georges Bataille, who writes that man's greatest desire is to overcome the fragmentariness of his existence, represented to him by the limits of his physical body, his mind, his personality, and his culture, and to enter into a seemingly prior condition of “continuity” and limitlessness, represented by the dissolution of personal limits in death (pp. 5–19). The presence of a death wish has often been noted in The Old Curiosity Shop, but only as a passive, regressive desire, not as a yearning with legitimate metaphysical significance. See Leonard F. Manheim, “Thanatos: The Death Instinct in Dickens' Later Novels,” Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Review, 47 (1961), esp. 60–61. Influenced by neo-Freudians like Menninger and Ferenczi, Manheim sees the death drive in Dickens as regressive and anti-erotic.

¹⁶ See Welsh, “Work,” in The City of Dickens, pp. 73–85, for a good discussion of differences in the attitudes of Dickens, Carlyle, and other Victorians toward work as the expression of moral virtue and as an experience. Welsh calls these differences a “contradiction between doctrine and theme,” and he notes that the value of work in Victorian novels is almost always defined negatively rather than embodied in a positive ideal.

¹⁷ Rogers, p. 133.

¹⁸ This aspect of Swiveller's character has been well documented by James R. Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 99–104.

¹⁹ As Steven Marcus points out, this notion would seem to conflict with Forster's assertion that he suggested Nell's death to Dickens, but even Forster admits that “the man's purpose seems to be always present” (p. 132).

²⁰ In “A Christmas Tree,” Dickens recollects Little Red Riding Hood as “my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss” (Selected Short Fiction [Baltimore: Penguin, 1976], p. 130).

²¹ Most descriptions of eroticism focus on the role played by such radical contrasts. Bataille, in “Beauty,” Death and Sensuality, pp. 135–41, has written that the beauty-and-the-beast motif in literature never merely features an interest in innocence; rather, the conjunction of purity and monstrosity gives point to the brutality of the degradation, making it a more intensely erotic violation. Roland Barthes writes, in The Pleasure of the Text (trans. Richard Miller [New York: Hill and Wang, 1975], p. 7): “Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so.”

²² Without the pressure of this threat, “purity” by itself would indeed be obsessional in this novel, as Steig and Marcus claim it is. The presence of a constant threat to Nell also refutes both the argument that Dickens shared Nell's quest for purity and the argument that he rejected it—both purity and its destruction are necessary to the mythopoeic world of the novel.

²³ Such a claim, however, is made by Leslie Fiedler, “Good Good Girl and Good Bad Boy,” No! in Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature (Boston: Beacon, 1960), pp. 257–65.

²⁴ Quoted in George Ford, Dickens and His Readers (New York: Norton, 1955), p. 61.

²⁵ See Jerome Meckier, “Suspense in The Old Curiosity Shop: Dickens' Contrapuntal Artistry,” Journal of Narrative Technique, 2 (1972), 199–207, for a de-tailed account of Dickens' skill in preparing his readers for the conclusion of the novel.

²⁶ I am thinking mostly of Steven Marcus' charge that the novel tries to disengage itself from energy (p. 142).

²⁷ Quilp's leering at Nell is often compared to Dickens' interest in Mary Hogarth: see, e.g., Marcus, pp. 151–64. Jack Lindsay, in Charles Dickens (London: Dakers, 1950), pp. 192–93, also compares Quilp's hostility toward his wife and mother-in-law to Dickens' own connubial bitterness.

²⁸ Welsh, p. 120.

²⁹ This scene (Ch. lxii) and the quarrel about Quilp's nose are quoted by A. E. Dyson, The Inimitable Dickens (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 30, and Marcus, p. 159, respectively. The three of us, however, pursue different ends.

³⁰ Dyson, p. 30. 31 Brown, p. 162.

³² These notions are developed by Bataille, esp. pp. 5–17.

³³ Marcus, p. 148, refers to remarks made by José Ortega y Gassett in The Dehumanization of Art, trans. Helene Weyl (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968).

³⁴ From the manuscript. These lines did not appear in the printed novel, but they are quoted in the notes of The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Angus Easson (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), p. 703.

³⁵ See esp. Marcus, pp. 164–68.

³⁶ Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice, quoted in Jacques Derrida, “A Hegelianism without Reserves,” trans. Allan Bass, Semiotext(e), 2, No. 2 (1976), 25–55.

³⁷ This is Bataille's term for the state of selfless union beyond death.

³⁸ George Eliot, Middlemarch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 613.

³⁹ Appendix, The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Angus Easson, p. 680.