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Little Nell
Oct. 28th, 2020 08:55 amI wish Little Nell didn't weep so much.
For Dickens weeping is attractive and engaging. It shows heart. And all his supposedly sympathetic characters well up at the slightest provocation- especially the women. We think of it as a Victorian thing, but it started with Rousseau and the romantics- and by the time Dickens was writing his early novels the cult of sensibility they started was at full tide- and beginning to ebb. We are separated from that culture by many decades of the stiff upper lip- a way of dealing with awfulness which is as inhuman as the cult of tears was soppy.
I'm trying to like Little Nell- trying, that is, to experience her as Dickens's first readers did. We like our fictional kids to be sparkier but, if you set cultural prejudice aside, I don't think she's such a bad sketch of a shy, unworldly little girl. There are moments when she puts me in mind of Carroll's Alice. "Is waxwork funnier than Punch?" she asks Mrs Jarley- and that's a very Alice question- one that cuts to the quick- because how can waxwork be superior to Punch- as Mrs Jarley insists it is- unless it amuses us more? The funnier the better, that's not a bad critical maxim to carry through life.
If only she didn't weep so much.
For Dickens weeping is attractive and engaging. It shows heart. And all his supposedly sympathetic characters well up at the slightest provocation- especially the women. We think of it as a Victorian thing, but it started with Rousseau and the romantics- and by the time Dickens was writing his early novels the cult of sensibility they started was at full tide- and beginning to ebb. We are separated from that culture by many decades of the stiff upper lip- a way of dealing with awfulness which is as inhuman as the cult of tears was soppy.
I'm trying to like Little Nell- trying, that is, to experience her as Dickens's first readers did. We like our fictional kids to be sparkier but, if you set cultural prejudice aside, I don't think she's such a bad sketch of a shy, unworldly little girl. There are moments when she puts me in mind of Carroll's Alice. "Is waxwork funnier than Punch?" she asks Mrs Jarley- and that's a very Alice question- one that cuts to the quick- because how can waxwork be superior to Punch- as Mrs Jarley insists it is- unless it amuses us more? The funnier the better, that's not a bad critical maxim to carry through life.
If only she didn't weep so much.
