[I read this 1841 novel in ten sections, writing about each section in turn as I read it. I had never read it before, so each section is new to me. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
31 August 2024
Chapters 1-8
In 1840, Dickens wanted to diversify from the monthly format of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. His new project was a weekly magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock, a vehicle for a miscellany of writing by Dickens and others, including the serialised publication of any new fiction. He hoped that it would take away the monthly grind, the conceit of the magazine being that an old raconteur would tell stories to the gathered company, arising from his own experiences, and… it didn’t catch on at all with the public. Readers were only really interested in the new story that appeared in the fourth number, and it pretty soon became clear that Dickens would have to concentrate on writing that in weekly parts.
This goes some way towards explaining the slight hiccup in the narrative format in the early chapters of the novel. For three chapters, Master Humphrey relates how he happens upon a young girl walking alone in London at night, and how he finds out a little about her life both by accompanying her home and by returning next day. Then, how does it go? ‘I shall for the convenience of the narrative detach myself from its further course, and leave those who have prominent and necessary parts in it to speak and act for themselves.’ Good to get that out of the way.
The world of the novel is a dingy place. There appears to be only one loving relationship in it, and that one has become highly problematic. Fifteen or so years before the creation of Little Dorrit in the novel of that name, we are presented with little Nell—little in age, in this case, as well as in stature—unconditionally devoted to her grandfather and very highly regarded by the narrator. Her grandfather seems to love her just as devotedly, but something is wrong. In her earlier childhood—she’s thirteen now—they would spend untroubled evenings together. We don’t discover this until later: ‘I used to read to him by the fireside, and he sat listening, and when I stopped and we began to talk, he told me about my mother, and how she once looked and spoke just like me when she was a little child … we were very happy once!’ But no longer. Now, to Master Humphrey’s horror, the old man has to spend every night away from home, leaving Nell to look after herself. And, as he discovered on that first night, sometimes she might find herself lost and completely alone in the city.
It’s at the end of the first weekly episode—in a four-paragraph section added, I learn, after the original Master Humphrey’s Clock version—that Dickens presents us with an image of the position of Little Nell in the dark scheme of things. Master Humphrey is back home, feeling dreadful after having left her alone in the shop. ‘I had ever before me the old dark murky rooms—the gaunt suits of mail with their ghostly silent air—the faces all awry, grinning from wood and stone—the dust and rust and worm that lives in wood—and alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.’ Hablot Brown’s illustration shows her white figure smiling in her sleep, beatifically bright against the white bedsheets and surrounded by the darkness and decay.
(Interestingly, the Project Gutenberg version I was going to copy from doesn’t include the four paragraphs. The above quotation is from a single paragraph in the original version.)
This is Nell as we always encounter her in these early chapters. She spreads happiness and light to everyone around her—there is a lumbering ‘boy’, Kit, whom she treats like a child and teaches to read—and at first we know nothing of the deep sadness she feels. She is genuinely devoted to her grandfather, and our interest is piqued by the strangeness of the situation. For instance, there seems to be no accounting for a strange little scene in Chapter 3, in which the monstrous Quilp—we’ll soon come back to him—brings the old man gold to be placed in his safe. And nor can the reader guess what enterprise convinces Nell’s grandfather that one day she will be so rich she will never again need to worry about money.
His bold talk has convinced Nell’s older brother Fred, as mean-spirited as Nell is generous, that the impoverished style of life in the curiosity shop is a pretence. Master Humphrey himself, still narrating at this point, is perplexed. Perhaps the old man is ‘one of those miserable wretches who, having made gain the sole end and object of their lives and having succeeded in amassing great riches, are constantly tortured by the dread of poverty, and beset by fears of loss and ruin.’ It seems unlikely, because the old man is so clearly distressed by having to leave Nell every night, to come home exhausted. But Fred is determined to believe it, and that the old man is going to cheat him out of a fortune that should be his.
The grubbiness of this little storyline is in no way alleviated by the presence of the closest thing to comic relief in the novel so far—even the comic relief has a grubbiness about it—Dick Swiveller. His name, as apt as any in Dickens’s early novels, describes his nature. It’s clear he has no guiding moral compass of his own, and is highly susceptible to any suggestions Fred comes up with. I’ll come back to both of them when the now anonymous narrator does in Chapter 7…
…because first, he has bigger fish to fry in the form of Daniel Quilp. Or smaller. In a Dickens novel, diminutive size always seems to matter. With young women, it often goes with angel-like goodness. With men of any age, it goes with the opposite. We remember another novel from the early 1840s, Barnaby Rudge, and the conspiring, conniving Sim Tappertit. If Quilp is as vain as Sim—and, in his own topsy-turvy way, he is—it is for the way his smallness confers upon him a goblin-like air of wickedness. With a name that sounds like a belch or the call of an amphibian, Quilp is a grotesque ‘dwarf.’ Dickens, still using the voice of Master Humphrey in Chapter 3, only hesitates over the use of the word twice, then never again. When Quilp first enters the old man’s shop, he is ‘an elderly man of remarkably hard features and forbidding aspect, and so low in stature as to be quite a dwarf, though his head and face were large enough for the body of a giant.’ The description carries on for a long paragraph before he turns his ‘black eyes … restless, sly, and cunning’ in the direction of Nell. As she retreats towards the brother she loves—of course she loves him— ‘the dwarf (if we may call him so) glanced keenly at all present.’ You bet.
Chapter 4 takes place in Quilp’s house, just before his return, where a conversation taking place. His pretty young wife—the question of how she could have ended up with him for a husband is glossed over in a sentence for now—is with his mother-in-law and four or five other ladies, mostly pronouncing on the faults in everybody else’s husbands. Usually, we are given to understand, these fine ladies gossip in twos about the others. But all together, they can turn their attention to ‘the common enemy,’ husbands. But there’s no community in their talk, the main purpose of which is to condemn unnamed members of the group who don’t know how to put their husbands in their rightful places, under their thumbs. So, soon, the criticism becomes specific. Betty, Quilp’s wife, has got it wrong. They wouldn’t let him act as he does—they wouldn’t even have had the poor sense to marry him in the first place—and we get a glimpse of the isolation of her life. Her mother, who had conspired in the marriage and now lives with them, is as scared of him as everybody else. She might criticise Quilp, but in doing so she only makes her daughter’s life worse.
We see this when Quilp returns home to overhear the part of the conversation pertaining to his own faults and cruelty. He is sarcastic when they realise he has been listening, and the other women all leave Betty and her mother to face his anger. But, as we see, he doesn’t do anger. Instead, he does a dark parody of loving charm that is far worse, and far more deviously cruel. Betty’s punishment arrives with immediate effect. Or, to put that another way, with mind-numbingly long and drawn-out effect. Quilp tells her he won’t be going to bed yet, and as he chain-smokes cigars through the night, she is obliged to sit with him and stay awake too. It’s insidious domestic sadism, as confirmed in the final illustration of the chapter.
Next day, we follow him to his ‘counting-house’ after his night of tobacco-fuelled reverie. There are more grotesqueries, from his head-standing office boy whose only work seems to be to look out of the window to… the rest of it. Hablot Brown’s illustration perfectly presents the sloppy griminess of the riverside place, but it could as easily be a design for a theatrical set. It’s ready for the (literally) knockabout onstage exchanges between Quilp and the boy, so absurdly formulaic I wonder if Dickens’s original readers would recognise their violently comic threats from the music halls. ‘And here it may be remarked, that between this boy and the dwarf there existed a strange kind of mutual liking. How born or bred, and or nourished upon blows and threats on one side, and retorts and defiances on the other, is not to the purpose.’ After Quilp’s wordless cruelty of the night before, the comedy violence of the threats is grotesque, but somehow harmless. ‘Now, you mind the wharf. Stand upon your head agin, and I’ll cut one of your feet off.’ No he won’t. But maybe it’s a relief for Quilp not to have to present his leering pastiche of politeness and charm.
Meanwhile, Dickens has some serious business to carry out. Quilp is about to catch up on the sleep he missed when the boy comes in to tell him there’s somebody to see him. It’s Nell, with a letter from her grandfather. Quilp reads it, and he’s very disturbed by it. We soon discover that it’s about a financial failure, and we come to realise that Quilp is plotting his next move. We are still in the ramshackle counting-house, and the knockabout burlesque continues around the main characters—Quilp’s boy is having a comedy fight with Kit, because Kit insulted Quilp, and even Quilp is bemused by the logic of this—but there’s a dark thread running through now. Quilp insists that Nell goes back to his house, because he thinks his wife might be able to wheedle out some information from her about what her grandfather is up to.
But there appears to be the germ of a different, more monstrous idea forming in his mind. How would Nell feel about being his ‘number two’—that is, his second wife after the first one is gone? ‘to be my wife, my little cherry-cheeked, red-lipped wife. Say that Mrs Quilp lives five year, or only four, you’ll be just the proper age for me.’ This doesn’t appear to be a joke, and Nell’s reaction is as we would expect: ‘the child shrank from him in great agitation, and trembled violently. Mr Quilp … only laughed and feigned to take no heed of her alarm.’ They go to his house, Quilp forces his wife to try to get the information that Nell, of course, doesn’t possess—all she can describe is the saddening change in their lives since her grandfather began his nightly excursions—and he gives Nell a letter to take back.
By this time, the release of new chapters in Master Humphrey’s Clock has become more regular. Nell’s sad little conversation with Mrs Quilp forms most of Chapter 6, and the same edition of the magazine contains the seventh chapter too. Dickens wants to develop another plot thread, just as seedy in it way as the Quilp storyline, and focusing on Dick Swiveller and Fred. We’re in another recognisable, vaguely comic milieu. This is the impoverished world of the shabby, drone-like would-be gent. Dick has no money, and gets by as best he can. It isn’t pretty. Not only does he make a huge joke of how he has cheated so many local shopkeepers and caterers there’s hardly a road within miles that he can safely walk along, not only does he act out a pantomime of how he will sprinkle pretend tears all over his next ‘penitent’ letter to his aunt and benefactor—how we laughed—he tops it all by unthinkingly going along with Fred’s suggestion in Chapter 7 that he should marry Nell when she comes of age.
Fred’s words as he persuades Dick of the good sense of his plan contain eerie echoes of Quilp’s half-formed plan for Nell. ‘I don’t mean marrying her now … say in two years’ time, in three, in four. Does the old man look like a long-liver?’ Quilp muses on the death of his wife, while Fred happily looks forward to that of ‘the old man.’ It’s the way of this grubby little world…
…and Dick can only think of one obstacle. In fact he doesn’t think of it at all, but it is forced upon his attention when the soapy arm of the cleaning-girl appears, to thrust a note into his hand. Sophie, the woman he has been stringing along, wants him to come to a little soiree—and Dick has to think fast. Has he been rash? Has he committed himself? He decides not. ‘Love-making, yes. Promising, no …. There can be no action for breach, that’s one comfort. I’ve never committed myself in writing, Fred.’ So that’s all right. All that’s needed—and it comes in the first of the chapters to appear in the next number—is a comic little scene at Sophie’s mother’s ‘seminary’ for young ladies—you can just imagine—in which he has to feign jealousy of an imagined rival. The comedy comes from the fact that there is a real rival, a market gardener. In the moment, Fred forgets why he’s there and really does feel jealous, and he is only saved by his own cowardice. The rival would be happy to fight, but Dick confines himself to two long, exhaustively described looks of disdain, He leaves, to dream of laying waste his rival’s market garden and turning it into a brick-field.
Addendum—Quilp as ‘nightmare’
Quilp is taunting his wife about his own good looks, just before his long night of cigar-smoking in Chapter 4: ‘he treated her to a succession of such horrible grimaces, as none but himself and nightmares had the power of assuming.’ Dickens’s readers would recognise what is meant by ‘nightmares’. An engraving of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare had been cheaply available for fifty years by the time the novel appeared. Might we recognise the grimacing figure sitting on the woman’s chest?
Chapters 9-16
Dickens needs to move things on. Half way through these eight chapters, Nell and the old man have been forced from the curiosity shop and have set out on their impoverished way from London. Quilp had gleaned enough from what he heard Nell telling his wife to guess that the old man was gambling all his money away and, having let him stew while waiting for a visit, he confronts him. ‘I know, that all those sums of money, that all those loans, advances, and supplies that you have had from me, have found their way to—shall I say the word?’ He does say the word, or two words: ‘To the gaming-table … your nightly haunt.’ The old man, already near collapse, falls into a long illness, during which time Quilp gets his shady lawyer to draw up papers of ownership based on a sheaf of promissory bills given in exchange for the loans. Shortly after the old man’s recovery, Quilp tells him he’ll have to leave: ‘To-day’s Tuesday.… There’s no hurry—shall we say this afternoon?’ He agrees to Friday instead, and both Nell and her grandfather leave at daybreak.
That’s almost it, in terms of the plot, except for the constant presence of the ever-loyal Kit. He, like Nell and her grandfather, is an innocent without an ounce of selfishness. None of these can imagine a mindset like Quilp’s, so when Quilp tells the old man that Kit is the source of his information about the gambling, he can only believe it, and the others can only wonder what on earth has made him forbid Kit from ever seeing them again. But Dickens has created a world in which innocents can remain pure—we remember the symbolism of that image of Nell, immune from the darkness around her bed—so, both before and after the Friday morning of the departure, there is an undying bond between Kit and Nell. Dickens offers another symbol, in the form of the linnet that Nell has to leave behind. ‘She wept bitterly for the loss of this little creature—until the idea occurred to her—she did not know how, or why, it came into her head—that it might, by some means, fall into the hands of Kit….’ Perhaps he would take it as she intended, ‘as an assurance that she was grateful to him.’ Of course, Quilp wants to wring its neck when he realises they have gone in the next chapter, but guess who comes to its rescue.
I’ll come back to the little bird, but I need to rewind. Before Quilp’s long-awaited but highly unsettling arrival at the shop, the narrative has focused on Nell’s state of mind for something like three pages. It’s as though Dickens wants to confirm her angelic status, and her grandfather’s dependency. A long description of her endless days of sadness and disquiet, of her nightly vigil at an upstairs window until she is too tired to sit any longer, concludes with the old man’s firm belief that she hasn’t a care in the world. This is how good she is at hiding her true feelings, so that ‘he went on content to read the book of her heart from the page first presented to him … and murmuring to himself that at least the child was happy.’ Are we invited to judge him for his easy satisfaction with that ‘page first presented to him?’ The quotation continues with him ‘little dreaming of the story that lay hidden in its other leaves….’ Maybe he doesn’t see because, in his wrong-headed monomania, he doesn’t want to see.
Because it is a monomania, his conviction that it is only a matter of time before he will make her rich. We see it confirmed when Quilp confronts him with it. He has never, ever won at the gaming-table—Quilp forces him to admit it—and yet he is convinced that one final loan will turn it all around. ‘“See, Quilp, good tender-hearted Quilp,” said the old man, drawing some scraps of paper from his pocket with a trembling hand, and clasping the dwarf’s arm, “only see here. Look at these figures, the result of long calculation, and painful and hard experience. I must win. I only want a little help once more, a few pounds, but two score pounds, dear Quilp.”’ Forty pounds, many thousands in today’s terms, all through some crazy figures and the fact that he has dreamed of tonight’s result three times in a row. No doubt Dickens had met gamblers who had lost everything.
Any more details while we’re still in London? We get a little more about Kit’s life, when he’s not standing vigil outside Nell’s window, looking up unobserved. On the night when Quilp refuses any more loans, the old man can’t go out—so Nell doesn’t sit at her usual window looking after he’s left. After a wasted night of waiting, anybody else would take their frustrations home with them. But not this boy. At home, poor but spotless rooms in which his mother irons whenever Kit’s two-year-old brother and a baby aren’t keeping her busy, ‘Kit was disposed to be out of temper, as the best of us are too often—but he looked at the youngest child who was sleeping soundly, and from him to his other brother in the clothes-basket, and from him to their mother, who had been at work without complaint since morning, and thought it would be a better and kinder thing to be good-humoured.’ That’s Kit for you. That and his undying loyalty towards Nell…
…which makes her instruction from her grandfather, that Kit must never see them again, all the more difficult to take. Nell has arrived to tell him this, and to pay his final wage (plus a little extra, as you would expect), and they are both at a loss. At the end of the chapter, after she has left forever, comes this: ‘the mother wept louder yet and rocked faster; but Kit, insensible to all the din and tumult, remained in a state of utter stupefaction.’ Only many weeks later, after the long illness that leaves the old man mentally more feeble—and when Quilp’s new acquisition of the shop is common knowledge —does Kit secretly whisper up to Nell that he bears no malice. There will always be room for them both with him and his family. Dickens likes his holy innocents.
Quilp isn’t cut from this cloth, and neither is the other character who moves into the shop with him while they wait for the old man to die or leave. This is Brass, the lawyer, who has a comically ugly face to go with his comically ugly reputation. ‘This Brass was an attorney of no very good repute, from Bevis Marks in the city of London; he was a tall, meagre man, with a nose like a wen, a protruding forehead, retreating eyes, and hair of a deep red.’ What was I saying last time about the meanness of the comedy? In this chapter it derives largely from the grotesqueries of these two and Quilp’s boy, and the pipes Quilp insists on for purposes of fumigation. Tobacco does terrible things for the lawyer, much to Quilp’s delight, whereas the ‘tumbling boy’ is ‘case-hardened, and would have smoked a small lime-kiln if anybody had treated him with it.’
But the comedy sits alongside the horrifying plight that Nell and her grandfather are now in. As soon as he arrives, Quilp takes over—desecrates, to all intents and purposes—Nell’s charming little sanctuary of a room. He’s been speaking to her as sensitively as he always does, and she makes it clear she won’t be using her room any more. ‘“No,” replied the child, hurrying away, with the few articles of dress she had come to remove; “never again! Never again.” “She’s very sensitive,” said Quilp, looking after her. “Very sensitive; that’s a pity. The bedstead is much about my size. I think I shall make it my little room.” His movements, here and wherever he flits around the place, always confirm him either as the figure in Fuseli’s Nightmare—his stealthy entrance on his first visit in Chapter 9, when he sat unobserved on the back of a chair is just that—or some kind of circus monkey. He shows it ‘by throwing himself on his back upon the bed with his pipe in his mouth, and then kicking up his legs and smoking violently.’
The last time Nell sees him before their departure early on the Friday morning is when she has to get the key from the table in what is now his room. ‘Here she stood, for a few moments, quite transfixed with terror at the sight of Mr Quilp, who was hanging so far out of bed that he almost seemed to be standing on his head, and who, either from the uneasiness of this posture, or in one of his agreeable habits, was gasping and growling with his mouth wide open, and the whites (or rather the dirty yellows) of his eyes distinctly visible.’
Luckily, they are able to leave unobserved, and they can turn their attention to what she and her grandfather want above all else, to be far away. Before their final short sleep, they had dreamily contemplated their future together. She: ‘Let us begone from this place, and never turn back or think of it again. Let us wander barefoot through the world, rather than linger here.’ He: ‘We will … we will travel afoot through the fields and woods, and by the side of rivers, and trust ourselves to God in the places where He dwells.’
This comes at the end of Chapter 12, the second of two in the thirteenth issue of Master Humphrey’s Clock. The pattern is now two-chapter issues, and the next number is all about events in London after they have gone. There’s knockabout comedy—literally, again—in the scene in which Quilp discovers what has happened. There’s a loud knocking, he can’t find the key, he blames Brass for not knowing where it is, and he remembers he’s told his wife to come early to help with the sale of all the building’s contents. He’ll play one of his nasty little tricks on her—he’ll open the door sharply and rush out at her to knock her over. But he runs into Dick Swiveller instead, there, he later says, to ask after the old man’s health. But before he has the chance, he gives Quilp at least as good as he gets in a comedy struggle… and so on. But as they all go in, Quilp pinches his wife on the arms, ‘which were seldom free from impressions of his fingers in black and blue colours.’ Any comedy in the scenes involving Quilp is always shot through with cruelty.
This is the only time we see Dick Swiveller in these chapters. He’s appalled by the news of the old man’s apparent penury—not that Quilp can resist suggesting that maybe the old man has gone off to a comfortable retirement. Why should he, Quilp, be the only one to worry that the old man has secured secret fortune somewhere? Whatever, Swiveller leaves empty-handed, wondering where this all leaves him now that Sophie is out of the picture. Quilp, meanwhile, gets on with the sale, so that by the end of the chapter there’s nothing left. Except…
…except for Nell’s little bird. Kit has called by to repeat his invitation to Nell and the old man to come to stay with him and his family. He’s just in time to save the bird—which he can only do by fighting Quilp’s boy again. Back home, having won the fight, he can give it all the attention he can’t give to Nell. ‘I think I’ll hang him in the winder, because it’s more light and cheerful, and he can see the sky there, if he looks up very much. He’s such a one to sing, I can tell you!’ All that’s left for him to do is to give Dickens a pretext for introducing the next chapter, and the next set of characters. ‘I’ll go out and see if I can find a horse to hold, and then I can buy some birdseed, and a bit of something nice for you, into the bargain.’
Whose little pony—there are no horses to be held for love nor money—does he end up holding? Nobody we know, but we know they’ll be important. They are the funny little Garland family, in town to see the notary. He is about to formally confirm the handing-over of the money in his trust fund to the funny little Abel Garland, now aged 28 and just like his father, ‘though wanting something of his full, round, cheerfulness, and substituting in its place a timid reserve. In all other respects, in the neatness of the dress, and even in the club-foot, he and the old gentleman were precisely alike.’ And now Kit has them on his side. The older Garland gives him a shilling because nobody has any less, and says, jokingly no doubt, that he will need a minder next week too for his comically stubborn little pony. Kit, being Kit, spends the shilling on presents for the family, and seed for the bird. Of course he does.
For the next chapter, the narrative rewinds to when Nell and her grandfather left the shop. The journey is described in a kind of generic, loving detail. It’s as though this isn’t a single, real June morning, but, perhaps as in one of Boz’s sketches, everything you might hope the waking city to feel like on the brightest morning imaginable: ‘The town was glad with morning light; places that had shown ugly and distrustful all night long, now wore a smile; and sparkling sunbeams dancing on chamber windows, and twinkling through blind and curtain before sleepers’ eyes, shed light even into dreams, and chased away the shadows of the night.’ We don’t know the direction the travellers are taking, she having now become the guide, ‘if guide she were, who knew not whither they were bound.’ That’s how it is now, the enfeebled old man—luckily, not too enfeebled to walk all day, for mile after mile—having given up on the idea of guiding anyone, including himself.
But they are ‘pilgrims,’ a word used early on. Perhaps this is to prepare us for a conversation much later in the day, when all that remains of London is a distant prospect as they rest and look back. Nell muses on the new sights, and particularly on the ‘pleasant fields’ they are now in. ‘There had been an old copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress, with strange plates, upon a shelf at home,’ but what she and her grandfather are seeing ‘is prettier and a great deal better than the real one, if that in the book is like it, I feel as if we were both Christian, and laid down on this grass all the cares and troubles we brought with us; never to take them up again.’ We’re not in Kansas anymore—not that we really know where we are. But on this journey, at least on this first day, all they encounter is good. Settlements are generic, as when ‘a cluster of poor cottages … were often the commencement of a little village: and after an interval came a wheelwright’s shed or perhaps a blacksmith’s forge; then a thriving farm with sleepy cows lying about the yard…’ and so on. It isn’t an idyll—there’s poverty here—but it will do for the weary pilgrims. Because…
…there’s kindness too. At a village they reach late in the day, everyone in a family they speak to is helpful, looking out for them as they leave again to trudge on to the next town, miles away. But they are overtaken by a carter the same family had told to look out for them, so they won’t have to walk any further today. They find life among the gravestones, literally, as they encounter two men who run a Punch and Judy stall. The puppeteer is endlessly cheerful, whilst the man in charge of drumming up a crowd and looking after the money is… not so much. Could they be personages from Pilgrim’s Progress or a miracle play? They might be—and their line of work adds to the reader’s sense of a parade of types for our edification. Or—and this has just struck me—maybe the manager isn’t Pessimism or some such, but Realism. He’s the one who has to think about making enough money to buy their next meal.
Meanwhile, Nell has had to get her sewing kit out to help them repair one of the puppets—no comment—and they are given free entry to the show at the inn. The old man loves it—Dickens had discoursed on the mythology of second childhoods earlier in the chapter—but Nell can’t stay awake. Thank goodness the mistress of the house is as kind as you’d wish, suggesting they stay at the same rough sleeping-place as the salt-of-the-earth showmen. Life’s rich tapestry? You bet. But I wonder how long the optimism is going to last. Et in Arcadia Ego, and all that. The old man they had met in the last village had been proud of his sprightly old age but, well, we know that nobody lives forever.
Chapters 17-24
Youth and age. Dickens goes beyond simply presenting a memento mori at the start of these chapters. Nell wakes up and makes her way to the churchyard again, amusing herself—yes, really—by looking at the inscriptions on the headstones. Here is a young man who died 55 years ago at the age of only 23—and, now, here is an old woman, come to lay some of his favourite flowers. Is she his mother, Nell wonders, but of course she isn’t. ‘I was his wife, my dear.’ … Ah, true! It was fifty-five years ago. ‘You wonder to hear me say that …. You’re not the first. …Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn’t change us more than life, my dear.’
Dickens takes it further, having the old woman describe how her dreadful grief over his early death slowly, slowly changed. Now, ‘she spoke of the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson, with a kind of pity for his youth, growing out of her own old age, and an exalting of his strength and manly beauty as compared with her own weakness and decay.’ He goes further still. By the end, she is speaking ‘as if he were dead but yesterday, and she, separated from her former self, were thinking of the happiness of that comely girl who seemed to have died with him.’
But this is an interlude between stages on their journey. With the Punch and Judy men, we’re already in the world of itinerant entertainers, a world Dickens sticks with for three chapters. There is going to be a race meeting in a town not far away, and Nell can’t think of a better place to make a few coppers from kindly strangers. On the road, or at the inn, is the group of acrobats on stilts, the freak show, the performing dogs (kept on a very short leash indeed by their owner, so that one of them who ‘lost a halfpenny’ is allowed no supper) and the conjuror. Nearer the race there are the gamblers and other tricksters—and other girls better practised than Nell in the art of finding ways to get money from the trippers. Any supposed freedom of the road she had dreamed of seems a long way from reality—and the little posies Nell makes remain unsold. Only one woman, clearly one who knows from experience the downward path Nell is in danger of following, buys one out of pity. She kindly, but very firmly indeed, urges Nell to go home while she can.
The old man is hardly a character at all in these chapters. All that drives him is the urge to keep adding to the distance from London—a determination that convinces Codlin, the misanthropic-seeming Punch and Judy man, that there must be somebody urgently looking for them. He says as much to ‘Short Trotters’ Harris, his jolly little partner, but from then on he keeps any plans he might have to himself. He knows ‘Short’ is too kindly for his own good, and would never seek to make anything from anybody else’s plight. But he, Codlin, keeps such a close eye on Nell and her grandfather that Nell grows suspicious of his motives. As soon as she can, she tells her grandfather they need to get away from his, and they leave the racecourse behind. Phew.
And… we’re back in London with Kit. He remembers his promise to mind the Garlands’ pony again, and is at the right place in time. He can instinctively handle it better than anyone else, and Garland is impressed when it seems to follow him happily after a worse than usual display of stubbornness. It soon leads to him and the other Garlands, to Kit’s immense surprise, arriving at his house before he does and offering him a job. They are assiduous in their checks of both Kit and his mother, and they don’t find a single thing wanting in either of them. A job at six pounds a year—six pounds!—is Kit’s, and he is as cheerful about it as he always is. They get him a new set of clothes and he’ll be starting at their Finchley house in two days’ time. ‘It would be difficult to say which party appeared most pleased with this arrangement, the conclusion of which was hailed with nothing but pleasant looks and cheerful smiles on both sides.’ Is it just me, or do some of Dickens’s wholesome characters seem to belong in a kind of Toytown?
Maybe not. Maybe it’s a world of melodrama in which personality traits are painted in broad strokes. And guess what. The Garlands have left, and who should arrive but the impish Quilp, accompanied by a man he thinks will help him find Nell and the grandfather he’s sure is holding out on him. It’s Dick Swiveller, now persuaded by Quilp that they will do far better if they are frank and open with one another about what they plan to do. Quilp has arrived to try and get Kit and his poor mother to tell him what they know, but he gives that up and decides Dick is a better bet. Why don’t they go for a friendly glass or two of his favourite drink, at his favourite drinking-house? Cue comic scenes of Dick being as wide-open in laying out his plans—mainly the plot to marry Nell, devised by Fred—as Quilp is secretive.
But the narrative leaves them to get on with it, and we follow Kit to the Garlands’ pretty house. We’re with him as he waits for somebody to answer the door—they had been chasing the pony around its paddock trying to get it to do what they wanted—and see how shy he is with Barbara, the young maidservant who is at least as shy as he is. But Kit is doing something right—the pony is ‘complaisant’ when he comes near, and the Garlands are convinced all over again that they have made the right decision. Bless. Meanwhile, on his way home from his drinking session, Dick realises what Quilp has been up to. He reaches the tearful stage of his drunken evening—and only realises after he has spent time bemoaning his misplaced trust of Quilp that the little man is still with him. But Quilp doesn’t mind, and is able to wind poor Dick around his finger easily to convince him that he’d got it all wrong. How we laughed. But we know that these two must inevitably cross paths with Nell and the old man eventually… and we know that Codlin will somehow be involved. But that’s in the future.
Do I sound bored? Sorry if I do… but let’s get back on the road for another little episode. The two travellers are tired out when, safe at last, they arrive at a village. There, they finally gather enough courage to address a schoolmaster who is sitting distractedly at the door of his little schoolhouse. And we’re back with the theme of death and loss. Nell is taken with the beautiful handwriting of some uplifting mottoes on the walls inside, and the schoolmaster hints at the cause of the sadness that keeps him so quietly musing in the evenings. ‘My favourite scholar!’ said the poor schoolmaster, smoking a pipe he had forgotten to light, and looking mournfully round upon the walls. ‘It is a little hand to have done all that, and waste away with sickness. It is a very, very little hand!’
Chapters 25-32
These chapters are all set on the road and, for a time, the dreariness of their travels is relieved, so that for a while they are almost having a good time. Does it last? I’ll let you guess… because first, there’s that bit of dreariness concerning the old teacher’s favourite scholar to be finished off. The scholar himself is finished off, but not before the poor man is subject to some more slings and arrows. Nell—still always ‘the child,’ which can occasionally be confusing—is spending time in the school-room, and it’s a scene of barely-suppressed anarchy. If the old man can ever keep things under control, especially on a hot day when nobody wants to be there, his heart definitely isn’t in it today. Why not let the boys have a half-holiday? He’ll be able to visit his favourite child and, he hopes, see signs of recovery.
Hah. The women of the village complain about him taking half a day’s pay for nothing, letting their boys’ education go to ruin. Then he visits the boy, and Nell is there to witness the heartbreaking scene of the little lad’s death. His grandmother has already complained of how the schoolmaster works the boys too hard—the irony—and now he lays his hand on the boy’s head. He’s a holy innocent, having asked the schoolmaster to put a handkerchief up at the window so the other boys will think it’s him waving… but the end is coming. ‘The two old friends and companions—for such they were, though they were man and child—held each other in a long embrace, and then the little scholar turned his face towards the wall, and fell asleep. / The poor schoolmaster sat in the same place, holding the small cold hand in his, and chafing it. It was but the hand of a dead child. He felt that; and yet he chafed it still, and could not lay it down.’
Any dry eyes in the house? Thought not. Nell and her grandfather stay another night, and then they are on their way again. But in this underpopulated version of England they travel all day without coming to any proper settlement, and by evening the next town is still eight miles away. They are told this by the owner of an extraordinary caravan—and suddenly we’re in a jollier universe. The owner, eating a meal she is happy for them to share once she realises how hungry they are, is Mrs Jarley. They don’t know that yet, or that she owns a travelling waxwork show. But, she’ll have them know, she’s no itinerant entertainer like those Punch and Judy rogues Nell mentions. Hers is an educational spectacle, and respectable people pay good money to be enlightened.
It’s all absurd, of course. Mrs Jarley has pretensions—she’s always ‘the lady’ before Nell knows her name, and often after that ‘the delight of the Nobility and Gentry,’ as her publicity flyers have it—but she is good-hearted. She likes her comforts, but likes to see those around her comfortable too. And when she realises not only that Nell is both modest and quietly good-looking but also able to read and write, she offers her a job. Until now, Mrs Jarley has guided her customers around the exhibits—the publicity claims there are over a hundred—but it would be comfortable to hand it over to an attractive young girl. She, and her factotum (or whatever he is) George agree that they will find something for her grandfather to do as well.
But even now menace of different kinds and thoughts of death are never far away. And it brings tears, broken sleep and even terror to poor Nell, in chapter after chapter. All of it is focused on her, as Mrs Jarley gets on with her own life, helped by the contents of the little bottle she always keeps nearby, and Nell’s grandfather seems not to have a thought in his head. This latter is one of the things Nell sheds a tear about, as she wonders whatever happened to the thoughtful, alert old man she remembers. It’s as though Dickens has created a sympathetic character whose main function is to suffer whatever he can throw at her. We’ve just had her witnessing the death of the young scholar, and the old schoolmaster’s anguish. Next…
…how about some terror? They have no sooner made camp in the town when, kept awake by worry, she takes a short walk at midnight. And she sees a familiar figure. Of all people—what are the chances?—it’s Quilp, scornfully ordering his boy to move faster with the luggage. They have to reach the London coach in half an hour and, to Nell’s relief, off they go. But she wonders, of course, why he’s there… and the reader supposes that Dickens engineered their temporary disappearance from the roadside—they travelled the final eight miles to the town in the caravan—specifically for Quilp, having been tipped off where they were travelling, to miss them.
So we’re often inside Nell’s mind as she takes on all the cares. What will her grandfather do if she becomes ill? What will she do if he becomes ill? But at least they seem to be safe for the moment. For day after day, even week after week—Dickens keeps the chronology vague—the show does well in the town, mainly though visits by school parties. Dickens can have some fun, as with the self-proclaimed genius of a poet, Slum, who takes her money to write pastiches of popular songs to publicise the show. And Nell becomes an asset, at the head of the parade through the town, where boys fall over themselves to be noticed by her.
But that’s enough of that, because it’s time for the worst horror yet. Another chance event—they have to shelter from a rainstorm on a walk—brings them to an inn where a card game is in progress. The old man is immediately taken over by his usual monomania, and Nell can’t say no when he demands all the money she has made so far. Which, of course, he loses… by which time it’s midnight, and Nell decides they will have to stay. She will pay with the sovereign she has sewn into her hem—but what is that shadowy figure, watching in the corridor as she secretively pays the innkeeper? And, as she tries to sleep, what is the dark shape in her room, that chink of coins? She is terrified and, irony of ironies, desperate that her grandfather shouldn’t be subject to the same intrusion. She follows the figure down the corridor, where she discovers that the thief was her grandfather all along. The reader might have known, but it’s a terrible shock for Nell.
She follows him into the room, but she can’t be angry with him, or even moderately firm. She pleads with him to stop, but all the time, just as when he gambled away everything he owned in London, he tells her he is only doing it for her sake. She doesn’t give up her pleas, reminding him how the best times for as long as they can remember are these, when they have had nothing. His excitement subsides, he seems to relent—and then loses every last penny they have.
Am I the only reader who finds all this just too distressing? Whilst Dickens definitely doesn’t aim to make the events on the road seem plausible, at the same time he makes Nell’s distress as realistic and affecting as he can. Take the sleepless night she suffers when she realises her grandfather is the thief who terrified her. ‘The terror she had lately felt was nothing compared with that which now oppressed her. No strange robber, no treacherous host conniving at the plunder of his guests, or stealing to their beds to kill them in their sleep, no nightly prowler, however terrible and cruel, could have awakened in her bosom half the dread which the recognition of her silent visitor inspired. The grey-headed old man gliding like a ghost into her room and acting the thief while he supposed her fast asleep, then bearing off his prize and hanging over it with the ghastly exultation she had witnessed, was worse—immeasurably worse, and far more dreadful.’
Is it time for another bit of relief? Good-hearted Mrs Jarley isn’t at all fazed by their absence in the night, having guessed the reason, and trusts Nell to make a good job of persuading Miss Monflathers, the preposterous head of a locals girls’ school, to bring some more pupils. She cuts as absurd a figure in her pretensions as Mrs Jarley, but she’s the polar opposite. She wants everyone around her to feel small, and she’s good at it. In the school grounds, she and her fawning pupils surround Nell, and she subjects the poor girl to a tirade: ‘And don’t you think you must be a very wicked little child … to be a wax-work child at all?’ Only one girl, Miss Edwards, helps her as she drops her handkerchief—and Miss Monflathers turns on her, too. This is the poor pupil- teacher, and she is the only one there, including the fawning staff, who shows any trace of humanity. She is sketched in as the kind of heroine Dickens is fond of, a beacon in the benighted school, and Nell is taken by her grace and modesty.
A positive sign at last? Well… Dickens turns it into another trial for Nell. The summer holidays arrive, and Nell sees that Miss Edwards must have nowhere to go except the school. Nell likes to see her in the town, and one day follows her to where she picks up her much younger sister from the coach. And from then on, Nell suffers more anguish—witnessing what unconditional love and affection is like. ‘Why were the eyes of little Nell wet, that night, with tears like those of the two sisters? Why did she bear a grateful heart because they had met, and feel it pain to think that they would shortly part? Let us … thank God that the innocent joys of others can strongly move us, and that we … have one source of pure emotion which must be prized in Heaven!’ If the dying boy had been a holy innocent, Nell is little short of an angel.
Meanwhile, the only family she has is an old man she can no longer trust. And if anyone realised his ‘weakness’ he’d be chased away at best or, if caught stealing, much worse. During the card games, Nell had reached a dark place indeed. ‘Exulting in some brief triumph, or cast down by a defeat, there he sat so wild and restless, so feverishly and intensely anxious, so terribly eager, so ravenous for the paltry stakes, that she could have almost better borne to see him dead.’ It isn’t the only time that this idea finds itself lodged in her mind.
If I give the impression I haven’t found these chapters easy to read, it’s deliberate. It’s a relief to realise—I sneaked a look—that the next few chapters are set in London.
Chapters 33-40
Following a comic feat of relocation—‘the historian takes the friendly reader by the hand, and springing with him into the air … alights with him upon the pavement of Bevis Marks’—we are back in London. And it’s Dick Swiveller who is now centre stage, often in the company of even more of a bit-part player, Sampson Brass the lawyer. We’ve seen Brass toadying up to Quilp in the early chapters, and now we’re in his office on the edge of the City. We see him at work with his sister, Sally Brass, who not only looks exactly like the unprepossessing Sampson, she is also comically mannish: ‘had it consorted with Miss Brass’s maiden modesty and gentle womanhood to have assumed her brother’s clothes in a frolic and sat down beside him, it would have been difficult for the oldest friend of the family to determine which was Sampson and which Sally.’ Dickens squeezes a lot of comedy out of this, and the fact that she is the only competent one in the firm. And, when Dick arrives on Quilp’s orders to be their new clerk, his astonishment at her appearance (and everything else) makes this all feel much more like familiar Dickens territory than of late. Alleluia.
Quilp arrives, behaving exactly like himself. What is it with him that his entrances are always comic? There’s an illustration of his peek-a-boo arrival, his upper half over the window he’s lowered suddenly, and he can’t wait to lavish compliments on Sally. He takes Sampson out for a drink, and we can guess his motive. Quilp is their only client, and we can guess it won’t be difficult for him to persuade the Brasses to tell them all they know about the travellers…. Comic descriptions and actions aside, most of the business of these chapters is to do with advancing the plot. There are two other new characters to be introduced, arriving together and neither of them named, ever. There is ‘the single gentleman,’ always called this because he takes the rooms over the Brasses’ office, advertised as suitable for such a person. And he never reveals his name, however much other people want him to.
The other is the Brasses’ own servant, ‘a small slipshod girl in a dirty coarse apron and bib, which left nothing of her visible but her face and feet. She might as well have been dressed in a violin-case.’ From now on she is ‘the small servant,’ and she seems to do everything required of her quietly and without any expectations of anything from anybody. Near the end of these chapters, Dick is determined to find out where she is quartered, and what on earth she ever eats. Following Sally Brass down the lowest steps, he witnesses the strict regime the poor girl lives under. Sally’s legalistic instructions and questions would be comic if they weren’t so cruel. ‘You’ve been helped once to meat; you have had as much as you can eat, you’re asked if you want any more, and you answer, “no!” Then don’t you ever go and say you were allowanced, mind that.’ It seems that Nell isn’t the only young girl starved of affection.
Sally, it seems, has always like this, ‘having from her earliest youth devoted herself with uncommon ardour to the study of law.’ As a child, she had drawn up imaginary bills and contracts, so that she could act out cases with her schoolmates. We suppose this was the only contact she ever had with them… so it isn’t surprising that she is as astonished by Dick Swiveller as he is by her. She has never spent time with anybody outside her legal duties, and Dick holds a kind of fascination for her. A strange kind of relationship grows up, so he moves away from the imagined murder of her with a long ruler on his first day, to something approaching mutual tolerance. When Punch and Judy shows appear out in the street—not a rare occurrence, apparently—they both go to the window, and he helpfully rubs the glass clean with the little headdress she wears, before she puts it back on.
But I’m not telling you the plot. The single gentleman arrives, tells Dick he is taking the rooms—his manner is such that Dick is powerless to stop him—and proceeds to sleep for so long it makes the Brasses worry that he might be dead. After some comic ‘leading questions’ designed to encourage Dick to remember some false instructions about the man’s property—it seems Dick is much too honest for such shenanigans—they go through an absurd performance of trying to wake him. Which they do, to his wrath, despite his having slept for 26 hours. Only Dick is left on the landing outside his door—and the gentleman invites him in for rum punch. This, it turns out, is Dickens’s way of making Dick indispensable. The rent is important to the Brasses, but they find that only Dick can speak to the gentleman….
He, the single gentleman, soon becomes important. Whenever there is a Punch and Judy show nearby, he invites the performers to his rooms for refreshments. (Maybe this becomes such common knowledge that other performers are encouraged to set up.) Our attention is caught, of course, and we aren’t surprised when Codlin and Short are invited up. They still regret losing Nell and her grandfather at the races—Codlin’s recriminations are robust—and, of course, the single gentleman is interested in finding out anything he can about the wanderers. He’s disappointed that they haven’t seen them since the races—but they tell him that Jerry, the dog man, has seen them something like 60 miles away. File that away for later…
…because Dickens takes us to meet Kit again, after what he reminds us are fifteen chapters. He is thriving at Abel Cottage, the Garlands’ house, not only as the sole master of the recalcitrant pony but in everything else he turns his hand to. And he sends money to his mother. And he is adored by everybody, including Barbara the maid. And… so on. There’s a chapter in which, just for the fun of it, Dickens describes the ‘quarter day’ Kit spends not only with his mother and younger brothers, but also with Barbara and her mother. They go to the theatre, the mothers get on better than anyone would ever guess—and Kit is impervious to their broad hints about the suitability of Barbara as a future wife. He makes no secret of Nell, all their (and Barbara’s) invitations to recognise that she is yesterday’s news leading only to ever greater praise for her. Poor Barbara, as the narrative has it.
Dickens brings the threads together through the investigations of the single gentleman. He knows that Kit and his family have always been close to Nell and her grandfather, and sends a message to the Garlands that he wants to offer Kit a job on higher wages. The Garlands, being the people they are, don’t resent this, rejoicing in Kit’s prospects and persuading him to speak to their lawyer. The single gentleman is there, and explains why he thinks Kit would be just the person to accompany him, right now, on an overnight journey to where they were last seen. But Kit doesn’t want to go. He fears that Nell will be a rich lady now—and anyway, her grandfather had forbidden him ever to come near. Ah.
What to do? The gentleman is determined, and when Kit mentions that only his mother would have any influence on the old man, he says that she is the one who must go. Kit can see how improbable this would be, but says he will do his best to persuade her. He has two hours, by which time she must be there, and ready to set off. Oh yeh? Even if they, or anyone else, catches up with them, Dickens left Mrs Jarley about to move on, the summer trade offering very frugal pickings.
There’s another link, and Dickens makes it through a chance encounter between the lawyer’s man and—guess who. Dick is nearby on an errand for the Brasses, and gleans enough about what’s going on for it to be useful. And if the Brasses find anything out, so will Quilp.
Chapters 41-47
The plot is straightforward, so Dickens has plenty of time both for some acerbic commentary and a lot of continuing themes. The main plot point is that Nell and her grandfather won’t be with Mrs Jarley when the single gentleman arrives there. She has had to get the old man away from temptation—his addiction is now so out of control he is about to steal from Mrs Jarley—and start their journey again. They set off before he can take any money, after Nell has accidentally overheard him making plans with the gamblers, and they walk for nearly two days. Two bargemen and their horseman pick them up for the next part, a day and night and more, until they get to a hellish manufacturing town next evening. A loner of a furnaceman lets them sleep in the warm, and even gives them a couple of pennies next morning. But these are soon gone, and Nell has lost her appetite anyway and is near collapse. In the town, people are unemployed, children are dying, and there is no more charity. Nell, not for the first time, wonders about her own death. On the road she collapses at the feet of… the village schoolmaster, on his way to a new job.
What are the odds? Not that it matters—Dickens manoeuvres Nell and her grandfather into situations based on chance and mischance and, so far, always saves them when all is hopeless. By the time the kindly schoolmaster has paid for her to rest at an inn for a night or two, she is well enough to ride comfortably in a stage-wagon. They all arrive at the village where he is to be a clerk and teacher, at the highest salary he has ever received. And not for the first time, the travellers rest in a churchyard.
Meanwhile, Nell’s determination that their tracks are impossible to follow, especially when accepting a lift from the bargemen, are all too successful. Kit had found his mother in the Bethel chapel she frequents—where Quilp also is, no doubt hoping for just such a chance as this. (Dickens makes Kit’s efforts to be discreet almost comically fruitless, so he knows Quilp has seen him.) He conveys his mother to the notary’s office, and she travels all night by post-chaise with the single gentleman. They find Mrs Jarley newly married to George, her factotum, and distraught that she has no idea where Nell and her grandfather can be. If only the single gentleman had arrived last week!
Is it only about the plot? Obviously not, because Dickens makes a lot of every new situation. The scene at the Bethel Chapel is a mixture of farce and a withering satire aimed at hellfire preachers. The serious part of it is the way Mrs Nubbles is taken in by it—a rock-solid model of generosity made to feel ashamed of any tiny pleasures that come her way. The scene in which Nell happens upon the gamblers with her grandfather becomes a masterclass in how fraudsters win over the most vulnerable. In fact, this scene forces Nell to realise that the old man is a hopeless case. She knows he plans to rob Mrs Jarley, and Dickens ramps up the horror of her plight. It’s worse than the theft of her own money at the inn, which was a Gothic nightmare, because the only loving relationship she has ever had has been torn apart.
She knows her grandfather has a day to find the money, but suddenly ‘she was distracted with a horrible fear that he might be committing it at that moment; with a dread of hearing shrieks and cries piercing the silence of the night; with fearful thoughts of what he might be tempted and led on to do, if he were detected in the act, and had but a woman to struggle with. It was impossible to bear such torture.’ This sets the tone of Dickens’s presentation of her inner life from now on. She can only keep going by ‘endeavouring to keep steadily in her view the one idea that they were flying from disgrace and crime, and that her grandfather’s preservation must depend solely on her firmness, unaided by one word of advice or any helping hand.’ The next days are characterised by this dreadful sense of being alone in her affliction, and it takes a terrible toll.
The journey by barge helps her cover her tracks, but the drunken demands of the bargeman, who forces her to sing all night, then their arrival at the dreadful industrial town, only serve to bring her down further. This isn’t merely a staging-post in the fable-like structure of their journey, an allegorical presentation of a hell on earth. It becomes an uncompromising exposé of the conditions in such towns, not merely squalid but life-threatening. As they prepare to sleep in a dark corner, even the furnaceman’s act of kindness is set about with ill omens. Nell recoils from the dark figure as he approaches, and then she sees him properly. He is ‘miserably clad and begrimed with smoke,’ ‘naturally of a very wan and pallid aspect, [with] hollow cheeks, sharp features, and sunken eyes [and] a certain look of patient endurance.’ This is what generous humanity is reduced to.
The next day, having bought bread with the pennies the man couldn’t really afford to give, she finds she can’t eat. Physically, she is utterly drained, and we wonder how far this will go. There’s a clue, perhaps, in the next encounter as they trudge miles through a string of dreadful towns. Desperate, if only for her grandfather’s sake, she knocks on a door. What faces her is beyond horrific. She had asked for a ‘morsel of bread’ from the man at the door. ‘Do you see that?’ returned the man hoarsely, pointing to a kind of bundle on the ground. ‘That’s a dead child. I and five hundred other men were thrown out of work, three months ago. That is my third dead child, and last. Do you think I have charity to bestow, or a morsel of bread to spare?’
Nell is close to collapse, and it’s at the end of the next chapter that she falls down at the feet of the poor schoolmaster. But before she can reach even that low point, Dickens has a point to make about the inevitable outcome of lifelong poverty. She and her grandfather witness a scene in which a local gentleman returns a boy to his mother, after he had been caught stealing. He was ‘deaf, dumb and blind,’ and the man ‘had compassion on his infirmities, and thought he might have learnt no better.’ Another mother is outraged. ‘Won’t you give me back my son, Sir, who was transported for the same offence!’ Did he have the same infirmities, asks the man, and she is ready with her reply. ‘He was deaf, dumb, and blind, to all that was good and right, from his cradle. Her boy may have learnt no better! where did mine learn better? where could he? who was there to teach him better, or where was it to be learnt?’
Is there to be some security and rest for Nell at last? Well, maybe. The schoolmaster gets her to an inn, where, after a satirical little scene with a local doctor who only recommends what others around him have suggested, she is well looked after and recovers enough strength to travel in a wagon. They get to the rustic little place where the schoolmaster has his new post, and he leaves them near the church while he finds lodgings for them. The place is idyllic-looking—‘the old grey porch, the mullioned windows, the venerable gravestones dotting the green churchyard’—and Nell is particularly taken by two old, decaying houses. ‘Upon these tenements, the attention of the child became exclusively riveted. She knew not why. The church, the ruin, the antiquated graves, had equal claims at least upon a stranger’s thoughts, but from the moment when her eyes first rested on these two dwellings, she could turn to nothing else.’ What does she see that we don’t?
Chapters 48-53
For the first time, we spend four chapters almost exclusively following Quilp. We’ve previously had little insights into his bizarrely impish ways—‘impish’ hardly begins to describe his leering nastiness, as we see from the earliest chapters onwards—and now Dickens shows us how ‘the dwarf’ relishes the way he can disconcert people at every turn. He polishes his act and takes pride in it, like the villain in a melodrama, or even pantomime. I remember the first time in his shambles of a riverfront office, how much his fights with the boy were like the knockabout antics of a vaudeville act. This is exactly it. What he shows us isn’t so much a real person as a performance, designed to mask his true motives behind clownishness and unpredictability.
In Chapter 48 he first appears, seemingly impossibly, at the inn where the single gentleman and Mrs Nubbles are, in the town where they had hoped to find Nell: ‘there he stood, bowing with grotesque politeness; as much at his ease as if the door were that of his own house … and looking like the evil genius of the cellars come from underground upon some work of mischief.’ Anyone looking at him—this is Kit’s mother’s point of view—can’t help thinking of imps and devils. She, and Kit, had only seen him the day before, at the Bethel chapel. Can he appear just anywhere, like the real Devil? Wherever he is, he’s always somehow at home, on his own territory.
We’ll shortly get an explanation of how he stage-manages this effect, because after the scene at the inn Dickens decides to write almost entirely from Quilp’s point of view in these chapters. As he puts it, Quilp ‘fell into certain meditations, of which it may be necessary to relate the substance.’ From now on, we learn all about the effort he puts into his act. The reason for his sudden appearances is because he wants something. He had been at the Bethel chapel because he knew that if Kit’s mother had any information it would be easy to get it out of her. And we know why he’s popped up at the inn—because he had followed trails left by Swiveller and the notary’s man to discover that the single gentleman knew something, and had headed to the town where they were last seen. Luckily for Quilp, a night coach was about to set off for the same place, at the same time.
But he makes the most of any happy chances he gets to play his part, doing his best to iscombobulate the single gentleman and, especially, Mrs Nubbles. But the single gentleman isn’t at all put out by Quilp’s antics. He had met Quilp on his first arrival in London, looking for information, and he can see exactly what Quilp is about. So it’s a wasted journey for ‘the dwarf,’ as Dickens is happy to call him—except for one thing. Kit’s mother rides back to London in the coach, and Quilp makes the most of it when he finds he has a place on the roof above her: ‘her solitary condition enabled him to terrify her with many extraordinary annoyances; such as hanging over the side of the coach at the risk of his life, and staring in with his great goggle eyes.’
She is completely overwhelmed. To her, ‘Mr Quilp did in his own person represent and embody that Evil Power, who was so vigorously attacked at Little Bethel, and who, by reason of her backslidings in respect of Astley’s and oysters, was now frolicsome and rampant.’ He keeps up the show when they get back to London. Kit is waiting, and she tells him about the journey. Kit isn’t scared. He goes straight up to Quilp and warns him that the next time, ‘you will oblige me (though I should be very sorry to do it, on account of your size) to beat you.’ But Quilp isn’t scared either. He walks up to Kit and, with his face ‘within two or three inches of [Kit’s], looked fixedly at him, retreated a little distance without averting his gaze, approached again, again withdrew, and so on for half-a-dozen times, like a head in a phantasmagoria.’ Again the performance—but when Kit snaps his fingers in disdain, Quilp realises he will need a different approach….
…and in a chapter or so he plans to see the Brasses to enlist their help. But first, we have an almost set-piece demonstration of how he uses every opportunity to maintain his persona. He’s been away for days and, when he returns home unannounced and unobserved, is delighted to hear th]at he is being talked about. He overhears every word of a conversation between his wife, her mother and the Brasses talking about his own disappearance and probable death. Sampson Brass is enjoying the pretence of mourning Quilp’s loss, all the while persuading Mrs Quilp there’s probably no hope, and mixing more punch from Quilp’s drink supplies. Quilp’s loving it, especially when he can pounce. His mother-in-law scurries up to her own room, then Quilp has a great time taking everyone’s drink from them and swigging them all before telling them how he isn’t a bit surprised how appalled they are to see him. Sampson Brass resorts to his usual ploy of transparent, meaningless flattery while Mrs Quilp, truthfully, tells him how relieved she is.
It’s the perfect excuse for Quilp to move out for a while, pretending he knows when he isn’t wanted and making a makeshift encampment for himself in his riverside office. ‘I can be quite alone when I have business on hand, and be secure from all spies and listeners. Nobody near me here, but rats, and they are fine stealthy secret fellows. I shall be as merry as a grig among these gentry.’ He gets himself a hammock, and terrifies his wife next morning when she comes to plead with him to return. ‘I’ll keep watch-dogs in the yard that’ll growl and bite—I’ll have man-traps, cunningly altered and improved for catching women—I’ll have spring guns, that shall explode when you tread upon the wires, and blow you into little pieces!’ She won’t try that again.
Looking for the Brasses at their office, he happens first upon the little servant, who is terrified, and Dick Swiveller, who is his insouciant self. Swiveller, bemoaning the marriage of his beloved Sophie, and blaming both Quilp and Fred Trent for his loss. When he tells Quilp he’s seen Fred, and that he has no idea where Nell is either, we see Quilp really does think everyone is as bad as he is. He suspects Dick was trying to get one up on him by asking Fred about Nell…. But now he can invite the Brasses to take tea and give them orders. ‘It was not precisely the kind of weather in which people usually take tea in summer-houses, far less in summer-houses in an advanced state of decay,’ and even Sampson has trouble praising its merits through his sneezes. But Quilp tells him their orders, regarding poor Kit. After detailing how Kit disgusts him, he comes out with it: ‘I repeat that he crosses my humour, and I hate him. Now, you know the lad, and can guess the rest. Devise your own means of putting him out of my way, and execute them. Shall it be done?’ The Brasses don’t hesitate. Of course it shall.
Time to get back to the village, a strange mixture of sunshine and dark Gothic details, where the schoolmaster now resides. Nell is loving it. She’s still pale from her recent illness, and she occasionally thinks back to the dreadful latter part of their journey, but everything in the village is to her taste. The churchyard, those picturesque tumbledown cottages next to it…. What could be more idyllic for a child whose mind is far more occupied with death than with life? She muses on how wonderful it would be to stay there—and then the schoolmaster arrives, with what seems to be the best possible news. One of the cottages is his! And it’s as murkily Gothic inside as a death-obsessed teenager could wish, all pointed arches and crumbling masonry. ‘Oh yes, she says eagerly, ‘a quiet, happy place—a place to live and learn to die in!’ The poor schoolmaster does his best to divert her thoughts. ‘A place to live, and learn to live, and gather health of mind and body in…’ he says. And then, the jackpot: ‘…for this old house is yours.’
The rest of this chapter and the next is as full of delights for Nell as this first introduction to her great good fortune. The schoolmaster is all kindness—he’s taken the smaller cottage for himself—and so are the old sexton, the old vicar and the old ‘bachelor,’ a university friend who moved in when the vicar’s wife died fifteen years ago. And, my goodness, there are lovely young people too! Nell is in her favourite place, the churchyard, where some of them play near a small grave, and she imagines that it mustn’t be very different now, as the child was probably always a bit sickly and quiet. (I’m not making this up.) But it isn’t what she’d called it, what one of the boys refuses to call a grave, but ‘a garden—his brother’s. It was greener, he said, than all the other gardens, and the birds loved it better because he had been used to feed them.’ Not weird at all, then.
Where could be better? The old well actually inside the old church, which the sexton describes to her? It’s now dry so that the rope, which had been lengthened every ten years for most of his life, hits echoing stone a long way down. Even Nell shudders a little at that one. ‘A dreadful place to come on in the dark!’ she exclaims, and his reply is no comfort. ‘What is it but a grave!’ No, it’s somewhere else in the church, a Gothically ornate chapel that soon becomes the place to go for her. ‘The child sat down, in this old, silent place, among the stark figures on the tombs—they made it more quiet there, than elsewhere, to her fancy—and gazing round with a feeling of awe, tempered with a calm delight, felt that now she was happy, and at rest.’
[Nell’s dream—view of heaven, and the sound of angels’ wings] Do we think poor Nell will survive to the end of the novel? And if you said yes, what on earth are you thinking?
Chapters 54-61
Two further chapters in the strange village, with Nell—still always ‘the child’—learning different life lessons. And death lessons. The bachelor loves the history of the place, but doesn’t let truth and plausibility get in the way of a good story. And if a chapter of the history is too dark, he passes over it without a word. The dark side has no place in his narrative of a community and its Christian beliefs. Like the fabric of the church buildings and effects, everything is ‘sacred to goodness and virtue.’ Does this world-view work for Nell? A part of me suspects she does. Next there’s the sexton, just about back on his feet after the pains of age have incapacitated him for a while. Unlike his helper, digging a grave as the sexton talks to Nell, his energetic days of walking miles are over. But he constantly patronises the other man for sure signs of infirmity, especially his deafness. He loves to perceive old age in others but not in himself—Nell had wondered in the previous chapter how he spoke about the future as though he had countless years ahead of him. When he discovers who the grave is for, a woman probably in her sixties, the sexton insists she’s far older. Unlike her, he’s much too young to think about death.
This becomes an overriding contrast. An old man refusing to engage with thoughts of a death that can’t be far away is speaking to a girl who, whilst not welcoming it, is perfectly reconciled. For him, the graveyard represents a kind of entropy, with nothing to celebrate. As the memory of the dead fades, so do the flowers on the graves: ‘At first they tend them, morning, noon, and night; they soon begin to come less frequently; from once a day, to once a week; from once a week to once a month; then, at long and uncertain intervals; then, not at all. Such tokens seldom flourish long. I have known the briefest summer flowers outlive them.’ But Nell isn’t going to take this passively, and tells him how much this ‘grieves’ her…
…and the schoolmaster lends a sympathetic ear. Graves might be left untended as time passes, but the dead’s good deeds are not forgotten. With her grandfather, she begins tending children’s graves. And, finally, he starts to realise how he has never considered her needs up to now. She is clearly not long for this world—most of Chapter 55 is about how everyone, visitors as much as the locals, is solicitous of Nell’s deteriorating health. The boy she had met playing over his brother’s grave becomes her friend, begging her not to leave him. ‘They say…you will be an angel before the birds sing again.’ And while we’re on the subject of death—we’ve hardly been off it for some time now—the sexton returns to show her the well in the crypt, musing ‘what is it but a grave?’ To Nell, it’s ‘a black and dreadful place’—in contrast to her dream of seeing spring again. Well, will she?
That’s enough of that. It comes as a relief to be back in London, with Dick Swiveller, and the harmless things he finds to occupy his time. His blighted love life becomes an excuse to dramatise his pretended grief, in dreadful pastiches of famous poetry. Mr Chuckster ‘s the notary’s clerk, and they lapse into a brief and absurd Shakespearean medley—‘’tis now the witching hour of night’ at nine a.m.—comically mirroring the pastoral Gothic of Nell’s village. And it’s time to reintroduce the plot against Kit. The small-minded Chuckster complains about him having become the Garland family favourite—and Kit arrives with a letter for the single gentleman. Chuckster is nasty with him, but Swiveller ‘being in the main good-natured’ begins to feel ashamed. It’s the beginning of something new in him, a definite sympathy for the underdog. And then the Brasses arrive, in disconcertingly high spirits, because they are primed to set their trap for Kit.
But first, there’s a further development in Swiveller’s transformation into a worthwhile human being. He sees the small servant spying on him, confronts her with the fact, and… is much more interested in her thinness and the paucity of her life than he is about her cheek. He feeds her, treats her to some of his punch, and teaches her to play cribbage, the game he had been playing alone when he caught her. He decides he doesn’t want to be caught there with her, so they go down to her little cellar. She is mystified by his theatrical manner—she has never seen a play—that he calls her the Marchioness and the cellar her palace. Later, he meditates on her strange and to him exotic life… but things move on in the plot to ruin Kit. Sally is missing a silver pencil case—and Dick is distressed that the Marchioness might be implicated. Sally suggests it must be Kit, but Sampson Brass is as theatrical as Dick in his repudiation of the idea.
But by now, after always sending Dick away from the office when he does it, Brass has been offering Kit gifts of one or two half-crowns. He implies they come from the single gentleman, as he sings Kit’s praises and makes absurd conversation with him about every last detail of his life. Then, having carefully set everything up, he plants a five-pound note in Kit’s hat. Then, with Sally and Dick present, he pretends that the note is missing from his desk… etc. He makes sure, after they have caught up with Kit on the road, that Dick is the one to find it. A constable is called, and Kit, mortified by the false accusation, and Dick’s shame-faced admission that he did indeed find the note, asks if he can be taken to the notary’s office on the way to the police station. Quilp has positioned himself in a location where he can take his impish delight in Kit’s downfall… and the Garlands can do nothing but look at Kit, bemused and mortified by what has happened.
And that’s it. We know there will be no hope for Kit, now in prison and trying to make sense of the impossible thing that has happened to him. Dickens has the time to muse on the unbearable horror felt by the falsely accused… and allow Kit the modest comfort afforded by his mother’s visit and her staunch belief in his innocence. Then, a surprise. Somebody has ordered a daily pint of beer for him, and the first is accompanied with a scribbled note. It’s from ‘RS’, Dick Swiveller himself, who had been an unwilling witness before the magistrate. Definitely on the right track, old Dick.
Chapters 62-68
Not long to go now, and we’ve already come to the end of some of the London-based story arcs. Dickens manages this through the kinds of storytelling techniques that make him unique among serious Victorian novelists. A monstrous, imp-like figure sings and dances as he drinks boiling spirits and mutilates a giant wooden head, representing his enemy. A man wakes from a fever, discovering he has been nursed for weeks, entirely competently, by a girl who has no experience of doing such a thing. She had needed to escape from her cruel masters, and this has given her somewhere to rest her head. Marvellously, at the eleventh hour, she can tell him the truth that will lead to the release of the boy he never believed could be guilty. This information, and his recovery, comes just in time. Now, despite a lifetime of incarceration, she is able to reach the only men who could help bring about the release, and take all the necessary steps to tell one of them in secret. And so on, and on. How much disbelief are we expected to suspend?
Answer: all of it—and we’re happy to do it. We aren’t distracted by the preposterous implausibility and the fantastical, Arabian Nights-style characterisation and plot twists. We love it. Dickens creates universes for his novels, as particular as those in fantasy or science fiction movie franchises. What we’re looking for isn’t realism, but engagement at every human level. The only other writer I can think of who can do this is Shakespeare. Quilp has no more rational motive for trapping Kit than Iago has for sending Othello half-mad with jealousy. And, as we read or watch, that isn’t what we’re interested in.
First, that scene with the impish Quilp beating the giant torso and head. He’s bought it for this express purpose, and has had it delivered to his rat-cave by the river. The main purpose of the scene is to confirm how far from any kind of recognisable humanity Quilp has come. He subjects Sampson Brass to abuse and bullying, forcing him into flights of sycophancy whist having to swallow the same boiling spirits he himself thrives on. Brass is powerless in this ‘hermitage,’ as Dickens ironically calls it in a later chapter, and Quilp is the devil. As a parting shot, he makes Brass negotiate the dangerous obstacle course of his grounds in complete darkness, chuckling all the time, and warns him to mind the vicious dog.
Then comes Kit’s trial, a bitterly satirical critique of the adversarial legal system. The prosecution’s lawyer is as fond of humiliating defendants, witnesses and defending counsel as Quilp is of humiliating everybody, and they all buckle under his questions and knowing innuendoes. Dick Swiveller feels as guilty as the real criminals awaiting their own trials by the end of it and, of course, Kit is sent down to await sentencing. This system has no interest in the truth, only reputation-building victories.
Next, the Arabian Nights episode—that’s exactly what the participant thinks it is—of a magical awakening. The Brasses have been happy to follow Quilp’s instruction to sack Dick Swiveller, and he returns home. ‘But … The spiritual excitement of the last fortnight, working upon a system affected in no slight degree by the spirituous excitement of some years, proved a little too much for him.’ He falls into a raging fever, vividly evoked as a ‘rambling, ever, through deserts of thought where there was no resting-place, no sight or sound suggestive of refreshment or repose.’ Thankfully, three weeks are compressed into a single long paragraph, and when he does wake up it is with a feeling of ‘most blissful rest.’
Maybe we’re to consider this a kind of necessary purgatory. Whether it is or not, there is no return to any kind of suffering for him from now on. The small servant, now always ‘the Marchioness,’ has saved his life, paying for his needs by selling almost everything he has. In his weakened state, he’s fine with this, and she is full of tender care for him. She—go figure—knows precisely how to nurse him, telling him to rest himself… but before he sleeps, she can’t resist hinting at something she witnessed at the keyhole. He makes her tell him how she heard every word of the plot against Kit, including even the detail that the five-pound note was lent to them by Quilp. Dick tells her how to find one or other of the Garlands at the notary’s office to bring him to his room. She instinctively takes a circuitous course, stays judiciously hidden before seizing her chance, and ambushes the younger Garland by climbing behind him as he hurries away behind the pony. Job done, like a pro.
Is it an open-and-shut case? The rest of this chapter and all of the next one suggest that it is, but the Garlands and the notary need the Brasses to bear witness against Quilp. If they don’t, only they will be prosecuted and Quilp will escape justice. But how to make them do it? Dickens squeezes a lot of dark comedy from the Garlands’ decision to lean on Sally Brass. They invite her to meet them ‘on business,’ trap her between them, and reveal to her that they know everything. She is about to laugh them to scorn, only her obsessive consumption of snuff revealing her inner agitation, when her brother arrives and starts talking before she can stop him. He is breathless with the desire to confess everything, including Quilp’s leading role, and she is mortified. She has finished the snuff, is biting the box in frustration—and, strangely, falls asleep. Nobody notices exactly when it is that she slips away.
But nothing now stands in the way of it all coming right. Brass is arrested, a warrant will be issued for Quilp’s arrest tomorrow, and Kit will be released. And running parallel to all this is another story, that of Swiveller’s growing admiration of the Marchioness. He can see her quick-wittedness, and Dickens is careful to show us how solicitous she is of his needs. The Garlands have been looking on benignly, and send a huge hamper containing food like the Marchioness has never seen and wine that’s no doubt better than any Swiveller has had in years. And there’s better to come. His wealthy aunt has died, bequeathing him an annuity of £150 a year. It’s a perfect amount, perhaps what an author might decide was going to be best for him. He’ll have enough to live on rather than a fortune—she could have left him with £25,000 if she’d trusted him—and it won’t get in the way of him marrying a penniless young protégée of his, one for whom he is now determined to provide an education.
So, Quilp is arrested, yes? That would be far too good for him. He confirms his inhumanity in the next chapter, treating his wife sadistically even as she braves the terrors of a thick sea-fog to bring him a letter. It’s from Sally, who tells him what her useless brother has done. At first he can’t believe it, especially after he’s spent their last meeting hammering home—almost literally, as we know from Brass’s black eye and other facial injuries—how he needs to keep on the right side of the man who pays his bills. He sends his wife away, as helpfully as he did to Brass that other time, and rouses himself to start packing everything he can. He fantasises about what a pleasure it would be to see him drown, the delight in seeing him rise once, and sink, the joy in seeing him rise again, and sink—I’m paraphrasing, but you get the picture—and hears a knocking at the gate. He’s already barred it, and knows a different way out. He’s pleased that the fog is as thick as he’s ever seen—the arresting officers will never see him slip away—but, in his desperate hurry, he knocks over the stove, and his source of light.
What comes next is a masterclass in portraying mounting dread and horror. From his realisation that he has lost all sense of direction—it’s as silent as it is dark, the officers having stopped their knocking—to his stumbling over ground that seems strange to him, we are inside Quilp’s own desperate mind. Dogs bark, but from where? They bark from on board ship as well as on the land, so they are no help. He feels for a wall or fence but, instead, ‘he staggered and fell—and next moment was fighting with the cold dark water!’ His struggle as he tries not to drown is exactly as he had contemptuously imagined for the man he had prematurely called Judas, when Brass had earlier tried to stop him chanting out his triumph over Kit. ‘It was of no avail. The strong tide filled his throat, and bore him on, upon its rapid current…. Another mortal struggle, and he was up again, beating the water with his hands, and looking out, with wild and glaring eyes….’ And so on, until he reaches ‘the smooth and slippery surface’ of a ship’s hull—which merely pushes him under for the final time. The tide carries away ‘a corpse.’ The illustration that ends the chapter shows ‘it,’ the corpse, sprawled on its back where the tide had ‘flung it on a swamp—a dismal place where pirates had swung in chains.’
Whoo. Time for some light relief, which Chapter 68 brings in spades. The Garlands take Kit to their dear old house, and everybody he loves is there to greet him. Even Barbara, moved beyond tears by his reprieve, is able to speak to him when she happens to be in the pony’s stable at the same time as he is. The pony is in ecstasies to Kit and, of course, it’s mutual—but Barbara manages to turn Kit’s attention away for long enough for him to speak kindly, shake her hand and, finally, kiss her. Let joy be unconfined—which it is, in the present tense, for four rapturous pages. What could be better? Well… Mr Garland has some news for Kit. Tomorrow they will go, with the single gentleman, to see his brother, a bachelor who lives in a lovely old village. And you’ll never guess who they are going to see. Kit wonders, is she well and happy? ‘Happy she is, beyond all doubt…. And well, I—I trust she will be soon.’
Hmm. There aren’t many loose ends to be tied up in the five chapters that remain, but we can all think of at least one. Will there be a dry eye in the house?
Chapters 69-73—to the end
Nope. Eyes. Any dry ones. ‘They looked into the faces of each other, and no man’s cheek was free from tears.’ This is when Kit, the Garlands and the single gentleman have realised that Nell is dead, and the grandfather is again going into her room to check whether she is awake. We don’t find out until the next chapter that she’s been dead since the previous morning. At first, when Kit is the first to find the old man letting out a moan with every breath as he sits before a dying fire, he must imagine Nell is still simply sleeping. But her friends in the village wouldn’t have left them both alone at such a crisis, although it isn’t clear when Kit realises this. His eyes are soon filled with tears, but it isn’t until five pages after his arrival, and that of the other travellers, that Dickens spells it out. ‘For she was dead. There, upon her little bed, she lay at rest. The solemn stillness was no marvel now.’ The illustration below this is of no sleeping form, but that of a deathbed, with the form that had been Nell smiling beatifically.
Why does Dickens delay the moment for so long? Why doesn’t he allow Kit a spoken farewell to her, but only the comfort of knowing that she had spoken of him with affection just before her death? Perhaps it’s a courtesy to all those readers who had not had the good fortune of final words with a dying loved one. By the time Dickens was writing this, he had made it a specific aim of his to bring comfort to those readers bereaved by the deaths of children. Maybe, again, this is why Nell has always been ‘the child.’ She must be well into her teens now, but you wouldn’t know it. (Do I really know it anyway?) Whatever, Dickens uses the word ‘dead’ three more times in the next few lines, and again half a page later, before the chapter ends. But its final words are spoken as a comfort. The kindly schoolmaster, after evoking the glories of Heaven, says, ‘if one deliberate wish expressed in solemn terms above this bed could call her back to life, which of us would utter it!’ He might get a different response in our own century, but hopes were different then.
So, that’s the only truly loose end fully tied up. But there are other things either to finish, or bring to a satisfying resolution. I’ll be quick.
During the freezing cold, two-chapter journey to see Nell, the single gentleman tells Abel who he is. He’s Nell’s great-uncle, having been given great care and attention by her grandfather when they were both boys. The single gent is twelve years younger, and had been so sickly everyone feared for his life, including his older brother. The younger considers his brother’s constant attention saved him—and when the older had fallen in love with the same woman as the younger, the latter let him marry her. In sorrow, the younger left the country, making a success of his (single) life, and hearing only snippets of his brother’s tragic fortunes after that. The woman died young, giving birth only to another child just like her own angelic self—who married a bad ‘un, died young, and left her children in the care of their grandfather. Fred was cut from the same cloth as his father, whereas the infant Nell was exactly like her mother and grandmother. When the younger brother had heard about the loss of the shop, he sold up everything and returned to share his success with them.
After Nell’s death, her grandfather never does come to terms with it. He goes to her tomb in the church every day, telling himself and everybody else that he is ready to start out on the road as soon as she comes to him. He dies there, and is buried with her.
And the final chapter sorts out everything else. In a drolly ironic section, Sampson Brass is jailed for perjury and fraud, and can be seen on dark nights after his release scavenging through rubbish in the streets of London with his equally ragged sister. Quilp is buried as a suicide, with a stake through his heart, until Tom Scott exhumes him for Mrs Q and goes off to be an acrobatic tumbler. When she remarries, it’s to a man of her own choice—and her mother will be moving out. Dick Swiveller pays for the Marchioness’s education for six years, living a frugal life while he does so, and she proves herself a capable student. She’s ‘Sophronia’ now, he tells people, but even after they marry she will always be the Marchioness to him. The Garlands continue to live happily, Abel marries, the pony responds to being treated with deferential respect and lives ‘in clover,’ literally, until its death.
The ‘younger brother, or single gentleman, as you will’ spends his life spreading as much comfort as he can, including to everyone who had been good to Nell and her grandfather on the road. ‘The sisters at the school—they who were her friends, because themselves so friendless—Mrs Jarley of the wax-work, Codlin, Short—he found them all; and trust me, the man who fed the furnace fire was not forgotten.’ Nor is the schoolmaster, ‘poor’ no longer. The gamblers don’t do so well, being arrested and punished. Fred, who had become their accomplice, is later found drowned in France. Nobody knows, and nobody collects the body. So it goes.
Kit marries Barbara, their mothers share a house to bring up Kit’s brothers, and soon fine children start to arrive. And Kit is found a job connected with the law, after the excellent impression he had made on everybody during his trial, including the cynical prosecuting counsel. God bless us, every one.
We can read it for you wholesale 
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