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Grandfather Trent alone among the tombs
Harold Copping
1893
Photographic reproduction of line drawing, p. 143
9.5 x 7.8 cm (3 ¾ by 3 inches), vignetted
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image, caption, and commentary below by Philip V. Allingham
It was a secluded village, lying among the quiet country scenes Nell loved. And here, her grandfather being tranquil and at rest, a great peace fell upon the spirit of the child. Often she would steal into the church, and sit down among the quiet figures carved upon the tombs. What if the spot awakened thoughts of death? It would be no pain to sleep here. For the time was drawing nearer every day when Nell was to rest indeed. She never murmured or complained, but faded like a light upon a summer's evening and died. Day after day and all day long, the old man, broken-hearted and with no love or care for anything in life, would sit beside her grave with her straw hat and the little basket she had been used to carry, waiting till she should come to him again. At last they found him lying dead upon the stone. And in the church where they had often prayed and mused and lingered, hand in hand, the child and the old man slept together. [Mary Angela Dickens et al., "Little Nell and Her Grandfather," pp. 142-143]
left: Detail of headboard from Cattermole's At Rest. Right: Phiz's's version of the death of Little Nell in the frontispiece for Volume II of Master Humphrey's Clock (3 October 1840) adds her stricken grandfather.
Copping uses the metonymy of Nell's empty basket and bonnet, lying beside her sleeping grandfather in the nave of the old church, to suggest her abiding presence with Victorian readers. Her death shocked Dickens's readership in Great Britain and America like, and left a lasting impression on a whole generation of readers. The illustrator, therefore, makes no effort to show us what became of the novel's other characters, notably the sordid villain, Daniel Quilp, the imaginative Dick Swiveller, the the street-smart Marchioness, and the odious Samson and Sally Brass. The final vignette in the volume, the tailpiece Grandfather Trent alone among the tombs, seems a fitting way to end the little work of fourteen short chapters, even though the protagonist of "Little Nell and Her Grandfather" was among the first of Dickens's movingly rendered child characters, who Mary Angela Dickens terms "these dramatic fairy children" (7) in the introductory chapter.
The premier children — the "super-children," as Mr. Shaw would have it — in whose case Boz exercised all his power, and which rank in the very first place, were, of course, Little Nell and Little Dombey, also the pathetic, little, lame Tiny Tim. ["Dickens' Dream Children," 9]
Left: George Cattermole's 6 February 1841 tailpiece for the serial in Master Humphrey's Clock presents Nell's death as a transubstantiation: The Spirit's Flight — The soul of Little Nell ascending (Part 40: Chapter 73). Centre: Charles Green offers a dark nemesis for the evil Brasses, wandering the sordid London streets in rags: Two wretched people were more than once observed to crawl. . . (1874). Right: Harry Furniss ends his volume of The Old Curiosity Shop with an effusion, as Grandfather Trent prostrates himself in grief over Little Nell's corpse: The Death of Little Nell (1910).
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). London: Chapman and Hall, 1841. Rpt., 1849 by Bradbury and Evans (3 vols. in 2).
_____. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Thomas Worth. The Household Edition. New York: Harper & Bros., 1872. I.
_____. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Charles Green. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.
Dickens, Mary Angela, Percy Fitzgerald, Captain Edric Vredenburg, and Others. Illustrated by Harold Copping with eleven coloured lithographs. Children's Stories from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1893.
Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University.
Created 26 September 2023