The Death of Little Nell
Harry Furniss
1910
14.5 cm x 9.3 cm, framed
Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing V, 544.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Context of the Illustration
And still her former self lay there, unaltered in this change. Yes. The old fireside had smiled upon that same sweet face; it had passed, like a dream, through haunts of misery and care; at the door of the poor schoolmaster on the summer evening, before the furnace fire upon the cold wet night, at the still bedside of the dying boy, there had been the same mild lovely look. So shall we know the angels in their majesty, after death.
The old man held one languid arm in his, and had the small hand tight folded to his breast, for warmth. It was the hand she had stretched out to him with her last smile — the hand that had led him on, through all their wanderings. Ever and anon he pressed it to his lips; then hugged it to his breast again, murmuring that it was warmer now; and, as he said it, he looked, in agony, to those who stood around, as if imploring them to help her. [Chapter LXXI, 534-35]
Commentary
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.
In his climactic illustration Furniss reacts to previous programs for The Old Curiosity Shop which emphasized the death of the child, not showing others' responses to her death, but describing her body as if she is sleeping rather than dead. She is tranquil and "at rest" as Cattermole's caption proclaims in the celebrated 30 January 1841 illustration At Rest. Furniss rejects this celebration of death as a release, and focuses instead on the prostrate figure of Grandfather Trent, laid low by grief. The dress that Nell loved so much sits on the armchair in the foreground: "Her little homely dress, — her favourite!" cried the old man, pressing it to his breast, and patting it with his shrivelled hand. "She will miss it when she wakes. They have hid it here in sport, but she shall have it — she shall have it" (LXXI, 530). The grief-stricken figure upon whom Furniss focuses is not Kit Nubbles, as in the text, but the overwhelmed grandparent, as in Phiz's thumbnail for the frontispiece to the second volume of Master Humphrey's Clock, a more likely source than Thomas Worth's penultimate illustration for the American Household Edition, She turned to the old man with a lovely smile upon her face (1872). Furniss has taken the elaborate, mediaeval headboard directly from Cattermole's celebrated illustration At Rest (Nell dead).
Related Material about The Old Curiosity Shop
- Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (homepage)
- The Old Curiosity Shop Illustrated: A Team Effort by "The Clock Works"
- Illustrated Editions of The Old Curiosity Shop
- Kyd's Characters from Dickens (1889)
Bibliography
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. V.
Created 24 May 2020
Last modified 28 November 2020