Has anyone read Charles Dicken's " The Old Curiosity Shop"??

Question

I read this book recently but could not make out the reason for Nell's death. Was it the journey they had taken or was she suffering from any illness from the start?? Please tell me.

Answer 1

Dickens wrote his books in serial form, a chapter at a time. He may not necessarily have known early on just how things would develop, but Little Nell is clearly destined to be a tragic figure. Quite early on in the book there is a premonition when Little Nell meets the schoolmaster and reflects on the deaths of so many children around her and feels thankful to have been spared. Many chapters on, Dickens decides that she will gradually weaken as the result of the journey and its privations and the starvation to which she is exposed. The Victorians were enamoured of death and loved being able to weep over the death of a child in a work such as this. Death in infancy was so common that they would be ready to accept that a child could fall into a decline" and lose her hold on life. Many children simply wore themselves out through the harshness of their lot: working in factories, as chimney sweeps, etc. for long hours with very little food and no medical attention. Little Nell was not a particularly robust child and it was all too much for her system. The chance meeting again with the schoolmaster, when she falls unconscious at his feet, is almost a dress rehearsal.

'She is quite exhausted,' said the schoolmaster, glancing upward into his face. 'You have taxed her powers too far, friend.'

'She is perishing of want,' rejoined the old man. 'I never thought how weak and ill she was, till now.'

It is a lingering death of the kind that the Victorian reader would have relished. A starving child overtaxed herself taking a long journey.

Answer 2

Obviously someone read it. Can't think why. My knowledge of Dickens is restricted to what I was forced to read at school. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, school children were submitted to the depravity and misery as portrayed by Dickens and told that that was the current situation in England.