 | | on the ground, and exclaimed "The Villain! The Rascal!! The bloodthirsty scoundrel!!!" His astonished brother thought he had
gone mad,
and enquired aghast of whom he was speaking? "Dickens," he roared, "he would
commit murder!
He killed my little NellHe killed my sweet little child"!
9
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Paul's death was as rapturously received as Nell's. The
Westminster Review
spoke for many when it joined the two together:
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| | The happiest and most perfect of Dickens' sketches is that of 'Little Nell' in the story of
Humphrey's Clock.
Her death is a tragedy of the true sort, that which softens, and yet strengthens and elevates; and we have its counterpart in 'Little Dombey', in the new work of this gifted author.
10
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Both this reviewer and Macready, we can notice, use moral terminology in praising the pathos ("strengthens and elevates," "make our hearts less selfish"), a point that will turn out to be important. And once again the most revealing response to the book comes in private letters, and none more so than that of Francis Jeffrey, the fierce critic of the
Edinburgh Review,
scourge of sentimentality, whom we have already encountered reproaching Wordsworth. Jeffrey's stern outside hid (or hardly hid) a very soft center:
|
| | Oh, my dear Dickens! what a no.5 you have now given us! I have so cried and sobbed over it last night, and again this morning; and felt my heart purified by those tears, and blessed and loved you for making me shed them; and I never can bless and love you enough. Since that divine Nelly was found dead on her humble couch, beneath the snow and the ivy, there has been nothing like the actual dying of that sweet Paul. Every trait so true, and so touching. In reading of these delightful children, how deeply do we feel that "of such is the kingdom of Heaven;" and how ashamed of the contaminations which
our
manhood has received from the contact of earth.
11
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In fairness I ought now to mention that the editors of the Pilgrim edition of Dickens's letters, Madeline House and Graham Storey, are skeptical about assertions of national grief over Nell's death. "For the response of the public in general," they claim, "little evidence has been collected."
12
Since they then go on to cite a good deal of such evidence, their skepticism actually rests on the facts that much else in the novel was praised besides Nell, that some of the evidence does not actually specify the shedding of
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