Midway through the old curiosity shop (1840–41), Quilp returns home to discover his own wake in progress upstairs. He has been absent for three days, dogging the footsteps of the friends and family searching for Nell: materializing at Little Bethel, the chapel Kit's mother attends, or rising from the larder of the inn to which the single gentleman and Kit's mother retire after discovering from Mrs. Jarley that they have just missed Nell. Quilp's wife, having heard nothing from him all this time, has concluded that he has drowned, and so Quilp finds her, her mother, and the lawyer Sampson Brass at work on a descriptive advertisement for his corpse. As Quilp looks on, the group insultingly anatomizes him – “Large head, short body, legs crooked” (Dickens 382; ch. 49) – a process punctuated by the slightly inebriated Brass's musings on the afterlife to which the dwarf might have flown. Brass considers the possibility that the recently deceased might be at that moment watching from the next world, and this thought leads to another platitude about the dead:
“I can almost fancy” said the lawyer shaking his head, “that I see his eye glistening down at the very bottom of my liquor. When shall we look upon his like again? Never, never! One minute we are here” – holding his tumbler before his eyes – “the next we are there” – gulping down its contents, and striking himself emphatically a little below the chest – “in the silent tomb.” (381; ch. 49)
Brass's sentiments are, at least for a moment, tantalizingly vague. We, of course, know precisely where Quilp is – behind the door – but Dickens's suspension of Brass's speech until the lawyer has finished his drink seems to offer a much less definite possibility: that once the dead are no longer “here,” they are simply “there.” But where, when it comes to the future life, is that? Only in the silent tomb? For all its lack of seriousness, this scene gets to the heart of a fundamental curiosity in this novel about what might await us in the next life. In other words, while readers of the novel have tended to focus most intently on whether Little Nell might die, the novel itself seems equally interested in what might happen to Nell – and to us – after death.
When Quilp finally springs from his hiding spot and bursts through the door, his wife and Mrs. Jiniwin respond with shrieks of horror, thinking he has risen from his watery grave. Quilp's “resurrection” is of a piece with his generally malicious behavior toward his wife, her mother, and the rest of his acquaintance, but it, too, is part of the novel's interrogation of what death might bring. Indeed, Quilp's return is one of a series of moments in the novel that hint that, once gone, the dead might come back again. Elsewhere, for instance, Quilp appears to Nell so suddenly that “he seemed to have risen out of the earth” (215; ch. 27); later we are told that Nell and her grandfather find themselves in such a state of confusion upon entering the crowded streets of industrial Birmingham that it was “as if they had lived a thousand years before, and were raised from the dead and placed there by a miracle” (337; ch. 43). Throughout, the novel evinces a fascination with the fate of the corpse – Nell's body, but also Quilp's, dug up by Tom Scott, or Fred Trent's, left unclaimed in the Paris morgue.
In the 1840s, the question of the body's role in the future life was also among the primary concerns of the burgeoning field of psychology. Before the solidification of psychology's disciplinary boundaries later in the century, such questions were considered to be well within the field's purview. Mental scientists therefore looked to the grave as persistently as does The Old Curiosity Shop, seeking to understand the nature of mind by theorizing about what might await us in the hereafter. The subsequent debates about the story the corpse might tell were among the most passionate arguments waged in psychology in the middle of the nineteenth century. This essay focuses on the interlinked fascinations with the corpse in both The Old Curiosity Shop and Victorian mental science, reading Dickens's treatment of death in the novel as his own engagement with – even intervention in – these psychological debates. Nell's death in particular is a clear effort to insist on the immateriality and immortality of mind, to uphold what was widely seen as the standard (albeit beleaguered) position in psychology's struggle over the relative significance of our mental and physical beings. But alongside Dickens's efforts to offer Nell as evidence of a spiritual immortality, the novel lets slip hints of a lingering attachment to the body, a conflicted and anxious sense that it might matter after all. Through this conflicted perspective, the novel sheds light on a broader ambivalence in British culture in the 1830s and 1840s about the significance of the body and the nature (even the possibility) of a future life.
I
In the 1840s, psychology was a diffuse and contentious field, a body of thought that had formed for itself very few orthodoxies. Neither the methods nor even the subject matter of the field could be said to be entirely agreed upon. Was psychology to study the soul? The brain? The nerves? And should it do so by way of observation? Introspection? Laboratory experiment? Yet as varied and inclusive as psychological writing and research was, many who wrote about the mind nevertheless perceived the field to be divided along very clear battle lines. And “battle lines” they seem to have been, as is made clear by the martial metaphors that are used so incessantly to describe mental science throughout the century, as in the title of Alfred Barry's 1869 Contemporary Review article, “The Battle of the Philosophies – Physical and Metaphysical.” In these common representations of mental science – which were utterly reductive, to be sure, but which gained force through being so widely acknowledged – the field was seen to be dominated by those studies which insisted on the mind's immateriality, as it had been dominated (according to these representations) since psychology's beginnings in Britain. Lurking behind this notion of the immateriality of mind, moreover, was an often unspoken assumption of mind's immortality, too. Hence Robert Chambers's complaint in the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), that mind has become “a received synonyme [sic] with soul, the immortal part of man” (325). While much of the actual writing being done in the field represented what Roger Smith calls “a temperate articulation of middle ground” (89), the widespread insistence on the binary nature of psychological theory (that writers were either spiritualist or materialist, as I explain below) – coupled with the equally widespread treatment of the soul-based position as orthodoxy, as the standard position – meant that physical theories of mind were always in danger of being read as radical challenges to that orthodoxy.Footnote 1
Chambers offers such a challenge, insisting of the “spiritualist” position that “[t]here is here a strange system of confusion and error, which it is most imprudent to regard as essential to religion, since candid investigations of nature tend to show its untenableness” (325–26). As such comments suggest, for as often as the immateriality and immortality of mind were treated as psychological orthodoxy (and as “essential to religion”), there were those in the 1840s who dared to question these beliefs, most often through the role these writers imagined for the brain in mental life. John Stuart Mill, in his A System of Logic (1843), describes those “eminent physiologists” who hold that “some particular state of our nervous system, in particular of that central portion of it called the brain, invariably precedes, and is presupposed by, every state of our consciousness. According to this theory, one state of mind is never really produced by another: all are produced by states of body” (850).Footnote 2 In other words, mind is a product of these states of body, dependent on them for its very existence. Of course, such claims were also the foundation of phrenology's localization of particular faculties in discrete regions of the brain. George Combe – the figure who was perhaps most responsible for disseminating the ideas of phrenology throughout England – thus writes early in his System of Phrenology (1819) that “the same Divine Wisdom which ordained the universe, presided also at the endowment of the brain with its functions; that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that mind is the noblest work of God” (ix). Recognizing how potentially controversial such a position was, however, despite the religious language in which he couches it, Combe insists in his later The Constitution of Man (1828), “I have endeavoured to avoid all religious controversy” (ix). Few of his reviewers were placated by such claims.Footnote 3 John Elliotson, Dickens's friend and physician (and never one to shy away from controversy), insists in his Human Physiology (1840), which Dickens owned:
Mind is the functional power of the living brain. As I cannot conceive life any more than the power of attraction unless possessed by matter, so I cannot conceive mind unless possessed by a brain, or by some nervous organ, whatever name we may choose to give it, endowed with life. I speak of terrestrial or animal mind; with angelic and divine nature we have nothing to do, and of them we know, in the same respects, nothing. (32)
Elliotson, like Combe, attempts to position himself on the side of religion here, but the argument he makes – that mind cannot exist without a brain or other nervous organ – is one that was apt to be received in the 1840s as irreligious and atheistic.
Less controversial mental scientists were willing to acknowledge the brain's part in cognition, but they insisted that the brain was merely the mechanism by which the mind operated in this plane of existence; certainly the physical organ was not constitutive of the mind. John Abercrombie, two of whose books Dickens owned, writes of the brain that “[t]here is a remarkable connexion between this organ and the manifestations of mind; and by various diseases of the brain these manifestations are often modified, impaired, or suspended” (30). But rather than agreeing that such connections prove mind to be a product of our physical being, Abercrombie insists that “they accord equally with the supposition that the brain is the organ of communication between the mind and the external world. When the materialist advances a single step beyond this” – when he or she attempts to theorize that the “remarkable connexion” between mind and brain proves mind's dependence on brain – “he plunges at once into conclusions which are entirely gratuitous and unwarranted” (30–31). In other words, Abercrombie, like many writers in the 1840s, insisted that there were proper limits to what psychology could claim to know; it is on these grounds that he finally dismisses the question of the relation between mind and matter, explaining that we “never can know in our present state of being” (36). In his Principles of Human Physiology (1842), William Carpenter assumes a similar position:
When we speak of sensation, thought, emotion, or volition . . . as functions of the Nervous System, we mean only that this system furnishes the conditions under which they take place in the living body; and we leave the question entirely open, whether the Ψυχη has or has not an existence independent of that of the material organism, by which it operates in Man as he is at present constituted. (80)
At the same time that they insisted on the limited possible scope of research into the brain, moreover, many of these same writers reassured readers that the nature of the relation between mind and body, whatever it might prove to be, should ultimately pose no challenge to our belief in our immortality. Abercrombie makes this point (36), encouraging readers to trust the “deep impression of continued existence” that we all intuitively possess (38); unlike the “casuist,” he argues, the
sincere and humble inquirer cherishes the impression, while he seeks for farther light on a subject so momentous; and he thus receives, with absolute conviction, the truth which beams upon him from the revelation of God – that the mysterious part of his being, which thinks, and wills, and reasons, shall indeed survive the wreck of its mortal tenement, and is destined for immortality. (38)
Scientific inquiry, if sincerely and humbly performed, will only further convince us of the future life promised through the revelation of God, according to Abercrombie. Less sincere inquirers may attempt to obscure this truth, but their claims can never truly disprove it.
But others lacked this confidence that the belief in immortality could survive the assaults of those who claimed that the brain was the organ of the mind. They instead insisted that those authors who suggested that the mind was a product of the brain were intent on denying religion and the future life. In the psychological writing of mid-century, such panicked reactions to psycho-physiological approaches were often implicit in the mere label “materialism,” at least when applied to another writer's work. The Fraser's Magazine reviewer of Combe's Constitution of Man, for instance, dismisses the text as “material infidelity,” insisting that “the philosophy of Mr. George Combe cannot be adopted without renouncing the very principles of the New Testament” (“Mr. George Combe” 511). Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, whose Theory of Pneumatology (1834) Dickens owned, calls materialism a “monstrous idol” (39) and “infernal irreligion,” which he asserts inevitably leads to “eternal perdition” (23).
As I have suggested, these critiques of materialism are founded on the assumption that only the soul can survive death. This claim is perhaps made nowhere so starkly as in Henry, Lord Brougham's 1835 work A Discourse of Natural Theology, which was a key text in these debates in the 1830s and 1840s: the book was widely reviewed, and many psycho-physiologists – like Elliotson – offered their own positions on mind, matter, and immortality as direct rebuttals of Brougham.Footnote 4 That Brougham's work inspired such responses is hardly a surprise, considering how sweeping the book's claims were:
The Immateriality of the Soul is the foundation of all the doctrines relating to its Future State. If it consists of material parts . . . we have no reason whatever for believing that it can survive the existence of the physical part of our frame; on the contrary, its destruction seems to follow as a necessary consequence of the dissolution of the body. (84)Footnote 5
To suggest, then, that the mind was dependent on the brain was, for Brougham and others who saw themselves as among the psychological old guard, to deny our immortality, to state that our minds and souls would dissolve in the grave along with our bodies.
Yet the overheated rhetoric aimed at “materialist” thinkers by those who positioned themselves in the “spiritualist” school belied the real dissent among mental scientists – and among Victorians more broadly – about the nature of the future life. Numerous material theorists in fact answered the attacks they faced by pointing to passages of scripture that seemed to promise a resurrection of the body instead of the immortality of the soul on which Brougham and others insisted. The author of “Nolan and Powell” (1834), for example, reminds readers that “[w]e cannot . . . separate our hope of immortality from the physical fact of our Saviour's resurrection” (427); the reviewer of Brougham's Natural Theology in Fraser's Magazine argues the same point, asserting that our surest proof of immortality is Christ's own physical resurrection (“Lord Brougham's Natural Theology” 385). Following another tack taken by materialist theorists, this same writer adds:
I have no experience of the soul operating without a body; nay, my internal conviction is, that were not a body in some way necessary for the exercise of those powers which are inherent in the soul, a perfectly benevolent Being never would have encumbered it with the burden of a body at all. (385)
Surely, then, some sort of body will be necessary to the future life as well.
But it is Elliotson, again, who argues for the material resurrection most vociferously. Indeed, Elliotson manages to position psycho-physiology as a more honest and faithful response to scripture than the “spiritualist” position, explaining that “no Christian who has just conceptions of the Author of Nature will hesitate to look boldly at Nature as she is, lest he should discover facts opposite to the pronunciations of his revelation; for the word and the works of the Almighty cannot contradict each other” (38–39). Those who level charges of materialism, Elliotson implies, are guilty of doubting scripture's ability to stand up under the honest examinations of science. In any case, Elliotson adds, “A physical enquirer has to do with only what he observes” (39), not hypotheses about the immateriality of mind. Elliotson also turns the rhetoric of writers like Abercrombie against them, answering those who insist on the immortality of the soul that such matters are beyond the reach of science:
[B]ecause we refuse to listen to a mere hypothesis respecting spirit, we are not necessarily to deny the resurrection. For if a divine revelation pronounce that there shall be another order of things in which the mind shall exist again, we ought firmly to believe it, because neither our experience nor our reason can inform us what will be hereafter, and we must be senseless to start objections on a point beyond the penetration of our faculties. (42)
Those who attack materialism, in other words, are themselves guilty of overreaching the limits of psychological inquiry. Elsewhere, though, Elliotson fails to heed his own warning: he responds to Brougham by insisting that “we possess no such imaginary thing as an immaterial soul” (365n), and he insists that it is in the body that we will be raised on the Day of Judgment (691).
But what, their antagonists replied, of the decomposition of the corpse? How can the body be raised if it has dissolved into mere atoms of matter? To say that these atoms would be gathered together again on the Day of Judgment – as some materialist thinkers did – hardly solves the problem, for it was clear by the 1840s that after death these atoms would have moved on to form the bodies of countless others (if not animals, plants, or other entities). Which of these many bodies could claim ownership of those atoms? As numerous writers made clear at mid-century, moreover, the matter of the body is recycled even during life; as Brougham puts it, the dissolution of our physical being at death is more sudden than that which we endure every day of our lives, but it is not more substantial (101–102).Footnote 6 A bodily resurrection, then, must be an impossibility. Yet more than merely a denial of materialism, this recycling and circulation of matter was made to serve in numerous texts as positive evidence of the immateriality of mind. As Brougham again suggests, our minds survive unharmed the daily decay and replacement of the atoms of our bodies, the circulation of matter through a variety of animate and inanimate forms. We can therefore rest assured that our minds will survive the body's final dissolution in precisely the same way:
The strongest of all the arguments both for the separate existence of mind, and for its surviving the body remains, and it is drawn from the strictest induction of facts. The body is constantly undergoing change in all its parts. Probably no person at the age of twenty has one single particle in any part of his body which he had at ten; and still less does any portion of the body he was born with continue to exist in or with him. All that he before had has now entered into new combinations, forming parts of other men, or of animals, or of vegetable or mineral substances, exactly as the body he now has will afterwards be resolved into new combinations after his death. Yet the mind continues one and the same, “without change or shadow of turning.” None of its parts can be resolved; for it is one and single, and it remains unchanged by the changes of the body. (100–01)
On this basis, Brougham finally asserts that “the existence of the mind depends not in the least degree upon the existence of the body” (101). Many others reached the same conclusion.
But it was not only mind's survival of the body's perpetual change on which these writers seized to defend the immateriality of the mind. Many also found in the knowledge that no matter is ever completely destroyed further proof for the soul's equal indestructibility. Brougham, for example, claims that since we have no experience of annihilation in our relations with matter, there is no reason for us to imagine the annihilation of mind (89–90). Abercrombie assumes a similar position:
The effects of that change, which we call the death of the animal body, are nothing more than a change in the arrangement of its constituent elements; for it can be demonstrated, on the strictest principles of chemistry, that not one particle of these elements ceases to exist. We have, in fact, no conception of annihilation; and our whole experience is opposed to the belief that one atom which ever existed has ceased to exist. There is, therefore, as Dr. [Thomas] Brown has well remarked, in the very decay of the body, an analogy which would seem to indicate the continued existence of the thinking principle, since that which we term decay is itself only another name for continued existence. To conceive, then, that any thing mental ceases to exist after death, when we know that every thing corporeal continues to exist, is a gratuitous assumption, contrary to every rule of philosophical inquiry, and in direct opposition, not only to all the facts relating to mind itself, but even to the analogy which is furnished by the dissolution of the bodily frame. (34)
All our experience, in other words, points to the continued existence of mind and soul beyond the death of the body. And after scripture, according to these writers, it is the ashes of that body, its ever-circulating atoms, that offer us our best assurance of the future life.
II
The dust and ashes that are so prevalent in the psychological literature of the 1840s thus served both as a direct rebuttal of the materialist position and as evidence of the mind's immateriality and immortality. It is this psychological significance of dust and ashes, I want to suggest, that accounts for their prominent place in The Old Curiosity Shop, too.Footnote 7 This is, as many critics have noted, a novel full of dust and decomposition, so much so that Steven Marcus calls the England of this text “a vast necropolis” (145). We find rot not only in the graveyards in which Nell passes so much of her time (and from which, we are told, she derives “a curious kind of pleasure” [136; ch. 17]), but also in the urban scenes we witness – the “[d]amp rotten houses, . . . mouldering away” (124; ch. 15), that Nell and her grandfather pass on their way out of London, or Brass's moldy offices, or the decrepit shop of the title, the merchandise for which, Master Humphrey muses, Nell's grandfather might have gathered from old tombs (10; ch. 1).
Yet it is not only rot the novel describes, but the movement of matter through numerous forms, that powerful proof, according to mid-century psychology, of the immateriality of mind. For example, in the village where Nell's journey ends, the sexton makes keepsake boxes out of “scraps of oak, that turn up here and there” in the churchyard, including “bits of coffins” (411; ch. 53), a hobby that seems to gesture at the simultaneous recycling of the contents of those coffins. Three paragraphs later, Dickens describes the “marble, stone, iron, wood, and dust” of the church as “one common monument of ruin” (412; ch. 53), a claim that seems to acknowledge the fundamental identity – and interchangeability – of the atomic matter that forms each substance. Nell, of course, has already witnessed a striking example of the breakdown of matter during her night in the Birmingham factory, where she saw the reduction of matter to ashes – ashes which tellingly “fell into their bright hot grave below” – and eventually spent the night sleeping atop this decomposed matter, foreshadowing the final rest to which she and the novel are heading (342; ch. 44).
It is the novel's focus on the way human beings in particular are reduced to “atoms of earth” (412; ch. 53) that is most significant for my argument: late in the text, for instance, the narrator remarks on the way the village sexton cleans his spade after burying a woman named Becky Morgan – and scrapes off, “in the process, the essence of Heaven knows how many Becky Morgans” (417; ch. 54). Similarly, in the little village that marks the end of Nell's voyage, the fragments of old buildings are “mingled with the church-yard earth and overgrown with grass, as if they too claimed a burying-place and sought to mix their ashes with the dust of men” (363; ch. 46). This dust of men, in turn, seems to fill the very air Nell breathes inside the church: we are told that that air, “redolent of earth and mould, seemed laden with decay purified by time of all of its grosser particles, and sighed through arch and aisle, and clustered pillars, like the breath of ages gone” (412; ch. 53). We also hear how, in the churchyard where Nell and her grandfather meet the puppeteers Codlin and Short, “[t]he clergyman's horse . . . [crops] the grass; at once deriving orthodox consolation from the dead parishioners, and enforcing last Sunday's text that this was what all flesh came to” (131; ch. 16). The scriptural allusion here is put in the service of scientific fact: the plants that grow atop such graves are fed by the corpses that lie beneath, even contain the same atoms, and they thus stand as evidence of the circulation of matter. If it is not grass into which the body changes, then it is flowers: surely that is part of the reason the old woman Nell meets sitting by the grave of her late husband insists that she likes no flowers so well as those that sprout from his grave (138; ch. 17). It is certainly this logic that later lies behind the child's explanation to Nell that the birds love his brother's grave – which he insists on calling a garden – because his brother “had been used to feed them” (409; ch. 53). He still does, it seems. Nell's gardening in the novel's final pages reinforces the same lesson: both during life and after death, the matter of our bodies becomes the food on which future life must feed, thereby testifying, as I have explained, to mind's independence from the physical frame. Of course, the sexton is also a gardener. He tells Nell, “I dig the ground, and plant things that are to live and grow. My works don't all moulder away and rot in the earth” (409; ch. 53), but the distinction is a false one: as the novel makes clear, the things he plants grow because the corpses he buries rot and molder. These flowers and trees are more than just memorials to the dead; they are the dead.
The novel insists on the growth that comes from decay in a more figurative sense, too. The schoolmaster, having been reunited with Nell and her grandfather, describes the way his love for his young pupil has been transferred to her in terms that also invoke the circulation of matter: “‘If this’ he added, looking upwards, ‘is the beautiful creation that springs from ashes, let its peace prosper with me, as I deal tenderly and compassionately by this young child’” (359; ch. 46). And while it is a truism that in Dickens's fiction natural regeneration and growth often stand as figures for the ascension of the human dead to heaven, that tendency seems especially strong here. Nell's flight from London is of course founded on the idea of the pastoral charms of the country as an escape from the death-in-life of the city, so that we are told, for instance, that in the country she and her grandfather both feel “that the tranquil mind of God [is] there, and shed[s] its peace on them” (189; ch. 24). But it is in the village at the end of Nell's journey that Dickens most forcefully connects the country with the hope for immortality. Climbing to the top of the churchtower, Nell has a vision of heaven on earth:
Oh! the glory of the sudden burst of light; the freshness of the fields and woods, stretching away on every side and meeting the bright blue sky; the cattle grazing in the pasturage; the smoke, that, coming from among the trees, seemed to rise upward from the green earth: the children yet at their gambols down below – all, everything, so beautiful and happy. It was like passing from death to life; it was drawing nearer Heaven. (414; ch. 53)
While such moments led some early reviewers to complain that the novel's connection of the future life with the regeneration of nature was not adequately Christian – Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, said that Dickens seemed not to have heard of “such a person as Jesus Christ” (qtd. in Bowen 150) – Dickens clearly is at pains to offer a Christian message in this novel, especially through Nell's passionate religiosity. From the very first chapter, she is perpetually insisting on the happiness her prayers bring her (16; ch. 1) – and perpetually falling on her knees to offer those “artless” prayers (125; ch. 15). The text itself, moreover, is full of allusions to both the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress, the latter of which texts we learn Nell has spent many an evening poring over (125; ch. 15). As other critics have suggested, then, Dickens's displacement of the novel's religion onto its pastoral scenes seems more a product of his discomfort with doctrinal controversy than a sign of superficial or inadequate religious belief.Footnote 8
At the same time, the novel's focus on the decay and circulation of matter (including the regenerative power of nature) is not the only means by which it contests the claims of materialism. The text often makes a distinction between mind and body (102; ch. 12, 249; ch. 32, 401; ch. 52) and between body and soul (352; ch. 45), and throughout it insists on a dualist model of identity. In his first encounter with Nell, Master Humphrey calls her confidence and simplicity “two of the best qualities that Heaven gives [children]” (11; ch. 1), a description that accords with the insistence on innate gifts in many soul-based psychological texts. Dickens's narrator similarly remarks that the ties that “link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the true metal and bear the stamp of Heaven” (293; ch. 38); later he writes that Fred Trent spends his last years living by his wits, “which means by the abuse of every faculty that worthily employed raises man above the beasts, and so degraded, sinks him far below them” (572; ch. 73), a passage that repeats the orthodox conception that humankind are raised above the animals on the basis of the gifts God grants them and does so by way of the terminology (“faculty”) of a soul-based mental science.
But this novel's dualism is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the representation of “spiritual” Nell (19; ch. 1), who is more an angel than a living, breathing person. Again and again, her body is figured as secondary and inconsequential: the narrator remarks of her, for example, that “the temples of such spirits are not made with hands” (100; ch. 11), thereby positioning the body as merely the soul's earthly dwelling, what after her death the novel dismisses as her “earthly shape” (560; ch. 72). In this passage and throughout, the text repeatedly insists that our souls will be freed from their bodily frames at death: the narrator writes of the dead as “unprisoned souls” (404; ch. 52), for instance, and Nell repeats to Mrs. Quilp the lesson her grandfather has often taught her, that her mother “was not lying in her grave, but had flown to a beautiful country beyond the sky, where nothing died or ever grew old” (57; ch. 6). These are sentiments Dickens often expressed privately in these years, too, especially in response to the death of Mary Hogarth, with whom so many critics have connected Nell. In his diary, for instance, he writes that “cold earth must have her soon. But it is not . . . [she] who will be laid among the ruins. . . . She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere” (House, et al. 1: 632).
III
Yet while much of the old curiosity shop suggests that we are spiritual beings, and that in the immateriality of our minds we may find evidence of the immortality of our souls, the novel seems elsewhere to whisper a very different story. Nell's days in the ruined monastery overwhelmingly tell us of a future life that is wholly immaterial; but what of those metaphors of resurrection with which I began? And what about Quilp, whose body most often seems to have freshly risen from the bowels of the earth? Indeed, Quilp seems to reside in the grave. His counting house is described as “burrowing all awry in the dust as if it had fallen from the clouds and ploughed into the ground” (34; ch. 4), and it is surrounded by rust, decay, and the mingling of matter: “a few fragments of rusty anchors; several large iron rings; some piles of rotten wood; and two or three heaps of old sheet copper, crumpled, cracked, and battered” (34; ch. 4). Even his favorite drinking establishment, the summer-house at the Wilderness to which he separately brings Dick Swiveller and the Brasses, is situated in the midst of mud, rot, and decay. His hands, moreover, are perpetually encrusted with dirt, as though he had just finished clawing his way out of the earth. Playing on his wife's fears about his premature death, he makes these hints explicit, scoffing at her pleas that he return home, “I'm dead, an't I?” (391; ch. 50).
As so many critics have noted, Quilp's physicality serves as a counterpoint to Nell's spirituality, and he has often been read as Nell's double in this novel.Footnote 9 I want to go further, though, and suggest that through this physicality Quilp also brings to the surface the novel's own conflicted perspective on the relative significance of body and soul. Consider the fate the novel imagines for him, buried at the crossroads with a stake driven through his heart: on the one hand, this fate highlights a tendency in the text to punish the body – especially the dead body – just as Quilp revels in torturing his guests with boiling rum or inflicting new and creative punishments on his effigy of Kit. The novel leaves Fred's bruised and battered corpse unclaimed in the Paris morgue, and even spiritual, angelic Nell's journey is marked on her body: as Catherine Robson notes, the narrative focuses ever more intently on her bruised feet as the journey proceeds, and on the way her frail body slowly wastes away (85–86). Her body becomes a spectacle within the action of the novel, too, attracting the curious both to Mrs. Jarley's waxworks and to the ruined monastery at which she serves as docent.Footnote 10
As I have said, though, it is Quilp who most clearly reveals the novel's ambivalence toward our earthly forms. This is especially the case in his death. After he has drowned and the river has finished sporting with his corpse – as the novel itself sports with Nell's body – he washes up in a place “where pirates had swung in chains, through many a wintry night” (528; ch. 67). That is, Quilp's corpse comes to rest beneath a gibbet, an instrument of capital punishment that played its own part in the controversies over the resurrection with which I began. The 1752 “Act for the better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder” (25 Geo. II c. 37, 1752) – better known as the Murder Act – offered the first legal recognition of gibbeting (or “hanging in chains”), instituting it as one of two punishments (along with dissection) that could be visited upon the corpses of executed criminals. “[I]n no case whatsoever,” the 1752 Act commanded, “the body of any murderer shall be suffered to be buried” before enduring one of these punishments (Evans 205). Instead, as Albert Hartshorne describes in his Hanging in Chains (1893), perhaps the key nineteenth-century work on the subject, gibbeting involved the exposure of murderers’ corpses. The body was typically cast into a cauldron of boiling pitch (to preserve it from decomposition), after which it was cold-riveted into its irons and then exposed in a public place (Hartshorne 73–74) – the scene of the crime, or within sight of the criminal's home, or in some other prominent location.Footnote 11
But it is the logic behind the gibbet that gets to the heart of mid-century controversies about the nature of the future life – and reveals just what is at stake in Quilp's washing up beneath one. While many historians suggest that the gibbet was primarily intended as a spectacle to deter other would-be criminals, the Act itself figures both gibbeting and dissection as punishments for the offender, a way to add “some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy . . . to the punishment of death.” Hartshorne suggests that bodies were gibbeted as a warning to others (13) – while acknowledging that the spectacle failed to work as a deterrent, but instead became a curiosity (84)Footnote 12 – at the same time that he also posits that the punishment may have originally operated to increase the shame of the crime (17). Yet the intensity of the reaction of criminals to the threat of hanging in chains, as Hartshorne describes it, seems to put the lie to both of these theories: “[T]he idea of being gibbeted was ever a very terrifying one to the sufferer,” Hartshorne explains, “and many a strong man who had stood fearless under the dread sentence broke down when he was measured for his irons” (72–73). Such terror suggests a threat much greater than mere shame. The author of an 1832 Fraser's Magazine article on the Anatomy Act, “Dialogues of the Dead,” argues instead that such modes of death as the gibbet reveal a contradiction at the heart of Victorian beliefs about the afterlife. Despite the common insistence that our bodies are merely the shells we cast off at death, punishments like these are informed by the notion that the body's lying unburied is itself terrifying:
When you are casting about for some extra-dreadful punishment for murder, you hit upon a very mild modification of that disposal which just now you forced upon the poor as a mere matter of course – a nothing! That is, you hit upon hanging unburied. Surely this is meant for a punishment to the man gibbeted, not the passers-by; so there comes something very like a self-betrayal of your own lie, for now it seems that the mere being unburied – not cut piecemeal, but left above ground to “take mine ease in mine cage” – is something to strike terror; that it is an aggravation of death itself, a horror to deter from or to punish the foulest crime. (736)
The threat, of course, is that the unburied (or mutilated) corpse would be incapable of resurrection; hence the frequency with which friends and family members attempted to rescue corpses from the gibbet in order to offer them a proper burial. In other words, as both V. A. C. Gattrell (87) and Ruth Richardson (36) argue, punishments like gibbeting intentionally played on lingering popular belief that the resurrection would be of the body (even as legislators scoffed at these ideas).Footnote 13
The same is true of the other post-mortem punishment made law in the Murder Act, dissection.Footnote 14 That it, too, struck terror in the hearts of many is suggested by the attempts to assuage such worries that we find in the numerous articles written in the lead-up to the 1832 Anatomy Act, which increased the supply of bodies to the medical schools by granting these institutions ownership of corpses that were left unclaimed in workhouses and hospitals. Quilp's fate necessarily would remind readers of the debates surrounding this Act, both because of the connection of dissection and gibbeting in the Murder Act, and because England briefly witnessed an effort to revive gibbeting in 1832 while the Anatomy Act was before the Commons (Potter 73).Footnote 15 Significantly, many of the efforts at reassurance about dissection tended to be founded on precisely those arguments made against the physical resurrection in psychological texts. For instance, in his “Unlawful Disinterment of Human Bodies” (1830), Robert Gooch critiques in these terms regulations that would require anatomists to collect and bury the various pieces of the corpses they dissected:
Those who believe in the resurrection, at the day of judgment, of the identical body, which died perhaps centuries before, have been puzzled to explain how the different atoms of which it was composed, which time has converted into worms and mould, and these again into other things, should be collected and cemented into that body which the last trump is to awake. But it would be almost as difficult to collect the fragments of a dissected body for burial; the utmost care could not prevent parts of different bodies being buried as one person; and a list of the fragments jumbled into one coffin would be as curious as the composition of the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth. (13)
Indeed, Gooch describes the work of the anatomists as fundamentally similar to the natural process of decomposition, suggesting that “[d]issectors are as thorough workmen as putrefaction and the worms. To trace the fragments of a dissected body would be something like tracing the atoms of a buried one” (13). Buried or not, the matter of the body inevitably moves on; the soul, meanwhile, has long since flown to its future home.Footnote 16
These arguments about both the Anatomy Act and hanging in chains certainly would have been familiar to Dickens. As Albert D. Hutter points out, his uncle Charles Barrow started his Mirror of Parliament in the same year that the Special Parliamentary Committee on Anatomy was called in the lead-up to the Anatomy Act (6), and Dickens worked for the paper in the years during which both the Anatomy Act was passed, in 1832, and William Ewart's Bill “to abolish the practice of hanging of bodies of executed criminals in chains” was made law, in 1834.Footnote 17 Even if he did not report on either debate, Dickens's work as a parliamentary reporter, Hutter suggests, would have attuned him to the issues before parliament (6). What these debates about both gibbeting and the Anatomy Act make clear, moreover, is that while Victorian culture might insist on the insignificance of the body, its treatment of the corpse – like the novel's – suggests some lingering doubt that the body might not be so insignificant after all. In washing ashore beneath the gibbet, then, Quilp gets at the heart of a deeper ambivalence in Victorian culture about the nature – and thus even the possibility – of a future life.
But Quilp's subsequent burial expresses this ambivalence about the corpse in another way, too. As Sue Zemka reminds us, his is the fate of the vampire, a stake driven through his heart (295). What Zemka does not note is the place vampires held in the mid-Victorian imagination: they were undecomposed bodies who, in rising nightly from the grave, enacted the physical resurrection that haunts The Old Curiosity Shop. In his Letters on the Truths Contained in Popular Superstitions (1849), for example, Herbert Mayo cites the following description of the vampire from Georg Conrad Horst's Zauber-Bibliothek (1821): “A Vampyr is a dead body, which continues to live in the grave, which it leaves, however, by night, for the purpose of sucking the blood of the living, whereby it is nourished, and preserved in good condition, instead of becoming decomposed like other bodies” (23). Of course, Quilp rises from his real grave, too: rumors abound that Tom Scott has turned resurrection man, that other monster terrorizing the first half of the century and testing the limits of Victorian culture's insistence that the body did not matter.
Yet what seems most troubling about Quilp, in terms of the psychological narrative this text attempts to tell, is that while surrounded by so much decomposition – in his counting house, at the Wilderness – he himself remains intact. In light of the way decomposition was made to stand in the 1840s as evidence of mind's immateriality and immortality, Quilp's position between death and life, his imperviousness to the ravages of the grave, at the very least threatens to confuse readers. But it is not only Quilp who seems to survive the grave unharmed. The same sense of death as a kind of stasis also haunts the novel's representation of Jarley's waxworks, which are linked with the grave through Nell's parallel relationship to both: after all, she serves as docent at Jarley's and in the churchyard of the hamlet in which she spends her final days. Jarley, of course, is at pains to prevent her wax figures from decomposing, from mingling with the dust: we are told that they are “concealed by cloths, lest the envious dust should injure their complexions” (219; ch. 28), and “helping to dust the figures” (213; ch. 27) is the first task Jarley imagines for Nell. In other words, Jarley strives to prevent these figures from following the natural course of other dead objects, instead holding them in perpetual stasis.Footnote 18 Jarley also articulates wax's uncanny position between life and death, explaining to Nell that waxwork is “so like life, that if wax-work only spoke and walked about, you'd hardly know the difference. I won't go so far as to say, that, as it is, I've seen wax-work quite like life, but I've certainly seen some life that was exactly like wax-work” (211; ch. 27). It is precisely because wax does not “move,” either by speaking and walking or by decomposing, that it is so unsettling, incompatible with the models of life and death on which the novel tries to insist.
It is the freedom from decomposition that Quilp and the waxworks share, and the consequent havoc both wreak on the novel's efforts to offer the decomposing corpse as evidence of the immateriality and immortality of mind, that seems to underlie the text's connection of the two. Quilp and the wax figures become interchangeable in Nell's uneasy dreams, of course, and she is perpetually terrified while awake that he has hidden himself among those figures:
She slept . . . in the room where the wax-work figures were, and she never retired to this place at night but she tortured herself – she could not help it – with imagining a resemblance, in some one or other of their death-like faces, to the dwarf, and this fancy would sometimes so gain upon her that she would almost believe he had removed the figure and stood within the clothes. Then there were so many of them with their great glassy eyes – and, as they stood one behind the other all about her bed, they looked so like living creatures, and yet so unlike in their grim stillness and silence, that she had a kind of terror of them for their own sakes, and would often lie watching their dusky figures until she was obliged to rise and light a candle, or go and sit at the open window and feel a companionship in the bright stars. (226; ch. 29)
Note that it is the “grim stillness and silence” of wax that most horrifies Nell, this stillness that obliges her to go gaze upon the stars that the novel has already connected with a spiritual heaven. Nell, like the novel, cannot help but return to this nightmare, though, no matter how many times she seeks to reassure herself that the alternative vision Quilp seems to embody is a lie.
This connection between waxwork and the corpse is one that was easy for readers in the 1840s to make. Paul Schlicke points out that wax effigies were long a part of Royal funeral processions in England, and he adds that in the eighteenth century wax figures were used for anatomical instruction (116), presumably as a supplement to those corpses procured through the Murder Act.Footnote 19 Dickens himself made the connection between wax and the corpse in other contexts, too. In the Uncommercial Traveller piece “Some Recollections of Mortality” (1863), for example, he twice describes the vacant and purposeless gazes those present in the Paris Morgue cast upon the bodies there as being “like looking at waxwork, without a catalogue, and not knowing what to make of it” (4: 223; cf. 4: 224). As Bianca Tredennick points out, furthermore, efforts were made to preserve the bodies on display at the Paris Morgue for as long as possible: she explains that the cold water that Dickens sees dripping on the corpses worked to retard decomposition (72). It is worth noting, then, that it is that water – apparently a metonym for the absence of decay – that seems most to horrify Dickens in another essay, “Lying Awake” (1852): “I wish the Morgue in Paris would not come here as I lie awake, with its ghastly beds, and the swollen saturated clothes hanging up, and the water dripping, dripping all day long, upon that other saturated something in the corner, like a heap of crushed over-ripe figs that I have seen in Italy!” (147).
Such moments hint that what is most troubling about Quilp is not the various physical resurrections he undergoes, but the way his changelessness in the midst of decay – how he lingers somewhere between life and death in his symbolic grave, impervious to the rot all around him – lends power to another series of images in this novel, a third option for life after death: I mean here the novel's images of the dead lying conscious in the grave, waiting for the very resurrection that the text has elsewhere been at pains to deny. In one of Nell's graveyard visits, for instance, we are told that the skimming to and fro of the birds “satirised the old restlessness of those who lay so still beneath the moss and turf below, and the useless strife in which they had worn away their lives” (137; ch. 17). It is the stasis of these corpses, their lying still beneath the sod, that is potentially worrying. While the birds fly here and there, the dead remain imprisoned, all their worldly (and otherworldly) hopes apparently proven futile. Similarly, the dead in the churchyard where Nell spends her last days have chosen their graves as though they would be sentient (and immobile) there:
Some of those dreamless sleepers lay close within the shadow of the church – touching the wall, as if they clung to it for comfort and protection. Others had chosen to lie beneath the changing shade of trees; others by the path, that footsteps might come near them; others among the graves of little children. Some had desired to rest beneath the very ground they had trodden in their daily walks; some where the setting sun might shine upon their beds; some where its light would fall upon them when it rose. Perhaps not one of the unprisoned souls had been able quite to separate itself in living thought from its old companion. If any had, it had still felt for it a love like that which captives have been known to bear towards the cell in which they have been long confined, and even at parting hung upon its narrow bounds affectionately. (403–04; ch. 52)
If the final sentences of this passage attempt to dismiss as naive the sentiments these dead attached to their bodies – bodies that the novel insists were only the prisons in which the soul was contained during life – the passage nevertheless reminds us of Victorian culture's own diversity of opinion on these matters. Even Nell occasionally falls into the trap of imagining her own sentience in the grave, noting the pleasant sights and sounds in the chapel and thinking that “[i]t would be no pain to sleep amidst them” (413; ch. 53).
The fever into which Dick Swiveller falls in the novel's final chapters seems a comic send-up of the potential anxieties surrounding the notion of the dead as sentient and unchanging. Of course, the novel has already connected Dick with such images of the sleeping corpse. His threat to the single gentleman in light of the latter's sleeping “for six-and-twenty hours at a stretch” – a period of repose, Dick says, that led the house to conclude he had died – is the threat of being buried alive in the very place where Quilp's body is interred: “[I]f ever you do that again,” Dick tells him, “take care you're not sat upon by the coroner and buried in a cross road before you wake” (275; ch. 35). In his own fevered ramblings, moreover, Dick associates the green stripes on his bed-furniture “strangely with patches of fresh turf, while the yellow ground between made gravel-walks, and so helped out a long perspective of trim gardens” (491; ch. 64). Considering Nell's own gardening in the churchyard, the connection between Dick's fever and the nightmare of lying conscious in the grave seems unavoidable. Indeed, when Dick finally recovers, the Marchioness informs him that he has been “[d]ead, all but” (494; ch. 64). And she would know, having long been buried herself, trapped in the bowels of the earth beneath Bevis Marks. Yet while he has been conscious in his “grave,” even Dick has not been entirely untouched by decomposition: among the first questions he poses to the Marchioness upon returning to his senses is, “[W]hat has become of my flesh?” (493; ch. 64). It is as though Dickens is pulling out all the stops here: diverting our attention to the regenerative imaginative power of Dick and the Marchioness, making ridiculous the notion of the undecayed corpse, and throwing in for good measure one last reassurance that matter will inevitably move on.Footnote 20
But while Dick's fever seems an effort to defuse the potential anxieties that might be aroused by Quilp and the waxworks, his illness connects him with another, potentially more threatening, “sick man,” the one imagined by Master Humphrey in the novel's third paragraph:
Think of a sick man in such a place as Saint Martin's Court, listening to the footsteps . . . – think of the hum and noise always being present to his senses, and of the stream of life that will not stop, pouring on, on, on, through all his restless dreams, as if he were condemned to lie dead but conscious, in a noisy churchyard, and had no hope of rest for centuries to come. (6; ch. 1)
This is the nightmare at which Quilp and the waxworks gesture, the terrifying fate that lies beneath the novel's more orthodox claims: not that we will be resurrected as bodies, but that we won't be resurrected at all.
Nell's death, the event to which this novel has all along been headed, does little to assuage these anxieties. The final image of Nell among the angels – the illustration that closes the text – is of course a clear representation of the spiritual afterlife on which a soul-based psychology insisted, and the novel seems to work overtime in its final pages to insist on this message. For example, Nell's burial is followed in the text by the calm time at evening “when all outward things and inward thoughts teem with assurances of immortality, and worldly hopes and fears are humbled in the dust before them” (562; ch. 72). Yet the context of the illustration of Nell among the angels is problematic, accompanying as it does the moralistic (and simplistic) lesson Kit teaches his children about her death, that “if they [are] good like her,” they might join her in heaven (574; ch. 73). If anything, this parallel between the novel's insistence on a spiritual afterlife and the sort of reassuring and didactic lessons one offers children threatens to call into question the novel's other attempts to insist on the immateriality of the soul and mind in these chapters. Take the following passage, which certainly sounds more reassuring than rigorous:
When Death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world, and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes. In the Destroyer's steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven. (563; ch. 72)
The patronizing tone that ever threatens to creep into this passage is only exacerbated by the echoes here of what has come to be called the “schoolmaster's consolation,” his attempt to reassure the child Nell:
There is nothing, . . . no, nothing innocent or good, that dies, and is forgotten. Let us hold to that faith, or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in its cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those who loved it; and play its part, through them, in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deepest sea. There is not an angel added to the Host of Heaven but does its blessed work on earth in those that loved it here. Forgotten! oh, if the good deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear; for how much charity, mercy, and purified affection, would be seen to have their growth in dusty graves! (421–22; ch. 54)
Such a passage hits all the right notes: the ascent of the soul to heaven, the moldering of the corpse in the dusty grave. Even the physical resurrection is here pushed aside by the idea that virtues, not bodies, will rise from the grave. But again the message is undermined by its context – a tale told to a child remarkable for her innocence – and the slightly condescending tone that seems a consequence of that context.Footnote 21
That is to say that, interspersed as they are with the novel's representations of Quilp's failure to decay – a failure that seems to short-circuit the psychological arguments the novel has made on the basis of putrefaction – the novel's assertions about the next life come to seem rather unconvincing, come to seem like such reassuring fictions as Dick Swiveller's insistence that his bedstead is really a bookcase (60–61; ch. 7), or as the fictions with which the bachelor garlands Truth in his histories of the ruined monastery's dead (415; ch. 54).Footnote 22 No wonder the sexton is so dubious about Nell's explanation for the way the living neglect the graves of their loved ones: “Perhaps the mourners learn to look to the blue sky by day, and to the stars by night[,]” Nell suggests, “and to think that the dead are there, and not in graves” (419; ch. 54), a claim to which the sexton can only doubtfully respond, “Perhaps so. . . . It may be” (419; ch. 54). And this is finally the best consolation the novel can offer, either: perhaps so. It may be. While, in the words of the schoolmaster, the dead may live again in the thoughts of those who loved them, the novel hardly convinces us that they'll live again in any other form. Even the miraculous restoration of Nell's body after death – the erasure of all the suffering marked on that body, so that she looks once again fresh from the hand of God (557; ch. 71) – seems only to reveal Dickens's desperate need to find in Nell some evidence of the soul's immateriality and immortality. The stark difference between her corpse and the “mouldering embers” on which her Grandfather gazes – or the “Ashes, and dust, and ruin!” (551; ch. 71) on which the narrator insists – only further confuses the issue. No wonder her Grandfather spends his last days sitting by her grave, “in the attitude of one who waited patiently” (565; ch. 72), insisting at the end of each day, “She will come to-morrow!” (566; ch. 72).Footnote 23
Dickens's desperation in the face of the threat Quilp represents makes starkly clear just what was at stake in psychological debate in the middle of the nineteenth century. The slow transformation of the discipline from its philosophical and theological roots toward something that more closely resembled the physical sciences did not merely demand of the Victorians that they revise their conceptions of the nature of mind. To many, Dickens among them, this shift also seemed to call into question the very religious faith on which the discipline – at least in Britain – had once been founded. At the same time, Quilp reveals one of the key means by which materialist psychology was able to survive at mid-century despite the anxious rhetoric with which it was so often met. While many might agree in principle with an orthodox psychology's dismissal of our material forms, these same individuals had trouble putting those principles into practice when it came to the burial of the dead, for instance, or the treatment of the body after death, as was made clear a decade before The Old Curiosity Shop in the debates surrounding both the Anatomy Act and Ewart's Bill to put an end to the gibbet. It was this attachment to the body, the inability of most Victorians to think of the fate of their own bodies as entirely separate from the fate of their souls, that early materialists took advantage of in order to gain ground in psychology's battle of philosophies. But if materialism forced the Victorians to confront their lingering suspicions that the mind might depend on the body, the monstrous terms in which the novel figures Quilp reveal what a nightmarish prospect that could appear.
