Curiosity as didacticism in The Old Curiosity Shop

Winter, Sarah

Charles Dickens was both a frequent critic of didacticism in fiction and a novelist widely perceived in his time as a didactic writer. An anonymous reviewer for the monthly Metropolitan Magazine wrote in 1840 that Dickens "is now performing most efficaciously the office of a moral teacher" and related this impact to Dickens's provision of morally instructive literature for the newly literate among the poor: "There are even millions who are just emerging from ignorance into what may be called reading classes; all of whom Mr. Dickens is educating to honesty, good feeling, and all the finer impulses of humanity. He is the antidote, and a powerful one too, to the writers of the Jack Sheppard school [of popular Newgate crime fiction]" (93-94). Just after Dickens's death in 1870, a minor working-class satirical periodical, the Tomahawk, writing in a serious vein, called Dickens "not only a romancer" but a "mighty preacher"(qtd. in Ford 80). John Forster, Dickens's close friend, editorial advisor, and biographer, also attributes a reformative effect to The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), particularly in its depiction of Little Nell's death, describing its impact in personal terms as "a kind of discipline of feeling and emotion which would do me lasting good, and which I would not thank you for as an ordinary enjoyment of literature" (Letters 187n4). These accounts of Dickens's moral impress as a novelist suggest that it combined the different but analogous kinds of influence exerted by the educator, clergyman, and liberal parent.

An even more pertinent analogue to Dickens's influence implied in these contemporary assessments was the project of moral tutelage claimed by the writers of religious tracts for the poor. In Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Dickens attacks the premises of didactic religious fiction for children, describing the kinds of stories read by Charley Hexam in a London Ragged School: Young women old in the vices of the commonest and worst life, were expected to profess themselves enthralled by the good child's book, the Adventures of Little Margery, who resided in the village cottage.by the mill; severely reproved and morally squashed the miller when she was five and he was fifty; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied herself a new nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not wear nankeen bonnets, neither did the sheep who ate them; who plaited straw and delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts of unseasonable times. (Our Mutual Friend 214) That the children will reject such unrealistic and dull tales seems a foregone conclusion, but this curriculum conveys an implied motive for young readers to acquiesce in its moral schemes-as Dickens puts it, the message that "you were to do good, not because it was good, but because you were to make a good thing of it" (215).' Moral improvement becomes conceivable and is made potentially attractive to these precociously mature children when it is attached to the inducement of profit. In attacking this logic, however, Dickens does not necessarily imply that all kinds of fictional didacticism are morally suspect.

Dickens's popular fictions responded to an already existing critical discourse on the moral impact of fiction. In a 1750 Rambler article, Samuel Johnson defined fiction as essentially didactic, in part because of the force of its familiar examples in inspiring emulation, and in part because of the inherent mental openness of its common readers. Johnson singles out "the young, the ignorant, and the idle" as the intended audience of "familiar histories," "to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life" (143, 144). Such fictions are "the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account" (144). Yet the "knowledge of vice and virtue" that these novelistic examples impart comes with a surcharge of authority that Johnson implies derives not only from the youthful mind's unformed state but also from the fictional medium itself: "But if the power of example is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken, that when the choice is unrestrained, the best examples only should be exhibited; and that which is likely to operate so strongly, should not be mischievous or uncertain in its effects" (143).

Johnson's prescriptions presume the youthful or untutored mind's susceptibility to virtually automatic, "unwilled" inculcation through reading and give to fiction an impact on the memory that is at least equivalent to, and perhaps greater than, experience. Related assumptions about the superior efficacy of narrative example over the articulation of "axioms and definitions" (Johnson 144) in transmitting morality were shared by many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers who turned to the writing of fiction in order both to convey religious teachings and to uphold the existing social and political order. This essay will focus on the ways that Dickens revised these assumptions about the formative effects of reading fiction in order to devise his own brand of didactic fiction. I will contend that he perfected this new form of didacticism in The Old Curiosity Shop, a novel that makes pointed reference to the influential didactic genre of religious fiction by including an effigy of its most successful practitioner, Hannah More.

More, who became perhaps "the most successful propagandist of the 1790s" (Myers 267) through her writing of religious tracts, grants fiction a more limited power over the moral life of the reader than does Johnson, yet she relies on its potential impact on the mind. In a "Preface" to a collected edition of her Cheap Repository Tales, More argues that reading produces "a bias on the actings of the mind, though with a greater or less degree of inclination, according to the degree of impression made, by the nature of the subject, the ability of the writer, and the disposition of the reader" (vii). Thus, while the author cannot expect a "general effect" on the reader, she can hope that "some truth may be picked out from among many that are neglected; some single sentiment may be seized on for present use; some detached principle may be treasured up for future practice" (vii). More frames her sense of the necessary consonance between her prose style and the reader's intellectual capacities as a business relationship: There must be, not merely that intelligibility which arises from the perspicuousness of the author, but that also which depends on the capacity and perception of the reader. Between him who writes, and him who reads, there must be a kind of coalition of interests, something of a partnership (however unequal the capital) in mental property; a sort of joint-stock of tastes and ideas. The student must have been initiated into the same intellectual commerce with him whom he studies; for large bills are only negotiable among the mutually opulent. ("Preface" viii) More imagines the relationship between author and reader in simultaneously economic and pedagogical terms; a narrative should function as the reader's "initiation" into the intellectual level required to comprehend it. Such a transaction through the reading of fiction should both invite and instill a moral "coalition of interests" that is the ultimate aim of the didactic writer, although More clearly assumes that this is never a relationship between equal partners but rather a way for writer and reader to profit mutually from unequal shares in the same venture. This "joint-stock" implies not only shared tastes but also a common concern; in the case of More's famous contributions to the Cheap Repository of Moral and Religious Tracts, this concern relates directly to the preservation of English constitutional government. As More explains her moral and political motives, the stories in the Cheap Repository were written "[tio improve the habits, and raise the principles of the common people" and to satisfy the "appetite for reading ... among the inferior ranks in this country" with "such wholesome aliment as might give a new direction to their taste, and abate their relish for those corrupt and inflammatory publications which the consequences of the French revolution have been so fatally pouring in upon us" ("Advertisement"). More's extended metaphor of reading as consumption clearly complements her sense of fiction's capacity to excite and amplify the reader's commercial interests and shape his or her tastes, whether or not an Evangelical style of piety was the result. More articulates the didactic strategy that Dickens too will follow: she intends to substitute a different array of interests and priorities for the revolutionary agenda that she believes her lower-class readers have been gleaning from their reading of radical political tracts. More's conception of the Cheap Repository's rationale also suggests a precedent for the way that Dickens's own influence on reading habits was understood: instead of replacing politically radical Painite writings, Dickens's novels were viewed as popular literature that offered an alternative to such disreputable popular genres as Newgate crime fiction.

Dickens attempted to undermine the authority of religious fictions in order to appropriate their project to shape, and even to reconstitute, the ideas and actions of the reader in the service of achieving larger moral, political, and social goals. This kind of intervention through fiction was also part of Dickens's own developing agenda as a popular novelist and social reformer. In his 1838 Preface to Oliver Twist (1837-39), Dickens claims for his novel an impact as concerted and intellectually and socially corrective as either Johnson or More imagined for fiction: "It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid misery of their lives; to show them as they really are, ... would be to attempt something which was needed, and which would be a service to society" (34). Dickens describes his own technique as a realistic representation of the conditions that create criminal "associations," so that his narrative should duplicate these causal links and convey them in a form that could make such knowledge socially useful. Yet he also echoes the tract writers' estimate of the superior power of fiction to effect change in the reader. Of his own didactic and "realistic" depictions of lower-class crime, the young Dickens asks, "Have they no lesson, and do they not whisper something beyond the little-regarded warning of an abstract moral precept?" (35). Given Dickens's propensity to proclaim his moral messages in journalistic prose, public speeches, letters to the editor, and dramatic readings, this claim to "whisper something" should be taken as a figure for the kinds of reformative effects that Dickens, drawing on critical views about fiction's power to influence the mind, claims specifically for the novel. In The Old Curiosity Shop, however, Dickens goes beyond this opposition between "abstract precepts" and "lessons" conveyed in a surreptitious "whisper" to provide both the overt and subtle forms of instruction present in Oliver Twist, but this time presented in a generic opposition to religious fiction. Nell herself recalls the sanctified children of Evangelical deathbed stories. Yet before her death, through her exposure to moralizing characters, poverty, and the suffering associated with the industrial city, Nell becomes not only a prototypical protagonist of didactic fictions but also stands in for the reader of didactic tracts. Through Nell's story, Dickens mobilizes the conventions of didactic religious fiction in order to revise the interpretive framework and hierarchy of values that they promote. He then substitutes a different logic that Nell herself can teach, which I will term "antididactic." At the same time, however, I will show how this stance also constitutes a new form of novelistic didacticism.

This anti-didactic project relates not only to the novel's characters and plot but even more importantly to the ways that Dickens stages the reception of Nell's story both within the narrative itself and through its rhetorical formulations of the meaning of her death. In response to didactic fiction, the "consolation" that Nell's death should provide the reader is meant to contest the kind of economic rationale that informs the ways Evangelical didactic fictions imagine both their narrative transactions and their pedagogical access to the reader's moral life? The novel aims to replace a rationalizing moral and religious calculus aimed at attaining personal salvation and ensuring the reproduction of the existing social order with a novelistic technique of displacing self-interest, a displacement Dickens viewed as necessary to personal and social reform. Given the anti-novel stance of many Evangelicals, it also makes perfect sense that Dickens would turn the tables to assert the moral authority of the novel, attacking the sincerity of religious fiction by exposing its economic rationale for goodness and piety. Moreover, The Old Curiosity Shop also rejects the Evangelical epistemological certainty based on providentialism. Yet, as I will show, both Evangelical fiction and Dickens's novel rely on an instrumental conception of the relation between the narrative and the memory of the reader. Both forms of didacticism attempt to shape the reader's mental associations by emphasizing particular concepts, metaphors, and analogies in order to render them authoritative and habitual.

In its pervasive use of contrast as an organizing metaphoric and narrative principle, and as a spur to speculative interest-like Old Humphrey's in the face of the contradiction between Nell and the objects and associates surrounding her-I will argue that The Old Curiosity Shop also devises a secular and novelistic epistemology based on curiosity. Constructed as an anti-didactic response to conservative didactic fiction, curiosity in the novel becomes a means to instruct the reader in a form of narrative and social interest conducive to individual and social reform.

The Old Curiosity Shop and Cheap Repository Logic Samuel Pickering, Jr. has argued that didactic religious fiction was an important source for Dickens's writing in a number of ways: Dickens's novels appealed to lower-class readers educated in Sunday schools, whose curricula would have been likely to include didactic tales; his novels were published in parts, as were religious tracts; and his characters, like those of didactic fiction, were often easily recognizable social and moral types (Moral Tradition 107-22). One of the most overt ways that Dickens indicates the novel's connection to the generic conventions of didactic fiction is by fabricating an effigy of Hannah More. In an attempt to "conciliate" the "favour" of the proprietresses and students of boarding schools for young ladies in the vicinity of her wax-works exhibition, Mrs. Jarley transforms some of her wax figures to suit the scholastic taste: Mr. Grimaldi as clown becomes Mr. Lindley Murray, the famous grammarian; and "a murderess of great renown" is changed into Mrs. Hannah More; while Mary Queen of Scots, "in a dark wig, white shirt-collar, and male attire, was such a complete image of Lord Byron that the young ladies quite screamed when they saw it" (288). Hannah More's inclusion as a wax-works dummy also alludes to her stock of characters and formulaic didactic strategies. Miss Monflathers, the boarding school proprietress, represents a caricature of such a character as well as of More herself, and she in turn is invoked to stand in for a tradition of female pedagogues and authors of conduct books. Dickens's mocking recreation of More in wax also points to the pervasiveness of didactic religious fiction from the last decades of the eighteenth century. Published anonymously between 1795 and 1798, the Cheap Repository Tracts were printed and distributed at workhouses, hospitals, and prisons, and to the rural poor, charity children, and students at Sunday schools, or they were sold by booksellers and itinerant hawkers for between a half penny and one and one-half pennies per issue. During the initial four-year period of their publication, several million copies were put into circulation.' The Cheap Repository was part of the Evangelicals' more general undertaking of the "management of public opinion" (Spring 39), but More, who initiated and oversaw the project, envisioned the tracts as replacements for other forms of popular cheap fiction such as chapbooks and ballads. "To teach the poor to read, without providing them with safe books," More warned in The Evangelical Magazine, is "a dangerous measure" (qtd. in Pickering, John Locke 121). According to Susan Pedersen, in preparation for her writing, More purchased and consulted chapbooks, and the Tracts "made a point-by-point attack" on the popular songs, lewd verse, and sensational adventure and crime stories that chapbooks typically included.4 More's tracts set the initial generic standard for didactic religious fiction. One of her longer stories, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, displays the characteristic logic that the reader was meant to acquire as a "joint-stock" of Evangelical habits and piety. As the story opens, a middle-class "gentleman," Mr. Johnson, encounters a shepherd whose piety piques his charitable interest. The shepherd and his family win the patronage of this traveling gentleman and the local clergyman not only because, upon inspection, their persons, dwelling, and food are found to be clean and modest, but also because of the shepherd's ability to cite Biblical verses and stories and to interpret them in simultaneously doctrinally appropriate and commonsensical ways. Even though the family has had very little time to read, they all have managed by dint of repetition to memorize large parts of the Bible, which the shepherd considers, in appropriately Evangelical terms, "'a kind of stock trade for a Christian to set up with"' (Shepherd 197). He explains that although he does not have time to read the Bible during the week, he still recalls Biblical passages while he works, and this helps him "to keep out bad thoughts too" (197). In this fully internalized, habitual form the Bible becomes a way and means of life, as the shepherd explains: "'I have led but a lonely life, and have often had but little to eat; but my Bible has been meat, drink, and company to me, as I may say"' (180). The shepherd displays the correlation between habitual piety and subsistence that will ultimately gain him greater material rewards at the end of the story. When faced with an "actual want" such as hunger, the shepherd strives to "live upon the promises" of faith (184), of which the ultimate reward is eternal life. The shepherd supplies an analogy that, in displaying the limits of its application, permits the comprehension of the abstract concept of eternity: "'There is some comparison between a moment and a thousand years, because a thousand years are made up of moments, all time being made up of the same sort of stuff, as I may say; while there is no sort of comparison between the longest portion of time and eternity"' (185). More implies that poverty can be endured by being transformed into an intellectual problem of definition. The shepherd understands privation as measurable, and thus finite and temporary, while his faith rests on the corresponding, opposite conception of the infinite, eternal reward of salvation. More's tale lends narrative form to this logic of abstraction and incommensurability, and by embodying this logic the shepherd also teaches it as the product both of his own Bible reading and of the reading of the tale in which he figures. It is no coincidence that among the meager stock of texts pasted on the "clean white walls" of the shepherd's cottage is "Patient Joe, or the Newcastle Collier," one of More's other contributions to the Cheap Repository Tracts that recounts the patience under extremities of another pious working man (190). Thus the shepherd is not only an exemplary character in a tract but also an exemplary reader and emulator of didactic fiction. More's description from the Mendip Annals of the system by which she organized her Evangelical Sunday schools for the poor is also applicable to her fiction: "Principles, not opinions, are what I labour to give them" (Bradley 147). The shepherd's thinking consists of the habitual application of general principles permitting one to abstract from the material to the spiritual.

Thus the shepherd's interpretive strategies typify the kind of reasoning that the Cheap Repository Tracts were meant to inculcate, particularly in their role as substitutes for politically radical texts such as Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. The shepherd describes how he refused to read such radical publications (194), but more telling for More's didactic and political purposes is his related apology "for being so talkative": "Indeed, you great folks can hardly imagine how it raises and cheers a poor man's heart, when such as you condescend to talk familiarly with him on religious subjects. It seems to be a practical comment on that text, which says, 'The rich and the poor meet together: the Lord is the Maker of them all.' And so far from creating disrespect, sir, and that nonsensical wicked notion about equality, it rather prevents it." (185) Given the Evangelical Providential framework, according to which one's station in society is appointed by God, religious conversation between rich and poor should cement a common Christian mental and social conditioning that cuts across and supports the social order without rearranging or disrupting it-both rich and poor are held to the same standards of faith and action that promise equality in an eternal dispensation. The common discourse on religion presupposes and attempts to instill shared protocols of reading and understanding to create that "joint-stock of tastes and ideas" between didactic text and reader.

In the end the shepherd does not have to live on the "meat and drink" of faith and his memorized Bible. As a reward for his piety, he is given improved, subsidized housing, nominated to the post of parish clerk, and he and his wife are also appointed as Sunday school teachers. While the shepherd performs good actions for their own sake, the story nevertheless shows him profiting materially as well as spiritually from his sincere professions of faith.

In this way, More provides a fictional demonstration of the economic principles that supported Evangelical Anglican belief and practice. Evangelicals conceptualized their sense of religious duty in economic terms: their "language of devotion was sometimes borrowed wholesale from the marketplace," and it has been argued by Michael Hennel that the Clapham sect, with which More was affiliated, inaugurated "a tradition of communicating the Gospel in commercial terms" (Spring 39). Thus, Evangelical writers and preachers employed phrases such as, "to close with the offer of God in Christ" or "to acquire a saving interest in the Blood of Jesus" (qtd. in Spring 39). This economic and spiritual equation cut both ways, as it also lent a providential connotation to the operations of the market.' Oliver Twist draws most overtly on the model of the didactic tracts by providing negative monitory examples. Bad associations, in the case of Nancy, or crime, in the case of Fagin and his gang, result in suffering and death. The transition from Oliver Twist's didacticism to that of The Old Curiosity Shop, however, involves the inclusion of a metacommentary on the didacticism of the fictional lesson; it's as if one of Dickens's purposes in creating Nell was to convey how it feels to become both the heroine and the object (reader) of a didactic tale. Nell's encounter with Miss Monflathers enacts this dual role. On an errand to the school to deliver a packet of hand-bills advertising the wax-works, Nell meets up with the school proprietress and her teachers and pupils, lined up, books open, about to take their morning walk. Contradicting her earlier approbation of the wax-works exhibit, Miss Monflathers seizes what seems to be an irresistible opportunity to turn Nell into a negative example and object lesson. "'[D]on't you think you must be a very wicked little child ... to be a wax-work child at all?"' she quizzes Nell, "'Don't you feel how naughty it is of you ... to be a wax-work child, when you might have the proud consciousness of assisting, to the extent of your infant powers, the manufactures of your country; of improving your mind by the constant contemplation of the steam-engine; and of earning a comfortable and independent subsistence of from two-and-ninepence to three shillings per week? Don't you know the harder you are at work, the happier you are?"' (308). In attacking Nell as a naughty (and idle) wax-works child, the schoolmistress expresses the Evangelical disapproval of popular entertainment that critics have frequently credited the novel, and Dickens's fiction in general, with attempting to contradict.6 But the way that Miss Monflathers pedantically berates Nell and the schoolmistress's connection with the effigy of Hannah More suggest that the central anti-didactic purpose of the scene is to depict the effects of being the target not only of emotionally and intellectually coercive pedagogy but also of religious fiction. By categorizing Nell as a poor child who should have been a factory girl, Miss Monflathers also makes the reader imagine her as the heroine of a didactic industrial tale in which, given her physical weakness, she would suffer and die, as many Victorian factory children did. Nell, too, seems capable of seeing herself in this light, thus, in part, her tears-the scene suggests that the novel is willing to pursue its critique of didactic fiction to the length of creating a heroine "aware" of the narrative exigencies of her function. Nell both stands in for the fictional factory child and also embodies an attempt to criticize that kind of instructive typification by showing what it might feel like to become the object of a moralizing lesson with clear social ramifications. Thus Nell also represents the working-class reader of didactic tracts.

What does it mean to identify Nell as a figure for the factory child, if it is Miss Monflathers who teaches us to do so?7 The narrative locus of Nell's interaction with the factory system occurs during chapters 44 and 45: she is carried bodily to rest inside a hellish metalworks (417-18) and, during a subsequent nightmarish night of wandering, witnesses the destitution of unemployed workers, gazes on the corpses of their children, and encounters a tumultuous melee of rioting, "when maddened men, armed with sword and firebrand, spurning the tears and prayers of women who would restrain them, rushed forth on errands of terror and destruction, to work no ruin half so surely as their own" (424). The narrator deplores the workers' violence in tones that might have won More's approval, and the description echoes the anti-revolutionary rhetorical tradition she helped to inaugurate.

Yet this industrial tale within a novel also incorporates elements that contest this tradition. When Nell visits one of the workers' hovels to beg for charity, she overhears a conversation between a woman and a "grave gentleman in black" who has just restored a deaf and dumb boy who had been seized for theft to his mother. The gentleman explains his charitable action by confessing, "'I had compassion on his infirmities, and thought he might have learnt no better"' (427). Another woman present, whose healthy son was transported for theft, responds to this gesture with outrage: "If you save this boy because he may not know right from wrong, why did you not save mine who was never taught the difference? You gentlemen have as good a right to punish her boy, that God has kept in ignorance of sound and speech, as you have to punish mine, that you kept in ignorance yourselves.... -Be a just man, sir, and give me back my son."

"You are desperate," said the gentleman, taking out his snuff-box, "and I am sorry for you."

"I am desperate," returned the woman, "and you have made me so." (428) Such a scene not only lends its weight to Nell's despair, but also seems to be an encapsulated anti-didactic tract in which the gentleman who intrudes on the working-class household is spurned for the ineffectual and hypocritical nature of his intervention-as if a single act of charity could make up for generalized neglect and the lack of institutions such as schools that in the view of Dickens and many other supporters of popular education could contribute to the prevention of juvenile crime.8 This industrial interlude has been seen as referring to the Chartist uprisings contemporary with the novel's publication and as a simultaneously mythological, historical, and social image of the "crisis" of the industrial order for which Nell atones by her death?

While Miss Monflathers's identification of Nell as a factory child advertises the evident didacticism of the novel's own depiction of industrial squalor and rioting, I want to argue that this scene and the scene in the industrial town that follows it are anti-didactic. The narrative's treatment of industrialization must be taken at face value, as both conservative in its conjuring of middle-class fears about workers' unrest and radical in its critique of the failure of Victorian institutions to deal with the suffering and injustices of the industrial towns. But the industrial narrative must also be understood in terms of the history of didactic fiction's relation to working-class radicalism. In addition to communicating the starving rioters' desperation and the tragic impact it has on Nell, Dickens offers an anti-didactic response to the didactic project of keeping potentially revolutionary workers in their places. Misery, agitation, and the potential for revolution appear as persistent and natural outcomes of a harsh industrial system and do so despite attempts to inculcate acceptance and deference in the working class through education, religious instruction, and moralizing fiction.

The Old Curiosity Shop offers its own version of a celebration of the piety of the poor that is directly related to its anti-didactic depiction of industrial squalor. In commenting on Kit's family life, the narrator characterizes the "household affections" of the "poor man" as more authentic than the aristocrat's ties to familial lands because they are based not on feelings of ownership but on affective ties: "he has no property but in the affections of his own heart; and when they endear bare floors and walls, despite of rags and toil and scanty meals, that man has his love of home from God, and his rude hut becomes a solemn place" (363). Dickens seems quite close to the typical Evangelical recommendation of humble piety and mistrust of aristocratic privilege, and yet there is a significant difference in the novel's attempt to derive religious from domestic feeling rather than to demonstrate that orderly home life should be inspired by religion. This shift of priorities becomes clearer in the following paragraph, where suddenly the focus turns from individual to national "domestic" questions. The narrator declares that the comfortable must be brought to realize how difficult it is for domestic ties to be engendered among the poor, "when they live in dense and squalid masses where social decency is lost, or rather never found" and argues that by building improved housing for the poor, the necessary conditions for political stability would follow: "many low roofs would point more truly to the sky, than the loftiest steeple that now rears proudly up from the midst of guilt, and crime, and horrible disease, to mock them by its contrast" (363).

This rendition of a telling contrast suggests how such juxtapositions can expose hypocrisy and make a satirical mockery of one of the juxtaposed elements, in this case, the charitable intervention that preaches religious indoctrination of the poor as a condition of or substitute for material improvement. Unlike More's scenario for the shepherd, who receives his improved housing (with a roof that doesn't leak) only after he has demonstrated his piety and moral worth, the novel argues that environmental measures must precede any accurate evaluation of working-class domesticity and morality, even as it accedes to the authoritative, bureaucratic diagnosis of working-class "squalor" under current conditions and the privileging of domesticity as the evaluative criterion for the working-class family.10 But Dickens's imagery implies a redistribution of material and moral resources that inverts the mapping of social onto moral hierarchy typical of the didactic tracts, so that the renovated "low roof" would become the true indicator of worth and patriotism, in opposition to the claims of both the church and aristocratic proprietorship (364). In this sense, the novel provides a reordering of values that is meant to contest the ways that the Evangelical program is geared toward reproducing the social and political order, even as it attempts to reform the working-class reader's beliefs and conduct.

This industrial city could so easily have been Nell's home if she had sought work in a factory, as Miss Monflathers recommended, or if she were the heroine of an anti-didactic industrial fiction that might depict working-class life without the condescension of the Evangelical tracts. At least one Victorian reader whose response we can document, and who herself was a young girl, seems to have been especially impressed by the incongruities of Nell's class status: "Nell's being so much above her situation-is what interests me most," she reflected (Letters 185n3).11 Nell's "situation" might more logically be that of a poor, homeless, and possibly corrupted child, like the Ragged School's readers of the tale of Little Margery, yet her education and refinement seem more typical of a dutiful middle-class daughter, like the young reader herself. Of course, through Nell, Dickens gets to have it both ways, yet such characterization does not merely render Nell incongruous or unclassifiable, but rather makes her a flexible vehicle for the depiction of the possible fates that a child in her "situation" could undergo.

Through the discrepancy and contrast between Nell's middle-class demeanor and her utterly precarious condition-one that exemplifies the social vulnerability and potential for exploitation entailed in Miss Monflathers's and More's ethic for the poor of "work, work, work" (309)-Dickens leads the reader to comprehend the misery of the industrial town's inhabitants and the injustice of their suffering, and this is presumed possible because Nell shares the middle-class reader's role as observer of the factory and yet is associated with it, plunged into its sphere, and irretrievably damaged by coming into proximity with it. If a middle-class Victorian reader normally would not have experienced the economic vulnerability of the working-class unemployed, she could be expected to apprehend the physical, emotional, (and sexual) vulnerability of the young (female) child, which the novel employs to represent this economic disadvantage. But to see Nell as an exculpating "scapegoat" of the industrial system, as Theodor Adorno and Garrett Stewart have suggested, is to forget the anti-didactic lesson of Miss Monflathers's didacticism: it is this stand-in for Hannah More who wants to make Nell a scapegoat and be done with her (see Adorno and Stewart 187-92). The novel frames Nell's objectification by Miss Monflathers's didactic prejudice as a tendency of social categorization in general, and thus, without necessarily identifying with Nell, readers situated in a variety of social conditions may still understand and respond sympathetically to the experiences of determination by economic forces and by the imposition of stereotypes that her story illustrates. The ways that the novel reworks the conventions of didactic fictions that address a readership including the laboring poor and working class suggest that it also targets this section of the growing mass audience for cheap fiction. For a working-class reader, then, the novel's industrial interlude might seem familiar in the ways it echoes the usual patronizing warning against "self-destructive" revolt. At the same time, the novel provokes a different kind of response through its criticism of paternalistic interventions into the working-class household and its non-monitory didactic heroine, whose suffering should elude the summation of a sermon.

The Schoolmaster's Consolation The anti-didactic generic dimensions of Nell's characterization persist through the most important aspect of her plot for the novel's own didactic purposes, her death. The Evangelical Reverend Legh Richmond's popular religious fictions are particularly illuminating in relation to The Old Curiosity Shop's didacticism surrounding death. Richmond was a secretary of the Religious Tract Society, organized in 1799 by Evangelicals and Dissenters, and his tracts reached a circulation, if not necessarily a readership, of more than 1,354,000 (Jay 151). The pious ends of the young rural heroines of Richmond's autobiographical tales set on the Isle of Wight-Elizabeth, the thirty-one-year-old servant protagonist of "The Dairyman's Daughter" and twelve-year-old Little Jane of "The Young Cottager"-model Nell's end in that all three patiently accept their demise.12 Richmond's stories, however, include accounts of his protagonists' conversions and also focus on detailed discussions of belief between the narrator, who is meant to be Richmond himself, and the poorly educated yet doctrinally sophisticated Elizabeth or the precociously devout Jane. Like More in The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, Richmond celebrates the piety of the poor: "How often is the poor man's cottage the palace of God! Many can truly declare, that they have learned the most valuable lessons of faith and hope, and there witnessed the most striking demonstrations of the wisdom, power, and goodness of God" ("Dairyman's" 32). Richmond's goal is to provoke the reader's own conversion by allowing her to witness the heroine's final days and moments.

As Richmond describes them, the deathbed scenes occasion great grief but also afford significant spiritual benefit to the spectators. The pious death has a supremely important didactic function for the relatives and onlookers within the narrative, and, it is presumed, for the reader. During the final days of the consumptive Elizabeth's life, a devout soldier describes to Richmond the significance of his meetings with her: "'I love to visit the sick; and hearing of her case from a person who lives close by our camp, I went to see her. I bless God that ever I did go. Her conversation has been very profitable to me"' ("Dairyman's" 117). Richmond repeatedly evinces gratitude for the beneficial consequences of Elizabeth's death and funeral for her parents and himself and declares his feeling that "Je]ach minute that was spent in this funeral chamber seemed to be valuable" (132). Richmond employs the common Evangelical terminology in ascribing spiritual "profit" and "value" to the ways that these unavoidable deaths instruct others to cherish faith above everything. Such pious deaths should lead to acceptance of the loved one's loss, as Elizabeth's aged father declares, "'let us trust God with our child; and let us trust him with our own selves"' (130-31).

The story is meant to provide this kind of evidence and affirmation as well. Richmond addresses this most important final lesson to the reader in what seems intended as a kind rather than intimidating admonishment: My poor reader, the Dairyman's daughter was a poor girl, and the child of a poor man. Herein thou resemblest her: but dost thou resemble her, as she resembled Christ? Art thou made rich by faith? Hast thou a crown laid up for thee? Is thine heart set upon heavenly riches? If not, read this story once more, and then pray earnestly for like precious faith. (137) Richmond does not threaten the reader living in poverty with damnation for failure to obey the story's moral injunction, but rather recommends re-reading in the hope, he implies, of a resulting conversion experienced through the divine grace that follows upon the desire for redemption produced by the narrative. Here, then, is a variation on More's model, a gentler Evangelical didacticism that nevertheless frames the response to pious death as a spiritual gain prefiguring the reader's salvation conceived as access to "heavenly riches." The Evangelical calculus attempts to console and convert grieving relatives and witnesses by redefining such loss as a means to the measureless prize of eternal life.

Dickens attempts to foreclose a spiritual calculus like the one that Richmond's text demonstrates yet without denying the possibility of salvation or of a partially secularized didactic effect modeled on Evangelical fiction. As Elisabeth Jay points out in her study of Anglican Evangelicalism and the novel, the ritual of the "death-bed witness" was crucial to assure a "circle of attendants that their departing friend was truly saved," and she points out that Richmond's "conversation" with the dying girls of his tracts "provides the prototype for the variety of catechetical exchange to establish the dying person's frame of mind" (159-60). Thus Dickens makes a decisive anti-didactic move by depriving his readers of this ritual. When he foregoes a real-time narration of Nell's deathbed scene, instead focusing on the reactions of Kit, the single gentleman, and the schoolmaster to the vision of her grieving and confused grandfather, Dickens refuses to observe the logic of edification through the witnessing of the death itself. There is nothing of spiritual "value" in Richmond's sense for the reader in the helplessness of these men faced with the accomplished fact of Nell's death: "She was dead, and past all help, or need of it" (654). Even the schoolmaster's unanswered rhetorical question invoking the fulfillment of "Heaven's justice" for Nell-"'if one deliberate wish ... could call her back to life, which of us would utter it!"' given the difficulty of her life and the world's cruelty (654)-articulates the novel's strong sense of irony and injustice that surrounds Nell's death in ways that Evangelical deathbed narratives could not condone.13 Even when Nell's death is narrated in retrospect, she remains an anti-didactic heroine who "faded like the light upon a summer's evening" (655)-her death should neither frighten small children into a semblance of piety nor inspire a religious conversion. In this sense it is a resolutely, if incompletely, secularized, and some might even say depleted version of a long religious literary tradition that Dickens is working to exploit and transform. Thus critics who complain of Dickens's delectation and voyeurism in his staging of Nell's death may ironically be attacking him for doing the very things he was trying to avoid.14 One should not perceive injustice in death when Providential agency is at work, but the schoolmaster's invocation of divine justice can only substantiate the absence of Providence or any other overarching agency in Nell's life, other than the narrative's didactic project-and this project thus takes on a providential momentum whose moral the narrator articulates as a stern consolation: Oh! it is hard to take to heart the lesson that such deaths will teach, but let no man reject it, for it is one that all must learn, and is a mighty, universal Truth. 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. (659) Immortality and heaven are still present in the novel, but in addition to their general Christian, as opposed to sectarian, frame of reference they are also figures for the ways that lost loved ones, especially children, are to find a secularized perpetuity in the memories and good deeds of the living. Dickens also puts this dictum into the schoolmaster's dialogue, and he articulates it in a much less ponderous fashion when Nell confesses her grief over the sight of unvisited graves: "'Nell, Nell there may be people busy in the world at this instant, in whose good actions and good thoughts these very graves-neglected as they look to us-are the chief instruments."' The dying girl is comforted by this reflection (503), and Kit provides an example of how such memories work, even before he knows that Nell is dying, when he explains to Barbara how remembering her inspires him to be better (631-32).

Some of Dickens's Victorian critics found fault with the "blank verse" style (which Dickens claimed was inadvertent) of his moralizing paragraph, while others praised its sentiments and turned it into a self-contained poem.15 By juxtaposing the passage with a parallel formulation in Richmond's "The Young Cottager," it becomes clear that it too is an anti-didactic encapsulation of how the reader should respond to the novel. Here is Richmond's account of the significance of Little Jane's conversion, pious conversation, and deathbed for her interlocutors and his own readers: To some, I am persuaded, [Little Jane's] example and conversation were made a blessing. Memory reflects with gratitude, whilst I write, on the profit and consolation which I individually derived from her society. Nor I alone. The last day will, if I err not, disclose further fruits, resulting from the love of God to this little child; and, through her, to others that saw her. And may not hope indulge the prospect, that this simple memorial of her history shall be as one arrow drawn from the quiver of the Almighty to reach the heart of the young and the thoughtless? Direct its course, 0 my God! May the eye that reads, and the ear that hears, the record of little Jane, through the power of the Spirit of the Most Highest, each become a witness for the truth as it is in Jesus! ("The Young Cottager" 261-62) Little Jane's death and its narration achieve their impact first in the writer's memorialization, then through the reader's "witness" of the memory of Little Jane's conversion-through both reading and demonstration of faith before God in the reader's own conversion-and finally, "on the last day," in a retrospective vision that will reveal all the souls whom Little Jane's story has benefited.

These priorities shaped around conversion make the persistence of that motive apparent in Dickens's moral message as well, but here the converting agency derives from a reorientation achieved through the realization of death that is geared toward counterbalancing the loss of the child through good deeds. Unlike the mercenary ethics of the story of "Little Margery," Dickens's "hard lesson" teaches that no charitable action should be motivated by any idea of gain for oneself or it will fail adequately to commemorate the dead and to compensate for loss. The Old Curiosity Shop pursues its end of representing the death of the good child as an unjust loss over against what it reads as an Evangelical rationalization of loss that immediately justifies it as a spiritual gain for the believer and as a manifestation of an overarching divine purpose.

The underlying logic most significant for both Richmond's and Dickens's didacticisms, then, is not their common theme of the Christian acceptance of death but, as Johnson's formulations predict, their reliance on memory. Richmond articulates a practical technique, based on the association of ideas, for perceiving and fixing in the memory typological associations between the natural world and the divine agency of creation. Richmond explains that when the contemplation of nature or recollections of "past conversations and intercourse with deceased friends" become occasions for "religious meditation," "the memory becomes a sanctified instrument of spiritual improvement" ("Dairyman's" 58-59, 127-28). Richmond relies on the associative memory, which can be "greatly improved by exercise," to help him assemble his narratives of the exemplary deaths he has presided over: "[o]ne revived idea produces another, till the mind is most agreeably and usefully occupied with lively and holy imaginations," and the memory itself through these actions adopts the function of a narrative "memorial" ("Dairyman's" 58-59).

To illustrate the powers of the associative memory, Richmond quotes from the highly popular narrative poem The Pleasures of Memory (1792) by the now almost forgotten Romantic poet, Samuel Rogers: "Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain, Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain; Awake but one, and lo, what myriads rise!

Each stamps its image as the other flies; Each, as the varied avenues of sense Delight or sorrow to the soul dispense, Brightens or fades: yet all, with sacred art,

Control the latent fibres of the heart" ("Dairyman's" 59)16 Memory's influence over the "heart" seems equivalent to the effects on the mind that Samuel Johnson attributes to fiction, but it is invested with a greater instrumentality in the "control" it exerts over the emotions. In the original publication of the poem, Rogers provides a prose "Analysis" preceding each of its two parts. In the "Analysis" of the first part, Rogers outlines the moral usefulness of associative memory and, by implication, of his own poem as well: "The associating principle, as it is here employed, is no less conducive to virtue than to happiness; and, as such, it frequently discovers itself in the most tumultuous scenes of life. It addresses our finer feelings, and gives exercise to every mild and generous propensity" (vii-viii). In a similar way, Richmond explains the practical devotional uses for the Christian of the associative memory that helps him write his tales. But he also picks up on the moral effects of memory as a source of order, regularity, and connection that the Romantic poet Rogers explains in a secular and philosophical sense, and puts them to devotional purposes in constructing his religious narrative.

Dickens dedicated The Old Curiosity Shop to Rogers, who was noted at the time as a poet and whose career as a philanthropist Dickens wished to publicize." The novel's meditations on how the dead should be remembered through good deeds show similarities both to Rogers's understanding of memory's power to convert pain into pleasure and to Richmond's adaptations of associationist conceptions of memory for religious and narrative purposes. As Peter T. Murphy points out about Rogers's poem, memory, as a "vast reservoir, equal to the drain of all possible loss," "compensates us for the loss of the past, pure and simple" (153). Immediately following the "hard lesson" paragraph in The Old Curiosity Shop, an omitted manuscript passage deals further with the question of what kind of moral Nell's death has to teach. The schoolmaster suggests that Nell be remembered in conversation: "Let us not ... bury all mention of her. It is a comfort to me to have her living even on my lips." The schoolmaster, the younger brother of Old Trent, and Mr. Garland recall how Nell's grandfather used to tell her stories about "her poor lost mother," and the younger brother comments that "[tlhe lessons she had, dear girl, were not forgotten, ... neither will those be which she has left to us" (718n1). The life of the deceased has become a "lesson" to be "learnt"-remembered, repeated, and turned into morally instructive narrative that can also inspire good actions, as the novel itself expects to do. Kit tells "that story of good Miss Nell who died" at the request of his children, "and when they cried to hear it, wishing it longer too, he would teach them how she had gone to Heaven, as all good people did; and how, if they were good like her, they might hope to be there too one day, and to see and know her as he had done when he was quite a boy." Kit's story makes the children cry, until he reminds them of Nell's own laughter at him, at which they would "laugh themselves to think that she had done so, and be again quite merry" (671). This formulation of Nell's death as an object lesson that provokes both sadness and laughter resembles Richmond's sense of the mixture of feelings inspired by Christian "memorials": "The remembrance of former scenes and conversations with those, who, we believe, are now enjoying the uninterrupted happiness of a better world, fills the heart with pleasing sadness, and animates the soul with the hopeful anticipation of a day when the glory of the Lord shall be revealed in the assembling of all his children together, never more to be separated" ("Dairyman's" 43). It is no coincidence that the engraving of Nell's ascent to heaven among the angels is positioned after the novel has closed on the scene of Kit's domestic storytelling-Nell's afterlife is assured by the narrative itself as it enacts its own function of memorializing through Nell the lives and loss of the young in the domestic setting of the Victorian home.

Despite its conventional evocation of heavenly reunion, Dickens's version of memorialization remains both didactic and secularly oriented, much more retrospective than anticipatory. The novel's anti-didacticism also consists in its refusal of the Evangelical eschatology implied in Richmond's account of the spiritually valuable associative functions of memory. There is as much forgetting as remembering in Kit's memorialization of Nell, and strong overarching historical tendencies of change and dissolution are constantly conjured up in the novel's gothic scenery, in contrast to the timeless final accounting of the last judgment that Richmond's narrative points to as its narratological model. In the novel, the past becomes irretrievable except through memory, as it is cut off from a future eternity in which its meaning will be realized, and instead is subject to the constant renovation and flux that the city itself represents. When Kit takes the children to visit the street where the curiosity shop used to stand, he can no longer find it: "new improvements had altered it so much, it was not like the same ... he soon became uncertain of the spot, and could only say it was thereabouts, he thought, and that these alterations were confusing" (671-72).

Richmond advises his readers to reread the story of Little Jane, much as they were encouraged in Sunday schools and didactic fiction to reread the Bible until they had learned it by heart, and in this way the text becomes a vehicle for the reader's pursuit of grace and redemption through habit, example, and the reinvocation of associated feelings of devotion. After the reader's conversion in response to the deathbed narrative, however, the story should take on another memorial layer in that it will not only continue to inspire hope for a "like precious faith" in the face of death, but also become a reminder of the reader's own spiritual rebirth. The Old Curiosity Shop culminates with a reference to the pervasiveness of change, even as it affects the narrative itself: "so do things pass away, like a tale that is told!" (672). If Nell's death and those of all good children are assimilated to this understanding of change, so that their moral agency becomes dependent on the love they have inspired in the memories of the living rather than on hopes and calculations geared toward immortality, then the comfort the story affords may consist of these memories' function as sources of meaning and moral agency-as sources of reform rather than conversion. Here the memory of the story itself-and thus of the novel-achieves greater significance. In contrast to the Evangelical formula of explaining premature death as part of a Providential plan, and converting temporal grief into eternal joy, The Old Curiosity Shop, as has frequently been noticed, offers a vicarious and communal outlet for grief.18 Forster's sense that Nell's story provides a "discipline of feeling and emotion" interprets the novel's anti-didactic consolatory formula as a practical way to rationalize painful feelings, while loss itself remains unjustifiable.

Contrast and Curiosity The most subversively anti-didactic element of the novel's conceptual and metaphoric architecture is its use of curiosity as a basis for its revision of the Evangelical narrative pedagogy. It is no coincidence that the characters in the novel who most resemble the bad children of religious tracts are also bad teachers. Quilp and Sally Brass are both brutal pedagogues whose training consists of intimidation, and the novel depicts their instruction as the attempted inculcation, through the threat of violence, of a false perspective and situation. In Quilp's case, his "system" is "to impress with a wholesome fear of his anger" all the people with whom he comes in contact (86, 73). He particularly enjoys tyrannizing over Mrs. Quilp by sarcastically frightening her into confirming the insincere opinion that he is "nice to look at" and "the handsomest creature in the world if I had but whiskers" (81). Quilp rejoices in these forced falsehoods for their own sake, and his vengeful grudge against Kit stems not only from the boy's openly calling him ugly but also from his refusal to enter into the dwarf's system and be intimidated by him. Sally Brass extorts similar false admissions from her "small servant" (and her illegitimate daughter with Quilp) when she inquires whether the ravenous girl would like more meat after serving her "two square inches" of mutton: "The hungry creature answered with a faint 'No.' They were evidently going through an established form" (351). Quilp's and Sally's "systems" of inculcation are extreme and grotesque versions of the kind of pedagogy that Miss Monflathers performs on Nell-they exhibit the potential for exploitation, hypocrisy, and abuse that nineteenth-century pedagogical treatises render as the exercise of influence on the pupil's mind and emotions.

It is in the context of such coercive pedagogies that the novel places Dick Swiveller's relations with the Brass's small servant, whom he names the "Marchioness" to lend a more aristocratic atmosphere to their playing cribbage for a stake of "two sixpences" in the Brass's damp and filthy cellar kitchen (528). Dick's difference as a teacher lies not only in his imaginative attempts to embellish their surroundings and in his kindness in supplying the Marchioness with a generous portion of meat and beer, but also in his suspension of training through intimidation in favor of conversation and play. When the Marchioness refers to Sally as "'such a one-er"' for going out and leaving her locked in the kitchen, "[a]fter a moment's reflection," Dick decides, with great pedagogical tact, "to forego his responsible duty of setting her right, and to suffer her to talk on; as it was evident that her tongue was loosened by the purl, and her opportunities for conversation were not so frequent as to render a momentary check of little consequence" (530). Dick also plies the Marchioness with questions but waits for spontaneous answers, and instead of correcting her grammar and thus indirectly chiding her, enables her, at this early moment of their unusual friendship, to speak freely. After her emancipation from the Brasses, Dick sponsors her educational "advancement" (668). Unlike the ineffectual efforts to save little Nell, Dick's actions represent the possibility of a generous and open educational influence and beneficial intervention in the life of another person.

The part of the plot that concerns the development of Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness's friendship provides an alternative, embodied in Dick's spontaneity and the Marchioness's cleverness, to the everyday practice and underlying philosophy of coercive, mercenary, and ultimately unimaginative social relations epitomized by Quilp and the Brasses. Most important, there is nothing "systematic" about the way that Dick's and the Marchioness's fates ultimately coincide. In this sense, their story, which seems to be so much a matter of chance, provides a contrast and counterbalance to the inexorable progress of Nell's suffering and decline, and even to the moralization surrounding her death. Dick's kindness seems to arise from a sense of connection to his deceased mother, but this memory explains rather than motivates his concern for the small servant. In fact, Dick's interest in the Marchioness stems at first from a humane curiosity: "I'd give something-if I had it-to know how they use that child," Dick thinks to himself, "and where they keep her. My mother must have been a very inquisitive woman; I have no doubt I'm marked with a note of interrogation somewhere" (350). Curiosity-a more general term for inquisitiveness or the propensity to question reasons and causes-affords an epistemological link between generous motivations and good actions that benefit others. The novel depicts curiosity as a form of interest that could replace the complex calculation of "self-interested" spiritual value offered as an incentive both for pious living and the reading of Evangelical didactic fictions. Curiosity about the living provides a contrast to the memory of the dead as a motivation for good deeds, and it is also linked to a blend of reasoned and emotional access to fiction.

Curiosity also connects the allegorical figuration of Nell's story and the novel's anti-didactic agenda. In both Master Humphrey's musings on his encounter with Nell and her grandfather, added in 1841, and the 1848 Preface to the first Cheap Edition, Dickens stresses the central image of Nell surrounded by curiosities both animate and inanimate. Master Humphrey notes with some disapproval the "habit of allowing impressions to be made upon us by external objects" and remarks that, although the mind should depend on "reflection alone" for its understanding, it often would fail to note important evidence "without such visible aids" (55-56). It is as if Humphrey, the speculative observer, would prefer not to trust his memory, which seems to heighten the importance of certain visible signs. He surmises that he never would have been so "thoroughly possessed" by the image of Nell if it had not been "surrounded and beset by everything that was foreign to its nature, and furthest removed from the sympathies of her sex and age" (56). This incongruity between Nell and her surroundings makes her a subject of such "interest" that Master Humphrey cannot stop thinking about her: "she seemed to exist in a kind of allegory." Yet such thinking engenders anxiety about Nell's fate; Humphrey enters on a "'curious speculation"' "'to imagine her in her future life, holding her solitary way among a crowd of wild grotesque companions; the only pure, fresh, youthful object in the throng,"' but breaks off his train of thought, registering the likelihood that the contrast instigating his speculations seems less than promising for Nell's future (56). Dickens's preface also indicates this contrast as an original organizational element of the novel's conceptualization: "in writing the book, I had always in my fancy to surround the lonely figure of the child with grotesque and wild, but not impossible companions, and to gather about her innocent face and pure intentions, associates as strange and uncongenial as the grim objects that are about her bed when her history is first foreshadowed" (42). Whether the emphasis lies on strange objects or uncongenial companions, contrast works as the conceptual arrangement that provokes curious interest and spurs narrative. Nell is interesting and memorable because of her juxtaposition with things that contradict her.

The anti-didactic tendency of this kind of curiosity becomes apparent in light of Mr. Johnson's methods of interrogating the shepherd in More's tale. Exercising a program of pious reflection that corresponds to Richmond's notion of the practical uses of associative memory, Mr. Johnson takes advantage of the occasion of his ride across Salisbury Plain to recall a Psalm illustrating how the visible world of nature reveals divine grace, "[alnd he persuaded himself that the divine Spirit which dictated this fine hymn, had left it as a kind of general intimation to what use we were to convert our admiration of created things" (More 177). His thoughts are interrupted by a dog's barking, and on perceiving the shepherd and his cottage, he immediately begins to interpret the physical signs of the shepherd's spiritual worthiness: his repeatedly mended but intact and spotless clothing, his "open, honest countenance," and his "serious deportment and solid manner of speaking" (177-78). Despite the shepherd's often paradoxical manner of conveying his piety, the immediately visible indications of his goodness are borne out; the story suggests that virtue is easily recognizable to the outsider, even though the good man himself must persist in conceiving himself as a sinner. Mr. Johnson's interest in this pious working man involves pre-existing expectations that are "satisfied" by the shepherd's appearance and behavior, although to a surprising and gratifying extent (178).

Master Humphrey's initial interest in Nell, however, arises from his general practice of wandering through London at night "speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets" (43). This is an exercise of the restless imagination which Nell and the questioning that she provokes invest with an anxiety beyond Humphrey's more typically detached curiosity. Humphrey, like Mr. Johnson, finds what he expects in the selfish old man who has irresponsibly sent his young granddaughter alone on an evening errand through the dangerous streets, and he adopts the same license to admonish Old Trent that the middle-class visitors to the cottages of the dissolute poor typically demonstrate in didactic tales. Yet much of what Humphrey observes about the strange household is mysterious, and even his limited knowledge of Nell's unsuitable situation leads to no appropriate or efficacious form of corrective action-his agency in affecting her is drastically limited in comparison with Mr. Johnson's charitable intervention.

The underlying didactic logic of More's tale rests in its correlation between religious belief, respectability, and decent living conditions-even a kind of prosperity within the limits of a given social class-and its accompanying typological "conversion" of things of this world into signposts gesturing toward spiritual goals and the promise of divine grace. Her tale offers coherence, even in the shepherd's analogy that demonstrates the incommensurability between worldly objects and the spiritual value of salvation, between time and eternity. The shepherd's analogies set up a hierarchy in which one of the terms, representing things of this world or of nature, is always superseded in favor of spiritual truths and providential intention. For a person of faith, such analogies exemplify epistemological certainty, and, much like Biblical parables, they are meant to be effective pedagogical tools. Such analogies cannot in this sense be merely or even primarily rhetorical, because they also attempt to inculcate basic habits of perception and understanding: these didactic writers set out not only to persuade their readers but also to form and reform their attitudes and behaviors.

The Old Curiosity Shop makes a spectacle of its lack of such epistemological certainty, but in its own didactic fashion it argues for such uncertainty as a productive general condition both for narrative, certainly, and also for the morality of human relations. Think of Dick Swiveller's curiosity about the possible effects of his intervention in the Marchioness's life: "can these things be her destiny, or has some unknown person started an opposition to the decrees of fate?" (532). Contrary to Miss Monflathers's catechistic attack on Nell, Swiveller regards this speculation about his agency in affecting the Marchioness's fate as "a most inscrutable and unmitigated staggerer!" (532). The novel argues that it is precisely when you don't know the answer but can begin to formulate a new kind of question that the possibility of change emerges. The novel also contests the confident interpretive strategies and conceptual patterns of didactic religious fiction through one of its own basic figurative strategies-contrast. "Everything in our lives, whether of good or evil, affects us most by contrast," Dickens's narrator asserts (493). This is an epistemological claim, based on an associationist logic, that meaning can be most powerfully accessed when objects, experiences, even words are juxtaposed with an element that differentiates them from the often overwhelming jumble of everyday life. The context for this claim relates to Nell's apprehension of her death through the contrast between the peaceful village, where she has come with her grandfather and the schoolmaster "to live and learn to die" (482), and her previous wandering and trials; between the unchanging atmosphere of decay in the old gothic church and the brightness and "freshness" of the natural world outside its doors; between her awareness of her individual life and the "common monument of ruin," mortality, and the inevitable passage of "Time" (494; 493). Here contrast supports the novel's allegorical shaping of Nell's pilgrimage toward death, but it also works as a mode of instruction through which she reconciles herself to her death by understanding it as her passage from one state-life, growth, youth-to its complementary opposite. Nell is able to feel "happy" in imagining herself persisting as a static element, part of the decaying gothic architecture of the church, amidst cyclical change: "What if the spot awakened thoughts of death! Die who would, it would still remain the same; these sights and sounds would still go on as happily as ever. It would be no pain to sleep amidst them" (494). Such contrasts themselves form the architecture of common human experience, and from the dying Nell's point of view, they are not contradictory but seem harmonious, promising to include her in larger, opposed but complementary, structuring processes. Through Dickens's associationist framework, then, contrast also marks the connection between mind and world.

Curiosity, then, could be described as the state of associative self-consciousness, an epistemological desire to retrace the past circumstances that have connected certain ideas and feelings in the mind, or certain scenes and persons in the world. Thus curiosity also concerns itself with the presence or absence of human agency in bringing about a given situation-it asks questions about the sources of determination. Contrast, as one of the central functions for creating mental associations between ideas and feelings, works to fix relations in the memory, to make them salient." Thus, the initial and overarching contrast between Nell and her associations is both allegorical and didactic, with the didactic associationist element providing a secular logic for the popular religious connotations of the allegory. The instructive and revelatory nature of the organizing element of contrast also requires that Nell be idealized: any taint or fault would only blur the distinction between her and her environment and associates. The use of contrast in the novel is not necessarily allegorical, however, since it frequently relates to basic modes of perception that instigate interpretation and understanding, even before the contrasting elements can be correlated to their more abstract significations. Contrast can also imply contradiction and exhibits an angry, ironic awareness of injustice: Nell's premature death is juxtaposed to the selfishness of the aged who cling to life (658); the working-class mother angrily contests the gentleman in black's inadequate pity, since he refuses to extend his sympathy to those excluded from the system of justice he represents. More comically, asserting his presence among the living after a temporary disappearance, Quilp interrupts Sampson Brass's enumeration of his features, for the purposes of advertising him as a missing man, presumed drowned, to contradict his motherin-law's description of his nose as "flat": "striking the feature with his fist," he shouts, "'Aquiline, you hag. Do you see it?"' (460).

The perception of a startling contrast instigates the associative functions of memory and leads into higher order cognitive problems of how to make sense of a particularly jarring juxtaposition. As Master Humphrey notes with chagrin, incongruities such as Nell's association with grotesque objects are memorable, even to a troublesome degree, when they resist reflective attempts at interpretation. Contrast also spurs recollection, as when the peaceful village calls up Nell's memories of her exhausting journey. Earlier in the novel, when Nell and her grandfather first set out from the curiosity shop to steal away from Quilp and London, "nothing reminded them, otherwise than by contrast, of the monotony and constraint they had left behind" (152). In this case, the memory links the present to the past by contrast, as if its action works to prevent the mind from separating itself from old associations despite efforts at achieving physical distance from past circumstances. Unlike analogy as deployed in Evangelical fiction, contrast does not permit the supersession of one set of concepts by another but instead keeps oppositions in play in ways that both produce contradiction or admit a reconciling movement from one element to the other and also prevent the hierarchization of experience. This foreclosure of the possibility of escaping from temporality permits an anti-didactic tendency through which the novel, despite gesturing toward the consolations of heaven, refuses the transcendence of the past that the Evangelical conceptions of conversion and salvation promise. Such a refusal, I would argue, makes the novel even more dependent on training the reader's memory and curiosity to sustain its didactic and social reform projects than Richmond's narratives, precisely because the novel cannot count on the motive of conversion and the decisive break with the past that it seeks to accomplish.

Changing Cognition It is a critical commonplace that Victorian expectations for fiction's formative role at best may have been idealistic but most often were misguided or manipulative, part of a pervasive ideological regime of social discipline. I would argue, however, that there still remains a challenge to understand historically what it meant to write a novel as Dickens did, with the intention of actually changing social conditions at the level both of individual minds and social relations by intervening in people's mental habits and prejudices through their reading. Skepticism about the efficacy of such efforts can hamper and predetermine our understanding of Victorian writers' strategies to pattern readers' responses, so that any such practice seems coercive or politically suspect. In order that the different effects imagined by such practices can be examined in detail, and the various facets of political intent and their possibly diverging results be teased out, they should not always be conceived as fundamentally conservative, even though some, like More's, ultimately were.

What does it mean, then, for our understanding of the popularity of Dickens's novels, and of the educational functions of Victorian novels in general, that Dickens refined his didacticism in the ways I have been describing? One important implication that I would like to elaborate briefly here has to do with the need for a more complex notion of the "ideological" effects of reading. Much influential recent scholarship on the history of the novel in Britain has focused in important and useful ways on how fiction shaped middle-class readers' sensibilities and participated in the emergence of new social formations, including reading audiences.10 There has been relatively little study of the specific kinds of cognitive processes that novels aim to inculcate or contrive to mobilize in their readers and how such processes were transmitted through reading. I have shown that didactic practices attempted to teach the reader to rely on such fundamental figural and logical relations as analogy and contrast in order to create a complex correlation between a response to fiction and a social attitude or belief. Such correlations were presumed to work through the associative functions attributed to memory, which could record and make available to recollection ideas produced through reading in the same way that it facilitated the remembrance of experience. More important, as basic associative principles, analogy and contrast could be employed in many kinds of discourses and for various purposes-they were part of the tool-kit of psychological concepts adopted by writers who, for various reasons, were attempting to manage or intervene in social change by affecting the newly emerging mass readership.

Dickens's didactic anti-didacticism configures the effects of novel reading in relation to authoritative popular genres that sought to shape their readers' sensibilities, behaviors, and social expectations. Dickens was devising for the novel not only a didactic moral purpose but also a more concretely pedagogical function analogous to that of the didactic narratives that many of his readers would have encountered through religious schooling. In other words, through such didactic means Dickens's novels seek not only to persuade but also to provide the patterns of logic and emotion through which readers form their judgments of society. Curiosity affords the impetus for the kind of questioning that readers of Dickens's novel are taught to engage in as a means of overcoming habitual prejudices, including those they have acquired at school. The fact that Dickens attempted to put conventions of didactic fiction to new uses suggests his perception that they were effective in forming their readers' views and thus that his own writings would produce a similar outcome through their different but equivalent educational and reformative aims. Without denying the difficulty of ascertaining the results of Dickens's attempts to sway his readers, I would contend that his anti-didactic project does allow us to perceive how Dickens's novels constituted some of the conditions of their reception through their inclusion of recognizably pedagogical conceptual and figurative patterns meant to trigger and then revise habits of thought and forms of social explanation associated with familiar reading practices?l

I Collins has identified Charley Hexam's school with the Ragged Schools for the poor street children of London, begun in the early 1840s; Dickens was both a supporter and critic of these schools.

2 Dickens writes to John Forster in January 1841: "When I first began (on your valued suggestion) to keep my thoughts upon this ending of the tale, I resolved to try and do something which might be read by people about whom Death had been,-with a softened feeling, and with consolation" (Letters 188).

On the production and circulation of the Cheap Repository Tracts, see Brown 123-55 and Spinney.

Pedersen argues that the Tracts functioned as a "concerted attempt to change people's minds." The stories were intended to undermine not only the "content of this popular literature but also the very existence of a popular culture autonomous from dominant society" by "outlining the norms of a single Christian culture and differentiat[ing] the godly from the ungodly of all classes by their adherence to these standards" (107-08). In his history of the Victorian church, Chadwick characterizes the Evangelicals' continued zeal during the nineteenth century in passing out their didactic literature: "the distribution of tracts took no account of seasons. They were handed out in pleasure boats and omnibuses, left open on the tops of hedges, proffered on sticks to galloping horsemen, sent to criminals awaiting the rope, given to cabmen with their fare" (443).

See Hilton 69.

6 On Dickens's defense of popular entertainment, see Schlicke's Dickens and Popular Entertainment.

Gissing articulates the link between Nell and factory children as problematically allegorical: "Heaven forbid that I should attribute to Dickens a deliberate allegory; but, having in mind those hapless children who were then being tortured in England's mines and factories, I like to see in Little Nell a type of their sufferings; she, the victim of avarice, dragged with bleeding feet along the hard roads, ever pursued by heartless self-interest and finding her one safe refuge in the grave" (211).

8 Dickens writes on the connection between education and the prevention of crime in "Boys to Mend." See also Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth on the ways that educational institutions can substitute for the punitive measures of law (197-206; 453-56).

9 Schlicke discusses the novel in the context of Chartism in "True Pathos." On the pre-bourgeois, allegorical form of the novel as an "unmasking" of bourgeois society and Nell as this society's scapegoat, see Adorno and Hollington.

10 For a history of the emergence of domesticity as an evaluative and administrative category in relation to the working class, see Poovey, chapter 6.

11 This is a comment made by Basil Hall's "second daughter," quoted from a letter to Dickens. Hall himself points to Nell's middle-class qualities by comparing her to his eldest daughter, who is "just such a reflecting-considerate-kind-high principled child" (Letters 185n3).

12 See Pickering's Moral Tradition and Georgas for continuities between The Old Curiosity Shop and religious tracts that depict the holy dying of children. Georgas focuses on the relation of the novel to the ars moriendi tradition represented by such popular devotional texts as Jeremy Taylor's The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Dying, first published in 1651. For both of these useful analyses, the novel's own didacticism is paramount. Walder mentions Richmond's tales as models for Nell's story but without entering into a detailed comparison (84).

13 Richmond makes a similar observation but in the context of wishing that he could still benefit from Elizabeth's conversation: "I reflected on the interesting and improving nature of Christian friendships, whether formed in palaces or in cottages; and felt thankful that I had so long enjoyed that privilege with the subject of this memorial. I then indulged a selfish sigh for a moment, on thinking that I could no longer hear the great truths of Christianity uttered by one who had drank so deep of the waters of the river of life. But the rising murmur was checked by the animating thought; 'She is gone to eternal rest-could I wish her back again in this vail of tears?"' ("Dairyman's" 125).

14 The best known of such reactions came from one of Dickens's frequent detractors, Fitzjames Stephen, who in 1855 wrote that the author "gloats over the girl's death as if it delighted him;

he looks at it ... touches, tastes, smells and handles it as if it was some savoury dainty which could not be too fully appreciated" (qtd. in MacPike 36).

15 Ford records that when R.H. Horne praised the blank verse of the passage and reconfigured it in verse form, Dickens responded in a letter, writing, "I cannot help it, when I am very much in earnest" (70n).

16 Richmond does not cite the poem's title or author, presumably because it was so well known, or possibly because he does not want to emphasize his secular source.

17 The dedication runs as follows: "To Samuel Rogers, Esquire. My Dear Sir, Let me have my Pleasures of Memory in connection with this book, by dedicating it to a Poet whose writings (as all the world knows) are replete with generous and earnest feelings; and to a Man whose daily life (as all the world does not know) is one of active sympathy with the poorest and humblest of his kind. Your faithful friend, Charles Dickens" (37).

18 For a reading of Dickens's novel as an exercise in communal mourning, see Kucich.

19 In a brief note, Andrews has suggested a relation between Dickens's use of contrast in the novel, "to a greater degree than in any of his other novels," and Rogers's reference, in his "Abstract" of The Pleasures of Memory, to the power of contrast as an associating force. According to Rogers, "[By association] a picture directs our thoughts to the original: and, as cold and darkness suggest forcibly the ideas of heat and light, he, who feels the infirmities of age, dwells most on whatever reminds him of the vigour and vivacity of his youth" (vii). As Andrews points out, this passage also provides an associationist rationale for Master Humphrey's interest in Nell.

20 See Armstrong, Brantlinger, Lynch, McKeon, D.A. Miller, and Watt.

21 For two diverging views of the problems involved in assessing the impact of particular works of literature on Victorian readers, see Rose and Stewart 3-24.

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SARAH WINTER is Associate Professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge. Her essay in this issue is part of a book-in-progress investigating the language of association in Dickens's novels in relation to theories of reading developed in Victorian pedagogy.

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