Note 5 to Chapter 4 of the author's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter which Clarendon Press published in 1972. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author and of the Clarendon Press, which retains copyright.
The standard historical argument is given by Edgar Johnson, i. 323-4. He argues that "we live in a different emotional climate from theirs" and that "our response is the deviation". Our general fear of sentiment, in other words, is far mom unnatural than the presumed attraction many Victorians felt to it. The editors of the second volume of the Pilgrim Edition of the Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), however, argue that the evidence suggests a much mom moderate response to Nell on the part of the Victorians than critics like Johnson have supposed. The assumptions of such arguments as his may therefore be based on a vision of a weeping audience that is, if not entirely mythical, at least inaccurate. Justifications of Nell on artistic grounds ordinarily emphasize the ironies which attend her and deny sentimentality altogether; see A. E. Dyson, p. 112.
Last modified: 1 May 2001