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Little Nell from “The Old Curiosity Shop”
Felix O. C. Darley
Annin-Loomis
1856
9.1 x 8.5 cm (3 ⅝ by 3 ⅜ inches), vignetted.
Steel engraving
Frontispiece with Little Nell for Little Nell from “The Old Curiosity Shop” in Dickens' Little Folks, originally published in Series One by New York: J. S. Redfield, 1855.
[Click on illustration to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned it, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
‘There’s an old well there,’ said the sexton, ‘right underneath the belfry; a deep, dark, echoing well. Forty year ago, you had only to let down the bucket till the first knot in the rope was free of the windlass, and you heard it splashing in the cold dull water. By little and little the water fell away, so that in ten year after that, a second knot was made, and you must unwind so much rope, or the bucket swung tight and empty at the end. In ten years’ time, the water fell again, and a third knot was made. In ten years more, the well dried up; and now, if you lower the bucket till your arms are tired, and let out nearly all the cord, you’ll hear it, of a sudden, clanking and rattling on the ground below; with a sound of being so deep and so far down, that your heart leaps into your mouth, and you start away as if you were falling in.’
‘A dreadful place to come on in the dark!’ exclaimed the child, who had followed the old man's looks and words until she seemed to stand upon its brink. [Chapter LIII]
The old man limped on before, and warning her of the downward step, which he achieved himself with no small difficulty, led the way into his little cottage. [“Little Nell,” Chapter XIX, 144]
Clearly, then, Darley has not realised the scene in the text of Dickens' Little Folks (1855) because such a scene does not occur in this "re-telling" for children; rather, Darley seems to have gone back to the original text and the Maclise image in the Master Humphrey's Clock serial, Chapter LV, no. 35, for 28 November 1840, A Black and Dreadful Place. Indeed, Darley's stone well, his gothic archway, and his characterization of the thoughtful, pristine Little Nell, hand to her chin, closely match their counterparts in the earlier image; all that is missing in Darley is the gesticulating Sexton, a decidedly Gothic touch perhaps not fitting in a children's book illustration. His somewhat ghoulish appearance and pointing downward, as if towards the grave, render him the messenger of the untimely death of the angelic child wise beyond her years who has sacrificed her youthful vigour and peace of mind to tend to Grandfather Trent as the child has had to become the parent.
The obvious mismatch between the scene at the well inside the old church and the garden scene on page 144, in which the sexton is the "gardener," strongly suggests that illustrator Darley himself was not the actual redactor of Dickens's texts for Dickens' Little Folks, Series 1 and 2 (1855-56).
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Canton: Ohio U. P., 1980.
Darley, Felix Octavius Carr. Little Nell. Dickens' Little Folks, No. 6. New York: Redfield, 1856; rpt., John R. Alden, 1883.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"), George Cattermole, Samuel Williams, and Daniel Maclise. 3 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1841.
_______. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. Vol. XII.
_______. The Old Curiosity Shop, with 39 illustrations by Charles Green. Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Vol. XII.
_______. The Old Curiosity Shop, with 61 illustrations by Thomas Worth. Household Edition. New York: Harper & Bros., 1872. Vol. I.
_______. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. V.
Created 15 November 2023
Last updated 8 June 2025