"A Black and Dreadful Place" — Fifty-fourth illustration for Dickens's "The Old Curiosity Shop" by Daniel Maclise (original) (raw)

Passage Illustrated: The Sinister Sexton

"Come down with me," said the old man. "I have known it from a boy. Come!"

They descended the narrow steps which led into the crypt, and paused among the gloomy arches, in a dim and murky spot.

"This is the place," said the old man. "Give me your hand while you throw back the cover, lest you should stumble and fall in. I am too old — I mean rheumatic — to stoop, myself."

"A black and dreadful place!" exclaimed the child.

"Look in," said the old man, pointing downward with his finger. [Chapter LV, Vol. 2: 107-8]

Commentary: A Memento Mori

Jane Rabb Cohen (1980) succinctly notes that Maclise's imagination did not respond with great enthusiasm to Dickens's effusions on Little Nell's purity, innocence, and moral uprightness: "despite his sincere appreciation of his friend's writing, Maclise did not share Dickens's fondness for girls Nell's age, whom he considered 'most insipid'" (165). Although Maclise's Sexton is not particularly menacing, the painter depicts him in the habit of a monk rather than, as in Harry Furniss's interpretation (see below), a nineteenth-century clergyman in the Church of England. Furniss's elderly sexton is far more gaunt and aged than Maclise's middle-aged figure.

Maclise does not make Nell Trent merely young; he makes her vulnerable. This is no road-hardened adolescent who has been the custodian of her addle-patted grandfather. Maclise makes Nell the epitome of child-like innocence, and costumes her in delicate, respectable fashion. His bald-headed sexton does not appear seventy-nine years old, but in his dark monk's habit and with his knowing gesture he is an ominous contrast. Nell, discretely holding her hand to her bosom to stifle her anxieties about what the well signifies (death and oblivion) is framed in the light that streams through the receding gothic arches, whereas Maclise makes the sexton (not dressed in nineteenth-century garb like his counterparts in Furniss and Worth) a black figure against a black background. Thus, psychologically the sexton does not represent the wisdom and experience of age, but the fate of an untimely death that Dickens';s suggests is Nell's

Bibliography

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1988.

Cohen, Jane Rabb. "Daniel Maclise." (Part Three, Ch. 10). Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio U. P., 1980. 159-73.

Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop in Master Humphrey's Clock. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1840. I, 46.

Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens. New Haven & London: Yale U. P., 2009.

Created 9 May 2020

Last modified 31 August 2020