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Reflection for April 17, 2005

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"She was dead, and past all help, or need of it . . . the garden she had tended - the eyes she had gladdened - the paths she had trodden . . . - could know her no more." Such is Charles Dickens' description of the demise of little Nell toward the end of his classic story The Old Curiosity Shop. The novel, as was customary back in Dickens' day, was published in serial installments and subscribers, aware of Nell's worsening health, pleaded with the author to let her live. But no! At the tender age of 13 she dies, leaving not a dry eye in all of Britain and America.

So how could Dickens do such a thing to so innocent, courageous and caring a character? Well, I think it was because for Dickens Nell symbolized a once innocent England, green and pastoral, a countryside of charming villages and ancient churches that pre-existed the increasingly industrial, slum ridden, begrimed and impersonal England that was fast becoming an insatiable Empire, subjugating peoples all over the world and translating their resources into the private wealth of London investors. Dickens was dismayed by such so-called progress and - like many a romantic of his day - regretted the passing of the simpler, more personal nature and Chaucerian merriment of England's earlier Age of Faith.

And so his novel is a kind of odyssey, a tale about Nell's effort (as a vestige herself of old England) to escape the clutches of London's rampant materialism as symbolized by two predators named Quilp and Brass (their names alone are enough to make you wince). Keeping but a step ahead of her pursuers Nell makes her way through city traffic and blight and a countryside increasingly scarred by immense fiery foundries belching smoke until she finds refuge at last in a rural village which is itself a surviving remnant of the Age of Faith. The village sexton allows her and her grandfather to dwell next to his church which as Dickens' describes it was "built many hundreds of years ago and had once had a convent or monastery attached; for arches in ruins, remains of oriel windows, and fragments of blackened walls were yet standing." Indeed the house in which Nell will reside was itself possessed of "a vaulted chamber . . . still retaining, in its beautiful groined roof and rich stone tracery, choice remnants of its ancient splendor. Foliage carved in stone and emulating the mastery of Nature's hand yet remained to tell how many times the leaves outside had come and gone while it lived on unchanged."

In a word, Dickens has allowed Nell to find that eternal, simpler, spiritual, pastoral world she longed for - even as Dickens seemed to long for it. Of course, having found it, Nell dies - which may be a way of saying it's too late for England, too, to recover its faith in an Age of so-called Reason. But Dickens never ends up a prophet of doom. Nell may die but a resurrection must follow - or as the narrator puts it: "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 . . . 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."

I can personally identify with little Nell's nostalgia. When I myself was 13 I read the legends of St. Francis for the first time and have thereafter never felt quite at home in our purely secular environment (though I appreciate its benefits). No, my instincts still compel me to find my way back to a world enlightened by faith - which is why I come to St. Leo's which to me is, I guess, equivalent to Nell's village or better still to a sacramental homeland that is ever old yet ever new.

-- Geoff Wood