 | | am proud to say, with something of interest in that little tale, or some comfort or happiness derived from it, and my correspondent has always addressed me, not as a writer of books for sale, resident some four or five thousand miles away, but as a friend to whom he might freely impart the joys and sorrows of his own fireside.
2
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These letters from the backwoods of America have unfortunately not survived, and the eager rhetoric with which Dickens builds up the setting that gave birth to them suggests that they have lost nothing, and even gained something, in his retelling. We do have Dickens's reply to one, from a John Tomlin of Jackson, Tennessee, to whom he wrote: "to think that I have awakened a fellow-feeling and sympathy with the creatures of many thoughtful hours among the vast solitudes in which you dwell, is a source of the purest delight and pride to me."
3
Bret Harte's poem "Dickens in Camp"a description of cowboys round a camp-fire listening to the story of little Nell, read among "the dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting / Their minarets of snow"can stand for these lost letters, as it is meant to do, with its hushed awe as "a silence seemed to fall" on the remote scene, and the listeners felt how "their cares dropped from them like the needles shaken / From out the gusty pine.''
4
And we do of course have abundant documentation of the book's reception in England, both by the public and by Dickens's friends. Thomas Hood in
The Athenaeum,
writing before Nell died, was much taken by the
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| | picture of the Child, asleep in her little bed, surrounded, or rather mobbed, by ancient armour and arms, antique furniture, and relics sacred or profane, hideous or grotesque:it is like an Allegory of the peace and innocence of Childhood.
5
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And Margaret Oliphant, who later grew critical of Dickens's pathos, spoke, in her first retrospective survey of his fiction, with what was surely the common voice of readers:
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| | Poor little Nell! who has ever been able to read the last chapter of her history with an even voice or a clear eye? Poor little Nell! how we defied augury, and clung to hope for herhow we refused to believe that Kit and the strange gentleman, when they alighted amid the snow at the cottage door, could not do some miracle for her recovery.
6
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