ABSTRACT
Ruskin (1819–1900) was a warm, if sometimes unpredictably critical, admirer of Dickens. As (a) shows, he was not deeply impressed by The Old Curiosity Shop when it first appeared. His later comment on Little Nell, in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880) is often quoted: ‘Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop, was simply killed for the market, as a butcher kills a lamb (see Forster’s Life) …’ (Works, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (1903), xxxiv, 275n). But, granted the later Ruskin’s peculiarities of temperament and experience (he is probably alluding here to Rose La Touche, who had died in 1875), the passage (b) from Fors Clavigera does more to explain the appeal Little Nell had for many Victorians.
