The Old Curiosity Shop, entre transparence et secret
Transparency and Secret in The Old Curiosity Shop. The characters of The Old Curiosity Shop first appear as the representatives of simple social or familial categories ("the schoolmaster", "the single gentleman", "the child", "the grandfather", etc.), involved in a very forthright plot which leads ineluctably to Nell's death. A literal reading of the figurative (a process on which the whole of Dickens's fiction thrives) however provides compelling evidence that secrets lie beyond the superficial simplicity or transparency of the text. The characters appear as amorphous creations whose constant metamorphoses reveal that they have more in common than is at first apparent, which leads one to think that they are the projections in the novel of the many facets of a single psyche. When certain aspects of the configuration evoke the biographical episode of the blacking warehouse, the reader understands that the ultimate aim of the story-line (which has Nell flee both persecutors and benefactors only to die in an isolated place) is to preserve prelapsarian innocence - the ideal embodied by the young girl - from the corruption of the degraded and grotesque universe surrounding her.