[In the excerpt below, Kaplan contends that Charles Dickens' depictions of death were deliberately sentimental so as to arouse and encourage the public's sense of morality.]

.. . In his depiction of the deaths of Little Nell and Paul Dombey, Dickens dramatizes his belief in the innate moral sentiments and in sentimentality as morally instructive. "Yet nothing teacheth like death," one of Dickens' predecessors, whose works he owned, preached. William Dodd's widely read Reflections on Death (1763) is representative of hundreds of similar volumes whose depiction and evaluation of death the Victorians read. Dickens would have agreed with Dodd that

it is too commonly found, that a familiarity with death, and a frequent recurrency of funerals, graces, and church-yards, serve to harden rather than humanize the mind, and deaden rather than excite those becoming reflections which such objects seem calculated to produce. Hence the physician enters, without the least emotion, the gloomy chambers of expiring life; the undertaker handles, without concern, the clay-cold limbs; and the sexton whistles unappalled, while the spade casts forth from the earth the mingled bones and dust of his fellow creatures.⁹

In Oliver Twist, Dickens contrasts the easy familiarity and insensitivity toward death of Noah Claypool with Oliver's alertness to the inherent moral lessons in the coffin and the tomb. Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, and Martin Chuzzlewit also contain effective dramatizations of the moral significance of death, vivid embodiments of the Victorian concern with the potential devitalization of that powerful teacher of moral lessons and Christian virtues. To Dickens and his contemporaries, strong emotional response to death seemed more desirable than the all-too-common callousness, the kind of hardening of the feelings, that Dodd warns against. In a scene in Reflections on Death, which may have directly influenced Dickens' depiction of the death of Little Nell, Dodd dramatizes the death of a paragon of Christian virtue, a young mother who on her deathbed consoles her own parents, claiming that she is "wholly resigned" to God's will.

"I am on the brink of eternity, and now see clearly the importance of it—Remember, oh remember, that every thing in time is insignificant to the awful concerns of—" Eternity, she would have said; but her breath failed; she fainted a second time; and when all our labours to recover her, seemed just effectual, and she appeared returning to life, a deep sob alarmed us—and the lovely body was left untenanted by its immortal inhabitant! NOW SHE IS NUMBER'D AMONG THE CHILDREN OF GOD, AND HER LOT IS AMONG THE SAINTS.¹⁰

For her mourners, Nell provides a similar example of the lesson that death is a reminder to the living to allow their innate moral sentiments to flourish. To linger with expressive sentiment over the deathbeds or the graves of the departing or departed is to stand, even if prematurely, at the portals of paradise, being reminded that death is not only the mother of beauty but also that the moral sentiments that death evokes are the fountainhead of our feelings about the soul and about eternity. Dickens lingers for some time over Nell's deathbed, partly to affirm his commitment to Dodd's "important truth: The abuse of life proceeds from the forgetfulness of death." "Oh thank God, all who see it," Dickens writes of Paul Dombey's death, "for that older fashion yet, of Immortality! And look upon us, angels of young children, with Regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean" ([Dombey and Son], chap. 16). Though some modern readers may be uncomfortable with the emotional intensity and the rhetoric with which Dickens describes such dyings, and may elevate discomfort and misunderstanding into an accusation of insincerity, Dickens is attempting purposely to arouse his readers' innate moral sentiments, reminding them that the more emotionally sensitive they are to death the more morally attentive they will be to the values of life. In the early stages of his career, Dickens felt optimistic that such dramatizations would stir the world's conscience as well as its fears. The suppressed and the exploited would benefit. He believed that fictional presentations of the deaths of children had extraordinary corrective potential. Such deaths appealed powerfully to the moral sentiments both because they seem against "nature" and "human nature" and because children are more vulnerable than adults. Intensely aware of children dead and dying, Dickens and many of his contemporaries thought it impossible to be excessively feeling or "sentimental" in any pejorative way about such losses. Attempts to curb the expression of such feeling denied human nature and human need. . . .