The Ghost of "The Old Curiosity Shop" in "The Diamond Age"
Spoilers ahead; these are written with the assumption that one is basically familiar with The Diamond Age
While re-reading Stephenson, it’s helpful to consider Diamond Age from the lens of its traditional predecessor, the allusion that lingers between the pages, unspoken, but felt—Charles Dickens’ dark 1840 tale, The Old Curiosity Shop.
From this perspective, the world of The Diamond Age is an alternate universe for Nell, blending the future and the past, in a way that systematically addresses the failure and tragedy of Dickens’ novel.
In Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, orphaned teenager Nell Trent is a passive model of feminine grace and virtue with a loving, well-meaning grandfather. Ultimately anemic, Grandfather Trent, ponders the course of his granddaughter’s future in a Victorian world where class and her station as a young woman of limited means would offer her few and grim choices.
In an effort to exercise his responsibility as a guardian, Grandfather Trent chooses gambling as the most viable source to generate savings to provide a modicum of security for Nell’s future. Unsuccessful, he falls into great debt. Nell’s brother attempts to secure his own, short-term economic benefit by trying to “sell” his sister in marriage. He hatches a plan to split the supposed inheritance from her grandfather with a prospective spouse. This plan is thwarted and Nell escapes entering into the coercive marital contract.
Saddled with debt, Grandfather Trent and Nell journey to escape creditors, with help that arrives tragically too late. A sick, melancholic Nell ultimately dies and Grandfather Trent too perishes from unbearable grief, maddened by her memory.
Notably, what is missing and absent throughout the story is a warm, maternal presence and an accompanying, guiding “book.”
Where Dickens’ novel ends in futility, sacrifice, death and speaks to the greater shame of society—Stephenson’s novel ends in a personal, ambiguously optimistic resurrection myth. Stephenson’s Nell intervenes in Miranda’s sacrifice with the Drummers and metaphorically brings her back to life, incidentally, reshaping society.
It’s easy as an initial reader of Diamond Age to be struck by the mythos of Nell’s “success.” Instead, I invite you, dear reader, to consider the process.
Little by little, with a bespoke upbringing, tools, and enabling support, Nell reveals a natural capacity to do great things, such that out of all the other readers of the Primer, she not only becomes educated, but truly “intelligent.”
How did this come about? What does “intelligent” even mean? These will require multiple explorations.
To get started, here, I want to delineate the ways Stephenson offers Nell an elaborate support system and tools via the following:
A Promethean brother who steals a copy of the Primer, and deposits it in the hands of the beneficiary, Nell, then later sacrifices himself to ensure her safety. It reflects a rare, strange chivalry, a prosocial, non-economic bond between brother-sister that Dickens’ world never depicted;
A judge who decides in favor of valuing Nell’s growth and development, rather than holding the contraband-Primer “inert” in police custody;
An accidental mother-figure in the form of Miranda, who is the sole ractor of the Primer, whose long patience and close, contextually attuned attention ultimately contributes to Nell’s well-being and development;
Multiple strong male/father figures as represented by Hackworth-King Coyote, the “masculine” architectural integrity of the Primer itself, the sensei in the Primer, the Colonel who fills the role of a guardian, Carl Hollywood who knows of Nell via the proxy of Miranda’s updates;
Guidance through interest-based story-telling of the Primer with the book adjusting to the level of curiosity and inquiry exhibited by its reader;
The ability to dynamically change the direction of her story, or to edit it—to have a voice before an interface as well as the deterministic and predefined story-world of the Primer;
Game-playing, skill-building, and active participation in adventures within the context of a mythological narrative within the Primer;
Embodiment, safety, and cultural literacy through the formal, rigorous, structure of Miss Matheson’s Academy of the Three Graces amidst peers who were the children of the most powerful in Neo-Victorian society.
This is not a complete, exhaustive list. Just a small beginning in considering how Stephenson’s Nell was uniquely equipped with consistency of care, systems and advantages that provided different styles of nurturing and learning contexts.
These factors enabled her to not only fully develop and become an active agent in the world, but to use her agency as a gift to close the loop and protect her surrogate mother, Miranda.