rhetorical strategy may prefer that she does not fall ill too soon. But it may also be because Dickens had not yet decided on the outcome. In a letter to Thomas Latimer, Dickens claimed that he had "the design and purpose" of the story "distinctly marked in my mind from its commencement," and that he intended "to stamp upon it from the first the shadow of that early death."
19
But Forster claimed in his
Life
that it was he who suggested to Dickens that Nell should die, even quoting a letter in which Dickens thanks him for his ''valued suggestion."
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 | | He had not thought of killing her when, about half-way through, I asked him to consider whether it did not necessarily belong even to his own conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy endings, so that the gentle pure little figure and form should never change to the fancy.
20
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We cannot know the truth; but we can observe a different, but parallel, issue about how early the death of Paul is implied. When Dickens had finished the first number of
Dombey and Son,
he read it to his circle of English acquaintances at Lausanne; and "old Mrs Marcet, who is devilish cute, guessed directly (but I didn't tell her she was right) that little Paul would die."
21
Did Mrs. Marcet feel that an old-fashioned child should not grow up, because that would remove the basis for his quaint wisdom, or did she detect the incipient pathos that would eventually kill Paul? She plays the same role as Forster did with Nell, the difference being that Dickens is now in charge: he does not need anyone to detect the resonances of his text; he is aware of them, has even planned them, andd decides not to tell.
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Before leaving little Nell we ought to relate her death to its biographical contextwhich is, after all, what Dickens himself did. He and Kate did lose a daughter, Dora, who died in infancy in 1851, but that was after both
The Old Curiosity Shop
and
Dombey and Son
were finished and published; the death that he believed lay behind Nell's was that of Mary Hogarth, and this view was accepted, and enlarged on, by Edmund Wilson, the first truly modern and post-Freudian of Dickens's critics.
22
The death of Mary is one of the most intense, and famous, episodes in Dickens's life. After his marriage to Catherine Hogarth in 1836, her younger sister Mary came to live with them, and on 7 May 1837 she was taken suddenly ill after a visit to the theater and died the next day, in Dickens's arms (a point he mentions
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