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Shifting the focus of attention from Nell to Trent opens new possibilities of reading Dickens’s  The Old Curiosity Shop . Rather than telling the story of a little child’s journey towards death, the novel is about an old man’s failure to mourn that takes on the aspect of fetishistic disavowal. Trent is a split subject whose phantasmal formations open an abyss between knowledge and belief. His grappling with loss makes him crave for money, a projection which finds its ultimate embodiment in the character of Quilp. Dickens integrates this scenario into a symbolic web centred on the  topos  of fetishism, which provides the metaphorical medium of the novel while being its central theme. Objects and the subjects’ relation to them are thus placed at the crossroads between an anthropological, a Marxian, and a Freudian conception of fetishism. Dickens weaves his story around the unifying thread between these three facets of the fetishistic paradigm starting from his conception of the latter as a symptom accounting for what is wrong not only with individual lives but also with collective experience. Yet the spear that wounds can also heal, and that is why Dickens’s idea of salutary fetishism as a remedy to the maladies of the self and of society does not undermine his attempt at ‘defetishizing critique’ in  The Old Curiosity Shop .

Of ‘Household Gods’ and Devils: Fetishism in The Old Curiosity Shop