SOURCE: "Are You Sentimental?" in Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature, Princeton University Press, 1987, pp.39-70.

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...