Artwork Details
- Title
- Dickens and Little Nell
- Artist
- Frank Edwin Elwell (1858 – 1922)
- Year
- 1890; purchased 1900; installed 1901
- Medium
- Bronze, on granite base
- Dimensions
- Little Nell: height 5'4″ Dickens: height 6'8 1/2″ (base 6'8 1/2″)
Artwork Description
Originally commissioned by the Washington newspaper publisher Stilson Hutchins, Dickens and Little Nell pays tribute to the ever-popular but tragic heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop.
When the publisher was unable to make the final payments for the work, the prolific portrait sculptor, Frank Edwin Elwell, returned the money already advanced and took the work to England with the hope of finding a buyer. Instead, he discovered that Dickens’s own will prohibited any “monument, memorial or testimonial, whatever. I rest my claims to remembrance on my published works and to the remembrance of my friends upon their experiences of me.”
Elwell returned to America and exhibited the work at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, where it was awarded two gold medals. After four years of negotiations, Association for Public Art (then known as Fairmount Park Art Association) purchased the sculpture in 1900 and installed it in Clark Park in 1901.
After vandals damaged the sculpture in 1989, the Friends of Clark Park raised funds for its repair.
Content on this page was adapted from Public Art in Philadelphia by Penny Balkin Bach (Temple University Press, 1992). Bach was the longtime Executive Director of the Association for Public Art, working with the organization from 1980 to 2022.
Artwork Credits
Purchased by Association for Public Art (formerly Fairmount Park Art Association)
Owned by the City of Philadelphia