What's wrong with Little Nell

Among the latest additions to the site are some of the early Bookman articles, mostly dealing with painting. The one that caught my eye was "Literary Pictures of the Year" which contains the earliest example I can recall of Chesterton's displeasure with Dickens' Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop). The best known examples are those from Appreciations and Criticism (1911): "It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of Little Nell, that I object to," The Victorian Age (1913): "Both [one of Meredith's pieces and Little Nell] were chivalrous pronouncements on behalf of oppressed females: neither has any earthly meaning as ideas", or Braintree's diatribe in The Return of Don Quixote ch. 4.

In the UK edition of "Literary Pictures" there is a passage which reads:

Quilp, stunted and pulled awry as in a distorting mirror, is certainly the finest of Dickens' studies in the horrible and repulsive, and Mr. Steer’s portrait should satisfy every reader of "The Old Curiosity Shop."

But in the US edition this was changed to:

Quilp, stunted and pulled awry as in a distorting mirror, is certainly the finest of Dickens' studies in the horrible and repulsive - with the exception, perhaps, of Little Nell herself.

This looks to me as the harshest comment yet on L.N. I think this change must have been made by GKC as a happy afterthought after the UK edition had gone to press. It may mark the beginning of his long persecution of L.N., of which Quilp himself would have been proud.

In the following year he wrote in "Famous Novelists in the National Portrait Gallery":

Maclise's portrait [of Dickens] represents a languid, fashionable, and rather underbred young man, with repulsively long hair, looking out of window at the moon. It is a most careful and powerful picture of the refuse of the soul of Dickens; whatsoever things are false, whatsoever things are vulgar, whatsoever things are blatant and selfish, whatsoever things are of evil report in that great and genial spirit, are carefully extracted and perfectly reproduced in this portrait. This is the portrait of the man who wrote the repentance of Dombey and the death of Little Nell, not the man who wrote of Todger's boarding house and Bob Sawyer's party.

Other recent additions (February) are some articles from T. P.'s Weekly and his contribution to the Christ-Myth Controversy in The Cambridge Magazine called "Pedants and Pagan Christs". I'm in doubt how to treat this one: I think I should include the original article from May 4, because GKC's piece is a direct reply to it, but most of the ensuing correspondence goes a different way.