This passage reveals the sentimental here as a mere mask of gentility in Dickens’ world, the underside of which is characterised precisely as the cruelty of abusing one's own family members. To be ‘soft-hearted’ and ‘grateful’ is contrasted here with the artifices of a ‘sentimental turn’ – the latter is a socially appropriate reaction to Little Nell's absence from her house, while Kit's feelings are genuine and true. Dickens is clearly in sympathy here with those who may never have heard of the word ‘sentimental’ or learnt its codes of appropriate emotionality, and contrasts them with a ‘finely strung’ class who have learnt its mannerisms but are in essence morally bankrupt. This framing of sentimentality echoes that described by philosopher Mary Midgley, who equally aligns its codes with an attitude of ‘brutality’ (1979), as echoed furthermore in Oscar Wilde's dismissal of sentimentality as the mere ‘bank holiday of cynicism’ (2005: 353).

Nevertheless, to be be ‘sentimental’, or to have ‘sensibilité’, would be associated in the mid-eighteenth century with the cultivating of precisely that sympathy written of in relation to Kit: a goodwill towards the other and a moral purity of spirit towards reform and the alleviation of misfortune.