Ask anyone to rattle off some of the great works of 19th century English author Charles Dickens, and you’re very unlikely to find someone who doesn’t immediately pop off answers the likes of A Christmas Carol at the very least, or perhaps Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and maybe even A Tale of Two Cities.

Far less likely as a response is The Old Curiosity Shop, though I can most certainly assure you it is an equally valid answer. A great fan of Dickens myself, I am only finally reading it after working through most of the rest of his repertoire-and I find it to be as enlightening a literary experience as any of his other works.

Upon its surface, The Old Curiosity Shop is the story of little Nell, a poor, angelic, and self-sacrificing young girl whose paramount concern in life is not her own welfare but rather that of her selfish and irresponsible grandfather, in whose charge she is left by a cruel fate.

But when we dig deeper, we soon find that the novel is, as are most of Dickens’ works, a vehicle for his stinging social commentary. What’s more, the book is packed with ironies and contrasts. And towards that end, there’s no better place to start with than Nell and our villain, Mr. Quilp.

The insidious, scheming, hateful and sadistic Quilp is the very antithesis of the selfless, gentle, and kind Nell. And yet their fates are inextricably linked through the girl’s grandfather, with whom she shares another paradoxical irony. Here, the child is forced to be the adult while the adult is the child.

Nell’s grandfather places the child in peril through his ceaseless gambling that has reduced him to a debtor. To be sure, he tells himself he does this for the sake of the child, but that seems only so much rationalizing. After gambling away the Old Curiosity Shop where he and Nell made their home (and the child labored ceaselessly to care for him), the two are forced to flee the evil Mr. Quilp and take to the countryside, living on what little funds the child (ironically) has saved, as well as the charity of others.

Even upon their long journey, when funds to secure food and lodging are uncertain at best, Nell’s grandfather resorts to petty theft to satiate his gambling addiction. Despite the child’s imploring him to stop, he can’t resist, and it is only dear Nell that saves him, time after time. She never complains, never thinks of herself, and bears any hardship and burden for his sake.

Only at the very end, when it is too late, does Nell’s grandfather finally realize what is truly important. Dickens intercedes on his behalf, as with Scrooge, and describes a life of sorrows and hardships that he has endured, and that have brought him (and Nell) to this sorry state.

Back to the villain. You’ll not have an easy go of it finding a worse villain in all of literature than Mr. Daniel Quilp. You think Ebenezer Scrooge was a scoundrel? At least Scrooge had reason to be as he was, and was redeemed at the end. And even Darth Vader still had good in him. Not so for Mr. Quilp. The reader will truly despise this cad.

Dickens symbolizes Quilp’s wickedness through physical deformity: Quilp is an ugly, misshapen dwarf. Quilp takes delight in the suffering of others and works toward that end with much alacrity; indeed, he seems to pursue sadism as an end unto itself, and seeks to inflict pain on others, including poor Nell and innocent Kit.

Dickens does a fair amount of foreshadowing in The Old Curiosity Shop, and it’s not hard to guess the fate he has in store for someone. When the single gentleman is about in search of her:

What would he have given to know, and what sorrow would have been saved if he had only known, that at that moment both child and grandfather were seated in the old church porch……

And when Nell enters her apartment in the church, graciously provided by the old schoolmaster:

The solemn presence, within, of that decay which falls on senseless things the most enduring in their nature: and, without, and round about on every side, of Death….

But even in death there is hope, as Dickens assures us through the voice of the old schoolmaster:

”There is nothing,” cried her friend, “No, nothing innocent or good, that dies and is forgotten.”

Indeed, the latter quote may be summed up as a central theme of the book, and one he uses in another of his many contrasts here. When the Bachelor is ruminating on some of the knights buried ceremoniously in a crypt, he reflects that the violent deeds of men seem to linger on long after they return to dust. Dickens would argue, it seems, that this should apply to the good men do instead, rather than interring it with their bones as Shakespeare once said.

Then too, Dickens can even poke some fun at the subject of our own mortality as he does when the sexton and the Bachelor are discussing the passing of a woman from another village. She is generally acknowledged to of the young age of 64 or so, younger than the pair of them. But rather than face the implications that that implies for them, they simply rationalize to themselves that she had to be much older than that, and thus depart the scene with no further worries about how many years they may have left.

Of course, social commentary is as necessary to a Dickens novel as his characters are memorable, and The Old Curiosity Shop is no exception. During her travels, little Nell comes upon tragedy as she meets those whose children fall victim to hunger and imprisonment, thanks to a lack of work or any social relief for their parents.

Even the church is not immune to his stinging commentary, as Kit decries the clergy’s habit of frowning upon merrymaking as immoral (for the poor), though it seems to be just fine for the well-to-do to partake in it.

Such characters you will find here as the angelic Nell are rare indeed. The aforementioned Quilp is fiendishly well crafted, and the reader can’t help but despise him with a vigor inversely proportionate to his physical stature. Noble Kit, poor little Barbara, the delightful Marchioness, the surprising Dick Swiveller, the generous Garlands…. The list goes on and on.

The ending is truly emotional, and a more touching denouement is rarely to be found in even the best of literature. Don’t be intimidated by the 600 plus pages of this heft tome: its pure literary bliss, and you’ll despair that it ended much too soon. An absolute must read, to be sure.

More Dickens novels:

A Christmas Carol

Oliver Twist

Great Expectations


Recommended: Yes