Recommendations
Books Like The Old Curiosity Shop
Best books to read after The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens
The Old Curiosity Shop was the Victorian literary sensation — the novel that made crowds gather at docks waiting for the next installment, and whose heroine Little Nell became the most famous fictional child in the English-speaking world. If the novel's combination of extreme pathos and comic energy moved you, these books share its delight in character, its concern with childhood innocence, and its portrait of a world that is both deeply cruel and capable of extraordinary kindness.
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Buy on AmazonOliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's earlier portrait of childhood innocence threatened by social evil — the essential companion to The Old Curiosity Shop in its portrait of a child whose virtue is the measure of the world's cruelty; where Little Nell's suffering is primarily pathetic, Oliver's is more melodramatic and his redemption more complete
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Buy on AmazonA Little Princess
by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Burnett's novel about Sara Crewe, who maintains her dignity and imagination through institutional cruelty — the most direct Edwardian heir to The Old Curiosity Shop's tradition of the virtuous child who survives (or doesn't) the world's cruelty; sharing the Victorian conviction that childhood suffering is morally serious
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Buy on AmazonThe Secret Garden
by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Burnett's most beloved novel — the difficult orphan Mary Lennox who finds a hidden garden and transforms herself in transforming it; where The Old Curiosity Shop presents childhood virtue as imperiled by adult wickedness, The Secret Garden presents childhood as capable of self-transformation
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Buy on AmazonBleak House
by Charles Dickens
The mature Dickens novel that most successfully integrates the pathos and the comedy of The Old Curiosity Shop into a unified form; Esther Summerson's patient, self-effacing narration recalls Little Nell's patient suffering, but set within a much more complex social and formal structure
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Buy on AmazonWhat Katy Did
by Susan Coolidge
Coolidge's American novel about a girl whose accident and long convalescence teach her patience and character — the American heir to the tradition of childhood suffering and moral growth that The Old Curiosity Shop established in Victorian fiction; less dark than Dickens but sharing the conviction that suffering can teach virtue
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Buy on AmazonThe Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
Eliot's most emotionally intense novel — Maggie Tulliver, who wants more than her provincial world will give her, and whose end recalls Little Nell's in its combination of beauty and sorrow; the most psychologically serious Victorian parallel to The Old Curiosity Shop's portrait of a young woman destroyed by forces larger than herself
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Buy on AmazonDavid Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
The mature Dickens Bildungsroman — another innocent protagonist making a difficult journey through a world of comic villains and genuine kindnesses, but with greater psychological depth and more formal control; the natural destination for readers who responded to The Old Curiosity Shop's emotional directness and want more of the same energy, more fully realized
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Buy on AmazonAnne of Green Gables
by L.M. Montgomery
Montgomery's novel about the orphan Anne Shirley — imaginative, verbal, and determined to find delight in every situation — is the most beloved heir to the tradition of the orphan child protagonist that The Old Curiosity Shop helped establish; where Nell is defined by suffering and patience, Anne is defined by imagination and resilience
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