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Old Curiosity ShopThe Old Curiosity Shop Reading Order
The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) by Charles Dickens was the most popular of all his novels with his contemporaries — the death of Little Nell in its final chapters produced the most famous mass grief response in the history of fiction, with crowds meeting ships arriving in America to ask 'Is Little Nell dead?' and readers writing to Dickens begging him to spare her. The novel follows Nell Trent, a fourteen-year-old girl who lives in her grandfather's curiosity shop and who must flee with him when his gambling debts make them homeless; they travel through a darkening England while the villainous Quilp pursues them. The novel is uneven (Dickens himself later admitted as much) — the Nell and grandfather plot is melodramatic and often sentimentally overwrought, while the comic characters of Kit Nubbles, the Marchioness, and Dick Swiveller are among Dickens's finest early inventions. Oscar Wilde's famous remark that 'one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing' captures the modern response to what was once the century's most affecting fictional death.
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The Old Curiosity Shop (1840)
Complete Old Curiosity Shop Book List
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The Old Curiosity Shop
Charles Dickens·1840
Old Curiosity Shop — Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Little Nell's death now considered sentimental while it was once regarded as the century's greatest?
The shift reflects broader changes in how English culture understands emotional expression. Victorian culture valued what it called 'sensibility' — the capacity for intense, demonstrated emotional response — as a moral virtue; the ability to weep over Little Nell was proof of a tender heart. By the late nineteenth century (Oscar Wilde's period) this form of emotional display had come to seem performative and false, and the manipulative machinery by which Dickens produced the effect (the child's protracted suffering, her angelic goodness) became visible as manipulation. Modern readers are generally skeptical of sentimentality in this form. But Dickens's contemporaries were not wrong that the novel produced powerful emotional effects: the question is whether those effects were purchased at too high a price.
Who is Quilp, and why do readers love him?
Daniel Quilp is the novel's villain — a grotesque dwarf moneylender who pursues Nell and her grandfather and who takes a sadistic pleasure in the suffering he causes. Quilp is one of Dickens's most theatrically vivid villains: physically repulsive, energetically malevolent, endlessly inventive in his cruelty, and possessed of a dark humor that makes him far more memorable than Nell herself. He is also one of Dickens's most sexually charged characters — his obsession with Nell has a disturbing erotic dimension that the novel's surface morality cannot quite contain. Readers who find the Nell sections lachrymose often find the Quilp sections exhilarating; the novel's tonal instability is related to the difficulty of holding these two registers together.
Who is Dick Swiveller, and what happens to him?
Dick Swiveller begins the novel as a cheerful, dissolute young man — a Micawber-type figure who manages to seem cheerful despite his complete financial irresponsibility. He is gradually revealed to have genuine goodness beneath his posturing, and his relationship with the 'Marchioness' (a nameless servant girl) — which develops from condescension to genuine affection — is one of Dickens's most charming romantic plots. Swiveller nurses the Marchioness when she saves his life during a serious illness, and eventually marries her (having first educated her) in the novel's most satisfying romantic ending. Many readers regard the Swiveller-Marchioness plot as better than the Nell-grandfather plot at the novel's center.
What does The Old Curiosity Shop reveal about Victorian attitudes to childhood?
The novel is organized around two opposed images of childhood: Nell's ethereal goodness and the Marchioness's preternatural survival instinct. Nell is the Victorian ideal of the innocent child — uncomplaining, selfless, spiritually pure — taken to its logical conclusion (death, since such purity cannot survive in the fallen world). The Marchioness is the opposite — a street child who survives through resourcefulness and cunning. Victorian culture was invested in the protection of childhood innocence at exactly the moment when industrial capitalism was destroying it, and The Old Curiosity Shop's enormous popularity reflected its readers' anxiety about a world in which children like Nell were common.
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