Charles Dickens

Dark and dream-like, The Old Curiosity Shopis filled with unforgettable, grotesque characters- Quilp, a demonic dwarf who eats eggs in their shells and drinks boiling rum, a loving grandfather with a terrible gambling addiction, frail but loving Nell and her wicked brother Frederick, corrupt, abusive lawyer Sampson Brass and good-hearted hero Kit Nubbles. Famously one of Dickens's most moving tales, The Old Curiosity Shopis also one of his strangest and most memorable .

The Old Curiosity Shop

The old curiosity shop

Nikita 

The Old Curiosity Shop is one of those controversial novels that had a huge success when first published, but modern readers have a hard time with it. As some reviews suggest, the book is tedious and full of longueurs. The number one review on Goodreads attributes it to the shifting of literary tastes. However, to my thinking, there is something more to it.

I gather the key factor here is not the book's content but the way we read it. The journey of little Nell and her grandfather was meant to be read in installments, two chapters every week, rather than in large chunks of text, as the voracious modern reader is used to swallowing. That mere fact shed light on the grounds of the novel’s immense popularity. I cannot even conceive the enthusiasm with which I would have waited for every issue of Master Humphrey’s Clock if I lived back in the days.

Nevertheless, Charles Dickens was not only a marketing genius but also as great an author as any age ever produced. His picturesque descriptions of London and its environs have a fable-like air; vibrant colors and enchanting birdsongs infuse that world. But, as is often the case, the cruel reality breaks a glamor and exposes the very essence of things, and The Old Curiosity Shop is no exception. When creditors evict Nell and her grandfather from the shop, readers along with them are forced to walk the broad road leading toward the impoverished parts of England. Particularly terrifying, I find the grim industrial scenes of the furnaces and the desperate and destitute inhabitants of that area, who are so hardened by adversities that even death does not seem to bother them.

This confluence of beauty and deformity, affluence and poverty, fairy tales and reality pervades the narrative and its characters. Take, for instance, my favorite - Dick Swiveller; aside from being an immoderate drunkard, a squanderer of life, and the person of the worst work ethic, he turns out to be essentially honest and solicitous; or, in the passages where Daniel Quilp, the archetype of evil, physically and mentally abuses those around him, Dickens inserts humor softening reader’s loathing the wretch.

Sadly, the circumstances which led to the writing of the book were not of good nature. The death of Dickens’ sister-in-law at 17 propelled him to muse upon death and how one should cope with it. In some sense, The Old Curiosity Shop is his self-therapy, alleviation of the grief caused by the traumatic experience. The book has a soothing, almost therapeutic effect on me. At the end of the book, Nell, conversing with the schoolmaster, expresses her concerns about how quickly loved ones forget the deceased. Her interlocutor sees it from a slightly different perspective. People have no moment to spare, as they’re doing good deeds inspired by the memory of the dead. That is why unvisited graves are not a token of the depravity of people, but rather an illustration of the splendidness of our world.

The Old Curiosity Shop

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