The Old Curiosity Shop - Dickens' 5th book and 4th novel - is an odd fish, isn't it? Give or take Martin Chuzzlewit, it's perhaps the most confusing of his "Big Fifteen". It's been fifteen years since I first read it as a boy, and I still don't know where I stand. This is Dickens at his most Victorian, most sentimental. The long march of Nell and her Grandfather captured the public imagination in 1840 in a way that people of our era will never truly understand. At the same time, this is a world peopled with characters perhaps not as truly electric as those in Nicholas Nickleby but a little bit more real. The characters here are still, for the most part, symbols and cardboard stands, but by now, Dickens is a master at the novel's structure. The poignancy of Nell, and of the "Marchioness", and the rabid charisma of Mister Quilp, perhaps guaranteed Dickens his celebrity that would keep him in the trade for another 30 years.

I'm not sure if this is really worth 4-stars. Characters like Mrs. Quilp threaten to show signs of a personality and then fade back into the wallpaper. Predictable moment is heaped on predictable moment, glued together with endless apostrophising and moralising. This is perhaps the most dated of Dickens' serious novels. Yet it's still a compelling read, filled with rich descriptions of character and place, with a sense of social seriousness that anchors the novel far stronger than most of its contemporaries. I may never truly understand the "Little Nell mania" of the 1840s, but I can at least appreciate the man behind it. ( )

1841 original

Stories that Americans stormed the docks to obtain copies of this novel's final installment when it arrived are untrue, as demonstrated by Carra Glatt in this truly excellent essay from Ninteenth-Century Studies (which is unfortunately behind a paywall). Having read the novel, I agree that it must be untrue, because by that point the novel has gotten so boring that the only reason I can imagine storming the docks is to throw all the copies of the final installment into the sea, to save one having to read it. Like most Dickens novels, it starts out well, with Nell, her grandfather, and her friend Kit all sharply drawn in the usual Dickensian fashion. Good pathos and good comedy and good mystery. Nell and her grandfather taking to the road in desperation is well done, and there's so tense stuff as they set forth; Kit's mother provides some good comedy.

But like so many Dickens novels, I am finding, it fizzles away its good start. Soon Nell and her grandfather fade out of the story, and we are reading page upon page about these incredibly boring people adjacent to her family and oh my god please make it stop.

Has this child heroically persevered under all doubts and dangers, struggled with poverty and suffering, upheld and sustained by strong affection and the consciousness of rectitude alone! And yet the world is full of such heroism. Have I yet to learn that the hardest and best-borne trials are those which are never chronicled in any earthly record, and are suffered every day! And should I be surprised to hear the story of this child!


...so do things pass away, like a tale that is told!
( )

So very long. I'm sorry--this was bout an old curiosity shop? And it started with a first-person narrator and then suddenly got handed off to a third-person narrator? And why, exactly, was I to care very much about Nell or her grandfather?

I didn't hate this, and it served to pass the time (six weeks!), but really I don't think I would have stuck with it if I didn't want to read everything Dickens had written. ( )