Book Description
The emotional tale of Little Nell and her doting grandfather was an immediate popular success in 1840-41. Played out against the backdrop of a cold and brutal London, the twosome abandon their home to escape debt and roam the countryside as beggars. Relentlessly pursued by a malicious moneylender and encountering ne'er-do-wells, con artists, and the persevering poor, they also find goodness and generosity, love and loyalty. Dickens' proficiency in creating richly diverse characters are evident in this tale that brims with pathos and villainy.
The Old Curiosity Shop FROM THE PUBLISHER
A bestseller that gripped the nation when it was first published, The Old Curiosity Shop is a novel of sharp contrasts: of life and death, youth and age, desire and innocence, humour and villainy.
For the character of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, Dickens drew on a tragedy in his own life, the death at the age of seventeen of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth. Five years later he wrote, 'the desire to be buried next her is as strong upon me now ... and I know (for I don't think there ever was love like that I bear her) that it will never diminish.'
The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters -- the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the 'Marchioness'; the mannish lawyer Sally Brass; Quilp's brow-beaten mother-in-law, and Quilp himself, the lustful, vengeful dwarf, whose demonic energy makes a vivid counterpoint to Nell's purity.
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