Charles Dickens: His 10 most memorable characters - Little Nell of "The Old Curiosity Shop" - CSMonitor.com Charles Dickens: His 10 most memorable characters Latest News By Marjorie Kehe, Monitor Books editor February 7, 2012 Save for later Saved There are the poignant (Jenny Wren), the sinister (Bill Sykes), and the preposterous (Mr. Micawber). There are some so uniquely descriptive ( Ebenezer Scrooge ) that they have become nouns. But perhaps what the characters of Charles Dickens most have in common is the degree to which they endure. To celebrate the great novelist's 200th birthday on Feb. 7, 2012, here is a tribute to 10 of his most unforgettable characters. 1. Little Nell of "The Old Curiosity Shop" View Caption of The orphaned Nell Trent, a girl of "not quite fourteen" is the angelic heroine "The Old Curiosity Shop." Nell lives with her grandfather in his peculiar shop of odds and ends and will ultimately pay a terrible price for her grandfather's gambling habit.

Little Nell is sometimes credited with being the first Harry Potter , as American readers were so desperate to learn of her fate that, when a British ship bearing the latest installment of the story arrived in New York in 1841, Dickens fans stormed the city's piers, shouting to the sailors: "Is Little Nell alive?" Little Nell | fictional character | Britannica.com Little Nell fictional character THIS ARTICLE IS A STUB. You can learn more about this topic in the related articles below. Similar Topics Little Nell, fictional character, a frail child who is a major figure in Charles Dickens ’s novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Dickens’s account of her death after many vicissitudes is often considered the apotheosis of Victorian sentimentality. Learn More in these related articles: Charles Dickens February 7, 1812 Portsmouth, Hampshire, England June 9, 1870 Gad’s Hill, near Chatham, Kent English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era. His many volumes include such works as A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great...

The Old Curiosity Shop novel by Charles Dickens, first issued serially in 1840–41 in Dickens’s own weekly, Master Humphrey’s Clock; it was published in book form in 1841. The novel was enormously popular in its day but in a later age was scorned for its unabashed sentimentality. Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. MEDIA FOR: You have successfully emailed this. Error when sending the email. Try again later. Edit Mode Submit Tips For Editing We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Encyclopædia Britannica articles are written in a neutral objective tone for a general audience. You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered. Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources. At the bottom of the article, feel free to list any sources that support your changes, so that we can fully understand their context. (Internet URLs are the best.) Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval.

Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions. Submit Thank You for Your Contribution! Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article. Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Uh Oh There was a problem with your submission. Please try again later. Close Date Published: November 25, 2015 URL: Access Date: January 19, 2017 Share When Tiny Tim met Little Nell: it’s the great Dickens TV mash-up | Books | The Guardian The Observer When Tiny Tim met Little Nell: it’s the great Dickens TV mash-up Tony Jordan, former chief scriptwriter on EastEnders, explains why he’s happy to risk the wrath of Dickens purists in the BBC’s 20-part Christmas showpiece Some of the cast of the new BBC series Dickensian.

Photograph: Todd Antony/BBC The Observer When Tiny Tim met Little Nell: it’s the great Dickens TV mash-up Tony Jordan, former chief scriptwriter on EastEnders, explains why he’s happy to risk the wrath of Dickens purists in the BBC’s 20-part Christmas showpiece Saturday 28 November 2015 19.03 EST Last modified on Thursday 11 August 2016 05.59 EDT Close This article is 1 year old Is it Little Nell, or Tiny Tim on his crutch, or perhaps Bill Sikes with Bull’s-Eye the dog? Maybe it is Bleak House’s tenacious Inspector Bucket, or Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit, with her furled umbrella? None would be exactly an unexpected caller in the run-up to Christmas. Charles Dickens’s highly recognisable characters have been endlessly repackaged for television audiences; but this year, for the first time, they will actually be meeting each other.

In BBC1’s key festive offering, Dickensian, Fagin, played by Anton Lesser, and Scrooge, played by Ned Dennehy, are to go head to head on the cobbled streets of a vast set, built inside an old factory in Greenford, west London. Twenty-seven new “Victorian” structures will provide a den for the Artful Dodger and his fellow pickpockets from Oliver Twist, as well as draughty office space for Scrooge’s unfortunate factotum, Bob Cratchit. Spiralling around a 300ft-long high street, broad enough to drive a horse and carriage through, there are alleyways housing The Old Curiosity Shop, The Three Cripples pub from Oliver Twist and the great iron gates of Satis House from Great Expectations. It is a giant mash-up that sprang from the mind of Tony Jordan, creator and lead writer on the 20-part show. “The set is a crazy place, but it feeds into the atmosphere for the actors.

Dickens used the weather and the light almost like a character in his stories and this was a way for us to create daylight, dusk and night whenever we wanted it,” said the former EastEnders writer, who is confident he is doing right by some of the most venerated novels in English. “If Dickens were here he would be doing this, because he was a showman,” said Jordan. At a cost of half a million pounds for each of the half-hour episodes, his Dickensian cityscape is peopled by some of the country’s leading actors, including Stephen Rea as Bucket, Pauline Collins as Gamp, Tuppence Middleton as a young Miss Havisham, Caroline Quentin as Mrs Bumble the Beadle’s wife and Omid Djalili as Mr Venus from Our Mutual Friend. Jordan was determined to inject a tincture of risk back into TV treatments of Dickens and to introduce viewers to a wider population of characters than Scrooge and Miss Havisham: “With Miss Havisham, all you see each time is a mad old bird in a wedding dress. Do you really need another one after Gillian Anderson and Helena Bonham Carter have done it?

I found a passage in Great Expectations explaining how, as a young woman, she was cheated by her half-brother and how he conspired with a man named Compeyson. You haven’t seen that before. It is only about 25 words, but it is still Dickens.” Pinterest Tony Jordan, writer and creator of Dickensian. Photograph: Alan Simpson/REX Shutterstock Jordan also shows us Scrooge’s partner Jacob Marley (Peter Firth), before he acquired his ghostly chains, and looks at famous scenes, such as Oliver asking for “more” in the workhouse, from a fresh point of view. Inspiration came from imagining Dickens at work. The characters, Jordan suggests, all lived inside the author before they were committed to the page. It sounds like a description of the watercolour, Dickens’ Dream, by Robert William Buss, which depicts the sleeping writer at his desk in Gad’s Hill, with all his creations dancing around his head. “That’s it! What I think I have done is created the inside of Charles Dickens’s head. The closest I can get to explaining it is that Dickensian is not inspired by Dickens’s novels, but that Dickens’s novels are inspired by Dickensian!” said Jordan.

Access to the great man’s brain allows Jordan to mix up timelines, as well as stories, so that one affects another. “Let’s face it, Charles Dickens has got more talent in his little finger than I will ever have. But this is the only way I could get into it – writer to writer.” It is a risky trick to pull, inviting the scorn of Dickens fans and academics alike. “I am not a scholar. I have not read every novel,” said Jordan. “But the Dickens Society will love it. True, there is an irreverence within the DNA of the show which I could not have done if I were scholar, but there is also a respect for Dickens as a writer. I have worked with three Dickens experts and they have been universally positive because I am faithful to the characters.” As Dickens himself brought back Sam Weller, popular in The Pickwick Papers, and revived him for further magazine stories, Jordan feels there is precedent. What was trickier was finding the right tone. “Someone said to me there are two kinds of Dickens, the soft focus one, the happy ending one, where it is snowing, and then the social injustice Dickens, with the gritty reality of Victorian England.

He asked which one I was doing and I had to re-evaluate.” Jordan found his answer in an image. “I have stuck with this idea in my head of an urchin boy with his face pressed up against a window looking through the glass at a big man inside, warm with a ham and a glass of port.” Producing the new plots was a process of reverse engineering. Dickens’s original magazine instalments all ended as cliffhangers: no stretch for a man used to the closing drumbeats of EastEnders. “I looked at All Year Round, his publication, and thought about Dickens the businessman, not Sir Charles of Dickenshire. An early episode of Great Expectations ends with soldiers knocking at the door after Pip has helped an escaped convict. Next episode you find out all they wanted was help with a broken handcuff. God, if I had ever done that!” Jordan worked on the early scripts four years ago, looking at a cardboard mock-up of the set. He is amazed that others have not thought of combining the stories: “As a writer, sitting down to write a scene between Scrooge and Fagin, well, I don’t care about what broadcasters think. That is fun.

I want to do that on a Saturday morning!” Jordan admits that he is pretty close to being that urchin boy with his face pushed against a pane of glass. “I love that stuff. In a past life I was a Cratchit. My favourite bit of the set is their house. I want to live there. But then I love the whole place. “I have just sat down in the street on my own sometimes after filming. It is a thing of joy.” Baugh's Blog: Essay: Dickens's Novels - The Best of Books; The Worst of Books Sunday, 30 December 2012 Essay: Dickens's Novels - The Best of Books; The Worst of Books OK, ranking artists, or ranking their works, is a bit silly, I know. How can you compare books that are really quite different and then say that one is better than another? Yes, a list that declares that this novel is better than that, and that those books are worse than these, is rather ridiculous. But the enterprise is fun anyway!

Although, instead of listing the “best” of anything, however, it would make more sense to talk of one’s “favourites” – that would make it clear that the choices are strictly personal, and often based on highly subjective reasons, rather than measured distinctions. With that in mind, I am going to divide the 15 Dickens novels that I’ve read and reviewed this year into three groups: top 5, middle 5, and bottom 5. Some of these novels I’ve only read once – encountering them for the very first time in 2012 (Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood). Some of them I’ve read twice (The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, and Martin Chuzzlewit). The other four I’ve read several times (Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations). So the rather cursory nature of my acquaintance with some of these books needs to be kept in mind! All of Dickens’s novels, of course, are worth reading – at least once.

And over the course of a long reading-life, one ought to come back to some of them several times. As one’s own life experiences enrich and bruise one’s attitude to, and knowledge of, the world, there is so much more in these books to admire and to think about. Top 5 Great Expectations : the first Dickens novel I read – back in the mid-60s. I also studied it twice in university. A gripping coming-of-age novel that charts its protagonist’s inner development at the same time as introducing some truly memorable characters. It is also the most self-revealing of Dickens’s books. It was published weekly, and is about half the size of his usual novels, which makes the story move along at a good clip. Much less rambling and discursive than the longer books and the well-constructed plot keeps the story-telling taut and focused. David Copperfield : another bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) presented with a first-person narrative. The book is chock-full of wonderful characters.

The description of young David’s time at the Murdstone and Grinby factory is a fictionalised account of Dickens’s traumatic experience of working at Warren’s Blacking Factory, whilst the rest of the family was in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. Despite this and some other parallels to his own life, Dickens reveals less here about himself than he would later in Great Expectations. Oliver Twist : a compelling story that charts the development of an orphan raised in a parish workhouse. It is one of Dickens’s most melodramatic stories – gripping its readers, with its sordid descriptions of London low-life and yet another array of wonderful characters. A shorter novel than some, it moves along expeditiously – but the mystery of Oliver’s parentage leads to some unnecessary convolutions in the plot. Martin Chuzzlewit : a funny, satirical look at selfishness and greed as they contaminate the history of the extended Chuzzlewit family.

The novel includes two of Dickens’s funniest creations – the self-styled “architect” Seth Pecksniff, who is a delightfully unctuous hypocrite, and the booze-loving nurse Sairey Gamp, whose loquacious ramblings both irritate and entertain at the same time, as she tells us constantly about the thoughts and actions of her (apparently ‘fictitious’) friend “Mrs. Harris.” When the sales of this novel begin to slump, Dickens added a long interlude describing the disastrous trip of young Martin Chuzzlewit and his friend Mark Tapley to the United States. His British readers were not that interested with this satirical account of America, based on Dickens’s own recent trip there, and many of his American readers were highly offended. The Pickwick Papers : this was Dickens’s first novel. It’s a picaresque comic novel describing the adventures of the Pickwick Club, financed and led by the beneficent Mr. Samuel Pickwick, a retired business man who likes to travel around the country, with his friends, engaged in mild adventure. The introduction of the cockney servant Sam Weller took the novel into a whole new dynamic realm of fun and social commentary.

Weller represents the worldly-wise, working-class man, always eager for the main chance. Pickwick symbolises the benevolent nature of the reputable middle-class gentleman. Dickens’s working-class readers loved the character of Sam Weller. Here was a writer who understood them, and championed their cause. Middle 5 Bleak House : many academic critics select this complex, poetic novel as Dickens’s greatest artistic achievement. It is notable for containing two narrators, who share half of the story – an objective third-person narrator telling the story in the present, and the first-person narrator, Esther Summerson, who relates the story from a seven-year vantage point in the future. The biting satire of the book is focused on the corrupt legal system – specifically, the fate of a long-standing lawsuit, dealing with a contested will, that is making its slow-motion, tortuous way through the Court of Chancery. Despite its complex form and rich style, I found the book less involving than others – the story takes a long time to get going, and is not that interesting anyway. Nicholas Nickleby : this is Dickens’s third novel.

It combines humour and melodrama, and it also presents a young gentleman as protagonist – a man with no money or property, who is struggling to make his way in the world. In the opening section, Dickens does for Yorkshire boarding “schools” what he did for parish workhouses in Oliver Twist – skewer them unmercifully! The novel has elements of the picaresque adventure – Nicholas hits the road in search of his fortune, and enjoys an extended interlude as actor-playwright with the Vincent Crummles acting troupe. And it has elements of melodrama in the struggle Nicholas undergoes with his malignant uncle Ralph. A Tale of Two Cities : is the second of two historical novels Dickens wrote. This one is set during the French Revolution, and Dickens does an amazing job meshing the fate of a single family with the key events of this dramatic political event – which is spread over many tumultuous years. The emotional underpinning of this novel was Dickens’s interest in projecting himself as a self-sacrificing hero, dealing with the pain of an unrequited love. It really had to do with the mid-life crisis in the relationship between himself and his wife Catherine.

But he transmutes this inner turmoil into a wonderful story of dual identity and personal sacrifice. “It is a far, far better thing …” Little Dorrit : is a wonderful book built ultimately on Dickens’s childhood memories of his family’s incarceration in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. The first half of the book gives a detailed portrait of the life experienced in that place. Arthur Clennam - one of the main protagonists in this novel – is a revealing self-portrait of the disenchanted author himself. And William Dorrit, the “father of the Marshalsea” is another portrait of his father, John Dickens. Micawber (in David Copperfield) had been a positive version of his ambivalent attitude to his father, William Dorrit is the negative view. Little Dorrit is another portrait of a sweet and innocent young woman – she is quite unreal – a figure of self-abnegating perfection. Our Mutual Friend : Dickens’s final complete novel. It is a biting, satirical look at the corrupt nature of English society – which Dickens considered more and more obsessed with money and social position.

A key element of the plot is the fall-out from the apparent death by drowning of a young man, returning to London from overseas, who was the inheritor of a fortune earned by his father in dust heaps. The plot is a bit convoluted; some of the characters are not that appealing; but the writing style is often archly innovative and entertaining. There are several intriguing female characters in the novel – not always one of Dickens’s strong suit. Bottom 5 Barnaby Rudge : this is Dickens’s first historical novel (the second was A Tale of Two Cities). Although it was his fifth novel, he had the story in mind very early in his career, but put it off because other work took precedence, or because of disagreements he had with his publishers. The novel is set during the anti-Catholic riots in London in 1780. Like A Tale of Two Cities, the plot intertwines real history with the fates of a small group of characters living just outside the city. The book is interesting for having a simple-minded youth as its main protagonist. And there are several characters that get the usual satirical treatment.

The description of the riots – spread over a week, or so – is gripping, and it makes you want to learn more about this dramatic period. Dombey and Son : this novel begins, it seems, as a satirical account of mercantile capitalism – through the figure of wealthy businessman Paul Dombey. But it is pulled this way and that as Dickens shifts focus several times. There is a Little Nell-like interlude, which charts the slow decline and death of the young boy, Paul Dombey, Jr. And there is the increasingly melodramatic account of the marriage between Dombey Senior and Edith Granger. Edith is pushed into the marriage by her scheming mother, who is desperate to see her widowed daughter marry into big money. After the death of Paul, Dombey’s daughter Florence becomes the focus of the rest of the novel, and she is another of Dickens’s innocent young women who are exploited and neglected by selfish fathers or grandfathers. And the book ends with the rather unbelievable redemption of the recalcitrant father, Paul Dombey, who finally learns to appreciate his daughter’s selfless love.

The Old Curiosity Shop : the notorious story of Little Nell, who sacrifices her own interest throughout, in order to care for her selfish and gambling-addicted grandfather. They abandon their home – the Curiosity Shop – in order to escape the vengeful clutches of the malign dwarf Daniel Quilp. The endless account of Nell’s road-travels with her grandfather is rather tiresome. Her fate is telegraphed fairly early in the book and one waits for it with mounting anticipation and – dare I say it – also with growing irritation. Victorians, apparently, were a much more sentimental bunch than us jaded and rather cynical moderns – they lapped up the pathos in this book with glee. The Mystery of Edwin Drood : Dickens’s last novel. It was planned to be half the size of his usual epics. But he died, anyway, before finishing it – completing six of the twelve parts he had intended. It is based in Cloisterham, a town based on Rochester in Kent, where Dickens had grown up as a young boy, and where he returned (the nearby village of Higham, where his house, Gad’s Hill Place, was located) to live in later life.

So his last novel is set in the two locations that had fuelled his creativity most (the other, of course, was London). This was a detective story – one of literature's first – so it was ironic that he would die without having revealed the secret to the mystery, although the murderer’s identity is pretty clear from what he had already written and, more importantly, what he had told to a few friends and associates. The most interesting character is John Jasper, who can be seen as another self-portrait by the author, a troubled, self-divided man – motivated by love and hate – with many secrets to hide. Hard Times : a quickly written novel, published in weekly parts for Dickens’s magazine. It is the most didactic and straightforward novel he ever wrote. It is also the shortest – so it contains a very small cast of characters, and very little in the way of sub-plot and discursive digression. The book is a polemic against the philosophy of utilitarianism, which underpinned the no-nonsense industrialism of the mid-nineteenth century. Dickens had travelled north to Preston to witness for himself a notable industrial dispute.

He was appalled by the working conditions in the factories, but he was also critical of what he thought was the immoral opportunism of some trade union leaders. An interesting, uncharacteristic oddity in Dickens’s body of work. The type of novel he might have done a lot more of, if his work had been centred on ideas, rather than the portrayal of humane and life-like characters. Posted by Charles Dickens' Enduring Insights on Human Loss and Suffering - The Daily Beast David's Bookclub: The Old Curiosity Shop Charles Dickens' Enduring Insights on Human Loss and Suffering The death of 17-year-old Mary Hogarth opened Dickens's eyes to the all-pervading fact of early death in industrializing Britain. David Frum 02.18.13 2:11 PM ET Charles Dicken's The Old Curiosity Shop inspired the cruelest and most famous of Oscar Wilde's upside-down witticisms: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing."* The jibe is devastating, but also strangely off-key.

The death of Little Nell may be the most famous of Victorian death scenes, but it is hardly the most maudlin. (That honor must surely go to the death of Beth in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.) The death scene gets much of its power from some very unsentimental elements, not least that the narrator of the death, Nell's grandfather, helped to hasten it by his own errant behavior - and yet still at the end will not confront his own responsibility. Indeed, he cannot even acknowledge aloud the fact of her death. The jibe is off-key too because Wilde himself was hardly immune to the sentimental and even the mawkish. After all, The Selfish Giant is one of the most cloying works in literature. The great theme of The Old Curiosity Shop is early death. As Dickens' biographers explain, the book was written over the year 1840, three years after the death of 17-year-old Mary Hogarth, the younger sister of Dickens' wife. Dickens - then only 25 himself - had developed an intense devotion to Mary.

(Although Dickens would later be flagrantly unfaithful to his wife, none of the biographies I've read suggests that Mary and Dickens consummated a love affair.) Mary's loss devastated Dickens. Characters based upon Mary Hogarth show up in many of Dickens' early novels. His actual wife - who bore him a dozen children - seems to have made no impression on his art at all. Dickens being Dickens, the death of Mary Hogarth did not drive him to record only one girl's fate. It open his eyes to the all-pervading fact of early death in industrializing Britain. Here's from Chapter 45: Nell and her grandfather have been wandering for some time, poor and hungry, ruined by the grandfather's gambling mania. Nell is finally reduced to begging. She approached one of the wretched hovels by the way-side, and knocked with her hand upon the door. 'What would you have here?' said a gaunt man, opening it. 'Charity. A morsel of bread.' 'Do you see that?' returned the man hoarsely, pointing to a kind of bundle on the ground. 'That's a dead child.

I and five hundred other men were thrown out of work, three months ago. That is my third dead child, and last. Do you think I have charity to bestow, or a morsel of bread to spare?' Oscar Wilde, it should be noted, had also been touched by early loss: his sister, Isola, died at age nine of meningitis. Wilde wrote a (not very good) poem in her memory in the jingling high Victorian manner. Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. For Dickens, though, the deaths in The Old Curiosity Shop are more than occasions for grief. They are occasions for outrage. After Nell meets refusal from the unemployed worker who has lost three children, she knocks at another door, and there views this scene: It seemed that a couple of poor families lived in this hovel, for two women, each among children of her own, occupied different portions of the room. In the centre, stood a grave gentleman in black who appeared to have just entered, and who held by the arm a boy.

'Here, woman,' he said, 'here's your deaf and dumb son. You may thank me for restoring him to you. He was brought before me, this morning, charged with theft; and with any other boy it would have gone hard, I assure you. But, as I had compassion on his infirmities, and thought he might have learnt no better, I have managed to bring him back to you. Take more care of him for the future.' 'And won't you give me back MY son!' said the other woman, hastily rising and confronting him. 'Won't you give me back MY son, Sir, who was transported for the same offence!' 'Was he deaf and dumb, woman?' asked the gentleman sternly. 'Was he not, Sir?' 'You know he was not.' 'He was,' cried the woman. 'He was deaf, dumb, and blind, to all that was good and right, from his cradle. Her boy may have learnt no better! where did mine learn better? where could he?

who was there to teach him better, or where was it to be learnt?' 'Peace, woman,' said the gentleman, 'your boy was in possession of all his senses.' 'He was,' cried the mother; 'and he was the more easy to be led astray because he had them. If you save this boy because he may not know right from wrong, why did you not save mine who was never taught the difference? You gentlemen have as good a right to punish her boy, that God has kept in ignorance of sound and speech, as you have to punish mine, that you kept in ignorance yourselves. How many of the girls and boys—ah, men and women too—that are brought before you and you don't pity, are deaf and dumb in their minds, and go wrong in that state, and are punished in that state, body and soul, while you gentlemen are quarrelling among yourselves whether they ought to learn this or that?—Be a just man, Sir, and give me back my son.' 'You are desperate,' said the gentleman, taking out his snuff-box, 'and I am sorry for you.' 'I AM desperate,' returned the woman, 'and you have made me so.

Give me back my son, to work for these helpless children. Be a just man, Sir, and, as you have had mercy upon this boy, give me back my son!' Powering the The Old Curiosity Shop is an idea, an audacious idea for 1840, that much of the suffering Dickens records is preventable and unnecessary. The death of children seemed to Dickens not an inexplicable decision of divinity, but a wrong and waste caused by human action and inaction. As Dickens, the most influential artist of his age, propounded that idea, his contemporaries were acting on it. Infant and child mortality in Britain began a steady decline some time after 1850, accelerating after 1870, and then accelerating rapidly after 1900. Improvements in diet helped, then improvements in public hygiene, then improvements in the practice of medicine. Improvements in early mortality transformed public expectations about life and health in Britain. Dickens, born in 1812, grew up in a world where human health remained more or less what it had been in medieval times - and probably worse than in Neolithic times.

Wilde, born in 1868, grew up in a world where health expectations were rising and transforming for the first time in human history. And yet even now, after so much progress, it remains true that we all die, and some of us die young. Loss and grief and mourning define the human condition. And here too, Charles Dickens has something to offer in The Old Curiosity Shop that remains wisdom and a kind of comfort even to modern readers. From the start of the book, Nell feels an attraction to churchyards. Tired from her forced journeying, she chooses them as places of rest. Almost the first time she pauses, she is drawn into this scene: She was looking at a humble stone which told of a young man who had died at twenty-three years old, fifty-five years ago, when she heard a faltering step approaching, and looking round saw a feeble woman bent with the weight of years, who tottered to the foot of that same grave and asked her to read the writing on the stone. The old woman thanked her when she had done, saying that she had had the words by heart for many a long, long year, but could not see them now.

'Were you his mother?' said the child. 'I was his wife, my dear.' She the wife of a young man of three-and-twenty! Ah, true! It was fifty-five years ago. 'You wonder to hear me say that,' remarked the old woman, shaking her head. 'You're not the first. Older folk than you have wondered at the same thing before now. Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn't change us more than life, my dear.' 'Do you come here often?' asked the child. 'I sit here very often in the summer time,' she answered, 'I used to come here once to cry and mourn, but that was a weary while ago, bless God!' 'I pluck the daisies as they grow, and take them home,' said the old woman after a short silence. 'I like no flowers so well as these, and haven't for five-and-fifty years.

It's a long time, and I'm getting very old.' Then growing garrulous upon a theme which was new to one listener though it were but a child, she told her how she had wept and moaned and prayed to die herself, when this happened; and how when she first came to that place, a young creature strong in love and grief, she had hoped that her heart was breaking as it seemed to be. But that time passed by, and although she continued to be sad when she came there, still she could bear to come, and so went on until it was pain no longer, but a solemn pleasure, and a duty she had learned to like.

And now that five-and-fifty years were gone, she spoke of the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson, with a kind of pity for his youth, growing out of her own old age, and an exalting of his strength and manly beauty as compared with her own weakness and decay; and yet she spoke about him as her husband too, and thinking of herself in connexion with him, as she used to be and not as she was now, talked of their meeting in another world, as if he were dead but yesterday, and she, separated from her former self, were thinking of the happiness of that comely girl who seemed to have died with him. The Old Curiosity Shop is not one of Dickens' most admired novels. Its plot is a compilation of incidents, its main villain is too melodramatically villainous, its construction is so slapdash that Dickens started in the first person and then switched to the third without ever returning to rewrite the opening chapters.

"And now that I have carried this history so far in my own character and introduced these personages to the reader, I shall for the convenience of the narrative detach myself from its further course, and leave those who have prominent and necessary parts in it to speak and act for themselves." Yet that scene of the old woman waiting across time for her departed young husband will haunt the memory of anyone who has lost a loved one too soon - and explains why, despite the excesses scorned by 20th century modernists, Dickens still lives as an artist even after so many of his more tasteful detractors have faded away. * The quip is reported in many slight variations, but you get the idea. READ THIS LIST Baugh's Blog: Book Review: Charles Dickens 5 - "The Old Curiosity Shop" Book Review: Charles Dickens 5 - "The Old Curiosity Shop" Dickens drawn by Count D'Orsay in Dec. 1841 The death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s fourth novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, is one of English literature’s great cause célèbres. Lord Jeffrey, a literary critic and friend of Dickens, was found in tears after reading her death scene.

And the Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell threw the book out of a train window declaring, “He should not have killed her.” Oscar Wilde’s response? “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without dissolving into tears … of laughter.” And the poet Algernon Swinburne called Nell “a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads.” As the fate of Little Nell hung in the balance in the final few issues of the novel (printed in weekly-parts), American crowds at the harbour-front in New York City were reported to have yelled at the sailors on board of boats coming in from Britain: “Is Little Nell dead?” The novel, from the very beginning, has generated an intense and very mixed response. Modern sensibilities seem to agree more often with Oscar Wilde. The book is seen now primarily as a good example of the Victorian penchant for over-the-top sentiment. The Old Curiosity Shop was Dickens’ fourth novel. It was published in 88 weekly parts in Dickens’s new magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock. He had conceived of establishing his own weekly periodical whilst in the final stages of writing Nicholas Nickleby .

Apparently, the bad experience he’d had editing Bentley’s Miscellany for publisher Richard Bentley did not deter him from giving magazine-editing another try. His concept for the new periodical was a club of characters who would take turns telling stories. Cover of Master Humphrey's Clock Master Humphrey’s Clock was published by Chapman & Hall. They agreed not only to pay Dickens a weekly salary for editing it; they also picked up the tab for all of his expenses and shared the profits. The first issue appeared in April, 1840 and cost threepence a week. It was a handsome-looking publication – larger than the usual periodicals of the time, and printed on good quality, creamy-white paper. Each issue consisted of twelve pages of text and two engravings “dropped” strategically into the text, instead of placed at the beginning and end. Charles Dickens was 28 years old and at the height of his fame. The first issue of the new magazine sold 70,000 copies. But interest soon began to drop. He realized that he needed to write a new novel in order to revive the flagging sales. Serialisation of The Old Curiosity Shop began in the fourth issue.

By the end of its run, in November 1841, each instalment of the story was selling about 100,000 copies. Dickens’s usually wrote his novels in monthly instalments; this one was written in weekly parts and the episodes, therefore, are less expansive and the story proceeds at a more sprightly pace. At the beginning of the novel’s weekly publication, Dickens was only two weeks ahead of the printer – a rather risky situation. But he was used to that sort of pressure. All of his novels were written like that. He seemed to thrive on the pressure of writing to strict deadlines. He wrote 16 pages each week. His routine was to start work at about 8.30 in the morning and work through until about 2.00 in the afternoon. As usual, he began the novel with a general idea of theme and style, but only a vague notion of where he was going. The details of plot and situations came as he went along – often adapting things according to the responses he was getting from friends, family, and the general public.

The framing device Dickens began with in this novel was that of an old man, Master Humphrey, describing the experience of seeing an old man accompanied by a young girl during one of his late-night strolls in the city of London. He stalks them for a while, and begins to imagine their situation. So the book actually begins with a first-person narrator in the first three chapters. But Dickens found the technique difficult, and he soon abandoned it – switching to third-person narrative in Chapter Four. Nell and her grandfather on the road Dickens conceived of the character of Little Nell whilst staying with Walter Savage Landor in Bath. Landor was a poet and essayist. The two writers had only recently met, but were already good friends. Dickens would name his second son after Landor. The character of Daniel Quilp in the new novel was also inspired by an incident in Bath – Dickens had seen “a frightful little dwarf named Prior, who let donkeys out on hire” in the city. Prior was known to beat his animals and his wife - in equal measure.

The structure of The Old Curiosity Shop is a blend of alternating sections dealing, on the one hand, with the sentimental story of an innocent, angelic young girl caring for a physically-frail and morally-weak old grandfather, and, on the other, comic and satiric scenes featuring eccentric and, often, low-life characters. And Dickens engages throughout in a lot of moralizing commentary, meant to take the edge off some of the more unsavoury aspects of the story. It has to be said that much of the story dealing with Little Nell and the grandfather becomes tedious in its repetitious description of Nell’s struggles to care for the old man. And the eventual demise of this little angel is telegraphed to the reader over and over. In several scenes, for example, she is meditating about life and death in the cemetery of a country church. Much of the criticism of the sentimentality in this novel has been focused primarily on the infamous death-scene. But, as some critics have pointed out, Dickens actually handles the scene with much restraint.

The death is not described directly - much to the surprise of many only familiar with its notoriety – an account is given of it after the fact not by the narrator, but by one of the novel’s characters. Regardless, the book is still cited as a major example of its author’s maudlin sentimentality, his obsession with death, and his manipulation of the readers' feelings. Dick Swiveller and "the Marchioness" And it’s true that over-the-top sentiment involving Nell can be found throughout the book. But there is also a lot of genuine feeling and compassion found in the situations of other characters in the book. Dickens often is most successful in touching a nerve in his readers when he is not consciously trying. A good example here is the relationship between Dick Swiveller and “the Marchioness”. Swiveller enters the story first as a rather minor stock character – a ne’er-do-well clerk looking for the main chance. But in his compassion for the much-abused servant in the Brass household – whom he comes to dub “the Marchioness” – he morphs into an admirable fellow.

As is often the case with Dickens’s novels, the central characters here are not the real interest and moral-centre of the book. They are engaged in a series of adventures, often given allegorical overtones. It’s the motley collection of supporting characters who imbue the novel with interest and energy: Mrs. Jarley, the benevolent and earthy proprietor of a waxworks exhibition; Miss Monflathers, the cruel headmistress of a girls’ school; Codlin and Trotters, the squabbling entrepeneurs running a Punch-and-Judy show; and, of course, the grotesque and depraved money-lender Daniel Quilp. The fate of Daniel Quilp The contrast between the sweet innocence of Nell and the malevolent cruelty of Quilp presents the classic antitheses found in Charles Dickens’s view of existence: good and evil; angel and devil; female and male; masochist and sadist; asexual and lascivious. The sadistic delight which Quilp revels in, and the physical deformity he exhibits often repel and embarrass the modern reader. But this tactic of giving his most morally-twisted characters a corresponding physical deformity emerged clearly in his previous book.

He takes it even further here, and Quilp is, perhaps, his most grotesque and repulsive creation. Other strategies that had become familiar to Dickens’s readers recur here: Nell and her grandfather’s picaresque on-the-road adventures reminds us of the constant travels of The Pickwick Papers and the early experiences of Nicholas Nickleby with the Crummles’ acting troupe; the life-changing benevolence of the Maylie family in Oliver Twist and the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby recurs here in the Garland clan’s care for Nell’s friend Kit; and the element of mystery in the parentage of Oliver and Smike in two previous books occurs here in the background provided for Nell’s family – Dickens is unable to name the character chapter after chapter, instead he calls him the Single Gentleman. It’s awkward and formulaic. The Old Curiosity Shop, then, despite a fair amount of tedium in the sections dealing with Nell’s and grandfather’s flight from the clutches of Daniel Quilp, and despite some occasional tear-jerking moments, is still an entertaining and diverting read. It’s full of the usual comic characters and satiric scenes of low-life in the city of London.

When he’s not trying so hard to manipulate the emotions of his readers, Dickens writes with vigour and passion and creates scenes with intense atmosphere and presence. Problems of plot-coherence and narrative structure remain, but, with Dickens, it's the immersion into his created world, teeming with character and comic exuberance, that carries the reader forward. Not one of his best - but still worth a read! [2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son.

I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Charles Dickens was to start again, read through all 14 of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. I'll give it a try, anyway! So this is the fifth of a series.] Next: Barnaby Rudge [Resources used: "Introduction" to The Old Curiosity Shop by Peter Washington (1995); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990); "Portraits of Charles Dickens (1812-1870)", an excellent web-page collection of Dickens pictures. Dickens Portraits ] Posted by "It’s full of the usual comic characters and satiric scenes of low-life in the city of London." A very good review Clive.I enjoyed reading your analysis. The above sentence made me think of "The Old Curiosity Shop," oddly enough Ha! Ha!

The building reputed to be The Old Curiosity Shop is set amongst the buildings of The London School of Economics, which abounds in low life economics professors and lecturers.The shop is right next door to a pub, set within the LSE complex, called Ye Old White Horse, that is certainly not old but has sign outside saying, " No Students Allowed." How perverse is that? Dickens would have loved that scenario. He might have got it into his story some how I am sure. Charles Dickens - The Greatest Literature of All Time Charles Dickens Oliver Twist [SHOW] [HIDE] Oliver Twist is probably the novel most associated with Dickens, though not nearly his best nor most admired. It is also the first novel to take a child as the central character, which.... more A Christmas Carol [SHOW] [HIDE] Everyone knows the story of A Christmas Carol, if not from reading Dickens, then from incessant showings of the many film versions, especially around the holiday season.... more David Copperfield [SHOW] [HIDE] The first half of David Copperfield, concerning the struggles of the young boy against repressive step-parents and draconian schoolmasters, is one of the greatest, most....

more Bleak House [SHOW] [HIDE] Bleak House has both its ardent admirers who declare it among Dickens's masterpieces, as well as its detractors who call it one of his most grotesque potboilers. The.... more Hard Times [SHOW] [HIDE] What's to like about Hard Times: A lot. It's short, for a Dickens novel. It's accessible—anyone can read it without a great deal of learning and without getting lost in.... more Little Dorrit [SHOW] [HIDE] You could make a case that every Charles Dickens novel is atypical in some way, but Little Dorrit really is a special case. For one thing, it's been called his most political novel.... more A Tale of Two Cities [SHOW] [HIDE] It's the most political of Charles Dickens's novels, it's the least political—even anti-political—of Dickens's novels in some ways. But its position on politics, revolution.... more Great Expectations [SHOW] [HIDE] The greatest expectation to be quashed in Great Expectations may be our assumption that the innocent lad at the centre of the story will turn out to be another David....

more The writer to emulate—or to beat Chances are, you think of Charles Dickens in one of two opposite ways. As the writer, the very icon of the great and popular author for the masses, against whose work all subsequent fiction is to be measured. Or as the epitome of an old-fashioned, wordy, sentimental style that had to be swept away before real modern writing could flourish. In either case, you've got good company. Among those with the former view are Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, both great Dickens fan. In the present era, wonderful writers like John Irving still strive to present vast novels of quirky, interrelated characters like those Dickens became famous for. At least one recently popular novel ( The Quincunx ) by Charles Palliser, 1989) has created an entire Dickensian world, complete with characters and setting typical of Dickens' works. On the other hand, novelists since Dickens have generally striven to strip from their writing many of the features associated with Dickens's work (long descriptions, authorial intrusions, incredible narrative coincidences, leisurely pace, overt sentimentality) to produce terser, more realistic, understated prose appropriate for jaded twentieth-century readers with shorter attention spans.

The narrator of J.D. Salinger's ground-breaking The Catcher in the Rye (1951) famously refused to relate "all that David Copperfield kind of crap" about his childhood. Yet Dickens remains the author in ways that both sides recognize. No other fiction writer has created so many characters that people still know today: Little Nell, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Pip, Mr. Gradgrind.... Apart from Shakespeare , no other writer in English has ever produced as many major works considered classics today, with eight novels and novellas on our Greatest Literature and Greatest Novels lists—and arguments to be made for including several more. You may know my tendency to sort writers into those who mythologize (build up, simplify, transcend, create things to believe in) and those who demythologize (break down, ground, debunk, expose the nuances in things). Dickens, like other great authors but more so than anyone, does both at once.

He is a social realist, revealing the seamy side of Victorian culture, undercutting lofty notions of civilization and progress, exposing poverty and injustice. Many of his memorable negative characters embody the hypocrisies of British class and the cruel practices of commercial enterprise. But Dickens also propounds new, supposedly more humane, lofty notions of Victorian romanticism. Goodness of heart wins out over the evils he exposes. Conscience and noble intentions may cause their holders to suffer for a time but eventually they have an almost magical effect in countering socially embedded injustices. To read Dickens is often to become so absorbed by the positive characters and their plights that we willingly accept the most outrageously unbelievable outcomes. We accept them because we love the characters. We want the destinies Dickens prepares for them, even if it means accepting glorious notions of the unfettered human heart triumphing over narrow-minded interests. We want the new myth to replace the destroyed one. When this romantic drive is too obvious, we criticize Dickens for being sentimental, for constructing ridiculous coincidences, for going on and on. But when it works, we are transported.

(You can see better how this dichotomy of demythologizing and re-mythologizing plays out in some of the commentaries on individual works, such as David Copperfield .) How did he do it? What is most amazing is the sheer volume of work he accomplished at this high level. Only Walter Scott was more prodigious in the nineteenth century, but Dickens has proven more enduring. Scott's writing has remained largely unread over the past hundred years while Dickens's writing has continued to compel new readers, study, and multiple adaptation into newer media. Dickens created his massive works—with all their memorable characters, grand narratives, and complexly romantic style—at a rate of almost one per year, which must seem an incredible feat to today's literary authors who are lucky to produce slighter volumes every three or four years. And at the same time he was publishing travelogues, histories and dozens of shorter pieces, including stories, essays, poetry and memoirs. Not to mention his continual periodical editing, his public readings, plus his writing, producing and acting in plays. And his voluminous letter writing. No wonder he died relatively young at fifty-eight, looking like a worn-out man of seventy.

Given that display of superhuman energy over three decades, critics are quick to pounce on his alleged weaknesses. He was writing mainly for serial publication, publishing chapters of his novels every week and so the finished, collated works contain more than their share of meandering passages and hastily stitched together plots, it is said. But I am not sure you can't find that in the works of most other, less productive writers of his time—and of most times. You can also read critics' complaints of inconsistency over the years, with some claiming Dickens lost his early ability to generate fresh characters and situations in his later, overburdened years. Others dismiss his early work as flimsy and improbable, compared with the masterpieces of his latter life. Yet every period of his career seems to have produced work that public consensus has declared great—with Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol near the beginning, David Copperfield and Bleak House in the middle, and A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations near the end, to pick out the most obvious examples. In between, yes, the inspiration for some of his work seemingly flagged as he was pressed to meet demands—from publishers, the public and his own psyche—to produce work of all kinds.

You can find numerous instances of the workaday writer hacking out his weekly quota. But with Dickens, instead of killing his muse, this incessant production seems to have stirred him to his greatest heights. In everything he wrote, even in his less substantial works, he was always trying something new, something that intrigued him. Read only his greatly acclaimed works if you want, but the perceptive reader can discover something of interest in almost every Dickens morsel. He was much more innovative and artistic in the sense of revelling in craftmanship—experimental, if you will—than he is given credit. Sure, Dickens was producing scads of prose for a readership that thirsted for memorable characters in grand and tawdry romantic plots, and he met those demands happily. But within those strictures he kept finding new ways of telling his stories. I am amazed when reading Dickens to continually come across strange new juxtapositions of plot elements, novel turns of phrase, unusual points of view collapsing the gap between reader and narrator/author, clever and cutting rhetoric, poetic paragraphs that take flight from the most mundane situations, telling psychological insights that later writers would fill chapters with thrown off in a sentence or two....

I'm not saying he was a post-modern writer before his time. He is still Dickens, the epitome of Victorian era literature. And still a hard slog for some modern readers to get through. But the slog is worth it and pays back in surprising ways. Short life, long work Charles Dickens's life is probably more widely known than that of any other writer, except perhaps that of Hemingway in the next century. But in case you are unfamiliar with it, here's a bare outline [see bibliography for complete list of books]: 1812 Born in Landport, Hampshire, in England. 1824 Father thrown into Marshalsea debtor's prison (experiences used in Little Dorrit). Charles sent to work in a blacking warehouse at age twelve. 1824–1836 Studied at schools, worked as a law office clerk and then as a shorthand reporter at Doctor's Commons, and then as a parliamentary reporter for several periodicals (all experiences used in David Copperfield ). Short stories, sketches and essays started appearing in periodicals under his pen name Boz in 1833.

1836–1837 Collection of pieces, Sketches by 'Boz', published in book form. Also The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, a connected string of stories, published in a monthly serial, about blithely humorous characters travelling together. The Pickwick Papers, as it is known, won Dickens great fame and readership in his day, although it is difficult for today's readers to follow. 1836 Married Catherine Hogarth with whom he had ten surviving children. Dickens is thought also to have been in love with two of Catherine's sisters, one of whom, Mary, died in his arms while still young and was probably the model for Dora in David Copperfield. 1837–1839 Novel Oliver Twist appeared in monthly instalments in Bentley's Miscellany which Dickens edited, depicting the hard life of a guileless orphan caught up in the London underworld. Also Nicholas Nickleby, again about a boy's hard life and young adulthood, is serialized.

1840–1841 Weekly magazine Master Humphrey's Clock, written entirely by Dickens, launched with instalments of The Old Curiosity Shop, telling the travails of young Nell raised by her junk-store owning grandfather, and Barnaby Rudge, an historical novel set during England's anti-Catholic riots of 1780. 1842 Upset caused by Dickens's American Notes, concerning his disillusionment with United States after a visit. He criticized slavery, among other things. 1843–1845 A Christmas Carol (1843) published, his first of five consecutive annual Christmas novellas, later, including The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1845). Novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1845) caused further controversy in United States for its perceived stereotyped presentation of Americans. Dickens lived in Italy, Switzerland and France in 1844–1845. 1846–1848 Founded radical paper London Daily News. Contributed article "Pictures from Italy". Wrote Dombey and Son.

1849–1850 Semi-autobiographical David Copperfield appeared in monthly instalments. Often considered his masterpiece, the novel again follows the harsh life and loves of an orphaned boy who in this case grows into a famous writer with an unfulfilling marriage. 1850–1857 Founding editor of the weekly Household Words, until it was incorporated into All the Year Round. Published chapters of A Child's History of England (1851–1852) with a radical view of British History. Classic novels published in this decade include Bleak House (1852–1853), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1855–1857). 1857–1858 Became intensely involved in theatrical productions, meeting actress Ellen Ternan. Separated from wife Catherine and thought to have henceforth lived a double life split between the home he shared with his children and residence with Ternan, possibly including retreats in France. Kept his relationship with Ternan secret the rest of his life. 1858–1860 Highly popular lecture tours in Britain and the United States.

In 1859 he started editing All the Year Round, which succeeded Household Words and continued until his death. He also began a series of collaborations with other writers, that was to continue over the next decade, publishing A Haunted House, a collection of ghost stories which he edited and to which he contributed three stories and the framing device. A Tale of Two Cities , set during the French Revolution, also published in this period. 1860–1861 Great Expectations published, once again following the childhood and early adult life of a young man, in this case one who has a mysterious wealthy benefactor. 1864–1865 Our Mutual Friend, which starts with a murder mystery and features a secret, double life. 1867–1869 Another highly acclaimed reading tour of the United States and the British provinces. Also worked with Wilkie Collins on the play and subsequent novel No Thoroughfare, one several collaborations between the two in the 1860s. 1870 The Mystery of Edwin Drood left unfinished when Dickens died of a stroke and probably exhaustion.

Based on Dickens's skimpy notes (which did not reveal the ending) Edwin Drood has been finished by various authors, from immediately after Dickens's death up to 1980, although none have satisfied Dickens fans. Now that's a literary life that makes niggling over whether every word he wrote was perfect seem petty indeed. — Eric

Question: Little Nell is a character in which Dickens novel?
Answer: The Old Curiosity Shop