The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

The Old Curiosity Shop: A Tale by Charles Dickens

This past Christmas's Charles Dickens novel (which I am very belatedly writing up in May, and even more belatedly posting in August) was The Old Curiosity Shop, the novel that famously includes "the death of Little Nell." Even though I had not read it, it's responsible for the fact that I always call my friends' daughter Nell "Little Nell." Stories that Americans stormed the docks to obtain copies of the final installment (where she dies) 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).

Originally published: 1840-41
Acquired: January 2023
Read: February 2023

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.

I found it interesting how the first few chapters have a first-person narrator that just bows out of the story. The peril of serial publication! Dickens published this in his weekly periodical Master Humphrey's Clock, which prior to this was made up of short stories narrated by the eponymous Master Humphrey, but sales began to fall off and Dickens realized he needed to provide a novel for the audience he had built up with The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby.

I read a Charles Dickens novel every year. Next up in sequence: Martin Chuzzlewit