This, as I'm sure everyone knows, is by Charles Dickens (1812-70).

It was the subject of another of Henry Eliot's extended read-alongs, and we read it -- most rewardingly -- both in the original weekly instalments, and in the context of its original framework narrative, Master Humphrey's Clock.

The Clock, as I explained in that post, was intended by Dickens to offer him a more relaxed mode of publishing; its projected miscellany of subject matter and the possibility of including contributions from others were supposed to offer him a respite from the pressure of producing 32 pages a month. The problem was that the format didn't prove that popular... What DID capture the public's attention, however, was the story of The Old Curiosity Shop, which first appeared in the fourth issue. Planned as just one strand among many, it had taken over completely by the twelfth issue... With this development, Dickens had shot himself in the foot. Now he had to deliver copy not monthly but weekly... But it took off mightily. Master Humphrey's Clock (as the publication was still called) sold up to 100,000 copies a week.

Saturday 25 April 1840, then, introduced us to Little Nell, her grandfather, and the odd locality they inhabit:


"One of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town and to hide their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust..."

So the episodes succeeded each other until finally, the issue dated Saturday 6 February 1841 gave readers Chapter the Last (plus another interlude from Master Humphrey and his companions, and the announcement that the next issue would see the beginning of Barnaby Rudge, so don't go away, folks...).

It has been a really interesting experience, reading as the Victorians would have read. As this excellent site points out, "When you read a Victorian serial novel in paperback form, you are 'bingeing' it as you would a completed TV series. Nineteenth-century audiences used to read novels in installments, following many plots at the same time while they waited for the next issue to appear."

To help us recreate that experience, they offer a timeline giving access to the instalments of Victorian serial novels online, formatted as reproductions of the original pages if that's how you prefer it. I've actually only just discovered this site (as I'm keen to carry on the Master Humphrey experience by reading Barnaby Rudge, and wanted to know the instalment dates). But it is really interesting to not only see what the issues (priced 3d.) would have looked like, but also to sense the world of the original readers through the advertisements that bookend the text.

On 25 April, for example, when The Old Curiosity Shop was launched, we are offered the opportunity to buy Sketches of Young Couples, a book that contains "an urgent Remonstrance to the Gentlemen of England (being Bachelors or Widowers) on the present alarming Matrimonial Crisis"; or riding whips from 1s. each; or "artificial teeth, fixed without springs, wires, or ligatures at strictly moderate charges"; or Beddome's Powders (handy for "Worms, Colds, Influenza, and Bilious complaints"); or Prout's Indian Rubber Sticking Plaster ("which does not wash off... obviating the inconvenience of the continual renewing so justly complained of in the old Court Plaster"); and much more....


Nell sleeping. Most of the original illustrations are by George Cattermole or Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz -- who also illustrated the Sketches of Young Couples noted above), but this one, also from the first issue, is by Samuel Williams

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I didn't always rigorously adhere to the two-chapters-per-week of the original schedule, and sometimes found myself doing a catch-up when it was time for Henry's monthly posting. But I did definitely get the sense of how it felt to have the story spaced out, picking up the pieces of the narrative again each time, and living with these characters over a much longer time period.

And I also -- as always -- have appreciated the reactions and input of the group. As Henry Eliot points out, communal reading would have been the practice in Dickens's day. People would club together to buy the magazines, and would often gather -- including those who couldn't read -- to listen to readings. So the corporate nature of the experience also feels very authentic.

But one of the things this extended way of reading makes difficult is posting... Analysing each reading instalment would just make the post too long, and yet covering the last N months in just one post feels a little cavalier.

So what I'll do is go through the things that have stuck with me after all these months.

First, though, the basic plot, which is easily told: Nell (who's always referred to as a child, although she's 13, wise beyond her years, and the object of distinctly adult attention from at least two men) is an orphan, and lives with her grandfather. Falling into debt to the most merciless and unscrupulous of characters, Daniel Quilp, the pair flee London, hoping for a more carefree life. They embark on a quasi-allegorical journey through England, encountering many kindly people, but also plenty of others who don't have their best interests at heart. They're also being pursued, on the one hand by Quilp, who somehow seems to think they're concealing wealth that should be his (and who just likes to be objectionable anyway), and by a mysterious personage who turns out to be a concerned relative. Meanwhile, Grandfather's gambling habit ensures that their financial situation never improves until a benefactor steps in right at the end. By which time, though, it's too late for Nell... That's not a spoiler. Everyone knows Nell dies. There's that story (possibly apocryphal) of crowds gathering at the harbour in New York, asking those aboard the ship bringing the final issue whether their heroine was dead. And there's that snide comment of Oscar Wilde's (more on that later)... So, yes, Nell dies. But the villains get their come-uppance, as they usually do with Dickens, and lots of others experience a happy ending.

That's awfully brief. For more, see this really detailed summary.


Birmingham, 2019. In the latter stages of the book, Nell and her grandfather travel by commercial barge towards the Black Country

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Notes:

1.

You do often get the impression that Dickens was making it up as he went along... As Alfie Bown points out, "This novel is exceptional in that it was serialized weekly, putting a huge onus on improvisation and making it a text that is continually interrupting itself." The first change of horse in midstream is the switching of narrator after three chapters. Master Humphrey's first-person observer's narrative was proving too limiting, and so Dickens announces: "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." So there...

Similarly, the announcement (after the story is finished) that the unnamed "single gentleman" is in fact Master Humphrey himself makes zero sense. Physically and psychologically, they are clearly different people.

But never mind, because...

2.

The characters are really memorable.

Standing out for sheer malevolence and black comedic power is Daniel Quilp, "so low in stature as to be quite a dwarf". We hear immediately of his grotesque expression, ghastly smile, and restless, sly, and cunning eyes. He is officially a ship-breaker, but he has a finger in many pies: He collects rents, makes loans, bit of this, bit of that... He has this trick of mysteriously appearing in strange places... As he says to his unfortunate wife, whom he shamelessly and gleefully tyrannizes: "I'll be a Will o' the Wisp, now here, now there, dancing about you always, starting up when you least expect me, and keeping you in a constant state of restlessness and irritation." And that's the experience of many of the other characters -- that he's somehow conjured up by magic, always leering down at them from some impossible place.

Notable, too, is Sally Brass, sister of crooked lawyer Sampson. She's mannish in figure and voice, and "of a strong and vigorous turn" of mind. After the debacle at the end, it's rumoured that "she had gone down to the docks in male attire, and become a female sailor". Others say she enlisted in the army. Interesting.

Dick Swiveller is a case of the bad (or at least careless and thoughtless) turned good (although, with our 21st-century sensibilities, we do wonder a bit about his eventual marriage to a much younger person, who was formally a servant and quasi-ward).

And one of my favourite characters was the cantankerous pony, Whisker, who takes the concept of disobliging to a whole new equine level.



Nell is, let's be honest, insipid... She starts good, and carries on good. She's never even tempted to be bad. So she has no character arc. She's the eternal feminine, a symbol of purity, never referred to as a woman, but always as a child. And there's a drumbeat of death throughout the novel -- bringing her into touch with graveyards and dead children -- that signals the direction she is heading in, and reminds us that young people do indeed die. (Dickens had recently lost a beloved sister-in-law, at the age of just 17, and many believe he wrote his grief into this book.)

So, "the child" is very much sentimentalized. But she stands as an example of the objectification of young women (when Quilp leers at her, we're utterly appalled), and as an example of a childhood that's devastated by a family member's addiction. Granddad has a terrible gambling problem, and Dickens doesn't miss any of the effects of that: "Between the old man and herself there had come a gradual separation, harder to bear than any former sorrow. Every evening, and often in the day-time too, he was absent, alone; and although she well knew where he went, and why -- too well from the constant drain upon her scanty purse and from his haggard looks -- he evaded all inquiry, maintained a strict reserve, and even shunned her presence." That scene where he slithers into her room to steal their last money is genuinely terrifying and heart-breaking. And when she learns that his ne'er-do-well companions are trying to persuade him to steal from someone who has been good to them, she has to take them both back on the road. He is much diminished: "There was no divided responsibility now; the whole burden of their two lives had fallen upon her."

G.K. Chesterton also points out that the "quite definite and really artistic idea" that underpins the death of Nell is "that all the good powers and personalities in the story should set out in pursuit of one insignificant child, to repair an injustice to her, should track her from town to town over England with all the resources of wealth, intelligence, and travel, and should all -- arrive too late. All the good fairies and all the kind magicians, all the just kings and all the gallant princes, with chariots and flying dragons and armies and navies go after one little child who had strayed into a wood, and find her dead. That is the conception which Dickens’s artistic instinct was really aiming at when he finally condemned Little Nell to death, after keeping her, so to speak, so long with the rope round her neck."

Oscar Wilde famously joked: "One would need to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without bursting into tears -- of laughter." I don't think that's fair. So long foreshadowed, the death is quite affecting. And we don't even witness it. She dies before we get there: "For she was dead. There, upon her little bed, she lay at rest. The solemn stillness was no marvel now. She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death."

(Henry Eliot also pointed out that the village where the death takes place is said to be based on Tong, in Shropshire. Dickens, we are told, wrote this last part while staying as a guest at the Harp Hotel, in nearby Albrighton. "In the late nineteenth century, the popularity of The Old Curiosity Shop led increasing numbers of tourists to visit Tong until, in 1910, the local postmaster and verger, George Bowden, installed a 'grave of Little Nell' and began charging visitors a shilling to visit it. Bowden also created a false entry for Little Nell... in the parish burial register, but it was later exposed as a fake because he had used his own post-office ink.)


Here, Nell is being shown another of the many foreshadowings of death: "'There’s an old well there,' said the sexton, 'right underneath the belfry; a deep, dark, echoing well... By little and little the water fell away... What is it but a grave!... And which of our old folks, knowing all this, thought, as the spring subsided, of their own failing strength, and lessening life? Not one!'"


And here's another of Nell's favourite spots: "The child sat down, in this old, silent place, among the stark figures on the tombs -- they made it more quiet there, than elsewhere, to her fancy -- and gazing round with a feeling of awe, tempered with a calm delight, felt that now she was happy, and at rest"

Any discussion of the characters of The Old Curiosity Shop can't leave out the curious array of bit-parts that animate the text, especially in the first half. As Nell and her grandfather set out on their journey, they fall in with a veritable carnival of travelling entertainers. We meet Punch and Judy operators, and rub shoulders with a collection of fairground characters: The walking dogs; the giant; the woman with no arms or legs; the card magician with the weird eyes... Then there are the sideshows at the horse-races. Not to mention Mrs Jarley's waxworks. It's all delightfully grotesque.

Some feel that The Old Curiosity Shop is a poor title for the novel. We don't stay long in that locale, after all, so is this another example of Dickens's lack of forward planning? But Chesterton feels it is an appropriate title for a book that encompasses such a range of personages: "The comic characters in the book are all like images bought in an old curiosity shop. Quilp might be a gargoyle. He might be some sort of devilish door-knocker, dropped down and crawling about the pavement. The same applies to the sinister and really terrifying stiffness of Sally Brass. She is like some old staring figure cut out of wood. Sampson Brass, her brother, again is a grotesque in the same rather inhuman manner... About all this group of bad figures in The Old Curiosity Shop there is a sort of diablerie."

Michael Hollington also points out, with loads of examples, "how thoroughly and pervasively Dickens confuses the categories of persons and things. It is a kind of trademark of his imagination."


Still by the canal in Birmingham, and kind of Dickensian...

3.

The journey (which probably takes place in the 1820s) is really well depicted.

We begin with Nell's dream of escape -- not from poverty, but from coercion and fear, and the consequences of whatever (then) mysterious business her grandfather is mixed up in: "'Let us be beggars,' said the child passing an arm round his neck, 'I have no fear but we shall have enough, I am sure we shall. Let us walk through country places, and sleep in fields and under trees, and never think of money again, or anything that can make you sad, but rest at nights, and have the sun and wind upon our faces in the day, and thank God together! Let us never set foot in dark rooms or melancholy houses, any more, but wander up and down wherever we like to go; and when you are tired, you shall stop to rest in the pleasantest place that we can find, and I will go and beg for both.'"

So they make their way through London, through the poor areas, where "the shops sold goods that only poverty could buy"; through the areas where "faded gentility" struggled to make its last stand. They reach the domain of "pert cottages", and then fields. And finally "a hill, and on the top of that, the traveller might stop, and -- looking back at old Saint Paul’s looming through the smoke, its cross peeping above the cloud (if the day were clear), and glittering in the sun; and casting his eyes upon the Babel out of which it grew until he traced it down to the furthest outposts of the invading army of bricks and mortar whose station lay for the present nearly at his feet -- might feel at last that he was clear of London."



As they get closer to the "Black Country", their journey takes on hellish overtones. Some of the descriptions prefigure Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills, published some 20 years later:

"They had, for some time, been gradually approaching the place for which they were bound. The water had become thicker and dirtier; other barges, coming from it, passed them frequently; the paths of coal-ash and huts of staring brick, marked the vicinity of some great manufacturing town; while scattered streets and houses, and smoke from distant furnaces, indicated that they were already in the outskirts. Now, the clustered roofs, and piles of buildings, trembling with the working of engines, and dimly resounding with their shrieks and throbbings; the tall chimneys vomiting forth a black vapour, which hung in a dense ill-favoured cloud above the housetops and filled the air with gloom; the clank of hammers beating upon iron, the roar of busy streets and noisy crowds, gradually augmenting until all the various sounds blended into one and none was distinguishable for itself, announced the termination of their journey..."

Nell and her grandfather are even offered accommodation in a furnace room:

"In a large and lofty building, supported by pillars of iron, with great black apertures in the upper walls, open to the external air; echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces, mingled with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water, and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard elsewhere; in this gloomy place, moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires, and wielding great weapons, a faulty blow from any one of which must have crushed some workman’s skull, a number of men laboured like giants. Others, reposing upon heaps of coals or ashes, with their faces turned to the black vault above, slept or rested from their toil. Others again, opening the white-hot furnace-doors, cast fuel on the flames, which came rushing and roaring forth to meet it, and licked it up like oil. Others drew forth, with clashing noise, upon the ground, great sheets of glowing steel, emitting an insupportable heat, and a dull deep light like that which reddens in the eyes of savage beasts."


The likely route

They journey on, but it takes them a long time to escape this industrial area. And clearly, the people around them are as poor as they. When Nell begs for something to eat, she's told: "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?"

All of which throws into greater relief Dickens's satire of earlier, when Miss Monflathers, who runs the boarding school outside the town where Mrs Jarley's waxworks have temporarily halted, criticizes Nell for helping the show-woman to advertise her entertainment: "'Don't you feel how naughty it is of you,' resumed Miss Monflathers, 'to be a wax-work child, when you might have the proud consciousness of assisting, to the extent of your infant powers, the manufactures of your country; of improving your mind by the constant contemplation of the steam-engine; and of earning a comfortable and independent subsistence of from two-and-ninepence to three shillings per week? Don't you know that the harder you are at work, the happier you are?'"

This is the social realism that Dickens is famous for. But the journey of Nell and her grandfather is also -- as Nell herself acknowledges -- an allegory, reflecting Christian's journey in The Pilgrim's Progress. Henry Eliot points out that when Dickens extracted the text of The Old Curiosity Shop from Master Humphrey's Clock to be a standalone novel, he made very few changes. But he did add a passage to Chapter 1, in which the narrator comments that Nell "seemed to exist in a kind of allegory". And Dickens, says Eliot, came to see the whole story in an allegorical light, representing the fight between good and evil.

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Vintage Dickens, then. Annoying sometimes. But an addictive blend of comedy and pathos. Always larger than life, and thoroughly memorable. As I said, I'm moving straight on to more...