The Old Curiosity Shop

The Old Curiosity Shop is the fourth novel by the English writer Charles Dickens, published in book form in 1841 after appearing in instalments.

It was written for Master Humphrey's Clock, the weekly miscellany Dickens was then editing, which is one reason the book wanders as it does: the grandfather and his granddaughter leave London and drift through the industrial Midlands, through a travelling waxworks and a racecourse, and past a series of people whose kindness and cruelty arrive with equal suddenness. Nell is the good child of Victorian literature, of no particular age and almost no flaws, and Dickens gives her a companion in Kit, the honest boy she has been teaching to write. Set against them are the dwarf Quilp, whose delight in other people's ruinings is one of the most energetic creations of the novels of that decade, and the lawyer Brass with his sister and his clerk Dick Swiveller, where the book is funniest and hardest to predict. The serial was so popular in America that New York readers are said to have mobbed the docks for the ship carrying the instalments, and Queen Victoria read the novel in 1841 and called it interesting and cleverly written.