Let’s get the spoiler out of the way at once:

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

Or, if you prefer the longer version,

“One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears—of laughter.”

No matter how you word it, that’s a challenge if I ever heard one.

If you take up the challenge, pay attention to one thing: it is not “death scene” but simply “death”. Although Nell does eventually get a death scene, it is very much an afterthought. The heartbreaks and tearjerkers involve the other characters’ reactions to her death.

The Old Curiosity Shop is not likely to be anyone’s favorite Dickens novel. (Then again, there exist people who profess to admire Mansfield Park, so perhaps I am over-hasty.) But it’s got, in the person of Dick Swiveller, the second-best supporting character in all of Dickens. That alone makes up for any number of sins.

“The Child”

. . . and that’s just the illustration captions. Throughout the book, Nell Trent is described as a child. In fact my first impression was that you could count on your fingers the number of times the author, in his own voice, calls her Nell or Nelly instead of “the child”. But when I—which is to say, my text editor—counted, this turned out to be an exaggeration.

In Chapter Seven we learn that Nell is “nearly fourteen”, making her exactly the age of Juliet. (Contemporary readers may not have realized this, as the role was invariably played by actresses in their forties.) In the next few chapters, two different characters will talk about marrying Nell in a few years’ time; a third is accused—by his mother, who ought to know—of being in love with her. Since the narrative covers at least half a year, she must have turned fourteen by book’s end.

Now, consider “Let us be beggars”. Charles Dickens knew perfectly well that children much younger than Nell, both boys and girls, were working seventy-plus-hour weeks in mines, factories or domestic service. But Nell is just far enough up the social scale that actively looking for work is, in the most literal way, unthinkable. When she does work for money, it is always because some kind-hearted individual—there are surprisingly many of them—spontaneously creates a job for her.

If you stop and pay attention to what Nell actually does, you will notice that she is far less passive than the author would have us believe. She is not a helpless dependent; during most of the book, she is the sole support of her grandfather, a compulsive gambler whose mind wanders ever further from reality.

What could the child do with the knowledge she had, but give him every penny that came into her hands, lest he should be tempted on to rob their benefactress? If she told the truth (so thought the child) he would be treated as a madman; if she did not supply him with money he would supply himself; supplying him, she fed the fire that burnt him up and put him perhaps beyond recovery.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to see much of Nell as a fully realized character. The Preface says forthrightly that the author’s intention was to:

surround the lonely figure of the child with grotesque and wild, but not impossible, companions, and to gather about her innocent face and pure inten­tions, associates as strange and uncongenial . . .

And there, in a nutshell, is the problem with The Old Curiosity Shop. It isn’t simply a novel without a hero, like the best-known work of That Other Victorian Author. It’s a novel without a heroine, without an antihero, without a protagonist—without any center to it at all, making it a collection of lean-tos without anything for them to lean to.

Illustrations

Even if you didn’t know, it would be obvious that The Old Curiosity Shop originally appeared serially—because the number of illustrations doesn’t drop off as the book progresses. There may even be more of them in later chapters.

Since the installments came out weekly rather than monthly, everyone had to work fast; Dickens used four separate illustrators. As listed by the ever-useful Victorian Web:

The collaborative team (or “Clock Works” as Dickens dubbed it) consisted of Samuel Williams (1788–1853) and Daniel Maclise (1807–1870) supporting the chief illustrators, George Cattermole (1800–1868) and Phiz.

“Phiz” is Hablot Knight Browne (1815–1882) who ended up working on ten of Dickens’s novels.

Publication

The Old Curiosity Shop was originally published in the periodical Master Humphrey’s Clock, starting in the fourth issue and filling up most of the first two volumes. In fact it might be more accurate to say that it was published as the periodical Master Humphrey’s Clock: after the first couple of months, each issue consisted solely of an installment of the current novel.

As soon as the serial publication was done, the novel was reissued as a free­standing book. The first edition didn’t even bother to change the pagination; a few times in early chapters the author had to dash off new material to make it come out even. The preface (below) explains the whole thing more clearly.

The chapters have no titles. Instead, every recto (odd-numbered) page has a headnote. I’ve retained these for the ebook, keeping them as close as practicable to their original location, except where a note obviously refers to a chapter that starts at mid-page.

Formalities

This etext is based on the undated Chapman & Hall edition. Apparent errors, especially punctuation oddities, were checked against the 1841 first edition and the 1876 edition, both also from Chapman & Hall.

Page numbers ending in “a” were printed as unpaginated plates (blank on the back) facing a numbered page. The ones in [brackets] have been moved to the nearest paragraph break.

Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups and are listed again at the bottom of each file. The word “invisible” means that the letter or punctuation mark is missing, but there is an appropriately sized blank space.

Language: The author consistently says “resource” where today “recourse” is normal, as in “he had no resource but . . .” The spelling “an’t” is used consistently.