The Old Curiosity Shop was published in weekly installments in Dickens’s own journal Master Humphrey’s Clock from April 1840 to February 1841, and in a single volume by Chapman and Hall in December 1841. The death of Little Nell produced the most extraordinary public grief reaction of the nineteenth century: readers on both sides of the Atlantic wept openly; crowds gathered at the New York docks to ask passengers from the latest ship from England whether Nell had died; Daniel O’Connell, reading the installment on a train, burst into tears and threw the magazine out the window, crying, “He should not have killed her!”
The Novel
Little Nell lives with her grandfather in the Old Curiosity Shop, a London store filled with strange objects. Her grandfather is a compulsive gambler, secretly driven by the desire to provide for Nell, and he borrows money from Daniel Quilp — a grotesque, violent dwarf who is one of Dickens’s most terrifying creations. When Quilp seizes the shop, Nell and her grandfather flee into the English countryside, pursued by Quilp and befriended by various eccentrics. Nell’s health declines throughout the journey. She dies.
The sentimental reputation of the novel has damaged its critical standing — Oscar Wilde’s “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing” has been more influential than any serious criticism — but the novel contains some of Dickens’s finest writing outside the Nell chapters. Quilp is a masterpiece of comic horror: a sexually aggressive, physically violent imp of malice who terrifies everyone around him and enjoys every moment of it.
Daniel Quilp
Quilp is Dickens’s most physically grotesque villain — a dwarf of enormous strength and malice who beats his wife, terrorises his employees, and pursues Little Nell with a combination of financial and sexual menace that disturbed Victorian readers. He is also extravagantly alive: his energy, his wit, and his apparent indestructibility make him the novel’s most compelling character. The tension between Nell’s passive goodness and Quilp’s active evil is the novel’s structural principle — and most modern readers find Quilp more interesting than Nell.
The Sentimentality Question
Oscar Wilde’s famous quip has influenced readings of the novel for over a century. But the sentimentality charge, while not entirely unjust, ignores the extraordinary quality of much of the writing. The journey through the English countryside — with its industrial wastelands, its canal barges, its wandering showmen — contains some of Dickens’s most vivid descriptive prose. The novel’s structure anticipates the road narratives of later fiction.
Collecting The Old Curiosity Shop
First edition (Chapman and Hall, London, 1841): Published as part of Master Humphrey’s Clock, three volumes. Illustrated by George Cattermole and Hablot Knight Browne.
Approximate market values:
- Complete Master Humphrey’s Clock set (3 vols.), fine: $3,000–$8,000
- Very good: $1,000–$3,000
- Weekly parts in original wrappers (complete run): $5,000–$15,000
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Moderate appreciation.
Projected values (2026–2036): Parts issues should reach $10,000–$25,000.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did people really crowd the docks to learn Nell’s fate? The story is well-attested. Readers in New York called out to arriving ships: “Is Little Nell dead?” The public grief was genuine and unprecedented — a phenomenon that would not recur until the serialisation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin a decade later.
Is the shop real? The building traditionally identified as the “Old Curiosity Shop” still stands at 13-14 Portsmouth Street, London, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Its connection to Dickens is tenuous — the identification was made long after the novel’s publication — but it remains a tourist attraction.