The Old Curiosity Shop ★★★★☆

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Title: The Old Curiosity Shop
Series: ----------
Author: Charles Dickens
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Classic
Pages: 632
Format: Digital Edition

Synopsis:

Little Nell's Grandfather runs a Curiosity Shop and everyone, including her older brother and a money lending dwarf, think he is rich as Croessus. Unfortunately, he's also a secret gambler and ends up spending every penny they have on gaming, trying to win big so Nell can live in luxury for the rest of her life.

The help, a young man by the name of Kit, is dismissed, the brother plots to marry Nell to his friend because he is still convinced the Grandfather is rich (just miserly) and the dwarf causes trouble because of his evil nature.

Nell and Grandfather take to the road and meet various characters, some good, some bad and are saved from privation and death by working at a little church in some tiny town. The Grandfather's younger brother returns from faraway parts, very well off and begins searching for his brother and Grand-niece.

The dwarf plots rot and ruin for everyone and Kit finds a kindly couple to work for and settles down pretty well. Everyone caroums off of each other and does the thing called life and at the end Nell dies, Kit marries happily, Nell's brother is killed in France by bad company and the dwarf drowns and his poor wife finally marries happily.

My Thoughts:

This felt like Dickens used Nell as the white ball in a game of billiards. It is the focus of each player but what it does is defined by how it interacts with all the other billiards. Nobody cares about the white ball very much. In the same way Nell 's importance to this story was more how she drove interactions with the other characters.

I liked all the various stories. They were great Dickens' stories but the ties that bound everything together felt a bit weak. I almost wished that there had been more of the Marchioness (another young girl who ends up marrying and helping reform another side character) and not so much Nell. Nell was not a strong person and as such didn't have the personality to drive this story forward.

Don't get me wrong, this was still a good, fun, interesting story. But it didn't have quite that “pop” that I found in some of my other reads by Dickens. Could also be that coming after the Pickwick Papers didn't do this any favors for me either.

Overall, I enjoyed this but didn't find much to say about it and nothing made me sit up and go “Awesomesauce”. Definitely on the lower end of the Dickens Ladder.

★★★★☆

• Sentenced to Prism (2000 Review)