The old curiosity shop

Charles John Huffham, DICKENS (1812-1870), son of a clerk in the Navy pays office. His father was imprisoned for debt and this was followed by a period of intense misery which deeply affected him. When he was 12 year old worked in a blacking warehouse. This painful period inspired much of his fiction. Then he worked as an office boy, studied shorthand and became reporter of debates in the Commons for the "Morning Chronicle", collaborating later with other newspapers. These attracted much attention and led to an approach from Chapman and Hall which resulted in the creation of Mr. Pickwick, and the publication in twenty monthly numbers of "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club". Dickens captured the popular imagination as no other novelist had done and was admired by contemporaries as varied as Queen Victoria and Dostoevsky. Later criticism has tended to praise the complexity of the sombre late works at the expense of the high spirited humour and genius for caricature.
"The Old Curiosity Shop" (1841). Nell Trent lives in an old curiosity shop kept by her grandfather, who has borrowed money from Daniel Quilp, a hideous dwarf and a monster of iniquity, and this money he secretly expends in gambling, in the hope of retrieving his fortunes, for Little Nells sake. Quilp discovers where the money has gone and seizes the shop. The old man and the child flee and wander about the country. The remedy to this suffering comes, but too much late.

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