The Old Curiosity Shop (English, paperback, Charles Dickens)

Giants, dwarfs, tricksters–here is the dark side of Dickens at its most powerful and bizarre.
The story of ‘Little Nell’ gripped the nation when it first appeared. Described as a ‘tragedy of sorrows’, it tells of Nell uprooted from a secure and innocent childhood and cast into a world where evil takes many shapes, the most fascinating of which is the stunted, lecherous Quilp. He is Nell’s tormentor and destroyer, and it is his demonic energy that dominates the book.

The Old Curiosity Shop is a novel of contrasts: youth and old age, beauty and deformity, freedom and restraint. Expansively comic, sentimentally tragic, it is sometimes fairytale, sometimes myth and often Victorian life at its most bleak–haunted by the figures that live in the shadows, some of the strongest of Dickens’s many creations.

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