A Review of Charles Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop”
A Victorian-Era Curiosity
If you’ll pardon the obvious pun, I’ve always been curious about British writer Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop for one reason. Back in the day, it was published in serial format in magazines and such, and when it came time for the final installment to be released in the U.S., Americans were said to storm the ports of shipyards demanding the crew of incoming ships from Britain tell them whether or not the main character, the angelic girl-child Nell, survived from an illness or not. (The idea among these Americans was that the crew would have read the story before the ship departed Britain for the States.) Basically, there is no other book quite like this one, for no other book — not even the final installment of the Harry Potter series — has been the subject of starting near riots over the conclusion of its tale. So, for that reason, I’ve been curious about the power of a book of fiction that could influence people emotionally.
It has taken me a few years since acquiring an old, battered Penguin Classics paperback from 1983 — obtained from a book sale in the federal government maybe five years ago when I paid about 50 cents for this novel — to actually read The Old Curiosity Shop from cover to cover. I’m usually no student of fiction written before 1900, so I will come out and say here that I’m not an expert on this sort of thing. I realize that the language used in the book was quite common at the time of its writing, and I did have trouble with some of it — not wanting to go into pages of discussion about what a particular word means in the footnotes section of the work. However, I found it to be quite quaint. Not perfect, but quaint.
The reason why this book isn’t perfect lies in how it was published originally — in serial form. Basically, whenever Dickens was backed into a corner that he didn’t like, he simply changed things mid-stream without needing to go back and revise the manuscript from the outset. Thus, we have a male narrator that disappears from the book about four chapters in because need of having the narrator around for all of the action didn’t suit the story — so off he went. (The disappearance is covered by Dickens in an appendix in a fashion that doesn’t make too much sense.) Same goes, I assume, for a marriage sub-plot surrounding Nell early on. It is mentioned, and then brushed aside for a different change of tactic.
However, it is an interesting tale in terms of its influence on today’s fiction — perhaps not directly, but as a part of Dickens’ oeuvre. First of all, the use of giving characters weird surnames such as Wackles and Swiveller is a trait that lives on in the more surrealist works of Jonathan Lethem. (And I know Lethem has read his Dickens because Lethem has written at least one essay on him.) Secondly, it’s interesting to read a book like The Old Curiosity Shop and compare it with contemporary fiction written in the style of Dickens, such as The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock. That the work of Dickens has survived as popular entertainment throughout time is amazing.
The thing that is remarkable is that the tale holds up although, for me, the ending had been ruined. (I knew what happened to Nell before reading the book.) However, there are all sorts of interesting subplots and diversions to keep the reader’s interest. But those diversions are all that the book has, as the characters are a mite one-dimensional. Nell is a 13-year-old girl who is a little too angelic to be believed as a character, and while the villainous Mr. Quilp is a lot of fun — and sorely missed in the book’s mid-section — he strikes the same note throughout. That all said, I suppose that is where the state of English literature was at the time of its writing. Characters were either pure good or pure evil with no shades of in-betweenness that would come to characterize the fiction of, say, John Steinbeck.
At the end of the day, I’m not sure what to say about The Old Curiosity Shop. I’m not sure why it is named as such when said shop only is a character, per se, for only the very beginning of the book. I think I enjoyed it, but I also felt that there was some dead weight and the novel could have been better off with some pruning. Perhaps I might have enjoyed it more in a more-easy-to-digest-in-English version? I don’t know. I was able to follow it reasonably enough, but thought that there were some passages where Dickens was just prattling on either to be clever or to write to the conditions that publishing works on a steady deadline necessitated. And Dickens can sometimes be a sloppy writer, for which publishing the works as originals in complete book form all at once may have done him some good. It may have been easier to edit such works for one.
Still, I’m glad that I read this book because, well, it sated my curiosity. It did give me insight into popular fiction of the 19th Century, a subject in which I am sorely lacking (if only I made English my minor in university and not Film Studies). Seeing as though that The Old Curiosity Shop is an early novel of Dickens, it’s probably as good of an entry point as any into his works. And it is an interesting work if only for seeing an author conjure up a work of fiction that generally reads well as he was making it up as he went along with no do overs. There is stuff here for the more modern reader, but the mystery remains: why did people get so won over by an angelic character’s fate some 200 years ago? The answer still baffles me, and I can now say I’ve read the thing.
Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop was first published in serial format between 1840 and 1841.
Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands’ icon below) and share it with your followers.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
