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Charles Dickens
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The book of the girl who plagued the imagination of Charles Dickens, who "followed him about everywhere". The girl was Little Nell
and Little Nell became one of his best-known characters...(scroll down)
DESCRIPTION
The Old Curiosity Shop, originally published between 1840 and 1841, came from an idea of
writing a short story about a young girl forced to make her way through a world of uncaring
adults. She grew into Little Nell.
The villain in the book is Daniel Quilp, one of Dickens's most
frightening villians. Quip was a moneyleAnder, a man who existed solely to make others suffer and to watch with glee their
downfall. (My note: A man as alive today as he ever was. Britain today is a kind of halfway-home to what Dickens witnessed in Victorian Britain and Quilp is alive and well in modern Britain). He is truly sinister. He lusts after Little Nell who is still a child and
beats his timid, downtrodden wife. Dickens's disgust for the paedophiliac Wifebeating
character is evident throughout the book. The character was straight out of the
fairy stories of the Brothers Grimm. It was extereme but the extremity of it made him disgustingly alive. Quilp is as
obviously evil as evil can be.
Little Nell and her terrorized grandfather flee from the clutches of cruelty and there is
a lot of humour in their journey with the people they encounter. But Nells health
begins to fail and his readers begin to realise that he doesn't have
a happy ending in mind. Numerous letters begged Dickens to let Little Nell live. But Dickens saw the character as someone so perfectly good she could't live, or survive, in this world. With a heavy heart he killed her off.
By the end of 1840, the author was as famous in the USA as he was in Britain. As the latest edition came out, copies were hastened onto a ship for New York. It's an often-quoted story
that when the chapter in which Little Nell's fate was decided was due to arrive,
New York's harbour was thronged with anxious readers. As the ship entered the port those on the ground were reported to have called up to those on board, "Is Little Nell alive?" and, when they heard that she had died, to have wept.
Sourced & abbreviated from the Holy Grail of Dickens Books - Charles Dickens [Hardcover] by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley
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