The Old Curiosity Shop - Charles Dickens

[Cal Trask]

“In the majority of cases, conscience is an elastic and very flexible article.” Charles Dickens, 1840

Even though I’m a keen reader I have never read anything by Charles Dickens. Leeds Central Library has most of Dickens books so I was a bit spoilt for choice. I plumped for TOCS just on the title. As good a reason as any when faced with a massive canon of novels by the same author to choose from.

Plotwise it tells the tale of little Nell Trent who, with her Granfather, live and work in the old curiosity shop, but for reasons explained in the plot are exiled from their home and they travel the byways of the countryside outside London by foot encountering all kinds of weird and wonderful characters who are both friendly and not so friendly. The narrative is split between reporting on the fates of Nell and her Grandfather and the murky dealings back in London Town of Sampson and Sally Brass (attorneys at law), Frederick Trent (Nells older brother) and his rakish drunkard of a friend, the excellently named Dick Swiveller. But at the polar opposite of Nell’s angelic innocence and well meaning there is Daniel Quilip. Who may well be the best baddie I have ever read of in a novel. To sum Quilip up I would describe him as dispicable. Quilip is the height of nastiness and ugliness and in one chapter delivers to a crying toddler, in the hope that it would stop the infants racket, one of the most devastatingly funny lines that I have ever read in any book. Along with Nell we have Christopher ‘Kit’ Nubbles who is a beacon of honesty and good will.

As a fan of writers who write very economical powerful sentences Dickens is as far away from what I usually want from a book as you can imagine. Many readers say they can’t get past the first ten pages of Dickens books because of his grand style (using a lot of words when a few will do) but I found that once I’d got used to his style and register it made for very easy reading, and was a great way of setting a scene in my imagination as the reader. Especially in a scene where Nell and her Grandfather are leaving London in that strange twilight time between evening and the break of day, which may be two of the greatest paragraphs of descriptive writing I have ever read.

The current Mrs. Trask has read some of Dickens books and when I started this she said that Dickens stories held her imagination the way books did when she was a little kid, even though they deal with very adult emotions like love, greed, empathy, dishonesty etc. I totally agree with this statement (I have a tendancy to agree with Mrs. T on most things as I enjoy my state of aliveness).

To conclude I thoroughly enjoyed TOCS and will read other Dickens novels. I think what can scare people with Dickens, Austen, Bronte etc. is that its seen as highbrow literature for serious scholars, but in actual fact as with Shakespeare these stories were the domain of the basically educated working classes. It was later on in history that the higher-ups in Britain claimed literature and theatre as theirs and theirs only. The Old Curiosity Shop is a great novel and it seems to me that as a writer Dickens had a very sharp wit and a bottomless well of understanding when it came to human nature. 10/10