The Old Curiosity Shop

Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop was published as a serial novel between 1840 and 1841, appearing weekly in his own literary magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock. The magazine had not been doing well, and Dickens began writing the novel in an effort to save the publication. Dickens originally intended the narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop to be the same Master Humphrey who narrated the magazine’s other stories; the protagonist, Little Nell Trent, previously appeared in one of these. A work of historical fiction, The Old Curiosity Shop also belongs to the Victorian era genre of sentimental literature. The edition used for this study guide is the Reader’s Digest “World’s Best Reading” published in 1988, containing the complete original text from 1841 and featuring illustrations by Hablot K. Browne, George Cattermole, and others. There is also an open-access edition available through Project Gutenberg.

Dickens’s literary contemporaries had varying responses to the novel’s conclusion; the most famous was Oscar Wilde’s quip that “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughter” (Leverson, Ada, and Wilde, Oscar. Letters to the Sphinx.