Is it worth sticking with The Old Curiosity Shop?

[Guest]

I've been plowing through The Old Curiosty Shop for a fortnight. I'm still only 200 pages in and I'm sorry to say that it's something of a chore; dreadfully rambling, low-powered, half-bakedand even rather repetitive. There are 300 pages still to go.

Does it improve?

I read Barnaby Rudge in the summer and though the first half is rather light, the second - focussing on the 1780 Gordon Riots - is absolutely gripping, a stupendous piece of writing. TOCShop's intrinsic rewards do seem scant. Should I persist?

[Nick Armstrong]

I recall the feeling! For around 8 years I had a commute including a 50 minute train journey, I usually had a seat, and I used the time to read just about all CD's books. I have to say (not wanting to be discouraging) that Old Curiosity Shop I found to be the weakest of all. Still some great stuff in there, so I would press on - but the central character, Little Nell, is possibly his most tedious creation (remember Oscar Wilde's quote about needing a heart of stone to read of her fate without laughing!).

The only other really duff writing from Dickens I recall is contained in the American sections of Martin Chuzzlewit (featuring the eponymous hero and a dud creation called Mark Tapley)

Which is a pity, because that novel and so many of the others are just about the best things I've ever read. I'm a huge Dickens fan. Far from being 'heavy', what got me was the humour - laugh out loud comic brilliance which would have me chuckling on the train like a loon. Chuzzlewit, Dombey, Little Dorrit, Bleak House (dazzling) and the old favourites Copperfield and Expectations...

But yes, TOCS is a bit of a chore. I'd finish it - but hasten on to one of the others afterwards.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I remember trying to read Bleak House when I was at school, just to look clever. I gave up. I tried again, when, as a student I had a job working in a sweet factory (packing 8 million tubes of Love Hearts) on a night shift. Again, it eluded me, but 10 years later, I was really determined to stick with it, and it was well worth the effort. I hope you find this to be the case with The Old Curiosity Shop.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Short answer: yes.

I agree with Caliban in thinking TOCS to be Dickens' weakest novel. It rehashes elements from the superior Nicholas Nickleby but without the sharp characterization of that novel and with a greater infestation of sentimentality. But there are compensations: Quilp is a gift to actors, Dick Swiveller (you couldn't get away with it nowadays!) turns into a more rounded, fuller character, especially under the influence of the Marchioness (Dickens' best female character aside from Betsy Trotwood: neither sentimentally "pure" nor vicious) and the donkey is good.

But there are so many much better works by Dickens! If you're really not enjoying the experience of OCS, I'd suggest you move on: it'll still be there for you if you decide to try again later!

Best Wishes.

[mercia]

Dickens' best female character

I like Flora Finching
and Mrs Gamp

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Me, too ... but I prefer Flora's Aunt!

[aeolium]

I agree with fhg - possibly Dickens' weakest novel (with Barnaby Rudge), but still worth reading. Apart from the characters of Quilp, Swiveller and the Marchioness (who reminds me a bit of the dollmaker Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend), there are the Brasses, and some wonderful episodes including the return of Quilp 'from the dead' and the meeting of Sampson Brass with Quilp in the latter's retreat by the wharves.

I think the problem with Nell is to consider her as a real, human character, when Dickens has created something that is more mythopoeic than human. Though she works to keep her and her grandfather alive, and to pay for his gambling, there is no evidence of the effect of the work on her. She is early on referred to as a child, although she is 14 (not a child in those times) and the object of Quilp's attentions. After her death, her grandfather says "I often tried to track the way she had gone, but her small footstep left no print upon the dewy ground to guide me." He looks at her "as if she were a spirit" - which, effectively, she is. The Marchioness is the obverse of Nell, about the same age but doing all the dirty housework that Nell is never mentioned doing, a real person forced to be responsible before her time. The Marchioness lives, and Nell dies, though they are both characters who have not been allowed to have a proper childhood (Nell is a forerunner of Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son) - like Dickens himself with his blacking-factory experience.

[Nick Armstrong]

Yes fhg! I should have added Nickleby after Copperfield and Expectations as a favourite which is also a masterpiece!

Interesting, aeolium, about Nell being almost an abstraction.

And...

Mrs Gamp

Chuzzlewit Ch. 25: Mrs Gamp

...."was by this time in the doorway, curtseying to Mrs. Mould. At the same moment a peculiar fragrance was borne upon the breeze, as if a passing fairy had hiccoughed, and had previously been to a wine-vaults."



(I have on my iPod the audiobook version of Chuzzlewit, a free 60 odd hours' worth unabridged, an offer from audible.co.uk... read by a character actor from the 70 and 80s called George Hagan - fantastic on car drives !)

[vinteuil]

I remember as an undergraduate having to yomp through acres of Dickens - I came to enjoy the very early works - Pickwick Papers - and appreciate very much his later stuff - Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend - but in the end came to prefer Thackeray...

If you have limited time - we all have limited time - praps it's wiser to scoff the best of various writers - so yes, go ahead and wallow in some glorious Dickens (but don't worry too much about his lesser works) - and then have time to plunge into even greater writers - Stendhal - Balzac - Flaubert - Fielding - Richardson - Sterne - George Eliot -and (dare I say) Proust...

[agingjb]

Knowing that I have a tendency to give up before half way on "classics" (or whatever you call famous books written before 1900), I have taken to reading the last third or quarter of some of those books I got stuck on..

[Anna]

I too gave up on TOCS when I read it as a teenager. I've just started reading Great Expectations, not a conscious choice, I just picked it up in a charity shop. Immediately I'm hooked but the image of Magwitch from the David Lean film did flash before my eyes. I think they had a few quite a few more Dickens so I'll go back on Monday and see if they have Bleak House, which is brilliant. I confess I haven't read Dickens since my early 20s and the last one, which I never finished, cannot remember why, was Our Mutual Friend.

[Nick Armstrong]

Anna, I loved Mutual Friend.

If pushed to say which was my favourite, I think I would say Bleak House. It has it all. But Great Expectations will be great autumn reading

[hackneyvi]

I have to say (not wanting to be discouraging) that Old Curiosity Shop I found to be the weakest of all. Still some great stuff in there ... I'm a huge Dickens fan. Far from being 'heavy', what got me was the humour - laugh out loud comic brilliance which would have me chuckling on the train like a loon.

Knowing that I have a tendency to give up before half way on "classics" (or whatever you call famous books written before 1900), I have taken to reading the last third or quarter of some of those books I got stuck on..

I agree with Caliban in thinking TOCS to be Dickens' weakest novel ... But there are compensations:

But there are so many much better works by Dickens! If you're really not enjoying the experience of OCS, I'd suggest you move on: it'll still be there for you if you decide to try again later!

I too gave up on TOCS when I read it as a teenager. I've just started reading Great Expectations, not a conscious choice, I just picked it up in a charity shop. Immediately I'm hooked ...

We seem to be pretty much in agreement on TOCS. It has merits - Quilp's wife's tea party, Dick Swiveller's fistfight with Quilp and the gymnastic boy doing headstands round the counting house. But there's just too little of the good stuff. I rarely abandon a book once I've got past the first page and TOCS intrigues me because of the prominence of its weaknesses; it allows me to share a little more in sympathy with readers who disparage or neglect him (though not to the extent that I don't think he's magnificent and can be uproariously funny and thrilling - Barnaby Rudge quite as much as any of the others that I've read.) I'll finish TOCS a chapter or so at a time as a form of study. I can't make TOCS my main nightly reading though; does anyone else find that books which bore you end up keeping you awake?

I agree with fhg - possibly Dickens' weakest novel (with Barnaby Rudge), but still worth reading ... I think the problem with Nell is to consider her as a real, human character, when Dickens has created something that is more mythopoeic than human.

I agree in turn with you, aeolium. For Nell to be tolerable as a character, we'd have to see much less of her but she's as nebulous and uncharacteristic as the angel I know she becomes (peeped ahead to the book's last plate).

I remember as an undergraduate having to yomp through acres of Dickens - ... but in the end came to prefer Thackeray...

If you have limited time - we all have limited time - praps it's wiser to scoff the best of various writers - so yes, go ahead and wallow in some glorious Dickens (but don't worry too much about his lesser works) - and then have time to plunge into even greater writers - Stendhal - Balzac - Flaubert - Fielding - Richardson - Sterne - George Eliot -and (dare I say) Proust...

I picked up Trollope's autobiography a while ago; you and he are in agreement about Thackeray, vinteuil. I admire Balzac greatly (The Black Sheep converted me and Uncle Pons is my favourite of those I've read) but haven't read any of the other authors you list. I wound up bringing home Colm Toibin's The Story of the Night and Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories. Somehow, I'd always assumed that Tolstoy was a worthy, dry stick when, indeed, looking a little around his life, he seems to have been an extraordinary, revolutionary man. I hope to enjoy the Tolstoy because the book that truly fascinated me today was Resurrection but it felt too 'special' to start with.

[Mandryka]

You have one major reason for sticking with TOCS, hackneyvi and its name is Quilp.

Quilp is Dickens' most dynamic and enterprising villain and I have a sneaking suspicion that he was Dickens' own (secret) favourite of all the characters he created. Those with long memories may recall the scene in Wolf Mankowitzi's 1976 series Dickens Of London, where CD (as brilliantly played by Roy Dotrice) goes into a practically orgasmic paroxysm of delight while thinking up wicked things for Quilp to do. Elsewhere, we have the delights of the Quilp/Brass relationship (and the strong suggestion that Quilp is Sally Brass's lover and - possibly - the Marchioness's father)....though, I'll admit, that when DQ isn't around, the novel drops several gears and could never be considered one of CD's best (though it certainly was during his lifetime). I think the book gets by on atmosphere a lot of the time and it's enhanced if your copy features Phiz's illustrations (I particularly like the one of Little Nell's Grandfather playing cards with some rough-looking types).


My favourite Dickens is Our Mutual Friend.....a flawed work, maybe, but full of vivid characters and incidents. The fact that Henry James hated it is a recommendation in my eyes, though I think CD missed a trick in going for an optimistic ending and Mr. Boffin's story would have been stronger if he actually had become corruptd by wealth, rather than just pretending to be.

[Nick Armstrong]

even greater writers - Stendhal - Balzac - Flaubert - Fielding - Richardson - Sterne - George Eliot -and (dare I say) Proust...

Tendentious, vinsanto, wery tendentious....