The Old Curiosity Shop

I finished this book in the wee hours of Wednesday morning when I should have been either sleeping or plugging away at the 10 stories I still owed Anna for the supplement. I couldn't put it down.

But maybe because of the pressure I was under, or because I was aware that I would pay for having read that book when I was supposed to be working, I felt my irritation mount.

Nell was too good. The old man was too much of a dotard. Quilp was too evil....just grotesque figures swirling all around and this pretty little (child?) in the midst. I hated how Dickens kept calling her a child when by the end of the book she was at least 15.

Child?

And when the old man first beggared them with his gambling and then when he stole her money and made all those calls on her purse keeping the child he professed to love on such short commons, when he forced her through his behaviour to take flight from that comfortable job and that comfortable lady, and in doing so, forced her into the journey that ultimately killed her, I was aghast.

How could she love this man?

The famous death scene: I was left unmoved because it depended on you feeling compassion for the old dotard and I felt none. I kept thinking that if Nell hadn't been so careful of his life and let him die or be institutionalised it would have been better for her.

So it was lucky I didn't write this until after I'd had a few days to calm down and think about it.

A few days...

Taking Arnold and Maggot for a walk and thinking about it (Dickens, like Shakespeare, can never leave you unmoved) I realised that the whole point of the novel was that the old man didn't "deserve" her love. He wasn't good, or virtuous, or self sacrificing or anything. His love for her was a thin, grasping, clutching, evil thing.

And I don't even know if Dickens meant us to believe that he gambled for love of her. He gambled because it was a compulsion. He gambled because he had lost all shame or dignity and sunk to the level of a beast.

The point was that Nell loved him though she saw all this. She loved him despite what he was. Instead of for what he was.

And therein lay her magic. Her influence. Her pathos.

She loved him and kept loving him when he demonstrated over and over again that he didn't even deserve the barest affection. I guess it takes a large, large heart, even one in a frail, frail body, to love like that.

Of all the side stories, I loved the Dick Swiveller sub plot the most. It seemed that Dickens introduced him a certain way, all set for a certain course and then changed his mind. And he introduced Nell's brother Fred, and then changed his mind and kept him on the sidelines...even the confrontation with the mysterious old man, the granduncle, was left offstage.

I thawed towards him when he was kind to that little servant girl...when he saw how she was starved (both for food and company) and he bought her food and played with her. And then she saved his life. It was very very sweet, that. I found it more touching than the main story, I guess because Nell's grandfather simply disgusted me...but then, come to think of it, he was punished in the worst way possible. Her death. And her death at his door.

I wish they had resolved the parentage of that little servant girl because I was curious about it and he hinted darkly at her parentage. But never mind, I guess he was entitled to keep at least one of his secrets.

It seemed a little funny how he started the book from this stranger's point of view (and an accurate point of view, at that) and then he suddenly switched that off and never allowed that man back in the story again.

Kind of like Martin Chuzzlewit where he introduced various family members who went on to have nothing to do with the story, except for a few who showed up at the end for a wedding that never took place.

Quilp enraged me beyond belief....and I was glad he was dealt with so summarily...not even the dignity of a spectacular death - just a by the bye that didn't make any difference to anybody. Body fished out. Tortured wife now rich. Married again soon after.

Sometimes I shuddered on reading about him because I recognised in his misantrophic thoughts my own...I hate Quilp, because frankly my dear, I am Quilp. A hideous little dwarf, dancing around, making faces and hating everybody.