Curiosity about the Shop

Over the last several months I have been reading Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop.  Dickens novels are nicely structured to be read slowly over time--after all, that is how they were originally published.  This particular novel has long been on my list of books I wanted to read because of Oscar Wilde's remark about it: "One would have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing."  I have long wondered about that remark--was the death of little Nell supposed to be funny or was Wilde making a remark about Dickens' writing?  Presumably the latter, but without reading the book, it was impossible to be sure.  Dickens would also be fully capable of writing a death scene that was sad and funny all at once.

The other famous Little Nell story was of a crowd of people in America meeting a ship coming from England and screaming out to the sailors to ask if Little Nell had died.

Clearly Little Nell is an important person.  So, I finally read the book.

Wilde was making an observation of Dickens at his overwrought best--that scene is so over-the-top, it is impossible not to laugh at it.

But, much to my surprise, Little Nell was not  terribly interesting character.  Quilp, the villain, is much more curious--a purely malevolent character.  And, in one of those things which dates this book--Quilp, the evil Daniel Quilp, is a dwarf, and his stature is clearly designed to amplify the horror of his soul.  Imagine someone writing a book with an evil dwarf in it today.

The other big surprise, the shop in the title is irrelevant to the story--sure there is a shop, but it is abandoned shortly after the novel starts, never to reappear.  I'd have a hard time coming up with a more misleading title of any novel than this one.

So, the evaluation of the book:  It's Dickens,  It is exactly what one would expect from Dickens.  Charming with lots of caricatures--but caricatures in the best sense of the word--very clever portraits in which the caricatures become perfect illustrations of character types.  Dickens stands alone among novelists--there is really nobody like him.  And one thing about him that really intrigues me--it is really hard to rank his books in order of quality--there is a uniform goodness throughout his work.  His shorter novels get assigned more often in school, but I suspect that is less an evaluation of relative merits and more a desire to assign a shorter book.  English Lit types like to talk about Early Dickens and Late Dickens, with the later books being the more weighty (at least I think that is what they mean), but honestly, I have a hard time seeing all that much of a difference--even in Late Dickens there are amusing characters and happy endings.

I am getting close to the end of Dickens, though.  I only have four of his novels left unread (Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit).  Fortunately, with Dickens, I look forward to starting all over again once I finish all his novels for the first time.  (I also haven't read much of his shorter work and his non-fiction, but I have not heard much about those things, so I am not sure how good they are.)