The Old Curiosity Shop (Oxford World's Classics)

by Charles Dickens (Author), ElizabethM.Brennan (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.24

  '...holding her solitary way among a crowd of wild, grotesque companions; the only pure, fresh, youthful object in the throng.' 'Little Nell' cares for her grandfather in the gloomy surroundings of his curiosity shop. Reduced to poverty the pair flee London, pursued by the grotesque and vindictive Quilp. In a bizarre and shifting kaleidoscope of events and characters the story reaches its tragic climax, an ending that famously devastated the novel's earliest readers. Dickens blends naturalistic and allegorical styles to encompass both the actual blight of Victorian industrialization and textual echoes of Bunyan, the Romantic poets, Shakespeare, pantomine and Jacobean tragedy. Contrasting youth and old age, beauty and deformity, innocence and cynicism, The Old Curiosity Shop is a compelling mixture of humour and brooding meance. This edition uses the Clarendon text, the definitive edition of the novels of Charles Dickens, and includes the original illustrations.

• Used

  Paperback
  1974

  $3.24

• Used

  Hardcover
  1951

  $4.18

  'I really think I have done it ingeniously and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction.' So wrote Dickens of David Copperfield (1850), the novel he called his 'favourite child'. Through his hero Dickens draws openly on his own life, as David Copperfield recalls his experiences from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth and Uriah Heep are among the characters who focus the hero's sexual and emotional drives, and Mr Micawber, a portrait of Dickens's own father, evokes the mixture of love, nostalgia and guilt that, put together, make this Dickens's most quoted and best-loved novel.

• New

  Paperback
  1995

  $7.03

  With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Preston, University of Nottingham. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) and George Cruickshank. The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), with its combination of the sentimental, the grotesque and the socially concerned, and its story of pursuit and courage, which sets the downtrodden and the plucky against the malevolent and the villainous, was an immediate popular success. Little Nell quickly became one of Dickens' most celebrated characters, who so captured the imagination of his readers that while the novel was being serialised, many of them wrote to him about her fate. Dickens was conscious of the 'many friends' the novel had won for him, and 'the many hearts it turned to me when they were full of private sorrow', and it remains one of the most familiar and well-loved of his works.