72 pages • 2 hours read
Charles DickensThe Old Curiosity Shop
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1840A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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City Versus Country
The sharp contrast between city and country underpins every scene in the novel. In the beginning, all the reader knows is the grimy and greedy center of London, where the titular Curiosity Shop stands. As Nell and her grandfather venture further out into the countryside, they find peace and freedom away from the commercialized trappings of their old home. If Daniel Quilp, Frederick Trent, or the Brasses appeared in one of the rural hamlets through which Nell and her grandfather pass, these characters would feel like pollutants in a comparatively tranquil, undisturbed landscape.
The manufacturing town where Nell and her grandfather stay the night with a furnace-tender is the first time in their journey that they return to any town larger than a small country village, and it is also the first place Nell succumbs to the exhaustion that will later claim her life. Here under a smoke-filled sky, Nell encounters scenes of urban suffering she never saw while living in London. She begs for alms from people who have nothing left to give even to their own children—children who, in the case of one family, have likely died from starvation. In the countryside, the families she meets are just as poor if not poorer than many people in London, but they have found happiness in the simplicity and earnestness of rural domestic life. The novel’s depictions of country and city therefore reflect its critique of the economy that developed in tandem with urbanization; the agrarian economy of the countryside is comparatively idyllic next to the pollution and unfettered greed of industrial capitalism.
Dickens’s depictions of the city and the country also illustrate two distinct attitudes towards the past, as evidenced by how the inhabitants of both regions treat their respective artifacts and ruins. Once Nell’s grandfather’s secret is out and Mr. Quilp takes over ownership of the Curiosity Shop, he promptly liquidates the entire inventory and plans to sell the building itself. He demonstrates a casual indifference to the past, reducing the antiques to the profit he can make from their sale—an act that feels almost disrespectful to any history associated with the items themselves. However, the ruined church and old parsonage houses in Nell’s final village are carefully preserved to the best of the residents’ abilities. The bachelor knows the history of every brick and every gravestone, and he shares that knowledge with Nell so that the site’s legacy can live on even further. Once Nell and her grandfather move in, the locals all contribute to restoring the parsonage houses into livable, quaint homes. Meanwhile, in the city, the Curiosity Shop is gutted and sold; its physical presence is lost to time, and Kit’s memory of it fades as the streets and storefronts constantly change.
The Toxicity of Greed
Read as a Christian allegory akin to Pilgrim’s Progress, The Old Curiosity Shop depicts greed as humanity’s “original sin.” Greed is what drives Nell and her grandfather from their London home—most obviously that of Quilp, who covets not only the family’s shop but also Nell herself, and whose lecherousness and greed merge when he claims Nell’s bed for his own. The grandfather’s greed also plays a significant role since it is his gambling debts that enable Quilp to take possession of the shop. Significantly, the grandfather is not a villainous figure like Quilp. His greed grows out of or attaches itself to a positive trait: his love for Nell and his desire to provide her with a better life. This does not make his greed any less damaging, however; in fact, it seems likely that the grandfather’s love for Nell simply lends additional urgency to his efforts to stockpile as much wealth as he can. In Chapter 3, he elaborates that he wants to leave her “a fortune” so she’ll never be in want.
Even these good (if misguided) intentions ultimately fall away, leaving the grandfather a twisted, paranoid, and deceitful version of himself. When he attempts to steal from Nell, the full extent of his corruption becomes clear; his greed has turned him against his own granddaughter. Symbolically, the episode implies that money and materialism poison the ties that hold people—particularly families—together and even threaten virtue itself, as embodied by Nell. These anxieties were especially acute in the 19th century due to the rise of industrial capitalism, which not only commodified new areas of life but also impinged on traditional family life. Working-class women, for example, became more likely to labor outside the home, reducing the amount of time they could devote to mothering and potentially exposing them to sexual temptations or predations.
This critique of capitalism is not explicit in The Old Curiosity Shop, but the novel does deal extensively with another of its effects. As Nell and her grandfather leave the manufacturing town, the novel draws frequent attention to the region’s flames and darkness; the overall effect is hellish and underscores the connection between greed and sin. What is perhaps most significant, however, is the extent to which industrialization has polluted the countryside; Chapter 45 offers a vivid description of the “coal-dust” and the “factory smoke” choking out the vegetation of gloomy suburbs. The passage describes a place where nothing can grow or even survive; it anticipates the laboring man’s account of his dead children and foreshadows the fatal effects the episode will have on Nell’s own health. Greed therefore not only corrupts but also kills.
Only the Good Die Young
Perhaps the most prevalent theme throughout the novel is that of early death and the lasting impression it makes upon the loved ones left behind. From the beginning of her journey, Nell feels drawn to churchyards and chooses them as places to rest. In the first graveyard she comes upon after leaving London, Nell finds the grave-marker of a young man who died when he was only 23 years old. During her brief conversation with the man’s widow, Nell has her first exposure to death as an occasion for grief. When Nell’s parents died, she was still an infant, and so she never truly knew them in life or grieved them at their time of death. The widow describes the stages of grief to Nell, recalling how she would sit at her husband’s grave and weep, often wishing to die herself. As she grew older, her visits started to feel like a duty and her grief lessened. The pain did not necessarily go away, but rather became something else—the widow expresses her hope that one day, she and her late husband will reunite in death. Death ultimately sows the seeds of hope and highlights love’s endurance over time.
In the manufacturing town, Nell begs for alms from a couple who have lost all three of their children. The father’s anger is palpable when he speaks of his losses; these deaths were preventable and are therefore occasions for outrage as well as grief. This sort of death especially intersects with the novel’s critique of money and materialism since it is the conditions of industrial capitalism that caused the unemployed man’s children to die of starvation, exposure, or disease. If death seems to claim the novel’s most innocent figures, this is perhaps one reason why; children, for example, are uniquely vulnerable to these deaths of want.
There is another explanation: that death transforms the bad into good. This could be a religious idea, and the novel does allude to traditional Christian beliefs about the existence of heaven and the purification of the soul. However, the novel also frames death as an occasion for those left behind to reform themselves or recommit to some good purpose. Virtuous people are virtuous not only in and of themselves, but also in the effects their deaths have on others: In Chapter 72, the narrator says that for every innocent soul “strike[n] down” by death, a “hundred virtues” are released upon the earth and “bless it.” For the bachelor, though, the deceased doesn’t even have to be particularly worthy for this process to occur; he studiously ignores any negative stories attached to those buried beside his church and chooses to believe that they were all deeply virtuous people. Though comical, his attitude suggests that if the dead seem disproportionately good, it may be because death “made” them good, turning their stories (real or not) to moral purposes.
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