Old Curiosity Shop (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

The lascivious and repellent dwarf Quilp who dogs saintly Little Nell and her feckless grandfather is one of Dickens's most vividly nasty creations. Anton Lesser is wonderful in all the intricacies of this powerful fable a sound investment for winter evenings. --Rachel Redford, The Observer

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.