The Old Curiosity Shop

Little Nell Trent, a gentle girl not yet fourteen, lives with her grandfather among the dusty antiques of his curiosity shop in London. Secretly the old man is a gambler, losing everything in the hope of making her rich, and he falls into the power of Daniel Quilp, a grotesque and cruel dwarf who lends money. Ruined, Nell and her grandfather flee the city and wander the roads of England, meeting Punch-and-Judy men, a travelling waxwork show and strangers both kind and wicked, while Quilp and others try to track them down.

Charles Dickens published the novel in weekly parts in 1840 and 1841, and readers became so attached to Nell that its sales reportedly reached a hundred thousand copies a week. It also introduced two of his most delightful comic characters, the idle Dick Swiveller and the half-starved servant he names the Marchioness. Read Great Expectations, and see Dickens's life.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.

Published in instalments, books such as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol mixed comedy and social protest.