The Old Curiosity Shop

Little Nell Trent lives above her grandfather's shop of antiques and curiosities in London, unaware that the old man's secret gambling, meant to secure her a future, has left them entirely at the mercy of the sinister, dwarfish moneylender Daniel Quilp. When Quilp seizes the shop, Nell and her grandfather flee into the English countryside on foot, wandering from town to town while Quilp's pursuit — and her grandfather's own inability to stop gambling even in flight — slowly closes in behind them. Dickens serialized the novel week by week with no fixed ending in mind, and its slow, deliberate approach toward Nell's fate became, by its final installments, one of the most anticipated events in Victorian publishing, with crowds reportedly meeting the ship carrying the last number into New York harbor to learn how it ended.

The Old Curiosity Shop was serialized in Dickens's own weekly Master Humphrey's Clock from April 1840 to February 1841 and published in book form the same year.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.