In the Library
The Old Curiosity Shop
Charles Dickens, 1841
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 16 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 73
- Length
- Length 216k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
Night is generally my time for walking, says the old man who opens this book, and his walk ends at a shop crouched in a London corner among rusty armour and monkish carvings, where a child lies asleep as though washed up there by mistake. Her grandfather is gambling away everything they own, certain each night that he is winning it back for her. When a dwarf moneylender takes the shop, the two of them walk out of London and keep walking, past a race meeting, a travelling Punch show, a waxworks, into a black country of furnaces where a man who sits up watching a fire makes room for them beside it. It is also, absurdly, one of the funniest books Dickens wrote, with a drunken clerk christening a starved kitchen girl the Marchioness and teaching her cribbage in a cellar. He published it in weekly parts, and the letters came begging him to spare the child. Read the last chapters and you will understand the begging.