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teresatumminello 's review for:
The Old Curiosity Shop
by Charles Dickens
Such is the difference between yesterday and to-day. We are all going to the play, or coming home from it.
I have a history with this story.
When I was a child, I had a book of Dickens stories that I thought were the real thing (I wasn’t happy when I found out they weren’t) and this one, with its depiction of Little Nell was my favorite. I suppose that’s not surprising, as it has all the elements of a fairy tale, especially the incarnation of repulsive evil, Quilp, who has the characteristics of a Rumpelstiltskin, terrorizing the put-upon (most of it in helping her beloved grandfather who has gotten them into their mess), epitome of goodness, Nell.
I moved on to “real” Dickens starting in high school, but I didn’t read this until I was around thirty years old. The book itself has a special place in my memory, illustrated by the 5 stars I originally gave it (as a pre-GR read). I bought it in London at a Blackwell’s and read it on the plane ride home. If I wasn’t enthralled with it this time, I certainly was then. Now, with more Dickens-experience, I can’t give it 5 stars. It's an early novel and was written on the fly, especially in its beginning, for weekly installments.
Dickens used one installment to vent his spleen at injustice that is still, of course, relevant today:
Let moralists and philosophers say what they may, it is very questionable whether a guilty man would have felt half as much misery that night, as Kit did, being innocent. The world, being in the constant commission of vast quantities of injustice, is a little too apt to comfort itself with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood and malice have a clear conscience, he cannot fail to be sustained under his trials…Whereas, the world would do well to reflect, that injustice is in itself, to every generous and properly constituted mind, an injury, of all others the most insufferable, the most torturing, and the most hard to bear; and that many clear consciences have gone to their account elsewhere, and many sound hearts have broken, because of this very reason; the knowledge of their own deserts only aggravating their sufferings, and rendering them the less endurable.
My reread was with the local Dickens Fellowship. Several of us met online this month and we'll have the opportunity to do so next month. We’ll finish discussing this work and find out what Dickens we’ll be reading together starting in September. I’m up for whichever is chosen.
I have a history with this story.
When I was a child, I had a book of Dickens stories that I thought were the real thing (I wasn’t happy when I found out they weren’t) and this one, with its depiction of Little Nell was my favorite. I suppose that’s not surprising, as it has all the elements of a fairy tale, especially the incarnation of repulsive evil, Quilp, who has the characteristics of a Rumpelstiltskin, terrorizing the put-upon (most of it in helping her beloved grandfather who has gotten them into their mess), epitome of goodness, Nell.
I moved on to “real” Dickens starting in high school, but I didn’t read this until I was around thirty years old. The book itself has a special place in my memory, illustrated by the 5 stars I originally gave it (as a pre-GR read). I bought it in London at a Blackwell’s and read it on the plane ride home. If I wasn’t enthralled with it this time, I certainly was then. Now, with more Dickens-experience, I can’t give it 5 stars. It's an early novel and was written on the fly, especially in its beginning, for weekly installments.
Dickens used one installment to vent his spleen at injustice that is still, of course, relevant today:
Let moralists and philosophers say what they may, it is very questionable whether a guilty man would have felt half as much misery that night, as Kit did, being innocent. The world, being in the constant commission of vast quantities of injustice, is a little too apt to comfort itself with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood and malice have a clear conscience, he cannot fail to be sustained under his trials…Whereas, the world would do well to reflect, that injustice is in itself, to every generous and properly constituted mind, an injury, of all others the most insufferable, the most torturing, and the most hard to bear; and that many clear consciences have gone to their account elsewhere, and many sound hearts have broken, because of this very reason; the knowledge of their own deserts only aggravating their sufferings, and rendering them the less endurable.
My reread was with the local Dickens Fellowship. Several of us met online this month and we'll have the opportunity to do so next month. We’ll finish discussing this work and find out what Dickens we’ll be reading together starting in September. I’m up for whichever is chosen.