The Old Curiosity Shop

A bestseller that gripped the nation when it was first published, The Old Curiosity Shop is a novel of sharp contrasts: of life and death, youth and age, desire and innocence, humour and villainy.

For the character of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, Dickens drew on a tragedy in his own life, the death at the age of seventeen of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth. Five years later he wrote, 'the desire to be buried next her is as strong upon me now ... a...