The Old Curiosity Shop (released in 1841), written by Charles Dickens

The Old Curiosity Shop was a novel released in serial form between 1840, and 1841, in Dickens's weekly serial called "Master Humphrey's Clock". In this serial, Dickens had also published another novel, called "Barnaby Rudge", and in addition to these 2 novels, there were short stories also published in the serial. This compilation was however something that was later abandoned by Dickens and now the novels and stories are also published separately. The serial was constructed such that Master Humphrey was describing the stories to a group of friends; however, this did not really work and was abandoned after only a couple of versions of the serial.
Out of the various stories by Dickens, the plot of this story was said to be weaker than the plot of his other stories, however, the level of feelings that the reader had for the main character (the girl called Nell in the story was unprecedented) and people felt really bad when the ending was disclosed.



The story is essentially that of Nell, a 14 year old girl, very good, but who meets all sorts of good and bad people in life, and the way her life changes as a result of meeting these people. She stays with her grandfather, who runs a small shop, a curiosity shop. Her grandfather wants to make sure that he is going to leave something behind for Nell in terms of an inheritance, and hence goes off for gambling every night; but as you would expect, he loses money, and eventually has to hand his shop over to an evil deformed hunchback, Daniel Quilp. Daniel finally takes possession of the shop and evicts Nell and her grandfather. This delivers a severe shock to Nell's grandfather, and Nell takes her grandfather away from it all to the Midlands of England, to live as poor people, as beggars.
However, her brother refuses to believe that their grandfather has not kept an inheritance for Nell, and wants to locate them, and for this purpose, he takes the help of his friend, the simple but good Dick Swiveller, and also the help of Quilp (who gets involved just to do more evil). Nell, in the meantime has suffered badly in terms of health but managed to get her grandfather away. By the time the good people (Kit, a friend of Nell, along with a couple of others) manage to find Nell and her grandfather, Nell has dies as a result of the bad health she was suffering from.