Quilp and Little Nell

Good news everyone. The election is over!

I've been meaning to write all week about lots of things, especially the election, but work just drained me. So much stress and so much tension! I'm still recovering. So, suffice it to say that I'm happy Bush got a smack-down and Rumsfeld is out.

Book talk

The important news is that I finished "The Old Curiosity Shop" by Charles Dickens. Stop laughing!

This is my third time reading this novel and I like it more each time.

Dickens didn't mean to make this a novel, but he needed to extend a short story into a serial to save a magazine, so watching the structure change after the first few chapters is interesting.

The most compelling character in the story is not Little Nell. True, people on the docks of New York would wait for the ship to arrive with the book's next installment (the number, as it was called) to find out the fate of this angelic character, but I find Quilp a fascinating character.

In the image above, Quilp is talking with Nell in a sketch from the novel.

Quilp is the main evil character in the novel. He's a dwarf of extreme tendencies. He drinks scalding punch and smokes dozens of cigars at a sitting. He seldom sleeps. The scene where he stumbles into a tea party his wife is hosting is still hilarious after almost 170 years.

Throughout the book, Quilp makes sexual references to Nell, so his drive is not just greed, but lust. And the Marchioness, the poor child locked in the basement of Sampson and Sally Brass, is Quilp's love child with Sally Brass.

Sally makes Joan Crawford in "Mommy Dearest" look like June Cleaver.

I am disappointed in Quilp's death scene. It's filled with irony, but lacks the power of, say, the death of Sikes in "Oliver Twist," Ralph Nickleby in "Nicholas Nickleby" or the school master and crook in "Our Mutual Friend."

The book is OK -- I recommend reading it because all educated folks ought to know the references to Little Nell -- but not Dickens' best by any means. You can tell some of the plot is contrived and designed to stretch the piece, but, noting that, it's like saying The Beatles album "Let It Be" is their worst (which people tend to say). That album had four No. 1 hits! So, it's all perspective.

Modern readers often laugh at Dickens' works as being tame and prudish (Remember Clark Kent's joke about reading "A Tale of Two Cities" in the first "Superman"?). Oh, so wrong. You have to read between the lines about the sex (and it's in every novel) and the violence is everywhere.

Thought: "A Christmas Carol" is next.