Publisher, Naxos Audiobooks (January 2010)

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Death, innocence, sacrifice and corruption – The Old Curiosity Shop is vintage Dickens. Provoking an unprecedented outpouring of public grief when it was first published, it follows the story of Little Nell and her feckless grandfather. Forced to leave their magical shop of curiosities in London, they are pursued across the English countryside by the grotesquely evil dwarf Quilp. They escape – but at what cost? Part tragedy, part allegory, this is Dickens at his most intense; drawing on his own experiences, he weaves a story of extraordinary emotional power.

The Old Curiosity Shop was never intended to be a novel; it began life as a short story. In 1840 Dickens had decided to launch a new periodical entitled Master Humphrey’s Clock, containing a random selection of stories, satires and articles linked by ‘Master Humphrey’, who stored them in his clock for the enlightenment and enjoyment of his literary friends. This ‘club’ was reminiscent of Dickens’s first great success The Pickwick Papers. Nevertheless, the project was a gamble for Dickens; the stakes were high, and he was attempting to try something new on a weekly basis. The first issue introduced his narrator figure, Master Humphrey (Dickens himself, thinly disguised), who wanders the streets of London observing the day-to-day life there – its buildings and people.

At its first appearance Master Humphrey’s Clock sold 70,000 copies and it appeared that it might be a successful venture. Dickens had visions of earning £10,000 a year. However, by the third issue, public interest in a magazine that seemed to be merely a disparate and random collection of pieces had sharply fallen away. Dickens’s intuition told him his public was disappointed in him, and he set about making amends by abandoning Master Humphrey and his clock and writing a new full-scale novel in weekly instalments, based on a story Humphrey had already begun to tell, of a chance meeting with a face in the crowd – Little Nell.

The plight of Little Nell – an innocent child-victim, like Oliver Twist – had probably already prompted Dickens to start thinking about expanding the ‘little child-story’ (as he referred to its first incarnation). The theme of childish innocence threatened, a major theme of his output, seemed to stimulate his creative powers, and the character of Little Nell came to obsess him at this time with the morbidity that always lay beneath the surface of his personality. Recent tragic events in his life encouraged this state of mind. Mary Hogarth, his wife’s youngest sister, moved into the Dickens household in 1836, shortly after his marriage. At seventeen she was taken ill after a family trip to the theatre and died suddenly in Dickens’s arms. He was shattered by the experience and wore a ring which he had taken off her dead finger for the rest of his life. In an excess of grief he kept her clothes and asked to be buried with her upon his death. He relived his grief in the creation of Little Nell, closely modeling her character on his ideal ‘child’ – Mary Hogarth.

In order to concentrate exclusively on writing the novel, Dickens took a house away from London at Broadstairs in Kent. He worked daily from seven o’clock in the morning to two o’clock in the afternoon uninterrupted – and the characters and ideas flowed. This was just as well, for he had set himself an arduous task in providing weekly instalments, rather than his usual monthly parts. Sometimes he was barely two weeks ahead of printing.

Dickens structured his book around a journey. A journey gives opportunities for improvisation week by week; anything can happen. This structure also pays tribute to the genre of the Picaresque novel – the novels of journeying and rambling such as Don Quixote and Humphrey Clinker were both influences from Dickens’s childhood reading. Nell and her Grandfather venture into the unknown landscape of Victorian England, pursued by the evil dwarf Quilp. The two innocents, wandering abroad without purpose or plan, discover a world full of as many curiosities as they have left behind in their shop. The countryside and the emerging industrial landscape of the Midlands and the North provide a back- drop to the story, whilst encounters with puppets, wax-works, giants, dwarfs and performing dogs provide a grotesque illusion of life, adding a fantastical dimension to Nell’s fears and dreams.

About the Author: 1859–1930 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (knighted 1902), nephew to Richard Doyle, was born in Edinburgh and educated at Stonyhurst and in Germany. He studied Medicine at Edinburgh and practised at Southsea (1882–90). His debut was a story in Chambers' Journal in 1879; A Study in Scarlet (1888), Micah Clarke and The White Company (1891) were early stories. But it was by the preternatural acumen of the detective hero of his Adventures (1891) and Memoirs (1893) of Sherlock Holmes (originally in the Strand Magazine) that he became wildly known. Later novels include Brigadier Gerard (1896), Rodney Stone, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Lost World, The Poison Belt (1913); in 1894 he wrote a one-act play, A Story of Waterloo. He served in 1900 as Doctor in the South African War and wrote on it, on the First World War, and also, as a believer, on spiritualism.

About the Performer: David Timson has made over 1,000 broadcasts for BBC Radio Drama. For Naxos AudioBooks he wrote The History of the Theatre, which won an award for most original production from the Spoken Word Publishers Association in 2001. He has also directed for Naxos AudioBooks four Shakespeare plays, including King Richard III (with Kenneth Branagh), which won Best Drama Award from the SWPA in 2001. In 2002 he won the Audio of the Year Award for his reading of A Study in Scarlet. He also reads The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes I, II, III, IV, V, and VI and The Return of Sherlock Holmes I, II, and III, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of Four, The Valley of Fear, and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes.