THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

Selected Bibliography

Compiled by Janna Smartt Chance
for the 2003 Dickens Universe

The Dickens Universe will be using the Penguin Classics edition of The Old Curiosity Shop, edited by Norman Page. The definitive scholarly edition is the Clarendon Dickens, edited by Elizabeth M. Brennan. Other notable editions include: the Oxford World Classics edition, which is a based on the Clarendon edition; the Everyman edition, edited by Paul Schlicke; and an Adobe Reader Download edition, edited by Angus Easson.

For a record of Dickens’s correspondence with friends and publishers regarding The Old Curiosity Shop, see Volume 2, 1840-41 of The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey. For early reviews of The Old Curiosity Shop by notables such as Edgar Allen Poe and John Ruskin, see Dickens: The Critical Heritage, edited by Philip Collins, and The Dickens Critics, edited by George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr.

The bibliography below provides fairly thorough coverage of The Old Curiosity Shop criticism back to 1988. Prior to that date it becomes much more selective, however. For a complete bibliography of The Old Curiosity Shop as of 1988, see Schlicke, Priscilla, and Paul Schlicke. The Old Curiosity Shop: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1988.


CRITICISM

(Asterisks indicate items that graduate-student and faculty participants should familiarize themselves with prior to the Universe).

*Adorno, Theodor W. “On Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: A Lecture.” Notes to Literature. Vol. 2. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Ed. Rof Tiedemann. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 170-7.

Andrews, Malcolm. “Introducing Master Humphrey.” Dickensian 67 (1971): 70-86.

Ayers, Brenda. “The Little Women of The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dissenting Women in Dickens’ Novels: The Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. 74-77.

*Bowen, John. “Nell’s Crypt: The Old Curiosity Shop and Master Humphrey’s Clock.” Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 132-156.

Brattin, Joel. “Some Curiosities from The Old Curiosity Shop Manuscript.” Dickens Quarterly 7.1 (1990): 234-36.

Brooks, Chris. “The Magic Reel: Metaphor and Reality in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Signs for the Times: Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World. London: Allen & Unwin, 1984. 23-35.

Chesterton, G.K. “The Old Curiosity Shop.” Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens. (Cover title Chesterton on Dickens.) London: J.M. Dent, 1992. 50-64.

Chittick, Kathryn. “1839-1840-‘The Man of Feeling’: Nicholas Nickleby and Master Humphrey’s Clock.” Dickens and the 1830s. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 130-151.

Conlon, John J. “Private Sphinx and Public Sphynx: Riddle and Revelation in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens Quarterly 7.1 (1990): 218-34.

Cordery, G. “The Gambling Grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Literature and Psychology 33.1 (1987): 43-61.

Coveney, Peter. “The Child in Dickens.” The Image of Childhood; The Individual and Society: A Study of the Theme in English Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. 111-61.

David, Deidre. “Children of Empire: Victorian Imperialism and Sexual Politics in Dickens and Kipling.” Ed. Anthony H. Harrison, and Beverly Taylor. Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 1992. 124-142.

*---. “The Heart of the Empire; Little Nell and Florence Dombey Do Their Bit.” Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. 43-75.

Dennett, Jenny. “Sentimentality, Sex, and Sadism: The 1935 Version of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop.” The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen. Ed. Robert Giddings, and Erica Sheen. New York: Manchester UP--St. Martin’s, 2000. 54-70.

Dvorak, Wilfred P. “Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop: The Triumph of Compassion.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 28.1 (1992): 52-71.

---. “On the Knocking at the Gate in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Studies in the Novel 16.3 (1984): 304-313.

Edgecombe, R.S. “A Note on The Old Curiosity Shop and the Eighteenth-Century Night Piece.” Theoria: A Journal of Studies in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences 72 (1988): 53-61.

Feinberg, Monica L. “Reading Curiosity: Does Dick’s Shop Deliver?” Dickens Quarterly 7.1 (1990): 200-11.

Ford, George. “Little Nell: The Limits of Explanatory Criticism.” Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel-Criticism Since 1836. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1955. 55-71.

Gawell, Angela. “Subordinating the Other: Illustrations in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8.3 (1993): 169-79.

Georgas, Marilyn. “Little Nell and the Art of Holy Dying: Dickens and Jeremy Taylor.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 20 (1991): 35-36.

Gitter, Elizabeth. “Laura Bridgman and Little Nell.” Dickens Quarterly 8.2 (1991): 75-79.

Greenstein, Michael. “Lenticular Curiosity and The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens Quarterly 4.4 (1987): 187-94.

Grylls, David. “Dickens.” Guardians and Angels: Parents and Children in Nineteenth-Century Literarture. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. 132-152.

Hennelly, Mark M., Jr. “Carnivalesque ‘Unlawful Games’ in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens Studies Annual 22 (1993): 67-120.

Higbie, Robert. “The Development of Dickens’s Imagination: The Early Novels.” Dickens and Imagination. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. 48-73.

Hodgell, Pat. “Charles Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop: The Gothic Novel in Transition.” Riverside Quarterly 8.3 (1990): 152-69.

Hollington, Michael. “Adorno, Benjamin, and The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens Quarterly 6.3 (1989): 87-95.

---. “The Old Curiosity Shop and the New Curiosity Shop.” Dickens and the Grotesque. London: Croom Helm, 1984. 79-95.

Horne, Lewis. “The Old Curiosity Shop and the Limits of Melodrama.” Dalhousie Review 74.4 (1992-1993): 494-507.

Horton, Susan R. “Swivellers and Snivellers: Competing Epistemologies in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens Quarterly 7.1 (1990): 218-34.

Houston, Gail Turley. “Binging and Being, Self-Starvation and the Self: The Heroine’s Masterplot in The Old Curiosity Shop and Martin Chuzzlewit.” Consuming Fictions: Gender, Class, and Hunger in Dickens’s Novels. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 61-89.

Jacobson, Wendy. “The Redemption of ‘All Sorrows’: King Lear, The Old Curiosity Shop, and A Tale of Two Cities.” Shakespeare in Southern Africa: Journal of the Shakespeare Society of Northern Africa 5 (1992): 13-32.

Jaffe, Audrey. “Never Be Safe but in Hiding: Omniscience and Curiosity in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Novel: a Forum on Fiction 19.2 (1986 Winter). 118-134.

*---. “Omniscience and Curiosity in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 45-70.

Kelly, Dawn P. “Image and Effigy: The Illustrations to The Old Curiosity Shop.” Imagination on a Long Rein: English Literature Illustrated. Ed. Joachim Möller. Marburg: Jonas, 1988. 136-47.

Kincaid, James R. "Little Nell--She Dead." Annoying the Victorians. New York: Routledge, 1995. 35-46.

*---. “The Old Curiosity Shop: Laughter and Pathos.” Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. 76-104.

Langbauer, Laurie. “Dickens’s Streetwalkers: Women and the Form of Romance.” ELH 53.2 (1986): 411-431.

LaPointe, Adriane. “Little Nell Once More: Absent Fathers in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 18 (1989): 19-38.

Lucas, John. “The Old Curiosity Shop.” The Melancholy Man. London: Methuen, 1970. 73-92.

MacPike, Loralee. “The Old Curiosity Shape: Changing Views of Little Nell, Part I.” Dickens Studies Newsletter 12 (1981): 33-38.

---. “The Old Curiosity Shape: Changing Views of Little Nell, Part II.” Dickens Studies Newsletter 12 (1981): 70-76.

---. “Part I.” Dostoevsky’s Dickens: A Study of Literary Influence. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1981. 19-117.

*Marcus, Steven. “The Myth of Nell.” Dickens: from Pickwick to Dombey. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965. 129-68.

McCarthy, Patrick. “The Curious Road to Nell’s Death.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 20 (1991): 35-56.

McMaster, Juliet. “The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens the Designer. London: Macmillan, 1987. 95-120.

Meckier, Jerome. “Suspense in The Old Curiosity Shop: Dickens’ Contrapuntal Artistry.” Journal of Narrative Technique 2 (1972): 199-207.

Miller, J. Hillis. “Nicholas Nickleby; The Old Curiosity Shop; Barnaby Rudge.” Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958. 85-97.

Miller, Karl. “Mankind and Heaven.” Doubles: Studies in Literary History. London: Oxford UP, 1985. 187-208.

Morgan, Nicholas. “The Angel and the Imp.” Secret Journeys: Theory and Practice in Reading Dickens. London and Toronto: Associated UP, 1992. 31-57.

Newman, S.J. “The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens at Play. London: Macmillan, 1981. 62-87.

O’Keefe, Anthony. “The Old Curiosity Shop.” South Atlantic Review 53.4 (1988): 39-55.

Patten, Robert L. “Master Humphrey’s Clock: ‘wind, wind, wind.’” Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978. 105-118.

*---. “The Story-Weaver at His Loom: Dickens and the Beginning of The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens the Craftsman. Ed. Robert B. Partlow. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970. 44-64.

Pearson, Gabriel. “The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens and the Twentieth Century. Ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. 77-90.

Peters, Ross. “Imaginative Transformation and Moral Unity in The Old Curiosity Shop.” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 78 (1992): 41-62.

Petersson, Tortsen. “ ‘Impostors and Deceptions’: The Social Side of The Old Curiosity Shop.” Studia Neophilologica: A Journal of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literature 64.1 (1992): 81-87.

---. “ ‘That Never-Ending Restlessness’: The Revulsion from Life in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Moderna Sprak 86.2 (1992): 120-126.

Polhemus, Robert. “Comic and Erotic Faith Meet Faith in the Child: Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (‘The Old Curiosity Shape’).” Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life. Ed. Robert Polhemus and Roger Henkle. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. 71-89.

Pope, Norris. “The Old Curiosity Shop and the New: Dickens and the Age of Machinery.” Dickens Quarterly 13.1 (1996): 3-18.

Pykett, Lyn. “Walks on the Wild Side: The Old Curiosity Shop.” Critical Issues: Charles Dickens. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 59-68.

Raleigh, John H. “The Novel and the City: England and America in the Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Studies 11 (1968): 291-328.

Reid, J.C. “The Old Curiosity Shop.” The Hidden World of Charles Dickens. 2nd ed. The Macmillan Brown Lectures, University of Auckland Bulletin 61, English Series 10. Auckland: Auckland UP, 1966. 34-47.

Robson, Catherine. “The Ideal Girl in Industrial England.” Men in Wonderland: Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. 46-93.

Rogers, Philip. “The Dynamics of Time in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28 (1973): 127-44.

Rowlinson, Matthew. “Reading Capital with Little Nell.” Yale Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 9.2 (1996): 347-80.

Sanders, Andrew. “The Old Curiosity Shop.” Charles Dickens Resurrectionist. London: Macmillan, 1982. 64-93.

Schiefelbein, Michael. “Bringing to Earth the ‘Good Angel of the Race.’” Victorian Newsletter 84 (1993): 25-28.

---. “Little Nell, Catholicism, and Dickens’s Investigation of Death.” Dickens Quarterly 9.3 (1992): 115-25.

Schlicke, Paul. "Embracing the New Spirit of the Age: Dickens and the Evolution of The Old Curiosity Shop." Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 32 (2002): 1-35.

---. “The Old Curiosity Shop: The Assessment of Popular Entertainment.” Dickens and Popular Entertainment. London: Allen & Unwin, 1985. 87-136.

---. “The True Pathos of The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens Quarterly 7.1 (1990): 189-99.

*Schor, Hilary. “The Uncanny Daughter: Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Progress of Little Nell.” Dickens and the Daughter of the House. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 19-46.

Schwarzbach, F.S. “The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge: Breakdown and Breakthrough.” Dickens and the City. London: Athlone, 1979. 69-79.

Steig, Michael. “Abuse and the Comic-Grotesque in The Old Curiosity Shop: Problems of Response.” Dickens Quarterly 11.3 (1994): 103-14.

---. “The Central Action of The Old Curiosity Shop.” Literature and Psychology 15 (1965): 163-170.

---. “Phiz’s Marchioness.” Dickens Studies 2 (1966): 141-46.

Stevens, Joan. “Woodcuts Dropped into the Text: The Illustrations in The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.” Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia 20 (1967): 113-33.

Stewart, Garrett. “Prologue: The Parable of the Rosy Wine.” and “The Pivotal Swiveller.” Dickens and the Trials of Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974. xi-xxiii, 89-113.

---. "Telling Time." Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. 173-212.

Stoler, John. “Affection and Lust in The Old Curiosity Shop.” McNeese Review 35 (1997): 90-102.

Stone, Donald D. “Death and Circuses: Charles Dickens and the Byroads of Romanticism.” The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. 249-83.

Stone, Harry. “Dickens and Cannibalism: The Unpardonable Sin.” The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1994. 3-268, especially 217-224.

---. Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making. London: Macmillan, 1979. 107-17.

Tracy, Robert. “Clock Work: The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 30 (2001): 23-43.

Wark, Robert R. “The Curious Case of Joseph Clayton Clark.” Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 59.4 (1998): 551-55.

Walder, Dennis. “Death and The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens and Religion. London: Allen & Unwin, 1981. 66-90.

Walsh, Richard. “Why We Wept for Little Nell: Character and Emotional Involvement.” Narrative 5.3 (1997): 306-21.

Waters, Catherine. “Gender, Family, and Domestic Ideology.” Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Ed. John O. Jordan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 120-135.

Welsh, Alexander. “King Lear, Père Goriot, and Nell’s Grandfather.” Literary Theory and Criticism: A Collection of Essays in Honor of Rene Wellek. Ed. Joseph P. Strelka. Bern: Peter Lang, 1984. 1405-1425.

Westland, Ella. “Little Nell and the Marchionness: Some Functions of Fairy Tale in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens Quarterly 8.2 (1991): 68-75.

Wilson, Angus. “The Old Curiosity Shop.” The World of Charles Dickens. London: Martin Secher & Warburg Ltd., 1970. 137-144.

Winter, Sarah. “Curiosity as Didacticism in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34.1 (2000): 28-55.

Zemka, Sue. “From the Punchmen to Pugin’s Gothics: The Broad Road to a Sentimental Death in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 48.3 (1993): 291-309.