October 27, 2024–April 27, 2025 from 1:00-3:00 PM (Pacific) | Virtual Events
In 2024-2025, we returned to reading two novels, The Old Curiosity Shop (October 2024-April 2025) and Silas Marner (May-June 2025). Revisit the discussions Dickens enthusiasts and Pickwick Club members had about these books.
For six months, we focused on one of Dickens’s most intriguing novels, The Old Curiosity Shop, which contains such memorable characters as Dick Swiveller, Samson and Sally Brass, Little Nell, and the grotesque, violent dwarf, Quilp. It is probably Dickens’s first novel of the city, where the urban environment becomes character, setting, and theme. Its picaresque roots make it an adventure story as well as an allegory of moral journey; its interest in the urban landscape, its pleasures and dangers, suggest Dickens’s social concerns.
October 27, 2024
Chapters 1-12
Discussion Facilitator: Wayne Batten (Friends of the Dickens Project)
November 24, 2024
Chapters 13-28
Discussion Facilitator: David Brownell
January 26, 2025
Chapters 29-41
Discussion Facilitator: Ginny Hofmann
February 23, 2025
Chapters 42-55
Discussion Facilitator: Glenna Matthews
March 23, 2025
Chapters 56-68
Discussion Facilitator: Wayne Batten (Friends of the Dickens Project)
April 27, 2025
Chapters 69-End
Discussion Facilitator: John Jordan (UC Santa Cruz)
The Old Curiosity Shop Resources:
Header illustration: The Old Curiosity Shop frontispiece, wood engraving by George Cattermole (1840).
Recommended Edition: We recommend the Penguin Classics edition of the novel for its appendices and notes, but other versions are fine. First-time readers should avoid the Introduction if they don’t want spoilers. Download the novel to read at Gutenburg.org or listen to it at LibriVox.org.
The Santa Cruz Pickwick (Book) Club, a branch of the Dickens Fellowship, is a community of local bookworms, students, and teachers who meet monthly to discuss a nineteenth-century novel. The Santa Cruz Public Libraries provide support for the reading group.
