Dear Serial Readers,
I'm trying an experiment and I invite you to join me. I'm reading this serial via the Mousehold Words delivery system on my iPad or laptop rather than in a paper book format. I've asked Mousehold Words to deliver the 40 installments of THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP twice a week, and my plan is to post short comments after I read each installment (one at the start of the week, the other toward the weekend). I hope you'll join me! See the link to MOUSEHOLD WORDS in the right sidebar of the homepage of "Serial Readers."
I love the way this serial begins! The narrator as a flaneur, a man walking about London at night who encounters a little girl on a mission, is terrific as a launch into the story. Isn't this walking through the city at night, this musing and watching and wondering, like the solitary work of writing fiction and of reading it? The eponymous shop too with the "curiosity dealer" also reminds me of story-making & the shop as an emblem for the entire novel. And Nell seems an early instance of Dickens's fascination with the wise girl-child (Amy Dorrit, Sissy Jupe, Florence Dombey, Jenny Wren).
At the end of this opening number, my curiosity is piqued, eager and waiting for more. Why was Nell out alone at night in the London streets? What is the nature of the curiosity-dealer's nightly absences from home?
Stay tuned to part two of forty (second chapter)!
Serially speculating,
Susan
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