Welcome to Litsy!

I‘ve reached the “holidays” in the book. I‘m not sure if that means winter holidays but it‘s a good excuse to post another image from another dish from my grandmother‘s Old Curiosity Shop dishes.

Reading how popular this serialization of this book back in the day, I now understand why these dishes were made. Even the book description calls it the Harry Potter of its day.

#whattheDickens @Cuilin

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This book has taken a very very dark turn. Oh my heart hurts for Little Nell!!! I wouldn‘t have thought Dickens could go to such heartbreaking places. And I‘ve read enough Dickens to see an immense range of emotions. But dang, this is brutal. (I removed spoilers and replaced with ellipses.)

We definitely needed a bit of humor from Mrs Jarley deciding not to become an atheist.

#whattheDickens @Cuilin

But this is what she does instead:

“But instead of adopting this course of retaliation, Mrs Jarley, on second thoughts, brought out the suspicious bottle, and ordering glasses to be set forth upon her favourite drum, and sinking into a chair behind it, called her satellites about her, and to them several times recounted, word for word, the affronts she had received.”

😂😂😂

#whattheDickens @Cuilin

I‘m getting biscuits while we listen to the tagged book

#whattheDickens @Cuilin

“Little Nell stood timidly by, with her eyes raised to the countenance of Mr Quilp as he read the letter, plainly showing by her looks that while she entertained some fear and distrust of the little man, she was much inclined to laugh at his uncouth appearance and grotesque attitude. And yet there was visible on the part of the child a painful anxiety for his reply.”

Then he offers to make her Mrs Quilp number two! Eww!

#whattheDickens @Cuilin

“On the Surrey side of the river was a small rat-infested dreary yard called 'Quilp's Wharf,' in which were a little wooden counting-house burrowing all awry in the dust as if it had fallen from the clouds and ploughed into the ground; a few fragments of rusty anchors; several large iron rings; some piles of rotten wood; and two or three heaps of old sheet copper, crumpled, cracked, and battered.”

The boy on his head is, I believe, Tom Scott.

Quilp again with Little Nell

#whattheDickens @Cuilin

Meet Daniel Quilp (far left):

“The creature appeared quite horrible with his monstrous head and little body, as he rubbed his hands slowly round, and round, and round again—with something fantastic even in his manner of performing this slight action—and, dropping his shaggy brows and cocking his chin in the air, glanced upward with a stealthy look of exultation that an imp might have copied and appropriated to himself.”

#whattheDickens @Cuilin

“There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there, fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds, distorted figures in china and wood and iron and ivory: tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.”

#whattheDickens @Cuilin

Lap kitty while I read.