Le Magasin D'antiquités, Tome I

The book that made America weep. When Charles Dickens published The Old Curiosity Shop in serial form, readers on both sides of the Atlantic stopped their daily lives to follow the journey of a young girl and her grandfather through a England being swallowed by industry and greed. Little Nell, one of Dickens' most luminous creations, is only thirteen when she and her aged guardian are forced to flee London after losing their antique shop to her grandfather's secret gambling addiction. What follows is a pilgrimage through the English countryside, a winding road story of poverty, kindness, and an old man's gradual descent into obsession. Dickens wrote it as a defense of childhood innocence against a brutal world, and few novels have ever been so fiercely loved or so ruthlessly sentimental. It is not a comfortable read. It is a devastating one. More than a century and a half later, Nell's journey still cuts straight to the heart.