He keeps his nocturnal games a secret, but borrows heavily from the evil Daniel Quilp, a malicious, grotesquely deformed, hunchbacked dwarf moneylender.

In the end, he gambles away what little money they have, and Quilp seizes the opportunity to take possession of the shop and evict Nell and her grandfather.

To this end, they join forces with Quilp, who knows full well that there is no fortune, but sadistically chooses to 'help' them in order to enjoy the misery it will inflict on all concerned.

Her grandfather, already mentally infirm, refuses to admit she is dead and sits every day by her grave waiting for her to come back until, a few months later, he dies himself.

Master Humphrey's Clock was a weekly serial that contained both short stories and two novels (The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge).

Originally the conceit of the story was that Master Humphrey was reading it aloud to a group of his friends, gathered at his house around the grandfather clock in which he eccentrically kept his manuscripts.

However, Dickens himself cancelled Master Humphrey's Clock before 1848, and describes in a preface to The Old Curiosity Shop that he wishes the story to not be tied down to the miscellany within which it began.

Probably the most widely repeated criticism of Dickens is the remark reputedly made by Oscar Wilde that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.

Of a similar opinion was the poet Algernon Swinburne, who commented that "a child whom nothing can ever irritate, whom nothing can even baffle, whom nothing can ever misguide, whom nothing can ever delude, and whom nothing can ever dismay, is a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads".

[9] The Irish leader Daniel O'Connell famously burst into tears at the finale, and threw the book out of the window of the train in which he was travelling.

(However, stories that Dickens fans stormed the docks in New York City, eager for the latest installment of the novel, or news of it, are apocryphal.

[12] The Norwegian author Ingeborg Refling Hagen is said to have buried a copy of the book in her youth, stating that nobody deserved to read about Nell, because nobody would ever understand her pain.