Quilp

Perhaps even the dissipated Fred, whom long acquaintance with Mr. Dick Swiveller has not made any less dismal in his dissipation, has a place in it also.

But when we come to Swiveller and Samson Brass and Quilp and Mrs. Jarley, then Fred and Nell and the grandfather simply do not exist.

There are no such people in the story.

The real hero and heroine of the old curiosity shop are, of course, Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness.

The curiosity shop itself was a lumber of grotesque and sinister things, outlandish weapons, twisted and diabolic decorations.

The comic characters in the book are all like images brought in an old curiosity shop.

Quilp might be a gargoyle.

He might be some sort of devilish door-knocker dropped down and crawling about the pavement.

Now, how are we to account for the pleasure that we undoubtedly derive from these realistic delineations of pain? It is not the rapture of revenge.

We love, of course, to see Mr. Fagin hanged and Mr. Quilp drowned because we had already learned most heartily to hate them.

But why do we read again and again of the sufferings of Smike and the death of little Nell? Nor can we attribute to callousness or cruelty this strange fondness of ours for the sorrowful side of art.

Historians declare that high-class Romans used to dilate with the enthusiasm of connoisseurs on the innumerable shades and varieties of anguish depicted on the countenances of the victims of the arena.

Um, does there come a point where we are, um, Irredeemable.

Somebody like Quilp or Bill Sykes or...

Hey, it's hard to see any kind of hope for redemption in some of those characters.

But I think about somebody like Magwitch in Great Expectations, who, certainly by Victorian standards, or the standards of a certain type of Victorian, this hardened criminal, there should be nothing in him that can be redeemed, right? That's why we need to, you know...

Perhaps even the dissipated Fred, whom long acquaintance with Mr. Dick Swiveller has not made any less dismal in his dissipation, has a place in it also.

But when we come to Swiveller and Samson Brass and Quilp and Mrs. Jarley, then Fred and Nell and the grandfather simply do not exist.

There are no such people in the story.

The real hero and heroine of the old curiosity shop are, of course, Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness.

The curiosity shop itself was a lumber of grotesque and sinister things, outlandish weapons, twisted and diabolic decorations.

The comic characters in the book are all like images brought in an old curiosity shop.

Quilp might be a gargoyle.

He might be some sort of devilish door-knocker dropped down and crawling about the pavement.