Waylaid on the Road to Riches

delicate flowerLittle Nell Trent! delicate flower

Little Nell Trent is the girl whose untimely death set the world weeping in Charles Dickens' novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). She lives with her grandfather in his "old curiosity shop," where they are persecuted by the dwarfish Daniel Quilp, who has loaned money to the old man and who eventually forecloses on the debt and claims the shop. Nell and her grandfather wander, homeless, until they are given a cottage; both of them are worn out by their ordeal and soon die.

Pretty much your standard, uplifting Victorian fiction.

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