Blue cloth binding with gilt title on the spine. Dimensions are for one book.

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Two fine volumes in very good order.

The Old Curiosity Shop is one of two novels (the other being Barnaby Rudge which Charles Dickens published along with short stories in his weekly serial Master Humphrey’s Clock, from 1840 to 1841. It was so popular that New York readers reputedly stormed the wharf when the ship bearing the final instalment arrived in 1841.

The Old Curiosity Shop was printed in book form in 1841. Queen Victoria read the novel that year and found it “very interesting and cleverly written”.

The plot follows the journey of Nell Trent and her grandfather, both residents of The Old Curiosity Shop in London, whose lives are thrown into disarray and destitution due to the machinations of an evil moneylender and the grandfather’s addiction to gambling.

Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty (commonly known as Barnaby Rudge) is a historical novel by British novelist Charles Dickens. Barnaby Rudge was one of two novels (the other was The Old Curiosity Shop) that Dickens published in his short-lived (1840–1841) weekly serial Master Humphrey’s Clock. Barnaby Rudge is largely set during the Gordon Riots of 1780.

Barnaby Rudge was the fifth of Dickens’s novels to be published. It had initially been planned to appear as his first, but changes of publisher led to many delays, and it first appeared in serial form in the Clock from February to November 1841.

It was Dickens’s first historical novel. His only other is A Tale of Two Cities (1859), also set in revolutionary times. It is one of his less popular novels; British historian and Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd has called it “one of Dickens’s most neglected, but most rewarding, novels”.

It has rarely been adapted for film or television. The last production was a 1960 BBC production; prior to that, silent films were made in 1911 and 1915.