[Conclusion
in English is at the bottom of this post]
Di sinilah
semuanya berawal, di sebuah old curiosity shop di kota London—sebuah toko yang
menjual barang-barang antik (di mana anda akan menemukan sesuatu yang
mengundang keingintahuan=curiosity), karena di sinilah tokoh utama kita,
seorang gadis yatim-piatu berusia empat belas tahun bernama Nell tinggal
bersama kakeknya. Hanya berdua saja di dunia ini menjadikan Nell dan
kakeknya
memiliki ikatan cinta kasih yang amat kuat, sehingga meski hidup pas-pasan,
mereka berdua merasa bahagia.
Sayangnya
sang kakek, dalam harapannya untuk mengentaskan Nell dari kemiskinan, mencoba
mencari uang lewat jalan pintas—perjudian. Ketika akhirnya harta mereka yang
sedikit dan rumah mereka berpindah ke tangan lintah darat jahat bernama Quilp,
mereka pun terpaksa pergi dari rumah, mencoba mencari kebahagiaan di alam
bebas, rela hidup sederhana daripada berada di bawah kekuasaan Quilp. Dalam
pengembaraan mereka, ada begitu banyak hal terjadi. Ada saat-saat mereka
bertemu dengan orang-orang yang baik hati, yang memberi tumpangan dan uluran
kasih, namun ada juga orang-orang jahat yang ingin memanfaatkan kerapuhan kakek
Nell dalam perjudian.
Sepanjang pengembaraan
mereka, Nell—di usianya yang teramat muda—harus menanggung beban yang terlalu
berat baginya. Ia harus bertahan hidup sembari khawatir Quilp akan menemukan
mereka, sekaligus memelihara kakeknya yang—setelah ‘kejatuhan’ mereka—mengalami
kemunduran mental. Yang lebih hebat lagi, Nell menjadi semacam hati nurani bagi
si kakek; pada saat si kakek nyaris jatuh dalam jerat jahat perjudian, Nell lah
yang harus mengambil keputusan berat dan berani untuk melarikan diri.
Setelah
semua pengalaman mereka—yang indah maupun yang kelam—akhirnya mereka tiba di
sebuah desa nan tenang dan memulai hidup yang baru. Akankah mereka menemukan kembali
kebahagiaan seperti yang sering mereka rasakan ketika masih di rumah lama
mereka, old curiosity shop?
Sementara
itu, ada juga seorang anak laki-laki yang biasa bekerja di curiosity shop kakek
Nell, bernama Kit. Ia anak yang miskin, baik hati, jujur dan sangat mengagumi
Nell. Ketika Nell dan kakeknya pergi mengembara, ia pun mengalami banyak
petualangan, dari yang menakutkan hingga membahagiakan. Kisahnya boleh dibilang
mengiringi kisah Nell. Dengan dua tokoh utama ini, banyak pula hadir para
‘penggembira’, baik dari kubu yang jahat maupun yang baik, menjadikan kisah ini
semacam dongeng yang dituturkan dengan indah oleh Charles Dickens, kisah yang
akan selalu melekat di benak siapa pun yang membacanya.
 |
| Nell & grandfather in Mrs. Jarley's caravan |
Conclusion:
This is my
fifth Dickens, and I can say that The Old Curiosity Shop has just become my new
favorite. Usually I don’t quite like tales, where there were only black and
white, the good ones must be perfect: handsome, kind-hearted, yet weak and
poor; while the bad ones were always imperfect: ugly, wicked, heartless and
powerful. Can you see
Little Nell and Quilp in those two opposite frames? Like I
said, if I don’t like tales, then I should have disliked The Old Curiosity
Shop. However, it turned out that I really enjoyed reading this book. One of
the reasons perhaps, because this book spoiled me with many adventures scenes
during Nell and grandfather’s pilgrimage, which made the plot went quite fast.
Other reason is the appearance of comical characters like the funny-eccentric Dick
Swiveller or the street entertainers Nell met within her pilgrimage. Mrs.
Javier’s waxwork company and Whisker the funny pony of Mr. Garland were also
highly entertaining!
Besides the
entertaining aspects, I also found satisfaction in Dickens’ concerns of
injustice—especially to children—which became this book’s main theme. For your
information, I always love to read novels that bring concerns for injustice as
the main theme! Here we got two cases, one was Little Nell and the other was
Kit. Both were innocent and kind-hearted children who must suffered from adult’s
faults, crime and greediness. Dickens interestingly crafted these two cases in
two separate frames of story with Quilp being one of the main red-thread that
related them both to be concluded in the last chapters.
Speaking of
the last chapters, they were very emotional, and this aspect is the one I like the
most from this book.
**spoiler** I can feel that Dickens had poured out his own
emotion into these last chapters—the scene of Nell’s death, that he wrote them
while remembering and memorizing the death of Mary Hogarth—her sister-in-law—in
her seventeenth age, almost as youth as Nell was. You might have read on his
biographies, that Dickens have an affection towards Mary, and was quite shocked
when Mary died from heart failure in his arm. “
Mary’s death affected him grievously and the shock never seemed
completely to dissipate.” [from
Dickens’ Bicentenary 1802-2012 by
Lucinda Dickens Hawksley]. I can’t but share Dickens’ grief when he wrote about
Nell’s burial, and how his grandfather and others felt about it, feel how Dickens
must have felt on Mary’s sudden death, and the consolation he must have seek at
that time, just as what he wrote here...
“Oh! It is hard to take to heart the lesson
that such deaths will teach, but let no man reject it, for it is one that all
must learn, and is a mighty universal Truth.”
And from the
same book too—Dickens’ Bicentenary—I learned that writing about Nell’s death
had re-opened Dickens’ old wound of Mary Hogarth: “I am ….nearly dead with work—and grief for the loss of my child.”
**spoiler ends**
And last but
not least, I also like how Dickens concluded every piece of fragments nicely. I
am a reader who judges a book from its ending, not about happy or sad ending,
but more on whether it was cleanly closed or not. I don’t like it when there
were still one or few things unfinished or unclear, it will make me keep asking
questions like why that should happened, or what caused this or that, etc. In
this book, one concern raised in my mind near the ending. I noticed that Kit—after
his release from jail—had met and thanked everyone except the biggest heroes:
Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, whom Kit never mentioned nor made initiative
to come to thank personally. You might think I’m being absurd to think of such
small things like that, but as I said, I am a perfectionist when it comes to
story ending, everything must be cleared up before I closed the book (most
likely) forever. However, thanks to Dickens, I was rewarded by the final page
where Kit and Barbara named one of their children as Dick “whom Mr. Swiveller did especially favour” (p. 544). And so…this
story becomes one of my favorites of Dickens so far, and I rewarded him with
five stars!
Title: The
Old Curiosity Shop
Author:
Charles Dickens
Publisher:
Wordsworth Classics
Published:
1995
Pages: 544 +
notes
