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."[8] Nell's deathbed is not actually described, however. 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.[10]
The excitement surrounding the conclusion of the series was unprecedented. (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.)[11] In 2007, many newspapers claimed that the excitement at the release of the last instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop was the only historical comparison that could be made to the excitement at the release of the last Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.[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. She compared herself to Nell, because of her own miserable situation at the time.
