Auntique & Uncle Tony

Sellers of Antique Bookends, Vintage Glass, & Collectibles

Dickens Characters

Circa 1928

“Little Nell & Artful Dodger”

Price: $650 / pair

Dickens Characters Bookends. Manufacturer unknown.  Circa 1928.  Hand-painted polychrome gray metal.  The slightly taller bookend measures 8” high x 4-1/2” wide x 3-1/3” deep.  The pair weighs 6-1/2 lbs.  Original felt on bottom of base.  Minor age-related paint chipping.  Professionally cleaned to restore colors.   Extremely rare and  in outstanding condition. 

# 3039

 

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Little Nell, from the 1841 Dickens novel, “The Old Curiosity Shop.” The story follows the life of Nell Trent,  a beautiful and virtuous young orphaned girl of 'not quite fourteen’,  who lives with her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop in London. 

 

“He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough; and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man. He was short of his age: with rather bow-legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes. His hat was stuck on the top of his head so lightly, that it threatened to fall off every moment--and would have done so, very often, if the wearer had not had a knack of every now and then giving his head a sudden twitch, which brought it back to its old place again. He wore a man's coat, which reached nearly to his heels. He had turned the cuffs back, half-way up his arm, to get his hands out of the sleeves: apparently with the ultimated view of thrusting them into the pockets of his corduroy trousers; for there he kept them. He was, altogether, as roystering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or something less, in the bluchers.”

 

Jack Dawkins, better known as  Artful Dodger, is the scruffy young pickpocket who befriends Oliver Twist in Dickens’ 1838 novel.  

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