Is God Is and The Old Curiosity Shop

wherein I compare two very different works

Recently, in my journey through Dickens’s novels, I finished The Old Curiosity Shop. Very little of the book takes place in the shop of the title, which actually disbands during the very early chapters. (This book, more than others, bears the marks of Dickens’s serialized storytelling, frequently discarding characters and ideas—and even its narrator—as …