The Old Curiosity Shop

Kit proves himself to be trustworthy through his bond with the Garlands’ horse. The horse ignores or disobeys anyone else who tries to direct it, but Kit treats the animal with respect and earns its obedience. In a way, his work with the horse serves as a test for the Garlands’ later full-time employment of him. They see how diligently he works, how much care and pride he takes in his efforts, and it is these traits that inform their decision to hire him in their household. The power and endurance of a horse also symbolically echo Kit’s own character and what he values—for example, patience, dedication, and strength of will. While other characters, like Mr. Chuckster, taunt the horse and treat the animal with disrespect, Kit approaches the horse the same way he approaches his work and his relationships with other people: with compassion, mutual respect, and care for someone outside of himself, even though he has little if anything to gain from it. Kit could have easily taken the overpaid wage from their first meeting and never returned, but he came back to work off the difference and make his pay match his labor. This honesty goes a very long way with the Garlands.

By contrast, Quilp is as horrible to animals as he is to people, and he is dishonest across the board. Where Kit does good for its own sake and without hope of reward, Quilp does evil even when he doesn’t stand to gain by it. He tricks Dick into agreeing to marry Nell for her fortune, which Quilp knows she does not have. He only does this so that once the truth comes out after their wedding, he can take pleasure in Dick’s suffering. He also neglects to tell Fred that there is no fortune, so he can take as much joy in Fred’s impending disappointment as he will in Dick’s.

Dick is the first person to directly connect Quilp’s ugliness and dwarfism with villainy or moral corruption. His assertion that Quilp is not a good spirit because of how he looks reflects a widely held belief in that time period (and one still held in some cases today) that a beautiful person cannot be anything other than good, and that an ugly person cannot be anything other than evil. This belief directly links outward appearance with inner moral quality, and there is no better, clearer application of this belief than Daniel Quilp. He is ugly, and he is also a “dwarf” (or little person), so he stands out as different or “other” immediately. Since he is cruel, brutal, and menacing, he further solidifies the notion that his badness and his ugliness are connected—when really, he is a bad person who just happens to be ugly. Later in the novel, the reader encounters perfectly handsome people who turn out to be just as bad as Quilp, which perhaps lends nuance to Dickens’s use of appearance as a shorthand for character. It is also worth comparing Quilp to the character of Suzy Mowcher in David Copperfield—a little person whose words and storyline explicitly deconstruct the association of looks with morality.