Hounded by poverty from their home, Nell is uprooted from a secure and pleasant childhood and cast into a world where evil takes many shapes. Pursued by the lecherous and malignant Quilp, the young innocent and her elderly grandfather embark on a journey from the dark heart of the city to the countryside in search of the peace and tranquility that is destined to elude them.The Old Curiosity Shop is a story of contrasts: youth and old age, beauty and deformity, freedom and restraint. Expansively comic, sentimentally tragic, it is sometimes fairytale and sometimes myth. Now, in this exclusive BBC presentation, Charles Dickens' haunted characters are brought brilliantly to life in a production that is dream-like and sentimental. Produced by the world's foremost creators of radio entertainment, The Old Curiosity Shop illustrates the Victorian world at its most bleak, yet manages to do so with a heart-warming vitality that listeners won't soon forget.