The Old Curiosity Shop

Mr Quilp
  According to Dickens, Mr Daniel Quilp is a bent-over, hook-nosed dwarf, with a "ghastly smile... appearing to be the mere result of habit and to have no connexion with any mirthful or complacent feeling". A cold-hearted miser and money-lending monster of iniquity, he became landlord of the Old Curiosity Shop, after cruelly evicting the tenants, Little Nell Trent and her destitute grandfather. Quilp pursues the forlorn pair with unremitting hatred, finally driving them to their torturous, exhausting deaths.

This of course is fiction. The true Mr Quilp, upon whom Dickens loosely based his famous story, is behind you. He is a rather shadowy gentleman, who may sometimes appear as you wander about The Shop. You may rest assured; he will look after you as one of his own.

MR QUILP, aka THE IRREVEREND GAVIN BADDELEY


A Biographical Sketch:




A somewhat elusive figure, the notoriously decadent and deviant Gavin Baddeley is something of a dilettante. Born in England in the late 1960's, (or was it the 1860's?), he boasts a bastard bloodline composed of clergymen, actors, spies and whores. Baddeley followed in the family’s theological tradition, though from a somewhat more adventurous and inquisitive angle than convention might dictate.

Baddeley lived for some time in California, where he earned the epithet 'Bad English.' However, he currently resides in England where (in-between listening to pestilential music, appreciating abstruse symbolic art and conducting research into dark histories and the occult), he amuses himself by writing books and contributing columns to music & media, alternative and esoteric journals, ranging from Kerrang! and Knave, to The Observer and The Black Flame. He has also been the subject of numerous interviews and profiles in titles as diverse as The Guardian, The London Evening Standard and The X-Factor.

As well as establishing a reputation as a journalist and scholar of all things strange and sinister, Baddeley has attracted international critical acclaim for his books, including Lucifer Rising, a study of rock 'n roll and the demonic tradition, and the incisive cultural autopsy, Dissecting Marilyn Manson. Baddeley's latest and eagerly awaited book, a study of the Gothic tradition, is published by Plexus in the spring of 2001.

Now, for his sins, Mr Baddeley has assumed the mantle of Editor, and the ego of Mr Quilp, the proprietor of the Old Curiosity Shop, the online gothic emporium.

May we all rest in peace!
 
GAVIN BADDELEY Alias MR QUILP

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