Which Dickens novel features the character of Little Nell?

Little Nell appears in Charles Dickens's novel The Old Curiosity Shop.

Her full name is Nell Trent, and she is the novel's central character. Dickens introduces her as an orphaned girl not quite fourteen years old who lives with her unnamed maternal grandfather in a London shop filled with curiosities. Her closest friend is Kit Nubbles, an honest boy employed at the shop whom Nell teaches to write.

Nell's grandfather secretly gambles because he hopes to secure her future, but his debts allow the cruel moneylender Daniel Quilp to seize the shop. Nell then leads her mentally broken grandfather across the English Midlands, living as a fugitive and beggar while Quilp hunts them.

The journey destroys Nell's health. She and her grandfather eventually reach safety in a village associated with Tong, Shropshire, but rescuers arrive too late: Nell has died. Her sentimental death became one of the most famous and controversial scenes in Victorian fiction, prompting intense public emotion and later criticism of Dickens's idealised portrayal of innocence.