Professor Andrew Ballantyne, Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Chair of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) are two nineteenth-century novels that name shops in their titles. They each sold widely, and tell us something about the quality of life for certain groups of people in nineteenth-century London and Paris. In each novel, the identity of the proprietor – the grandfather of Dickens’s heroine or the young attractive widower whom Zola’s heroine is to marry – is established and clarified with reference to his shop. In each instance, architecture acts as a concrete embodiment of the attitudes and drives that animate the character and shape his decisions.