The sharp contrast between city and country underpins every scene in the novel. In the beginning, all the reader knows is the grimy and greedy center of London, where the titular Curiosity Shop stands. As Nell and her grandfather venture further out into the countryside, they find peace and freedom away from the commercialized trappings of their old home. If Daniel Quilp, Frederick Trent, or the Brasses appeared in one of the rural hamlets through which Nell and her grandfather pass, these characters would feel like pollutants in a comparatively tranquil, undisturbed landscape.

The manufacturing town where Nell and her grandfather stay the night with a furnace-tender is the first time in their journey that they return to any town larger than a small country village, and it is also the first place Nell succumbs to the exhaustion that will later claim her life. Here under a smoke-filled sky, Nell encounters scenes of urban suffering she never saw while living in London. She begs for alms from people who have nothing left to give even to their own children—children who, in the case of one family, have likely died from starvation. In the countryside, the families she meets are just as poor if not poorer than many people in London, but they have found happiness in the simplicity and earnestness of rural domestic life.