Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2008

It's possibly this Quilp:
<q>
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.
</q>
http://www.oldcuriosityshop.net/about/quilp.html  

It's a reference to a character in Dickens' _Old Curiosity Shop_, Daniel
Quilp, the novel's primary villain. He mistreats his wife and manipulates
others to his own ends. He lent money to Nell's grandfather, and took
possession of the curiosity shop during the old man's illness (which he had
caused by revealing his knowledge of Trent's gambling habit). He's a right
bastard and dies in the end.

Marius Hancu set the following eddies spiralling through the space-time
continuum:

After the Dickens character. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilp
where Daniel Quilp is described as "a malicious, grotesquely deformed
moneylender".