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Oliver Twist (changes)

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In this early work, swerving away from the vivacity and recklessness of Pickwick, Dickens creates the voice he’s known for: the humane cry against poverty, violence, and immorality

Folks

• Oliver Twist, the orphan, deserted by his father who’s ashamed of his illegitimacy, must go through hell to find his family again. He’s a little too perfect, leading one to think Dickens believes morality to be essential and imperturbable. An embodiment of goodness and innocence, despite shocking birth and despite awful society, he acts as a method to reveal the organization of the socius. He’s kind of neutral, colorless, thus allowing us to see the things he interacts with: he’s not really important: it’s what he allows to be shown.

• The institutional folk, from Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, who want to steal Oliver’s rightful inheritance, along with Monks, Oliver’s awful half-brother

• The good ones, Mr. Brownlow, who initially sticks up for Oliver with the issue of the stolen book, and who adopts Oliver; the Maylies, including Rose (who is Oliver’s “sister,” but really aunt)

• The gang: gang, a Punch and Judy show: Bill Sikes, the leader; Fagin, the Jew stereotype; stereotype, whose death-vigil before being hung is the closest we really get into deep personal consciousness in any Dickens; the Artful Dodger, who thinks he makes a great speech to the jury about injustice; and Nancy, who loves Sikes with a passion and who dies at his hand because she tries to save Oliver (she’s the prostitute with a heart of gold, telling Rose to see her as a woman too, and a loving woman with dignity); Noah Claypole, the turncoat; and Charlie Bates, who initially brings Oliver into the gang but who reforms

Themes

• Morality and Art
  • CF Hogarth’s “Gin Lane,” “Beer Lane,” points to stop drinking gin, but to drink the veyr English beer; Harlot’s Progress, Rake’s Progress, etc
  • Homilitic (ie, morally pedagogic) works during mid-Victorian period)
  • Note that the subtitle is “The Parish Boy’s Progress” reminding you of that famous religious work, A Pilgrim’s Progress
• Critique of Social Institutions
  • The poorhouse he’s in, and the blacksmith he’s apprenticed off to, are both terrible places
  • Once he runs away from them, he falls into a criminal gang: there isn’t anything there to help him
• Formation of the Family
  • The Question: how much is affinity, how much heredity?
    • Should it be determined by natural genetics or by behavior/love?
  • The Question: how much room for there is choice? Can you create your own family?
  • The Answer: Dickens would like to admit that there should be lots of room for it, but he isn’t comfortable with this answer, so the answer looks like no.
    • Oliver finds his family by affinity and by chance: they meet by chance, but because they like each other, they make a good family
    • And sure, Mr. Brownlow adopts him, and all his friends move near him
    • But then it turns out they’re actually related: Dickens has to make them related because he doesn’t want to admit his radical formation of family
  • The Answer: You have little room for choice.
    • Oliver’s father is judged for shunning his “natural” but illegitimate wife and son (again, legal institutions fail here)
    • The chosen family of the gang is unnatural and wrong, and is disbanded at the end.
      • Even though Fagin describe it as saying that everyone’s interests are mutual, and that to take care of yourself, you have to take care of others: it’s almost a good moral structure, but not quite (388)
    • Institutions – alternative families – fail
    • At the end, characters organize themselves around natural family: nuclear family with its constellations of “aunts” and “uncles” around them in the village
  • Ultimately, Dickens experiments with alternative family structures, but defaults to the one he knows best.
• London
  • Oliver’s early morning journey across London to get to the place they’re to rob is an opportunistic excuse to show London: a set-piece
  • Dickens’ description is the first of its kind, to show the diversity and loudness of it all (203)
  • A catalyst for events: it couldn’t have happened anywhere else, this story, so London drives the text, a spatial excuse for the text
  • “Quite confounded the senses” (203)
• The Masses
  • They spontaneously organize all the time
    • To go after Oliver, not to help him: 116
      • Tradesmen, carmen, butchers, bakers, milkmen, errand-boys, school-boys, children, everyone chases him
      • “a hundred voices”
      • “passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast” (116)
    • They organize at the end to catch the evil Sikes
      • Cf real trial: the Mannings’ murder trial, where they killed a lodger, buried in lime pit: 35,000 people came to see execution
    • Thus, they are an element of control, of policing, of surveillance
• Chance
  • Seems to be the operative of fate
  • Whenever there’s no good reason that events should happen as Dickens wants them to, chance/fate steps in
• Morality
  • Oliver seems incorruptible: why?
    • “There is something in that boy’s face,” says Mr. Brownlow: it’s the genetic inheritance that shows he’s moral and good (119)
• Determinism
  • Nancy and Oliver having some good in them: anti-determinist
• Transcendental Homelessness
  • Lukacs: reversible but absolute alienation from self, society, and a feeling of totality, in Theory of the Novel
  • Oliver is the tale of overcoming that, of going beyond it and finding that wholeness again
  • However, Dickens does outline connection between environment and character a little
• The Orphan
  • Allows you to dramatize the generation gap
  • Allows you to ask questions about nature/nurture
  • Opportunity for self-fashioning: an allegory about each generation finding its own identity
  • No parents = greater possibility, more responsibility
• Childhood
  • Cf Friedrich Ruckert, German poet and Orientalist who wrote 425 poems about the death of his two kids, many of which were set to popular music (Mahler, Brahms, Liszt, Schubert)
  • Creation of childhood as Victorians try to clean up the cities **