Oliver Twist in Never too Late to Read Classics

Aug 21, 2015 Christine PNW rated it liked it

Oliver Twist. The injustice. The hypocrisy. The melodrama.

There is something so satisfyingly symmetrical about reading Oliver Twist in the very week that one of America's most perniciously vicious public moralizers - and by that phrase, I mean the Duggar family - completely and hopefully irrevocably implodes. It is a reminder that hypocrisy is older than Dickens and that farce is just as common in real life as it is in fiction.

Oliver Twist, scholarship has it, was written in response to the P Oliver Twist. The injustice. The hypocrisy. The melodrama.

There is something so satisfyingly symmetrical about reading Oliver Twist in the very week that one of America's most perniciously vicious public moralizers - and by that phrase, I mean the Duggar family - completely and hopefully irrevocably implodes. It is a reminder that hypocrisy is older than Dickens and that farce is just as common in real life as it is in fiction.

Oliver Twist, scholarship has it, was written in response to the Poor Law of 1834, which changed British law in such a way that those who were poor would only receive relief within workhouses, and "outdoor relief" was abolished. "Outdoor relief" was the practice of providing assistance to those in poverty in the form of money, food or clothing that was provided without the requirement that the recipient enter an institution. It was replaced with "indoor relief" which required that, in order to be eligible, the individual recipient must enter a workhouse or poorhouse. The idea behind the requirement of indoor relief was that the workhouses would be so miserable, so dehumanizing that only the utterly indigent would accept it as it would be - marginally - better than actually starving to death. To call it harsh would be to understate it dramatically.

When I started my classics club project back in September, 2012, I intended to read all of Dickens before it ended in September, 2017. I've not had great success with this endeavor - I've managed only The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, and now Oliver Twist so far. In the interim, I've read a lot of other Victorian literature, though: Trollope (4 out of the 6 of the Chronicles of Barsetshire), Gaskell, Anne and Charlotte Bronte, Doyle, and Hardy, George Eliot. I think that it has taken a while to accustom my brain to the language of Victorian novels, and Dickens seems harder than the others because he is more satirical and more melodramatic than the preceding authors. Because Oliver Twist was a much easier read to accomplish than the others, and I'm hoping that I've broken the back of my aversion to Dickens.

Everyone knows the story of Oliver Twist. It is one of those books that has transcended its boundaries and become part of our collective consciousness. Bill and Nancy, Fagin, the Artful Dodger and Oliver himself are all characters who nearly seem to exist outside the boundaries of fiction. So, I'm not going to talk a lot about the plot, and am just going to mention a few things that I found interesting.

First, Dickens takes aim, particularly, at hypocrisy, and especially at hypocrisy within the framework of the workhouses. All of his parish government characters are rank hypocrites, from Mr. Bumble, the "porochial beadle," a minor functionary who assists with the parish workhouse (and the recipient of the famed request by Oliver for a bit more gruel) to Mrs. Mann, the matron of the workhouse who nearly starves her charges to death. As these officials are depriving the recipients of their charity to the point of incapacitation, they are, themselves, profiting from the misery which they inflict.

Second, the murder scene where Bill Sikes beats the prostitute, Nancy (one of few morally ambiguous characters in the novel) to death is based on the real murder of Eliza Grimwood in 1838. The Guardian published an interesting article on the subject here. The chapter which describes the murder is extremely graphic, especially given the time period of publication, and resulted in accusations that Dickens was being overly melodramatic, which apparently irritated him, since he toned down things a bit from the real murder.

Third, I found it interesting that Oliver Twist, in the end, is discovered to have an background that is upper-class, which, to some degree, is a cheap ending for me. The whole idea that, because of his gentle birth he is capable of resisting the moral decay of the slums may have resonated with Victorian readers, and even with Dickens himself, but it doesn't resonate to my more modern sensibilities that reject the notion of inherent nobility of character being passed through bloodlines to manifest regardless of the circumstances of upbringing. It is a primitive look at "nature" versus "nurture," and one that I found interesting but ultimately unsatisfying.

This is my 49th classic in slightly less than three years (you can find my complete list here), which means that I have only one more to read to finish my Classics Club challenge two years early (by September 1), although I still have 6 posts to write as well. I need a short one to put this thing to bed. ...more

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Oct 27, 2021 Ashley W rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 401-500-pages, 0stand-alone, genre-classics, source-audible

Started on Kindle, then switched to Audible and OMG loved the audio so much more! Really brought the characters to life.

There were so many surprises in this book for me. I always anticipated Dickens would be boring and tedious with slow stories without much action. I was so wrong.

First, the humor was a shocker. So much, though not intentional, at least on part of the characters. For example, Mrs. Mann is so flip about the orphans dying. That in itself isn't funny. Mostly because kids died so muc Started on Kindle, then switched to Audible and OMG loved the audio so much more! Really brought the characters to life.

There were so many surprises in this book for me. I always anticipated Dickens would be boring and tedious with slow stories without much action. I was so wrong.

First, the humor was a shocker. So much, though not intentional, at least on part of the characters. For example, Mrs. Mann is so flip about the orphans dying. That in itself isn't funny. Mostly because kids died so much then. But it was the way that she was just so off the cuff with her comments. Or when Mr. and Mrs. Bumble argued. They were such a real couple. Almost like a 90s sitcom couple with their bickering. And to think just months before they were flirting. Badly, but flirting. The bit about not knowing if Mrs. Corney missed her husband or teapot was another lol.

There was a great deal of action that I wasn't expecting. So many chases and Oliver running away and the situations that happened around him. I could say that he got himself into, but really he just walked into them and everything went very wrong. Or criminal.

The characters fit into easy categories. Those who wanted to punish/torment Oliver and the ones that wanted to save him. Unfortunately his formative years were comprised primarily of the former. Also, there were the Have Alots, Have Enoughs, and Have Nots. The Have Alots either wanted to help or ignore while the Have Enoughs were brutal to the Have Nots. Again, this was so common that it's sad, especially since so many were children and had nowhere to go except the orphanages that never had enough unless someone came to take them and put them to work.

Nancy, I think, is something of a cautionary tale. She had chances to leave Sikes and refused. I felt so bad for her and how she ended up, though his ending was so satisfying.

I love how things ended for Oliver and how he was the same child he was at the beginning. He could have let everything that happened to him, change him. Make him cruel or forget the people who cared for him. Definitely one of my new favorite characters. ...more

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Oct 06, 2023 Shirley (stampartiste) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorite-author-dickens-charles, read-classics, group-read, to-read-in-2023, classics-500-plus-pages, published-1899-and-earlier

Once again, I owe my great enjoyment of another Charles Dickens classic, Oliver Twist, to reading it with the Dickensians! Group, moderated by the generous and indefatigable Bionic Jean. The slower pace of these group reads makes for a richer appreciation and discussion of each novel. Thank you, Jean!

Having only ever heard the names of Oliver and Fagin and the famous “Please, Sir, I want some more” line from the movie, I was somehow under the impression that Oliver Twist was a children’s book. B Once again, I owe my great enjoyment of another Charles Dickens classic, Oliver Twist, to reading it with the Dickensians! Group, moderated by the generous and indefatigable Bionic Jean. The slower pace of these group reads makes for a richer appreciation and discussion of each novel. Thank you, Jean!

Having only ever heard the names of Oliver and Fagin and the famous “Please, Sir, I want some more” line from the movie, I was somehow under the impression that Oliver Twist was a children’s book. But with its dark message of the entrapment of poverty, and the introduction of vile creatures like Fagin and Bill Sikes, Oliver Twist was anything but a children’s story. It exposed what poverty does to people, even kind-hearted people like the young prostitute Nancy.

Even though the sweet, innocent Oliver is the central character of this book, it was the 17-year old thief and prostitute Nancy who stole my heart. Even though she had nothing to gain and everything to lose, she chose to protect Oliver and help him escape her fate. But tragically, she thought she had sinned too much to be redeemed herself.

As a contrast to Nancy, Dickens introduces the reader to another 17-year old girl, Rose Maylie, who was saved from a life of poverty and adopted by a rich widow. In contrast to Nancy, Rose escaped Nancy’s fate and was raised in love and comfort. “There but for the grace of God go I” would be an apt way to paraphrase what Nancy told Rose when they met:

”Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady, that you had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness, and—and—something worse than all—as I have been from my cradle. I may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my deathbed.”

Charles Dickens was such a compassionate Christian man whose novels attempted to enlighten his fellow Victorians that poverty drove people into a life of crime, and few avenues were available to lift them out of any other life. Dickens was such an important crusader for change in Victorian England. It’s impossible to walk away from his novels, including Oliver Twist, unchanged. ...more

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