Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [10]
Kathleen Tillotson, in her introduction to the Clarendon edition of Oliver Twist, traces the novel’s long incubation. Several significant scenes and characters are reworkings of ideas in Sketches by Boz, Dickens’s 1836 compilation of his early stories. The Artful Dodger has a prototype in “Criminal Courts,” Sikes and Nancy resemble characters in “The Hospital Patient,” and “A Visit to Newgate” anticipates Oliver’s interview with Fagin in the condemned cell. Tillotson suggests that elements of the narrative that would later become Oliver Twist had begun to take shape in Dickens’s mind long before he started writing Pickwick Papers. As the first novel Dickens published under his own name (for Pickwick Papers he retained the pen name of “Boz”), Oliver Twist is far more autobiographical than its genial predecessor. Indeed it exhibits many of the strengths and weaknesses of a first novel.
Dickens’s intense identification with Oliver, while contributing to Oliver Twist’s powerful emotional impact, also accounts for many of the novel’s structural flaws. The author’s insistence on his protagonist’s absolute innocence and helplessness severely limits Oliver’s potential for interesting character development. He is too much a “principle” and not enough a real child. Dickens himself appears to recognize this and, in the second half of the novel, increasingly turns his focus from Oliver to more entertaining secondary characters. A further problem lies in Dickens’s insistence on Oliver’s innate superiority to other boys in the workhouse and on the streets, and on the eventual restoration of his status as gentleman. The myth of “gentility” as an inborn trait may have helped the author to come to terms with the social humiliations of his youth, but it severely undermines the effectiveness of Oliver Twist as social criticism. If Oliver is to arouse readers’ indignation at the plight of children in workhouses, it is essential that they view him not as a specimen of unique virtue and sensitivity, but as a typical case.
Dickens’s method of composition may explain some of the apparent conflicts and inconsistencies in the narrative of his second novel. Unlike contemporary writers, Dickens composed his novels episodically, publishing early installments long before he had decided on the eventual direction of the plot. His relationship with his characters undoubtedly evolved and shifted as Oliver Twist progressed; his intense identification with Oliver may have taken him by surprise, subverting his original intention of using the child as a representative victim of an inhumane system of poor relief.
The initial inspiration for Oliver Twist seems to have been Dickens’s opposition to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. This law brought to an end the practice of out-of-door relief (aid given to the poor in their own homes) on the grounds of inefficiency, and compelled everyone in need of parish assistance to enter the workhouse. At the same time, the indigent were to be deterred from coming to the workhouse, except as a last resort, by ensuring that conditions there were as harsh as possible. Inmates were kept on near starvation diets, forced to do hard labor of a kind normally allocated to prisoners, and denied adequate medical care. Death rates were high, especially among children. Every child who died was one less charge on the parish. Dickens set out to dramatize the cruelty of the new law by charting its effects on a helpless orphan. His satirical exposure of heartlessness and greed made an immediate and powerful impression on his audience. He was by no means the first to protest the inhumanity of the new system, but the first fifty pages of Oliver Twist constituted the liveliest