Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [241]
—from an unsigned article in the Quarterly Review (1839)
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
No one has read that remarkable tale of Oliver Twist without being interested in poor Nancy and her murderer; and especially amused and tickled by the gambols of the Artful Dodger and his companions. The power of the writer is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive, and must follow him whithersoever he leads; and to what are we led? Breathless to watch all the crimes of Fagin, tenderly to deplore the errors of Nancy, to have for Bill Sikes a kind of pity and admiration, and an absolute love for the society of the Dodger. All these heroes stepped from the novel on to the stage; and the whole London public, from peers to chimney-sweeps, were interested about a set of ruffians whose occupations are thievery, murder, and prostitution. A most agreeable set of rascals, indeed, who have their virtues, too, but not good company for any man. We had better pass them by in decent silence; for, as no writer can or dare tell the whole truth concerning them, and faithfully explain their vices, there is no need to give ex parte statements of their virtues.
—from Catherine (1839-1840)
JOHN RUSKIN
The reader will perhaps be surprised at my separating the greatest work of Dickens, Oliver Twist, with honour, from the loathsome mass to which it typically belongs. That book is an earnest and uncaricatured record of states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full of the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble passion.
—from the Nineteenth Century (June 1880)
G. K. CHESTERTON
Relative to the other works of Dickens “Oliver Twist” is not of great value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and of so clumsy a melodrama, that one is almost tempted to say that Dickens would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater without it he would still have been incomplete without it. With the exception of some gorgeous passages, both of humour and horror, the interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of Dickens’s literary genius as in its revelation of those moral, personal, and political instincts which were the make-up of his character and the permanent support of that literary genius. It is by far the most depressing of all his books; it is in some ways the most irritating; yet its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that spontaneous and splendid output. Without this one discordant note all his merriment might have seemed like levity.
—from Chesterton’s Introduction to Oliver Twist (1907)
GEORGE ORWELL
In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself
—from Dickens, Dali, and Others (1946)
Questions
1. William Makepeace Thackeray imagines the reader “breathless to watch all the crimes of Fagin, tenderly to deplore the errors of Nancy, to have for Bill Sikes a kind of pity and admiration, and an absolute love for the society of the Dodger.” In all, Thackeray finds them “a most agreeable set of rascals.” Richard Ford, on the other hand, felt that these rascals, even in fiction, were corrupters of the young—“Our youth should not even suspect the possibility of such hidden depths of guilt”; these rascals “corrupt pure tastes and pervert morality.” Who’s right? How does Ford’s criticism pertain to debates raging today over children’s access to negative influences via television, film, and the Internet?
2. A number