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By Root 1615 0

tormentors has passed into popular culture. Millions of people who have never opened the nineteenth-century novel are familiar with the image of a ragged child holding out his porringer and asking for more. Like Robinson Crusoe or Huck Finn, Oliver has evolved from fiction into fable and archetype. Or perhaps he has simply returned to his roots. The characters and settings of Oliver Twist resonate so deeply and so variously because they echo a diverse collection of popular genres. The novel is at once social satire, thriller, melodrama, autobiography, fairy tale, moral fable, and religious allegory. While some of the specific texts that influenced Oliver Twist’s composition are no longer familiar to contemporary readers and may require some literary excavation, each of the various genres whose competing voices create the novel’s seductive energy survive and are easily recognizable in modern forms of entertainment.

Like its predecessor, Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s second novel reflects his childhood passion for the eighteenth-century picaresque novels Tom Jones and Roderick Random. As in the novels by Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, the plot of Oliver Twist revolves around illegitimacy and disputed inheritance. Like his literary forebears, Oliver is unaware of his true identity and adrift in a world of rogues and schemers. Unlike the more robust heroes of Fielding and Smollett, however, Dickens’s orphan does not grow up; he remains a frail and passive child throughout the novel, more victim than protagonist. Oliver’s failure to reach adolescence preserves him from the sexual temptations that befall Tom Jones and Roderick Random, perhaps making it easier for Dickens to persuade his Victorian audience that “little Oliver” embodies “the purest good.”

Dickens’s 1841 preface to the third edition of Oliver Twist echoes his eighteenth-century masters in its declaration of high moral purpose. Where Smollett’s preface to Roderick Random had announced the author’s wish to arouse “generous indignation ... against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world,” and Fielding’s dedication of Tom Jones had insisted that “to recommend goodness and innocence hath been my sincere endeavour in this history,” Dickens assures the readers of Oliver Twist of his intention to show “the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance and triumphing at last.” Indeed, in his efforts to persuade us that his depiction of “the most criminal and degraded of London’s population” is intended for instruction and not titillation, Dickens cites both Fielding and Smollett, among a host of other eighteenth-century novelists, as examples of writers who described “the very scum and refuse of the land” for “wise purposes.”

Dickens’s invocation of Fielding and Smollett in defense of his decision to draw Fagin, Sikes, Nancy, and the Artful Dodger “in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid poverty of their lives” was intended to refute charges, by his rival, Thackeray, and others, that Oliver Twist was an attempt to cash in on the immense popularity of the so-called Newgate novels of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton and William Harrison Ainsworth. Based on true accounts of notorious criminals published in compilations such as The Newgate Calendar (1773) and The New Newgate Calendar (1826—1828), the Newgate novels romanticized the lives of highwaymen and other lowlife characters. The popularity of the genre was at its height in the 1830s, beginning with Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) and culminating in the most successful Newgate novel of all, Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, which for four months in 1839 overlapped with Oliver Twist in Bentley’s Miscellany. Critics of the genre argued that such novels encouraged sympathy with vice and were a harmful influence on the young.

Dickens’s 1841 preface answers those who would lump Oliver Twist with the novels of Bulwer-Lytton and Ainsworth by insisting that his portrayal of Fagin’s gang, far from romanticizing villains, intends “to show them as they really are, for ever skulking