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With his genius for adapting different genres to his own purposes, Dickens has reshaped formal elements of Bunyan’s religious allegory to construct a bourgeois and secular fable. Salvation, for Oliver, is a comfortable income and a cottage in suburbia. He is entitled to it not even primarily because he has resisted evil, but because he is the son of a gentleman. His ability to withstand the coercions of Fagin, the threats of Bill Sikes, the seductions of the Artful Dodger, is, it is implied, a part of his genetic inheritance. He is the offspring of a decent, though erring, man and an angelic, ill-used woman. Through all his trials, Oliver has retained the best aspects of his parents’ natures and justified their unconventional love. Dickens, the romantic, uses Oliver’s spotless character to argue that true affection is more valuable than an empty marriage contract. The orphan’s half-brother, Monks, the child of their father’s hate-filled coupling with his legal wife, is physically and morally scarred. Oliver, the result of true, though legally unsanctioned, love, is morally immaculate.

In some miraculous fashion, growing up in a workhouse and a thieves’ den, Oliver even possesses innate middle-class manners and a more genteel style of speech than any of his early companions. Dickens appears to be arguing that social class is a matter of essential, inherited characteristics that express themselves regardless of nurture. Oliver is like Hans Christian Andersen’s Ugly Duckling; out of place and cruelly abused in the squalid environment of his birth, he is eventually recognized and claimed by his true family. At some time or another almost every child, stung by some perceived parental injustice, takes refuge in the myth of a lost “real family” of rank and privilege. The particular appeal, for Dickens, of such a fantasy is best understood in autobiographical terms. Much of the story of Oliver Twist is driven by memories of childhood ordeals. As Michael Slater points out, in his introduction to the 1992 Everyman’s Library edition of Oliver Twist, “Dickens had a closer, more intensely personal involvement with his story of a sensitive, intelligent young child’s exposure to social degradation and moral danger than his readers can possibly have dreamed of.”

When Charles Dickens was twelve years old, his father was arrested for debt and sent to Marshalsea Prison. As was customary at the time, the whole family took up residence in the prison—all except Charles, the oldest boy, who was taken out of school and sent to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory. For six months, the studious and ambitious boy was employed pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish for six or seven shillings a week. He spent his nights in lodgings near the factory and visited his family only once a week, on Sundays. For years Dickens was unable to discuss this period of his life, or to walk past Warren’s factory in the Strand. Eventually he wrote an account of the experience for his friend John Forster, who included it in The Life of Charles Dickens (1872—1874). Writing decades after the event, Dickens vividly recalled his boyhood feelings of betrayal and wounded pride: “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that ... no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared ... to place me at any common school” (Forster, p. 25).

The young Charles Dickens, acutely aware of his family’s fallen status in the world, and full of conventional nineteenth-century snobbery, was particularly humiliated to find himself working side by side with uneducated street urchins: “No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast