Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

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” (Forster, p. 26). One of Dickens’s companions, an orphan named Bob Fagin, seems to have had some real regard for him. Dickens recounts how Fagin taught him the job, nursed him when he was sick, and protected him from the bullying that his refined accent provoked. However, Bob Fagin’s kindness was more threatening to Dickens than the other boys’ taunts. By helping him to function in his new, degraded world, Fagin also unintentionally helped to undermine the boy’s sense of his true identity. The last thing the twelve-year-old Charles Dickens wanted was to fit in with his new companions. Years later, Dickens rewarded Bob Fagin for his solicitude by giving his name to the most dangerous villain in Oliver Twist.

In Oliver Twist, it is Bob Fagin’s namesake who attempts to socialize Oliver to the life of a pickpocket and, at the behest of Monks, to prevent him from discovering his true parentage. Fagin’s prize pupil, the Artful Dodger, discovers Oliver soon after his arrival in London. Hungry and homeless, the orphan runaway is at the lowest ebb of “lonesomeness and desolation” as he sits, “with bleeding feet and covered with dust, upon a doorstep” (chap. VIII). The Dodger takes him home to Fagin’s den, where he is given food and shelter. At first, the world of Fagin and his apprentices seems one of fellowship and fun. Only later, through the corrupting game with the pocket-handkerchiefs, do the real motives of the “merry old gentleman” become clear. He is preparing his charges for the gallows. Fagin is the most dangerous person a lonely and vulnerable child could meet, a corrupter with a smiling face.

Whether or not he realized it at the time, in hindsight Dickens knew how close he had come, during the months at the blacking factory, to disappearing, like Oliver, into the criminal world of the London streets: “I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond” (Forster, p. 28). The youthful Charles Dickens preserved himself from such an outcome, or so he afterward believed, only by keeping aloof from other boys and constantly reminding himself of his superior origins and ambitions: “Though perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space between us. They ... always spoke of me as ‘the young gentleman’ ” (p. 29). If, in his “lonesomeness and desolation,” he had allowed himself to make friends with the well-meaning Bob Fagin, who knows what might have been his fate?

Dickens’s boyhood miseries came to an end when his grand-mother died, leaving her son, John Dickens, enough money to discharge his debts. Charles was rescued from the blacking factory and sent to school at Wellington House Academy. From then on, successes came rapidly. Leaving school at the age of fifteen, he became a lawyer’s clerk and later a parliamentary reporter. By the time he was twenty-one, Dickens was contributing stories to newspapers and magazines under the pen name of “Boz.” At twenty-four, he was the celebrated author of
Pickwick Papers.
Yet his experiences at the blacking factory left their mark. Fear of poverty and debt drove Dickens to a lifetime of frenzied overwork. Obsession with childhood, and especially with the experiences of vulnerable and abused children, is a primary feature of his imaginative world.

Looking back on the most traumatic five months of his life, Dickens recalled, “That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is ... utterly beyond my power to tell. No man’s imagination can overstep the reality. But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work” (Forster, p. 29). Though it seems most unlikely, judging from his ebullient adult personality, that the twelve-year-old Charles Dickens bore much outward resemblance to Oliver Twist, it is easy to see how Oliver might represent the young Dickens’s hidden feelings of helplessness and abandonment. Pale, thin, starved, and utterly pathetic, passive little Oliver is the embodiment of all that his creator had suffered secretly. Dickens’s childhood feelings of undeserved humiliation and lack of control over the circumstances of his own life are relived in his account of the ordeals of an orphan boy, born in the workhouse and later left to fend for himself on the streets of London.

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 and most compelling literary onslaught the new legislation had yet received.

Oliver Twist
contains scathing and memorable portraits of hypocritical and self-important officialdom. Much of the novel’s harshest irony is directed at the parish beadle, Mr. Bumble, who proudly wears his “porochial seal” of “the Good Samaritan healing the sick and bruised man” (chap. IV) while allowing the indigent to die in the streets. Bumble boasts that his “great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they don’t want; and then they get tired of coming” (chap. XXIII). Dickens makes use of mordant satire to animate melancholy statistics. The infant Oliver is farmed out to a branch workhouse in which “twenty or thirty ... juvenile offenders against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing,” and where it seemed to “perversely happen” that in “eight and a half cases out of ten” children “sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident” (chap. II). Yet for all its poignant scenes and memorable characters,
Oliver Twist
has serious limitations as social criticism. The novel arouses our indignation against the general treatment of the poor but does not argue for any specific reforms. Indeed it is not entirely clear whether Dickens is attacking the Poor Law Amendment Act itself, or the failure of the new commissioners to stamp out abuses that had become entrenched under the old system. The main targets of his satire, Bumble, Mrs. Corney, and Mrs. Mann, are all relics of the old system of poor relief. In
Oliver Twist,
and throughout his writings, Dickens fails to present cogent arguments for reform at a systemic or institutional level because he harbors a deep mistrust of all systems and institutions. As Steven Marcus points out,
Oliver Twist’s
“determined, aggressive satire” cannot “in any convincing sense be assigned to partisan allegiance.” Dickens can conceive of reform only on a personal level.

In the world of
Oliver Twist,
public officials are at worst negligent and corrupt like Bumble or Mrs. Mann, at best merely inept and comic like the Bow Street Runners Blathers and Duff, who fail to solve the Maylies’ burglary. Oliver’s rescue is accomplished through the compassionate actions of individuals in the private sphere. Dickens nowhere offends his middle-class readership by suggesting that Brownlow, Grimwig, or the Maylies, as members of bourgeois society, can be blamed for condoning or collaborating in institutionalized oppression of the poor. He further assuages bourgeois sensibilities by providing his readers with a middle-class hero in disguise. In reality, Noah Claypole, and even Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger, present far more convincing models of the likely fate of a penniless nineteenth-century orphan.

Successful or not, social criticism ceases to be Dickens’s chief concern once his orphan hero arrives in London. In his portrayals of the workhouse officials, Dickens gives evil a comic face: Polemic is never far from pantomime. In their marital squabbles, Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney are like Punch and Judy, the sparring couple in a traditional English slapstick puppet show. When Oliver falls among thieves, the characters he encounters are recovered from a much darker and more primitive layer of the author’s imagination. From now on, Dickens can rarely muster enough detachment to write satire. He has entered Oliver’s orphanhood and is once again the abandoned and fearful boy in the blacking factory. As many readers have noticed, the denizens of Dickens’s underworld are curiously sexless: Nancy, the prostitute, is a slatternly Madonna, and there is never a hint of pederasty in Fagin’s relationship with the boys. Rather than, as is commonly supposed, distorting his characters to please a prudish Victorian audience, I believe Dickens created them this way because this was how they presented themselves to him: exaggerated, larger-than-life, erotic but sexless, grotesque, and mysteriously powerful, as grown-ups appear to a child.

Oliver Twist’s extreme polarities reproduce the moral landscape of childhood. In this respect, the novel resembles a fairy tale. As Bruno Bettelheim observes in
The Uses of Enchantment,
“The figures in fairy tales are not ambivalent—not good and bad at the same time, as we all are in reality. But since polarization dominates the child’s mind, it also dominates fairy tales” (p. 9). In the world of
Oliver Twist,
adult characters are either neglectful or corrupting parents, like Bumble, Sikes, or Fagin, or they are wise fathers and nurturing mothers, like Brownlow and Rose Maylie. Only Nancy, the sacrificial penitent, is allowed the least shade of moral ambiguity. Oliver’s good and bad adoptive families each have their own domestic hearth: While Brownlow and the Maylies sip tea from fine china and introduce Oliver to the pleasures of reading, Fagin presides over a den of drinking and gambling. The thieves’ London is a labyrinth of mean and dirty streets, noisy and noisome. Oliver’s refuges are neat and orderly. He picks flowers in the Maylies’ Edenic garden. Yet in Dickens’s novel, as in many a fairy tale, it is the ogre, the bad fairy, the wicked stepmother—that embodiment of all that we fear and reject in ourselves—who comes most convincingly to life. Brownlow is bland, Grimwig is tedious, but Fagin compels our attention with his exuberant villainy.