Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens, 1837-39 ★★★½

Waif Takes on the Big Bad City

A cruel disposition can be a positive quality when writing a novel. Case in point: Oliver Twist.

Charles Dickens’ torture test for his titular boy hero saves his book from mawkish excess and, along with its brilliant depiction of a harsh urban landscape, imparts readability and drive, not to mention a steady undertow of savage black humor. The result, marred at times by bathos and coincidence, is a bracing change-up from the author whose prior, first novel was the whimsical, often-pastoral The Pickwick Papers.

Author cruelty can be overdone. Take Tess Of The d’Urbanvilles, or more egregiously, The Painted Bird. But sometimes a little extra sand in the gears is just what a reader wants – and an author needs.

Does anyone enjoy Oliver Twist nearly so much when things are going well for Oliver? I’m sure nearly everyone quickly flies through pages where names like “Mr. Brownlow” “Rose” and “Harry Maylie” dominate; if they are like me, the speed bumps come only with “Fagin,” “Sikes,” and “Mr. Bumble.”

The set-up is pregnant with tragedy: Oliver Twist is a miserable orphan, his birth a mistake, consigned to life in a savage workhouse where asking for seconds on gruel is a criminal offense. Yet time and again, Providence, fate, and/or a very engaged author pull him back from the abyss. This is so even when he finds himself in the London underworld, under the care of master thief Fagin, who bestows praise upon Oliver’s eager ears while coaching him down a criminal path where either transport to Australia or a scaffold await.

A bit overlong, yes. “It is a tale told of grief and trial, and sorrow, young man, and such tales usually are; if it were one of unmixed joy and happiness, it would be very brief.”

Though it is ironic how that formula works in reverse in Oliver Twist, one understands what Mr. Brownlow means by that statement. The narrative of Oliver Twist covers a lot of ground, and presents a compelling case for reasonless cruelty in life even as it argues for humanistic compassion.

In his introduction to my Signet Classic edition, Edward Le Comte notes the “fairy tale” quality of Oliver Twist as license for its sentimentality. That may be a hard sell for the casual reader. People come out of nowhere to involve themselves in Oliver’s life for vague reasons. One fair maiden languishes for a couple of chapters under a life-threatening condition that can only be described as “acute Victorianism.” Oliver himself develops strongly but inevitably becomes a bystander in his own story, one with perfect manners and diction despite his dirt-poor upbringing. Reading through these sentimental passages works best when taken as a window to Dickens’ time.

The Artful Dodger, at center, introduces a shy Oliver to his gang and its leader, Fagin, seen at his most deceptively charming. "Although Oliver had been brought up by philosophers, he was not theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that self-preservation is the first law of nature." From an original illustration by George Cruikshank. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dodger_introduces_Oliver_to_Fagin_by_Cruikshank_(detail).jpg. 

The novel excels in the negative, in Dickens’ conception of bad guys such as the homicidal Sikes, the doughty Artful Dodger, and especially the savage and cunning Fagin, who despite brutal Sikes’ bluster presents the real center of menace, and Oliver Twist’s most interesting character. Much like Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers, Fagin is both vividly rendered and devastatingly quotable:

“Every man’s his own friend, my dear. He hasn’t as good a one as himself anywhere…Some conjurers say that number three is the magic number, and some say number seven. It’s neither, my friend, neither. It’s number one.”

Fagin’s Jewishness makes him a problem for modern readers. He reflects the casual anti-Semitism of Dickens’ time and place, and does so in a way more jarring than that other problem character of classic British literature, Shakespeare’s Shylock. Shylock after all makes a case for resentment [“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”] that echoes through time, whatever his sordidness. Fagin is just a straight-out cheat and stinker, rather feral in his depiction, like a penny-dreadful Nosferatu:

His right hand was raised to his lips, and as, absorbed in thought, he bit his long black nails, he disclosed among his toothless gums a few such fangs as should have been a dog’s or rat’s.

Yet Fagin’s negative charisma works as a magnetic center. When he’s on stage, Oliver Twist captivates us with its darkness.

When he’s not… That is the challenge of Oliver Twist, cutting through the happiness so we can wallow enjoyably in its misery.

Dickens was at a fascinating point in his career when he set to writing this in 1837, still wrapping up Pickwick Papers. It’s a classic case of a bestselling author writing in a more serious vein, only to get stick about it. Many critics claimed his depiction of how the poor lived was both underbaked and overdone. In his Preface to the Third Edition, published two years after the serial publication’s completion in 1841, Dickens’s vehemence is still pungent:

I have no faith in the delicacy which cannot bear to look upon them. I have no desire to make proselytes among such people. I have no respect for their opinion, good or bad, do not covet their approval, and do not write for their amusement.

The feeling you get, here and throughout reading Oliver Twist, is that this time it was personal for Dickens, who like Oliver spent time in a workhouse growing up and yearned for a loving mother’s care.

His depictions of London at its seediest have a lived-in feeling about them, simultaneously picaresque and repellent:

Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes upon which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it – as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage – all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.

Fagin’s hideout is similarly well-presented, a hodgepodge of bric-a-brac with trapdoors and dirty windows gazing out into nowhere. It is here the novel takes off, with Oliver fending for himself against the snares of his captors, finding himself strangely charmed (as we, the readers, are, too.)

Fagin’s reason for indoctrinating Oliver, when revealed, doesn’t make sense, and the introduction of the shadowy nemesis Monks is a tipping point in the direction of villain overload. It’s a book that moves a lot, twisting more than you’d expect even with that word baked into its title.

The dialogue veers between two poles. On the one hand, you get the hilariously vile Mr. Bumble, a bully who covets his position as workhouse disciplinarian, sagely explaining to the undertaker’s wife Mrs. Sowerberry why feeding Oliver too well caused him to rebel against her abuse:

“You’ve overfed him, ma’am. You’ve raised an artificial soul and spirit in him, ma’am, unbecoming a person of his condition, as the board, Mrs. Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you. What have paupers to do with soul or spirit? It’s quite enough that we let ‘em have live bodies. If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma’am, this would never have happened.”

When Oliver is put in better hands, the results are more mawkish, such as when he rhapsodizes of his mother looking down from Heaven: “If she had seen me hurt, it would have made her sorrowful; and her face has always looked sweet and happy when I have dreamed of her.”

There have been many successful adaptations of Oliver Twist for stage and screen; the 1948 film directed by David Lean may well be the best. Here, John Howard Davies' Oliver is pressed into service for a burglary by Robert Newton's Sikes. Image from https://lifdununa.is/grein/astaedulaus-omoguleiki/.

Moments like this make me wonder if Oliver Twist didn’t suffer from an emotional overinvestment by its author. So often, the novel’s brilliance is best captured along its margins, such as a ride Bill Sikes takes Oliver on along Smithfield Market, “a stunning and bewildering scene which quite confounded the senses” and which Dickens itemizes in almost dizzying detail. Or the clever banter between Fagin’s more jaded boys, like Jack Dawkins, a. k. a. the Artful Dodger, who explains to Oliver why he doesn’t feel guilty about his life of crime:

“If you don’t take pocket-handkechers and watches, some other cove will; so that the coves that lose ‘em will be all the worse, and you’ll be all the worse too, and nobody half a ha’p’orth the better, except the chaps wot gets them – and you’ve just as good a right to them as they have.”

Despite its reputation, Oliver Twist is a funny book, in part because it is so wrapped in tragedy that its releases work that much better. In Pickwick Papers, despite its undeniable charm, the gambols of our lead characters grow into a sometimes monotonous cycle of slapstick frivolity. Here the comedy feels more earned, because it comes from a harder, better-observed place.

I only wish I was as admiring of Oliver Twist as a whole. Oliver, as is so often said, becomes a spectator in his own novel, and at times a cloying one. Many of the secondary characters seem extraneous, and more than that after we discover how tied together they are by circumstance.

The strength of Oliver Twist lies in its dark underbelly, its unflinching depiction of the depths of human cruelty. Yet Dickens reminds us that such is not the totality of life’s rich pageant: “Men who look on nature and their fellow men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colors are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.”