Topicality of the theme

1.  Topicality of the theme

Charles Dickens life was very hard. His childhood was an unhappy period. His childhood passed in stresses for surviving in difficult conations of the XIX century England. His novel «Little Darrit» is about miserable life of his parents.

One of the creators of characters in all the world s literature is the British novelist Charles Dickens. His novel «David Copperfield» describes one of D… tourist character named Uriah Heep. The story is harried by its win hero, David Copperfield a young boy. He has arrived at Mr. Wickfield s, were he is to board while altitudes school. Mr. Wickfield has allowed practice. The story is set in the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Dickens stile is very unique and original. He uses in some time he uses short sentences, especially when he wants deemphasize something important. It is repetition are also interesting and we have them almost in all his book. «Oliver Twist» can give us some imagination about its author s style. Here we have many examples of using polysemantic words. One of such wage we come across in chapter II. Oliver had not been within the walls of the workhouse a quarter of an hour, and had scarily completed the devolution of second slice of bread, when Mr. Bambel, who had handed him over to the core of an old woman, returned, and telling him it was board had said hi was to happen before it forth word.

In this sentence one should pay attention to his to the words «workhouse» and «board». The first is public institution for reception of paupers in a parish or group of parishes. The inhabitants of workhouses were selected to most brutal exploitation. In «Oliwer Twist» Dickens gives a realistic picture of the horrible existence in workhouse.

The word board has many meanings the meaning is

Oliver Twist» is an excellent, fascinating and compelling novel which I had the pleasure of reading. This book is exceptionally well narrated which distinguishes Dickens as one of the greatest English story writers. The issues he raised are timeless particularly societal issues pertaining to dealing with poverty, class differences, child labour, orphans and the disadvantaged in society. He highlights the need to care for others and not to be selfish. Dickens did a good job of enlightening the middle class in Britain of the hardships that the poor had to endure during his time.

Oliver Twist is a very young, innocent orphan who lost his mother at birth. He is thrust into the cruel and unforgiving world. I was moved by the numerous hardships and challenges that he had to endure at such a tender age, including being shot at. He was moved away from the workhouse when he innocently asks for some more food, taken to as an apprentice undertaker and after some trouble runs away only to get into a group of thieves and robbers.

Dickens paints a grim, dark and horrifying picture of life of the poor in Victorian England. The author produced some memorable characters like Fagin the miser and the gang of thieves that included The Artful Dodger, Mr Bumble at the workhouse, Nancy the kind hearted whore with motherly instincts, Mr Grimwig who is always threatening to eat his head and those of others, Sikes the murderer and others.

Thankfully the book has a happy ending for Oliver. However, Nancy touched my heart and I felt that she should not have met such a grisly demise. Some unfortunate anti-Semitic references taint an otherwise exceptional novel.

This is excellent reading for those who like a well written story with exciting twists and turns.

I have read a number of Dickens books and can certainly call myself a big fan of his work. Considering the overwhelming popularity of «Oliver Twist,» it's a bit surprising that it took a graduate class to present the first opportunity for my getting to read it. While the book is good, it is not without its problems. I found the character of Oliver to be a little flat and a whole lot of unbelievable. Furthermore, Dickens played around with a lot of themes dealing with knots and mazes which was mildly tiresome.

And while I got a couple of big belly laughs out of Bumble's character, I was really peeved with Nancy's outcome. For those who have not read it, I am being cryptic for a reason.

All in all it is a clever little book, though it is clear it is one of his first. However, when you compare this one to the likes of «David Copperfield» and «Dombey and Son,» it leaves a bit to be desired.

For those who have never read Dickens and are afraid to pick up one of his many novels that are half a foot thick, start with «A Christmas Carol» or «Great

Expectations»….and then give «Twist» a whirl.

Oliver Twist was Dickens's first serious novel, after the comic Pickwick Papers. It is trash but his potential shows through.

The Penguin Classics version seen here gives us the book as it was originally serialized in magazines, and it is filthily anti-semitic, as is The Merchant Of Venice by Shakespeare and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, two other filthily anti-semitic British pieces of work. We have an established tradition here of Jew hatred in jolly old England.

 The characters in Oliver Twist are caricatures given to us as pure good or pure evil. I don't know which are worse. Rose Maylie is so sickeningly sweet and good as to be worse than the bad uns. So is Oliver Twist for that matter. Reading about either of them is like eating french toast with gobs of maple syrup but leaving out the french toast. Just spoon that maple syrup into your mouth straight.

 Beauty and goodness are equivalent to each other. Rose Maylie is so pretty, pretty as a picture, pretty as two pictures, and so is our pansy goody two shoes Oliver Twist. Perfection is too weak a word for them.

Meanwhile, the Jew is a despicably ugly character, both physically and morally. And when Oliver wakes up and looks out a window he spies the Jew, and he wakes up screaming The Jew! The Jew!

This edition of Dickens's viciously anti-semitic work identifies its primary villain as The Jew perhaps 300 times. It's The Jew this, The Jew that. If someone tried to get this garbage published today, the only publishing house that would take it would be from Aryan Nation.

 The problem with completely slamming this trash is that even though the characters are one dimensional, either goody goody good or bad uns, and even though it is a sledgehammer of constant Jew hatred, you still have a fledgling Dickens, a neophyte Dickens, which is like having a rookie Reggie Jackson on your team. He is going to hit some homers and win some World Series games. He has awesome talent and it does show.

There is a confirmed tendency to hero-worship the famous. Dickens or Shakespeare could have written any old garbage, and often did, and still most people would praise it to the skies because they really aren't looking past the name.

Do you have the independence and the true taste to really tell the wheat from the chaff? Very few people do. And Reggie Jackson struck out an awful lot, and had a big mouth which his foot fit easily into, and was never accused of being a nice guy.

This early version of Oliver Twist reeks. Get the musical instead. Or look for a later version, one that doesn't scream about The Jew ten times a page.

The introduction tells us that Dickens had Jewish friends who told him that this book was anti-semitic, and Dickens answered basically «yes, but most Fagin type criminals ARE Jews». Even so, he deleted some of his references to The Jew and added a nice Jew as a minor character in one of his later books. Big deal. That doesn't balance Fagin. Oh, I've ripped out your liver? Here, have a twinkie.

NOTES ON «OLIVER TWIST»

As Angus Wilson says,

… the somber tone of Oliver Twist, coming after Pickwick Papers, was a surprise, though no disappointment, to contemporary readers… With Oliver Twist Dickens the master of grand social vision, and Dickens the journalist, come to the front of the stage, while Dickens the comedian of Pickwick Papers retires into comparative shadow.

It is as if Dickens were eager to demonstrate his own versatility and to avoid beign typecast as the author of a particular kind of fiction: in the context of the 1830s it is hard to think of a more abrupt change…

Dickens drew on various literary and dramatic models in his second novel. The Gothic novel may well have contributed 'a certain supernatural element implied in the diabolic character of Fagin, and in the mysterious absence of his footprints after he has peered in upon Oliver in his country retreat, and in the whole phantom character of Monks'. The eighteenth-century picaresque novel may have suggested 'the disputed – inheritance – cum – illegitimate – son plot' (cf. Tom Jones and Humphery Clinker). Popular melodrama of the kind that Dickens enjoyed in the London theaters made its contribution, notably to the stylized and implausible dialogue at certain points. Most obvious of all to Dickens' first readers would have been the influence of the so-called 'Newgate novel', which flourished in the 1830s; to this category belong such once-popular works as Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832), and Harrison Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834). Such novels glamorized the criminal classes (the heroes of the first and third are highwaymen). At the end of the decade Thackeray satirized this school of fiction in his Catherine (serialized in 1839–40), narrated by 'Ikey Solomon, junior' (Ikely Solomon had been the prototype for Fagin); and in Frazer's Magazine (August 1840), describing the crowd at a public execution, he contrasted the real-life Nancys with those depicted in Dickens:

I was curious to look at them, having, in late fashionable novels, read many accounts of such personages. Bah! what figments these novelist tell us! Boz, who knows life well, knows that his Miss Nancy is the most unreal fantastical personage possible;… He dare not tell the truth concerning such young ladies.

Most obviously, there is the satire on the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and its effects. Peter Fairclough notes that the opening chapters of the novel appeared when a campaign by The Times attacking the Act was at its height. As Fairclough says,

The chief object of the new Act was to stop the benevolent Allowance System–a development of the granting of wholesale outdoor relief by many humane J.P.'s, whereby labourers' wages were supplemented to subsistence level by contributions to the Poor Rate–by abolishing out-relief to the able-bodied [see Note, Poor Laws].

Oliver is born into the pre‑1834 system, and sent to one of the baby farms which were a feature of the early nineteenth-century provision for pauper orphans. But by the time he is nine years old (Ch. 2) the new Act is in effect and his fate is settled by one of the elected Boards of Guardians that had been newly established. Humphry House has commented that Bumble's still being beadle after the introduction of the new Act was perfectly possible: 'all the details did not change at a stroke, and the early reports of the Commissioners are full of complaints of unsuitable officers taken over from the old system.

Dickens was to continue his attack on the inhumanity of the workhouse system: almost thirty years later, in his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, it is still a target. But it is not the only topical aspect of this early novel; indeed, according to House, 'A novel could hardly have been more topical than Oliver Twist, ' Saffron Hill, where much of the action takes place, was notorious in the period as a haunt of thieves, prostitutes and fences, and in making it the base of Fagin's activities 'Dickens was… using a contemporary topical allusion with which a great number of his readers would have been quite familiar beforehand' (House). The brief reference to Oliver's narrow escape at being apprenticed to a chimney-sweep alludes to the plight of the climbing boys, another contemporary scandal.

Oliver is a sort of male Cinderella or princess disguised as a goose girl; and his innate gentility (manifested, for example, in his speech–a product of his birth rather than his environment) is flagrantly non-realistic. Similarly, there is a problem arising from the conflict between the impulse of Dickens's part to satirize with righteous indignation and the impulse to turn anything and everything to comedy. Bumble is not, a priori, a figure of fun but the corrupt representative of an evil system. In the novel, however, he is a comedian, and some of the scenes in which he appears (for example, his courtship of Mrs. Carney) have little or nothing to do with the attack on the poor law. This is an aspect of Dickens' art not confined to this novel (compare, for instance, the treatment of Mrs. Gump in Martin Chuzzlewit, where the exposure of her incompetence as a nurse is almost lost sight of in the rich eccentricities of her monologues)….

Evil is rendered with much more conviction than good. Beside Fagin, the benevolent Mr Brownlow is insubstantial; even Nancy, though her activities as prostitute are scarcely touched on (Dickens never uses the word in the novel) and her sexuality is played down, is a human(i) portrait in a way that the virtuous Rose Maylie is not. Between these groups, as Wilson says, move 'the passive figure of Oliver himself and the mechanical figure of his sinister half-brother Monks.