Oliver Twist
remains one of the best known and most popular of Dickens’s novels. Translated, adapted, dramatized, filmed (most notably by David Lean in 1948), and even turned into a musical, the story of Little Orphan Oliver and his grotesque 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 uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great, black, ghastly gallows closing up their prospects, turn them where they may.” He argues that
Oliver Twist’s
relationship to the Newgate novel is comparable to
Don Quixote’s
relationship to the chivalric romance: Both seek to expose the absurdity of a genre they appear to imitate. Certainly Fagin and Bill Sikes would be unlikely to tempt even the most impressionable reader into a life of crime, though Dickens may be skating on thinner ice with the Artful Dodger, regarded by many as the novel’s most energetic and engaging character. Nancy, the prostitute who sacrifices her life for Oliver, has always presented a different kind of problem for readers. In his representation of Nancy, Dickens is hindered in his aim of showing vice in all its wretchedness by his anxiety to conform to “the manners of the age” and avoid “any expression that could by possibility offend.” The constraints of Victorian prudery, and Dickens’s “own taste” prevent any direct reference to Nancy’s occupation and result in a character scarcely less colorless than her respectable counterpart, Rose Maylie.
While it may be true that Dickens’s moral purposes are very different from those of Bulwer-Lytton and Ainsworth, there can be no doubt that the popularity of the Newgate novel contributed to the initial success of
Oliver Twist.
Dickens’s shrewd literary instincts are further revealed in his omission of any direct reference to Bulwer-Lytton or Ainsworth in the 1841 preface. Instead he uses John Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera
(1728) as an example of a work in which villains are romanticized. As the editor of
Bentley’s Miscellany,
he was not about to alienate two popular contributors.
Another influence on
Oliver Twist
was the Gothic novel, a fashionable genre in the 1790s and the early decades of the nineteenth century whose best-known practitioners included Ann Radcliffe and Matthew (“Monk”) Lewis. The word “Gothic” originally implied medieval, as in Horace Walpole’s influential
The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story
(1765), but by the late eighteenth century Gothic fiction was primarily concerned with the supernatural and the macabre, the medieval element being sometimes entirely abandoned. Oliver’s evil half-brother, Monks, with his swirling cloak, scowling features, and foaming at the mouth, is an all-too-perfect Gothic villain. Likewise, the episode in chapter XXXIV in which Oliver wakes from a deep sleep to see Fagin and Monks peering at him through the Maylie’s cottage window has the hallmarks of Gothic mystery. When Oliver calls for help, an extensive search reveals no trace of the intruders: “in no one place could they discern the print of men’s shoes, or the slightest mark which would indicate that any feet had pressed the ground for hours before” (chap. XXXV) . Oliver’s friends try to persuade him it was all a dream. Yet the atmosphere of threat generated by this scene comes from Fagin and not from his companion. While Fagin transcends anti-Semitic caricature to become a highly complex character whose motives and mental processes are carefully explained, Monks is a cardboard figure who never comes alive beyond his generic Gothic attributes.
Oliver Twist’s
Gothic elements seem tired and mechanical, as though Dickens never really had his heart in them.
The full title of his second novel,
The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress,
suggests that Dickens intended to confront deeper moral and spiritual issues than are found in the popular crime stories and mysteries of his time. The subtitle invokes both John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), and Hogarth’s two best-known and most powerful series of engravings, The Harlot’s Progress (1732) and The Rake’s Progress (1735). In the early nineteenth century, Bunyan’s Puritan allegory, tracing the journey of Christian through the snares of the world to the Celestial City, remained one of the most widely read books in the English language. Bunyan describes a perilous but ultimately successful struggle against temptation and evil. Hogarth’s images depict the opposite trajectory. In the 1841 preface to OliverTwist, Dickens cites Hogarth, “the moralist, and censor of his age” as an inspiration for his plan to show vice and crime in all their “miserable reality.” Bunyan’s allegorical hero, Christian, takes a secular form in Dickens’s conception of Oliver as “the principle of Good.” Oliver’s progress, like Christian’s, is destined to end in triumph. The fates of Nancy, Fagin, and Sikes, on the other hand, are as grim as those of Hogarth’s harlot and rake. While Bunyan presents the triumph of virtue as an individual moral struggle, Hogarth uses his representations of moral degradation as opportunities to expose social and political corruption. In
Oliver Twist,
as we shall see, Dickens struggles to reconcile Hogarth and Bunyan, social criticism and moral allegory.
Pilgrimage is one of literature’s universal themes. As Steven Marcus points out in
Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey
(see “For Further Reading”), “when Oliver sets out on his road to London with nothing but ‘a crust of bread, a coarse shirt, and two pairs of stockings,’ he is traversing one of history’s best worn paths.”Yet Oliver is an unusual kind of pilgrim in that he has no particular destination or goal. He does not seek spiritual rewards, like Bunyan’s Christian. Nor is he in search of earthly gain, like that other famous British pauper boy, Dick Whittington, who came to London to seek his fortune, ended up as Lord Mayor of the city, and was memorialized in the statue that confronts the fleeing murderer, Sikes, on Highgate Hill. Oliver, one might say, is an accidental pilgrim.
At the beginning of
The Pilgrim’s Progress,
Christian announces his intention to set out from the City of Destruction in search of “an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away.” In the terms of Bunyan’s Christian allegory, the riches his protagonist will inherit are salvation and eternal life. When Dickens’s Oliver leaves the town of his birth, he has no object beyond self-preservation in mind; he is in flight from the intolerable conditions of his apprenticeship to the undertaker, Sowerberry. Yet Oliver, like Christian, will come into an inheritance, and at the conclusion of
Oliver Twist,
we learn that Oliver’s earthly fortune, like Christian’s heavenly reward, can be gained only through virtue and moral rectitude. Oliver’s father’s will states that his son may receive his inheritance only if “in his minority he should never have stained his name with any public act of dishonour, meanness, cowardice, or wrong.” Oliver, who has steadfastly eschewed all criminal acts throughout his acquaintance with Fagin’s gang, deserves his inheritance. Yet whereas Christian earns his reward through active choices, perseverance, and cooperation with the workings of Grace, Oliver seems to achieve his by passivity and chance.
Dickens seems even more Calvinist than Bunyan in his insistence on human helplessness and the necessity to yield all to Grace. Like Christian, Oliver is alternately exposed to the forces of good and evil. Unlike Christian, who does battle with the dark angel Apollyon and even wounds him, Oliver acts only to refuse evil, never to combat it. Seized by Fagin, rescued by Mr. Brownlow, snatched back by Fagin, and then rescued again, Oliver is a passive bystander in the final battle for his soul. Oliver encounters the agents of Grace in his life, Mr. Brownlow and the Maylies, not as result of prayer and earnest supplication, but through a pair of outrageous coincidences: He pickpockets the only man in London who possesses a portrait of his mother, and then he assists in the robbery of his own aunt’s house. In both cases, it is his unwillingness to be a criminal, rather than any positive action on his part, that brings him into contact with his rescuers. In Calvinist terms, it seems that Oliver is already one of the Elect. Where Bunyan’s Christian must become worthy of salvation, Oliver’s innate worthiness must only be preserved. In an interesting reversal of Augustine’s formulation, the “principle of Good” embodied in Oliver is in fact a vacuum, a mere absence of evil.
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.”