Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (72 page)

Many children first encounter Dickens’s famous orphan through the musical Oliver!, by British composer Lionel Bart, and its film version, by Carol Reed. Oliver! premiered in London in 1960 and opened on Broadway in 1963, running to 774 performances in New York. Bart, who wrote the book, lyrics, and music, freely adapted Dickens’s novel and did away with much of the despair. The result made him famous. The catchy score includes such tunes as “Where Is Love?,” “Consider Yourself,” and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.” In 1963 Oliver! was nominated for Musical of the Year, and Bart won a Tony for his score.

Five years later, director Carol Reed (The Third Man) adapted the musical for film. Following Bart’s lead, Reed focused on the light-hearted aspects of the story, and the energy level remains remarkably high throughout the film. It opens, like the musical, in the dark and dreary workhouse, where Oliver and his orphan retinue sing a rousing “Food, Glorious Food” as a prelude to Oliver’s celebrated utterance “Please, sir, I want some more.” Once beyond the workhouse, Oliver! bursts with color. Nineteenth-century London is beautifully rendered, and each musical sequence seems to improve on the previous one.

Oliver is played by an especially innocent Mark Lester. Ron Moody, as a crusty Fagin, and Jack Wild, as the Artful Dodger, earned Oscars for their performances. Oliver Reed, Carol’s nephew, menacingly portrays Bill Sikes.

The success of Carol Reed’s Oliver! was so overwhelming that its recognition eclipsed that of the original musical. Nominated for eleven Academy Awards, the film took home six, including Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Score.

After the success of the Lean and Reed films, Disney perceived audiences as asking for some more and released a cartoon musical Oliver & Company (1988) that features the popular musical and vocal talents of Billy Joel, Huey Lewis, and Bette Midler. There have been several television adaptations. Clive Donner directed a British version in 1982, with George C. Scott as Fagin and Tim Curry as Bill Sikes. A British miniseries appeared in 1985. Tony Bill’s version of 1997, also produced by Disney, has Richard Dreyfuss as Fagin and Elijah Wood playing the Artful Dodger. The BBC offered another miniseries version in 1999.

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

The story of Oliver Twist, so far as it has yet proceeded, is its author’s masterpiece, and mean as the subject appears to be—the account of the Progress of a Parish Boy—promises to take its place among the higher prose fictions of the language.

—from an unsigned article in the Examiner (September 10, 1837)

 

That [Charles Dickens] exhibits genius in embodying London character, and very remarkable skill in making use of peculiarities of expression, even to the current phrase of the day, is undoubtedly true; but he has higher merits, and other elements of success. His powers of pathos, sadly touching rather than tearful, are great; he has a hearty sympathy with humanity, however degraded by vice or disguised by circumstances, and a quick perception to detect the existence of the good, however overlaid; his truth and nature in dialogue are conspicuous to all; he has the great art of bringing the actors and incidents before the reader by a few effective strokes; though deficient in narrative, his description is sometimes nicely true, and often powerful; and his command of language considerable, without his style ever appearing forced. In addition to these qualities, he has a manly self-reliance—above all pretence, and all conventional servilities of classes and coteries; nor does he ever, with a sickly vanity, obtrude himself upon the reader’s attention. Above all, he has genius to vivify his observation.

—November 24, 1838

 

[Oliver Twist] deals with the outcasts of humanity, who do their dirty work in work, pot, and watch houses, to finish on the Newgate drop. Alas! for the Horatian precept, ‘Virginibus puerisque canto.’ The happy ignorance of innocence is disregarded. Our youth should not even suspect the possibility of such hidden depths of guilt, for their tender memories are wax to receive and marble to retain. These infamies feed the innate evil principle, which luxuriates in the supernatural and horrid, the dread and delight of our childhood, which is never shaken off, for no man entirely outlives the nursery. We object to the familiarising our ingenuous youth with ‘slang;’ it is based in travestie of better things.... The jests and jeers of the ‘slangers’ leave a sting behind them. They corrupt pure taste and pervert morality, for vice loses shame when treated as a fool-born joke, and those who are not ashamed to talk of a thing will not be long ashamed to put it into practice.

—from an unsigned article in the Quarterly Review (1839)

 

No one has read that remarkable tale of Oliver Twist without being interested in poor Nancy and her murderer; and especially amused and tickled by the gambols of the Artful Dodger and his companions. The power of the writer is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive, and must follow him whithersoever he leads; and to what are we led? Breathless to watch all the crimes of Fagin, tenderly to deplore the errors of Nancy, to have for Bill Sikes a kind of pity and admiration, and an absolute love for the society of the Dodger. All these heroes stepped from the novel on to the stage; and the whole London public, from peers to chimney-sweeps, were interested about a set of ruffians whose occupations are thievery, murder, and prostitution. A most agreeable set of rascals, indeed, who have their virtues, too, but not good company for any man. We had better pass them by in decent silence; for, as no writer can or dare tell the whole truth concerning them, and faithfully explain their vices, there is no need to give ex parte statements of their virtues.

—from Catherine (1839-1840)

 

The reader will perhaps be surprised at my separating the greatest work of Dickens, Oliver Twist, with honour, from the loathsome mass to which it typically belongs. That book is an earnest and uncaricatured record of states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full of the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble passion.

—from the Nineteenth Century (June 1880)

 

Relative to the other works of Dickens “Oliver Twist” is not of great value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and of so clumsy a melodrama, that one is almost tempted to say that Dickens would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater without it he would still have been incomplete without it. With the exception of some gorgeous passages, both of humour and horror, the interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of Dickens’s literary genius as in its revelation of those moral, personal, and political instincts which were the make-up of his character and the permanent support of that literary genius. It is by far the most depressing of all his books; it is in some ways the most irritating; yet its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that spontaneous and splendid output. Without this one discordant note all his merriment might have seemed like levity.

—from Chesterton’s Introduction to Oliver Twist (1907)

 

In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself

—from Dickens, Dali, and Others (1946)

1. William Makepeace Thackeray imagines the reader “breathless to watch all the crimes of Fagin, tenderly to deplore the errors of Nancy, to have for Bill Sikes a kind of pity and admiration, and an absolute love for the society of the Dodger.” In all, Thackeray finds them “a most agreeable set of rascals.” Richard Ford, on the other hand, felt that these rascals, even in fiction, were corrupters of the young—“Our youth should not even suspect the possibility of such hidden depths of guilt”; these rascals “corrupt pure tastes and pervert morality.” Who’s right? How does Ford’s criticism pertain to debates raging today over children’s access to negative influences via television, film, and the Internet?

2. A number of critics have observed that in Dickens’s settings, things often have more life in them than the characters. The settings are vivid, active agents, bursting with energy—they seem ready to make things happen. The characters, on the other hand, are either stock male and female leads or machinelike assemblages of repetitive gestures, phrases, and attitudes that they are doomed to repeat every time they appear. Are these critics being fair? Does Oliver Twist contain any settings that seem to you particularly powerful or effective? How effective are the characters in Oliver Twist?

3. Is there any sense in which it would be accurate to call Dickens “realistic”?

4. In 1883 Anthony Trollope described Dickens as “probably the most popular novelist of any time.” How would you account for this popularity? Do you approve of it? Identify some features of Oliver Twist that may account for the novel’s wide appeal.

5. Does Oliver Twist still appeal to modern audiences, or have changes in tastes and values made the novel seem irrelevant and old-hat?

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Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. 1872-1874. New York: Doubleday, Doran 1928. By Dickens’s friend; still the classic biography.

Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 1952. Revised and abridged, 1977. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Kaplan, Fred. Dickens: A Biography. 1988. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Wilson, Angus. The World of Charles Dickens. New York: Viking, 1970. Places Dickens’s work in a biographical and social-historical context.

Davis, Paul.
The Penguin Dickens Companion
. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

Epstein, Norrie.
The Friendly Dickens
. New York: Viking, 1998. A light-hearted and accessible introduction.

Pool, Daniel.
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist: The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. A fascinating read, fresh and informative.

Butt, John, and Kathleen Tillotson.
Dickens at Work
. 1957. London, New York: Methuen, 1982. Provides useful insights into Dickens’s compositional methods.

Carey, John.
The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination
. London: Faber and Faber, 1973. Stimulating and perceptive; highly recommended.

Chesterton, G. K.
Appreciations and Criticisms
of the
Works of Charles Dickens
. 1911. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1966. A classic.

Chittick, Kathryn. Dickens and the 1830s. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. A detailed account of Dickens’s early literary influences.

Collins, Philip.
Dickens and Crime
. 1962. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. A fascinating background to the criminal world in Oliver Twist.

Gissing, George.
Charles Dickens
. 1898. Reprint: Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1966. A classic appreciation by a Victorian novelist.

House, Humphry. The
Dickens World
. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.

Leavis, F. R., and Q. D. Leavis.
Dickens the Novelist
. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.

Manning, Sylvia.
Dickens as Satirist
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971.

Marcus, Steven. Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey. New York: Basic Books, 1965. Relates Dickens’s novel to other genres and to his childhood experience.

Miller, D. A. The
Novel and the Police
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Contains a provocative reading of
Oliver Twist
based on the writings of Michel Foucault.

Miller, J. Hillis.
Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels
. 1958. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969.

Bettelheim, Bruno.
The Uses of Enchantment
. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

House, Humphry. Introduction. In Oliver Twist. Oxford Illustrated Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949.

Slater, Michael. Introduction.
Oliver Twist
. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent, 1992.

Tillotson, Kathleen. Introduction.
Oliver Twist
. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.