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Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

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Apr 02, 2021 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics, general-fiction

Note, July 28, 2023: I've edited my review to add this link: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... to the first thread of an outstanding discussion of this novel in the Goodreads group Dickensians!, which includes a great deal of background material, illustrations, etc. It would be a wonderful resource for anyone reading the book, or who has read it and wants a deeper understanding. (Spoilers can easily be avoided, since it's structured chapter by chapter.)

Oliver Twist was the first Dickens n Note, July 28, 2023: I've edited my review to add this link: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... to the first thread of an outstanding discussion of this novel in the Goodreads group Dickensians!, which includes a great deal of background material, illustrations, etc. It would be a wonderful resource for anyone reading the book, or who has read it and wants a deeper understanding. (Spoilers can easily be avoided, since it's structured chapter by chapter.)

Oliver Twist was the first Dickens novel I ever read (as an eight-year-old kid); it made an abiding impression on me, and created a lifelong interest in the author's work. (What I read was the printing in Dodd Mead's Great Illustrated Classics series, which uses the text of the 1841 edition --the book was published as a magazine serial in 1837-39, but first printed in a complete hardcover edition in 1838, before the serialization ended-- and includes Dicken's own Preface to it.) I eventually went on to read half a dozen more of his novels, some of them twice. In the cases of the other Dickens novels that I read as a kid or a very young man and haven't reviewed, I don't think I could do them justice without a reread. My reading of this one, though, fell on a young mind and imagination that was still pretty fallow, and created very vivid memories; and the child protagonist and the nature of the plot (which is more action-adventure oriented than some Dickens novels are) made this one more apt to impress itself on a young reader. So my memories of this book, like those of other classics I read at the same epoch of my reading life, are pretty clear. To be sure, my understanding of some aspects of the story at that age wasn't the same as an adult reader's would have been. (For instance, while I knew, from Dickens' reference to her in the Preface, that Nancy was Bill Sykes' "mistress," I didn't really know what that was, just that it was bad; so my comprehension of their relationship was decidedly limited. :-) ) But as I got older and learned more about life and history, I was able to bring the new knowledge to my memories of the book and deepen my understanding. IMO, I can do this tale reasonable justice in a review without a reread.

We first meet our title character as an infant newly born in a country workhouse, to an apparently unmarried mother who died in childbirth. The main body of the story picks up when he's nine, having been raised to that age in the dubious care of the parish charity system of that day. We then get a look at the life of orphans in the workhouse, at Oliver's unpleasant experiences farmed out as essentially the slave of a local undertaker, and (after his running away to London) at the noisome world of the great city's criminal underground. But there are other threads to the warp and woof of the plot as well, because an increasing web of mystery and intrigue surrounds his actual origins. How this plays out will ultimately tie in with his adventures in London.

This is only Dickens' second novel (and really the first in which he develops a continuous plot, rather than a series of episodes), but all of the characteristic features of his writing are here: his mastery of complicated plotting, his passion for social justice and converse hatred of cruelty and injustice, his warm human sympathy and appeal to a full range of emotions (he's a quintessentially Romantic writer, though of course at the age of eight I didn't know what that was), his wry humor, and above all his unequaled ability to create vivid and memorable characters --some of whom you'll love and some you'll detest. (There are plenty of them here, such as Fagin, Nancy, Mr. Bumble, the Artful Dodger, Bill Sykes, Mr. Grimwig who's forever rhetorically offering to eat his head; but really all of the significant characters here, even minor ones, are lifelike and drawn with great artistry.) Like all Victorian writers, he also writes with complex sentences and a hefty vocabulary. As a kid, I wasn't told that was supposed to bother and repulse me, so it didn't; I figured the range of linguistic possibilities existed for a purpose, and that complex sentences could be understood the same as simple ones. (Thankfully, that opened up a rich literary world to me!)

One of the more significant features of Dickens' work --and it's very noticeable here--that became more obvious to me, as I got older and reflected back on this book with an adult understanding, is the fact that he doesn't draw his characters only from the monied and refined strata of society. He depicts the poor and down-and-out of the Victorian world, and sometimes even those on the wrong side of the law, as much as the well-to-do; these characters can be central to the story and developed with great attention, rather than just part of the scenery and the furniture. They also make significant choices, including moral choices; and those that many prosperous Victorians looked down on as the dregs of society might make very positive moral choices, even at great cost. (And his understanding that positive moral choices are worth making, whoever you are, is crystal clear.) In other words, he writes about people, not just a certain class of people; and he's interested in who they are AS people, not just pigeon-holing them in categories based on how much they have in the bank.

If the novel has a literary flaw, it's perhaps that after he reaches London, Oliver tends to be a more passive protagonist than he is at the beginning; he's acted upon by others, and dragged around at their bidding, more than setting his own course. But this is realistic when you consider that he's a nine-year-old child, and not in much of a position to act independently; and he does make choices about how he acts, and what he won't do. Some readers and critics have accused Dickens (unfairly, I believe) of anti-Semitism because the only Jewish character here, Fagin, is a criminal with definite villainous qualities. However, Fagin isn't a villain because he's Jewish; he's an individual with bad qualities and who's made bad choices, who happens to be a member of an ethnic group which has the same range of moral possibilities --good and bad-- of any other ethnic group. In Dickens' own words "...it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.... [Dickens had researched the London underworld pretty extensively] "I have no feeling towards the Jews but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public or private, and bear my testimony (as I ought to do) to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I have ever had with them."

I'm glad this novel was my introduction to Dickens; I don't think I could have had any better one, or one that would have more whetted my interest in his work. It has my warmest recommendation! ...more

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Dec 16, 2009 Jacob rated it it was amazing

Mar 14, 2011 Alandra rated it it was ok

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