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Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England. His parents were middle-class, but they suffered financially as a result of living beyond their means. When Dickens was twelve years old, his family’s dire straits forced him to quit school and work in a blacking factory (where shoe polish was manufactured). Within weeks, his father was put in debtor’s prison, where Dickens’s mother and siblings eventually joined him. At this point, Dickens lived on his own and continued to work at the factory for several months. The horrific conditions in the factory haunted him for the rest of his life, as did the experience of temporary orphanhood. Apparently, Dickens never forgot the day when a more senior boy in the warehouse took it upon himself to instruct Dickens in how to do his work more efficiently. For Dickens, that instruction may have represented the first step toward his full integration into the misery and tedium of working-class life. The more senior boy’s name was Bob Fagin. Inspired by these events Charles Dickens decided to write Oliver Twist in general, Charles Dickens wrote many works in his life, such as:
- Sketches by Boz
- A collection of articles and tales describing London’s people and scenes, written for the periodical Monthly Magazine.
- The Postumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
- A Cristmas Carol
- Others The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Dorrit bnecame the symbols of an exploited childhoo confronted with the bitter realities of slums and factories. Other works include Bleak House, Hard Times and Great Expectations wich deal with the conditions of the poor and the working class in general. Characters and Themes No novelist succeeded as Charles Dickens in representing the vast social landscape of Victorian England. He set most of his novels in London, a city he knew deeply thanks to his work as a journalist who led him to investigate the most infamous neighborhoods of London. The writer was aware of the material and spiritual corruption of the time caused mainly by the Industrial Revolution and for this he developed a critical attitude towards society, denouncing the terrible conditions in which workers were forced to work, child labour, crime, prostitution and the English legal system to which he had no sympathy, but he added terrible descriptions of the misery and crime that raged in the English capital with humor and comic episodes. Dickens’s novels were influenced by the Bible, fairy tales, fables and nursery rymes, by Gotic Novels and by the 18th century novelists His plots are well planned even if a times they appear a bit artificial London was the setting of most of his novels: he always seemed to have something new to say about it and showed an intimate knowledge of it.
Oliver Twist
Author : Charles Dickens Type Of Work: Novel Genre: Children’s story; detective story; novel of social protest Narrator: Anonymous narrator Point Of View: The narrator is third person omniscient, and assumes the points of view of various characters in turn. The narrator’s tone is not objective; it is sympathetic to the protagonists and far less so to the novel’s other characters. When dealing with hypocritical or morally objectionable characters, the narrative voice is often ironic or sarcastic. Tone: Sentimental, sometimes ironic, hyperbolic, crusading Setting (Time): 1830 s Setting (Place): London and environs; an unnamed smaller English city; the English countryside Oliver Twist is born in a workhouse in 1830s England. His mother, whose name no one knows, is found on the street and dies just after Oliver’s birth. Oliver spends the first nine years of his life in a badly run home for young orphans and then is transferred to a workhouse for adults. After the other boys bully Oliver into asking for more gruel at the end of a meal, Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle, offers five pounds to anyone who will take the boy away from the workhouse. Oliver narrowly escapes being apprenticed to a brutish chimney sweep and is eventually apprenticed to a local undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry. When the undertaker’s other apprentice, Noah Claypole, makes disparaging comments about Oliver’s mother, Oliver attacks him and incurs the Sowerberrys’ wrath. Desperate, Oliver runs away at dawn and travels toward London. Outside London, Oliver, starved and exhausted, meets Jack Dawkins, a boy his own age. Jack offers him shelter in the London house of his benefactor, Fagin. It turns out that Fagin is a career criminal who trains orphan boys to pick pockets for him. After a few days of training, Oliver is sent on a pickpocketing mission with two other boys. When he sees them swipe a handkerchief from an elderly gentleman, Oliver is horrified and runs off. He is caught but narrowly escapes being convicted of the theft. Mr. Brownlow, the man whose handkerchief was stolen, takes the feverish Oliver to his home and nurses him back to health. Mr. Brownlow is struck by Oliver’s resemblance to a portrait of a young woman that hangs in his house. Oliver thrives in Mr. Brownlow’s home, but two young adults in Fagin’s gang, Bill Sikes and his lover Nancy, capture Oliver and return him to Fagin. Fagin sends Oliver to assist Sikes in a burglary. Oliver is shot by a servant of the house and, after Sikes escapes, is taken in by the women who live there, Mrs. Maylie and her beautiful adopted niece Rose. They grow fond of Oliver, and he spends an idyllic summer with them in the countryside. But Fagin and a mysterious man named Monks are set on recapturing Oliver. Meanwhile, it is revealed that Oliver’s mother left behind a gold locket when she died. Monks obtains and destroys that locket. When the Maylies come to London, Nancy meets secretly with Rose and informs her of Fagin’s designs, but a member of Fagin’s gang overhears the conversation. When word of Nancy’s disclosure reaches Sikes, he brutally murders Nancy and flees London. Pursued by his guilty conscience and an angry mob, he inadvertently hangs himself while trying to escape. Mr. Brownlow, with whom the Maylies have reunited Oliver, confronts Monks and wrings the truth about Oliver’s parentage from him. It is revealed that Monks is Oliver’s half brother. Their father, Mr. Leeford, was unhappily married to a wealthy woman and had an affair with Oliver’s mother, Agnes Fleming. Monks has been pursuing Oliver all along in the hopes of ensuring that his half-brother is deprived of his share of the family inheritance. Mr. Brownlow forces Monks to sign over Oliver’s share to Oliver. Moreover, it is discovered that Rose is Agnes’s younger sister, hence Oliver’s aunt. Fagin is hung for his crimes. Finally, Mr. Brownlow adopts Oliver, and they and the Maylies retire to a blissful existence in the countryside.
Purity in a Corrupt City
Throughout the novel, Dickens confronts the question of whether the terrible environments he depicts have the power to “blacken [the soul] and change its hue for ever.” By examining the fates of most of the characters, we can assume that his answer is that they do not. Certainly, characters like Sikes and Fagin seem to have sustained permanent damage to their moral sensibilities. Yet even Sikes has a conscience, which manifests itself in the apparition of Nancy’s eyes that haunts him after he murders her. Charley Bates maintains enough of a sense of decency to try to capture Sikes. Of course, Oliver is above any corruption, though the novel removes him from unhealthy environments relatively early in his life. Most telling of all is Nancy, who, though she considers herself “lost almost beyond redemption,” ends up making the ultimate sacrifice for a child she hardly knows. In contrast, Monks, perhaps the novel’s most inhuman villain, was brought up amid wealth and comfort.
The Failure of Charity
Much of the first part of Oliver Twist challenges the organizations of charity run by the church and the government in Dickens’s time. The system Dickens describes was put into place by the Poor Law of 1834 , which stipulated that the poor could only receive government assistance if they moved into government workhouses. Residents of those workhouses were essentially inmates whose rights were severely curtailed by a host of onerous regulations. Labor was required, families were almost always separated, and rations of food and clothing were meager. The workhouses operated on the principle that poverty was the consequence of laziness and that the dreadful conditions in the workhouse would inspire the poor to better their own circumstances. Yet the economic dislocation of the Industrial Revolution made it impossible for many to do so, and the workhouses did not provide any means for social or economic betterment. Furthermore, as Dickens points out, the officials who ran the workhouses blatantly violated the values they preached to the poor. Dickens describes with great sarcasm the greed, laziness, and arrogance of charitable workers like Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann. In general, charitable institutions only reproduced the awful conditions in which the poor would live anyway. As Dickens puts it, the poor choose between “being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.”
The Folly of Individualism
With the rise of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, individualism was very much in vogue as a philosophy. Victorian capitalists believed that society would run most smoothly if individuals looked out for their own interests. Ironically, the clearest pronunciation of this philosophy comes not from a legitimate businessman but from Fagin, who operates in the illicit businesses of theft and prostitution.
«Oliver wants some more»
This is a pass taken from the II chapter of the novel Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens. The text can be divided into two parts: The scene is situated in a workhouse, in other ways a place where children with no possibilities were given a work and a poor diet. The tradition in the workhouse is that every boy has only one bowl of soup a day and only on occasions of great public rejoincing they had two ounces and a piece of bread besides. Dickens uses a rhethorical language, indeed he uses irhony to described the situation suggested. The language is exaggerated, and example is how the meal time is called: “festive composition”. It goes without saying that the truth is that the scene is very, very sad and socially criticable. The proof is the expression used by Dickens “The bowls never wanted washing”: children were so hungry and there was such a little food that they eat any drip of food. Dickens uses the verb “to polish”, which is normally used for something shiny and glossy, as if the bowls after meal times were bright and clean. It goes without saying that Dickens is using a humorous strategie to create caricatures of the characters like the master and his helpers, who need to be even three to give out such a little portion to each one. Indeed the readership was mainly the middle class so he gives an alibi to them not to recognise with the bad character. An unusual verb is “to perform” which belongs to the semantic field of theater and music. This makes the description even more incredible, creating a sense of strangeness in the reader, who frees himself of his bad conscience. The scene described is all a big exaggeration, for example the operation “never took very long” and “the spoons being as large as the bowls”. Dickens's aim is to criticise the living condition of the children who were exploited, using a metaphoric language. In addition pathos provides an identification with the pathetic subject, in this case children. This is a consequence of the moral puritan obligation as the need to help peolple in difficulty as the consequence of industrialization. In the second part the narrator provides the idea of a ritual exaggerating the tones of the narration. The situation can be read as the struggle for democracy: the children decide to take action against the master who behaves as a dictator, indeed he is dispotic. The narrator uses a lot of commas and full stops. The narrator wants to suggest that there is a higher sense of democracy in children instead than in adults. It is a contradiction the long pray they had to say before eating and the poor meal, it is interesting that children explotation was justified by religious reason. You can notice that religion becomes a pretext to cover the guilts. That shows the doubled face nature of the Victorian Age: the Victorian compromise. Oliver represents a symbol: the change. Indeed he wants to turn upside down the tradition in workhouses. He is taller than the other boys: he is energetic and brave. The expression “Please, sir, I want some” is the emblem of the whole extract, indeed he seems to be the rapresentation of small children. It can been considered as the miniature of contemporary society, where the struggle for democracy brings a delegate to fight for others.
