Oliver Twist, published in 1838, was Dickens’s second novel and remains among his most popular. It is first and foremost an attack on a social system that, as Dickens saw it, treated poverty as a sort of crime. Through the character of the derelict orphan Oliver, Dickens wanted ‘to show … the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance, and triumphing at last.’ So the book expresses his faith in goodness as an innate characteristic.
Dickens’s immediate target was the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the ‘philosophers’ who framed and defended it. But his novel touches on issues much deeper than the rightness or wrongness of a single law. In one of his later books Dickens writes of the British capital as ‘this stranger’s wilderness of London’, a phrase he might have used in Oliver Twist. The paradox of the big modern city is that the larger it grows, the lonelier its inhabitants become. From the start of his life, little Oliver finds himself isolated and struggles with the indifference and incomprehension of others. Of such social fragmentation the homeless orphan is the emblematic figure.
This is not to say that all is loneliness. Oliver Twist is perhaps most famous for the cast of extraordinary characters who people it: the psychopathic burglar Bill Sikes, his ‘moll’ the warm-hearted Nancy, Fagin the corrupter of small boys, the child criminal known as the Artful Dodger – and Oliver himself, who survives the attentions of all of them.
The course will provide some social, literary and historical context, but the bulk of the class’s time will be devoted to a discussion of Dickens’s text with close readings of specific passages.
