Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens

 

Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist is Dickens's act of rage — a novel written fast and hot with anger at the New Poor Law of 1834 and the workhouse system it enshrined. 'Please, sir, I want some more' has become one of the most famous lines in English fiction, but its power comes from what surrounds it: the bureaucratic satisfaction with which the request is punished, the system designed not to fail accidentally but to fail deliberately, as policy.

Oliver himself is less a psychologically complex figure than an emblem of imperiled innocence, and Dickens intends this. His impossible goodness in the face of sustained corruption is the point: he is what society, in its workhouses and its criminal rookeries and its indifferent middle classes, is trying to destroy. That he proves so resistant to destruction is Dickens's wish, and the wish requires Oliver to remain somewhat purely good.

The novel's real interest lies in the supporting cast. Fagin is genuinely complex — manipulative, self-interested, capable of a kind of affection that doesn't preclude exploitation — and Dickens's creation of him has attracted much critical attention, not all of it favorable, in the centuries since. He is a monster of the social system as much as a personal villain; he takes what the streets offer and builds an operation from it.

Nancy is the novel's most painful creation. Trapped between her loyalty to Sikes, her genuine care for Oliver, and her own self-knowledge about what her life has made her, she embodies the kind of moral courage that exists in people who have no expectation that courage will save them. Her fate is the novel's most brutal passage, and Dickens makes sure you feel it.

Bill Sikes stalks through the novel like weather — not evil in any philosophical sense but violent in the way an animal is violent: immediate, reflexive, terrifying. His scenes with his dog have an almost unbearable quality.

Oliver Twist is not Dickens's most sophisticated novel, but it may be his most furious. Read against its historical context, it functions as journalism with a novelist's imagination — an assault on the idea that the poor deserve their poverty, made with the full force of indignation and an extraordinary gift for making you inhabit lives very different from your own.

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