So here we have a passage from the original manuscript of Oliver Twist and this is just
the moment when Oliver suddenly is trapped into criminality, so he’s being led into
this world by Fagin and the Artful Dodger, he goes out for a walk with them and suddenly
the Artful Dodger starts pick pocketing. He runs away and poor Oliver is left to take
the rap, and Dickens says the police officer arrives, who’s always the last person to
arrive in such cases, so he’s already making that sharp, satirical edge to it. And then
you see the suffering of Oliver, the indifference of the law to him, and then at the end of
it, ‘Don’t hurt him,’ said the old man compassionately. So the victim of the crime
who turns out to help Oliver is on Oliver’s side. But the law and the police are brutally
indifferent to his pain. So crime is at the centre of Oliver Twist
and there is a group of novels in the period called Newgate fiction and in some ways Oliver
Twist is like Newgate fiction, in other ways different. Newgate fiction is often accused
of glamorising crime, of making it look too exciting, as if these figures who can transgress
against the norms of respectable society are somehow morally admirable. And Dickens is
fascinated by that and the possibility that there might be a kind of life outside respectable,
bourgeois life, but at the same time also he wants to give a moral purpose to it.
So there’s constantly a war within Oliver Twist about a side that wants to be fascinated
and entranced by what crime can do and the freedom it allows one, on the other hand the
wish to give a moral purpose or design to it. And you also see Dickens who is clearly
at this point, you know, he’s a young man, he’s experimenting with different kinds
of fiction. Within the novel itself he describes what it is that he’s trying to do. Melodrama,
he says, alternates comic and tragic scenes like the red and white in the side of a streaky
bacon. And that’s what he wants to do too, so he’ll often move from very comical moments
to very tragic or dangerous or threatening moments. And Dickens wants to say not just
that melodrama does that and that he does that, but also that’s a form of realism
‘cause he says that’s what life is like. We do that in our own lives, we might move
from a scene of merriment to a funeral almost instantaneously and he says just as we do
that in life so too the novel must reflect that.
So Oliver Twist is a great success and we know it’s read throughout society, there
are popular representations and theatrical adaptations that the poor watch, but it’s
also read by Queen Victoria for example who says she finds it excessively interesting.
And there’s an interesting exchange between her and Lord Melbourne who’s the Prime Minister
and he doesn’t want to read Oliver Twist, he says, ‘It’s set amongst workhouses
and pickpockets and coffin makers and people of that sort. I don’t wish to know about
them in reality and I don’t wish to read about them in fiction.’ So there you see
two very different aesthetic responses to Oliver Twist, one that wants to see it merely
as a representation of an unpleasant reality and therefore shouldn’t be seen, and then
the much more engaging response and engaged and intelligent response of Victoria who says she finds it excessively interesting.
So Dickens is a deeply theatrical writer and in the later half of his career he has a very, very successful career as a public reader
And what he does is he carves out of his novels these moving, humorous scenes and episodes.
And the most famous of these is Sikes and Nancy, which is the moment in Oliver Twist
when Sikes, the criminal, bludgeons to death Nancy, the prostitute. Now they’ve always
been controversial, his readings. His friend John Forster told him that he shouldn’t
do it, that it was the exchange of a higher calling for a lower and particularly he was
opposed to the Sikes and Nancy reading because of its violence, because of its sexuality,
because of its effect on the audience. So he knew that he could hold an audience absolutely
in the palm of his hand with his readings but above all with the Sikes and Nancy reading
and you know, would peak himself on the number of women who’d been carried out fainting
from the auditorium. So this is Dickens’s own reading copy of
Sikes and Nancy, so the death of Nancy from Oliver Twist, and it’s full of his own markings.
So you can see him here adding little bits, more exclamation marks,
and then action here, so he’d be acting it out, and then alerting himself to the murder, so the death of Nancy
is coming, murder coming, he writes. So here he is building to the climax, action again,
unlocking the door, giving us an extra pause, up to three exclamation marks now. All the
key words underlined, key phrases, just thinking through everything as a performance, as an
enactment of these horrific, terrifying emotions.
Just before Oliver Twist comes out the new Poor Law is passed, and this is the most revolutionary
change in the lives of people at the bottom of society that’s ever been seen. And so Oliver Twist begins in a workhouse and there’s
a constant campaigning radical social anger in the book against the stripping of dignity
of poor people. And you see that both in the novel and also in Dickens’s personal life
and in the campaigning journalism that he writes at the same time.
So Oliver Twist has some of the qualities of a parable or an allegory or a moral fable,
but it’s also got a documentary side to it, and Dickens is very keen to demonstrate
that he’s based in a realistic description of criminal London, and he gets very angry
when Sir Peter Laurie complains that this is a novel that’s unrealistic in its depiction
of the world of criminal life. And in the preface to the cheap edition he
takes on his critics in the most explicit way possible. He writes at page 267 of the
present edition of Oliver Twist, there is a description of, quote, ‘the filthiest,
the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London,
and the name of this place is Jacob’s Island. 11 or 12 years have elapsed since the description
was first published. I was as well convinced then as I am now that nothing effectual can
be done for the elevation of the poor in England until their dwelling places are made decent
and wholesome.