By Charles Dickens, 1838
What makes this novel problematic is, first, that poor Oliver is such a weak character. He has little character of his own beyond his innate sense of rightness and injustice, and since he is always the victim of injustice it takes little virtue for him to object to it. I think that everything that happens to him, whether good or bad, is imposed on him by other characters, from the governors of the orphanage or the evil den of thieves to the wealthy and principled family and friends who save him. Perhaps they would have been less inclined to save him had he not had such a pure and noble character, although they do try to save Nancy, too. But this is also a problem. Oliver is pure and noble only because he was born of a pure and noble mother, not because of anything he learned in his miserable upbringing. But Nancy has a common birth and she is too far gone to be saved, even though she is generous and protective toward Oliver. Dickens’ Victorian morals reserve good character to those of good birth, and only they are saved. I don’t know if Dickens was conscious of this, but it puts his sympathies for the working classes on a very limited basis.
Nevertheless, this is a social satire, and a pointed one. The contrast between Oliver’s true saviors and those who are appointed to help the orphans is acute. The self-serving, greedy middle-class governors of the orphanage and the small business owners who bully and exploit their child workers are little better than the criminal gang that Oliver escapes to – perhaps worse, as Oliver seems generally well-fed and warm with Fagin’s gang, and enjoys the company of Charley and Jack the Artful Dodger. Of course, the gang does threaten and intimidate him into thievery that Oliver clearly wants no part of. He only avoids them by the luck of being captured by good-hearted saviors who turn out to be the only people in London who can discover his true story.
In Dickens, it’s always the characters that make the story memorable, and their strength makes Oliver himself fade away. This story presents the pompous Bumble and the avaricious wife he ties himself to, the cheerful Dodger, the truly nasty Bill Sikes and his unhappy partner Nancy, and the conniving Fagin. These are such colourful characters that they overshadow the purity of Mr Brownlow, Harry and Rose, and even Oliver himself. The villains are always more colourful.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to ignore the anti-Semitism that colours Dickens’ portrait of Fagin, whom he commonly simply calls the Jew and shows hovering over his hoard of stolen treasure. The stereotype of the Jewish criminal miser leaves an unpleasant taste. Fagin only stops being a caricature in his final days when he faces death and Dickens shows his disordered torment with surprising sympathy.
The Victorians had quite a taste for maudlin sentimentality, and that is one of the forces driving the story. Dickens’ characters and his descriptive writing elevate the novel beyond that, but modern audiences must have a hard time getting beyond the sentimentality. I suppose that’s why modern adaptations like the movies and the musical leave a lot of the story line out to create a celebration of the characters that is fun, if not very close to Dickens’ original.
