The question of how men are to live in a world which seems so little geared to their accommodation is of primary concern in all Dickens’ novels. The depth and heaviness of the way in which the majority of men are compelled to live make up the travail of the actual which is variously confronted by major characters from Samuel Pickwick at the moment of his entry into Fleet Street Prison to Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend who would prefer an existence “on an isolated rock in a stormy sea” (I, xii, 145)¹ over the exacerbating boredom of his present vassalage to society. It is not a matter of physical or economic survival that is at issue, though failure in both may also occur, but it is rather the human need to reconcile a widely cherished dream of what life ought to be like with the apprehension of what it really is. By the nineteenth century the world which had once seemed a sphere turning in accord with some celestial music had become a battleground where the forces of order and chaos appeared locked in tenebrous conflict. The gap between the individual and the universal appeared to be unbridgeable, for there was, as the narrator in Our Mutual Friend observes, an “immensity of space between mankind and Heaven” (IV, vi, 689).

Such as it was, the busy, discordant world of the nineteenth-century English might be evaluated as an unconvincing counterfeit of a treasured Platonic ideal or as a place of rayless exile from some abandoned glory. One of the most affecting images of the forlorn child in nineteenth-century literature is that of “the lovely Boy” in Book VII of The Prelude, isolated at a tavern among “dissolute men and shameless women,” who appears to the speaker to be in his innocent childhood “Like one of those who walked with hair unsinged/ Amid the fiery furnace.” By the end of the century the early death which Wordsworth had in charity wished for the yet uncorrupted London boy is grimly accorded Sorrow, the illegitimate baby in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, who is buried according to merciless church custom among the “unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned… .” The inhospitableness of this earthly environment is dramatized by the plight of the child who feels the poignancy of his own condition, who like Arnold’s “Gipsy Child by the Sea-Shore” has a dream sadder than any exile’s and a sorrow more forlorn than any angel’s. Nowhere is this helpless awareness of the world-besieged child manifested with more contrasting detail than in the account of the “adventures” of Oliver Twist.

In Oliver Twist the disparity between the real and the ideal is delineated in the simple, and often simplistic, lines of the moral fable. Even the reader who knows the tale well experiences in rereading the obsessive appeal of a fabulous recital which defines antinomies of black and white in human affairs. Since the characters of Oliver Twist are unmistakably stamped with marks of good and bad, the audience is not perplexed by subtleties of motive and action in the story. In order to achieve this effect of simplicity, the representation does not include any significant ambiguity of character or incident. For modern readers who are attached to the craft of character development, such a figure as Oliver may seem stiff and sentimental and Fagin hysterical and grotesque. These representations are as stylized, however, as the masks of tragedy or, better still, as the masks of tribal dancers. Because Oliver does not speak in the ordinary manner of children (or anyone else), his portrayal may seem to be preposterously stilted:

But Oliver is not an imitation of a real child in his speech and action; like the children in Blake’s poems whose songs are equally removed from natural speech, he is an emblem of vulnerable and threatened innocence.

Oliver is the reverse of the idealized figure in Keats’ letters who would, from the spark of divinity within him, create his soul amid the circumstances of this world. But this is the heroic and tragic destiny that Keats so readily confronted and that novelists rarely engage themselves with: the destiny of the Lear-inspired man who must “burn through” “the fierce dispute/ Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay.” Similar to many worthy characters in art and life, Oliver is minor in every detail of his being including his geniality of spirit. The boy’s spark of divine fire needs to be protected against the inundation of the world, and his soul is made for him by others, particularly by Brownlow, so that he does not create his destiny as much as he inherits and accepts it.

Even more passively tugged through the labyrinthine ways of his life than K. in Kafka’s fiction, Oliver is like an object that is taken up, handled, and put in place rather than an individual who controls his own movement. He is introduced to this world “of sorrow and trouble” as an “item of mortality” who will be “a new burden” (I, 1-2) for the parish; in boyhood he is advertised as a commodity with a five pound bounty attached available to the businessman who will relieve the public of his presence. Society with its money ethic recognizes the orphan in no other terms than as a liability or an asset, for as a pauper he has nothing to do “’with soul or spirit’” (VII, 41). This is the voice of the world speaking through Mr. Bumble and announcing its own narrow system of election and damnation. And the world, according to the narrator in Nicholas Nickleby, is “a conventional phrase, which, being interpreted, often signifieth all the rascals in it… .” (III, 41).

In novel after novel, Dickens traced the effects of this system on those who suffered from the world’s great exclusion. Initially not at all lacking in “soul or spirit,” the children of poverty are, like most children, susceptible to adult influence and adult experience for the development or erasure of that spirit. If they have been completely isolated and have never had comprehensible acquaintance either with cruelty or affection, they become what would now be called “autistic” like the unnamed boy in The Haunted Man. In some cases they may be trained to become part of the social organization: they are passed through a rigidly practical and emotionally insensitive educational process and are turned out as frosty moral and emotional geldings like Bitzer in Hard Times who is appropriately light-eyed, light-haired, and pale or like Charley Hexam in Our Mutual Friend who advises his sister, Lizzie, to “control” her “fancies” and look into “the real world” (II, i, 128). Or, already shunned by the respectable world, these children may become outcasts like the derisive goblins who enjoy the perverse freedom of Fagin’s postlapsarian Eden. Sometimes a nearly dehumanized child, a Jo in Bleak House who “lives—that is to say, Jo has not yet died—in a ruinous place, known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s” (XVI, 219-220), is exalted by the personal care of Allan Woodcourt and made fit, if not for life in this world, at least for human passage out of it. These children become, then, the product of what is done for or to them. To a great extent Oliver’s history is determined by the accident of his birth which accounts both for Fagin’s persecution and Brownlow’s concern. In addition, during the time of the novel he is faced with the threat of Fagin’s malign influence and he also enjoys the protective affection of the Maylies and of Brownlow. As an unesteemed orphan the boy may, to the official mind, have nothing to do “with soul or spirit.” At the same time the circumstances imposed upon him in the city and the country are so unique and extreme that his person is potentially a rare environment for the cultivation or the blighting of such spirit.

Except for his flight from the Sowerberrys’ which he initiates, Oliver is subjected to adventitious experience, and the contest for his life seems to be waged outside of himself. His early survival under the “protecting care” of the aptly named Mrs. Mann is accidental since the majority of her charges “sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident …” (II, 4). When Oliver is put out into the world as a piece of chattel for exploitation, he is saved by the authorities from Gamfield, the chimney-sweep, as fortuitously as he is handed over by Bumble to Sowerberry, the undertaker. On the road after his flight Oliver meets up with John Dawkins who leads him to Fagin; he is in turn taken from Fagin through Brownlow, abducted back by Nancy, and finally rescued by the Maylies. Managed almost by anyone who comes in contact with him, the boy is like a puppet plucked by strings manipulated above and beyond his view. But a puppet has both the security and bondage of his strings while Oliver does not know who he is or, often, where he is. At both the literal and the metaphorical level he can not find his way on his own. He is lost within the strangeness of Fagin’s den, wakes up baffled in Brownlow’s home, and falls unconscious at the Maylie threshold. Nor is he able to chart a course through the maze-like passages of London and even loses himself on the brief errand for Brownlow by “accidentally” turning “down a by-street” (I, 95). Although children usually have minimal freedom in settling the direction of their lives, Oliver seems more liable than most to the caprice of circumstance, to the chance benevolence or cruelty of his elders, and, importantly, to the uncommon helplessness of his own nature.

Oliver’s latent humanity is used with rough indifference by those who represent the rule and custom of the social order. At the workhouse he is one among many charges who are confined and abused by supervising moral derelicts; and at the Sowerberrys’ he is fed a dog’s leavings, bedded down among the coffins, and persecuted for his social inferiority by the charity-boy, Noah Claypole, who at least is not an orphan. The cruelty of the Fagin world is much sharper and more personal but also more confusing because it is ambiguously mingled with the expression of boyish fellowship and with comic affection as well as suddenly fervid tenderness on Fagin’s part. Oliver’s position is so strange that there seem to be no advances he can make either of language or gesture that will enable him to communicate to others his dimly-felt identity or to understand and define theirs. Although Nancy warns him accurately that he is “hedged round and round” (XX, 131), the orphan can find in the dingy men who surround him and in their soiled habitat nothing that will give off a reflection of the danger he knows is impending. He only feels the profundity of his isolation from the ordinary world, the numbing quality of his ignorance, and the undefinable danger in his weakness. Oliver gazes drearily out at a world which mirrors nothing of himself that will help him to know it better or his own disposition:

Because of its dimness, its stillness, and its silence, the city outside appears shut in, and empty. Alone in the quarters to which he had been so mysteriously confined, Oliver glimpses a shadowy chaos of forms which seem to be a dismal extension of the already sombre object world within Fagin’s tenement where the weaving of indefatigable spiders and the scampering of terrified mice are the only evidence of life. What living elements exist outside are probably more portentous than reassuring: the quick surreptitious appearance and withdrawal of the “ragged grizzly head” is a rodent-like movement. Life in the city so diminishes its inhabitants that the slum-dwellers are like rats and Fagin like a reptile and man like a dog or dog like a man in the Sikes relationship with his cur. In Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge” sonnet the city is beautiful in its quietness and seems “asleep” with its “mighty heart lying still” while here it appears inert and “heartless” with all its usual tormented energy suppressed. As a composition of molecules occupying space Oliver must have some conviction of his reality, but otherwise, melancholy in appearance, his thoughts still, usually crouched “in the corner of the passage by the street-door, to be as near living people as he could,” the boy is experiencing a lack of relationship to other beings so complete as to annihilate his personal identity. He is undergoing a psychic testing prepared by Fagin so that he will “prefer any society to the companionship of his own sad thoughts in such a dreary place… .” (XVIII, 120).

Another aspect of this record of Oliver’s lonely vigil is its dream-like quality. Oliver in his observatory is as unreal as the world upon which he looks—or as real. Again and again in the novel the dream as fact or metaphor is used to describe the insubstantial character of Oliver’s existence. The dream state may be actual as is the case during the boy’s illness at Brownlow’s when it is benign and peaceful and so like death as to make death seem a gracious release from care:

Here, as elsewhere in Dickens, death, the ultimate insubstantial state, is a temptation to a man in the midst of life: it is not a summons to perfected being, a portal to the irrefragable now, which Keats sometimes celebrates (although it does include the Keatsian forgetfulness of chaffing circumstance), but a deliverance from consciousness which always nags man into knowing his present misery. Because reality is so vivid, so energetic, so much larger and more powerful than human feeling, and so indifferent to it, a man—or a boy—is apt to break his heart against the hardness of the actual world—and he is always tempted to seek an anodyne rather than submit to this heavy fate. The dream of heaven, the careless life of childhood, sleep, and death are all corresponding modes of security in Dickens’ fiction. Emerging from sleep to the consciousness of Fagin’s room, Oliver watches through half closed eyes the old man examining his stolen wealth:

It is better to lie in bed, safe from the urgencies of time and dreamily suspended above the menace of the actual. When Oliver creeps into his “narrow bed” at the Sowerberrys’, he wishes “that that were his coffin; and that he could be laid in a calm and lasting sleep in the churchyard ground: with the tall grass waving gently above his head: and the sound of the old deep bell to soothe him in his sleep” (V, 26). The quiet orderly routine of the Brownlow household resembles the peace of heaven:

At the end of the novel a visit to the workhouse recalls the boy’s old painful life so vividly that all the intervening pleasant days seem like a dream: “there was nearly everything as if he had left it but yesterday, and all his recent life had been but a happy dream” (LI, 349).

When, therefore, Oliver stands observing the city from his confinement at Fagin’s, the claustral moodiness of this scene is complexly relevant to the point of view of the novel. Unlike the Malloy-Malone-Unnamable complex of characters (or character) in Beckett’s fiction who have their thickly oppressive consciousness and their strong bodily awareness to assert against the obscurity and insubstantiality of the external world, Oliver has only his thin and splintered layer of past memory and murky apprehension of the present to serve him in identifying himself and in relating that self to the object world outside. But here the solitary orphan can only be identified as another object and not defined as a person; he too is opaque as are the grotesque shapes he sees. Perhaps no more can be said of the real world of people and places than that it is a jumble of objects which can be ordered only as in a dream arranged and shaped by the imagination.

Such an ordering occurs tentatively in the pastoral setting of the Maylie residence and finally in the little society presided over by Brownlow at the end of the novel. In his perplexed captivity, Oliver can only wait to be moved from the limbo of his present by some external force. At this point in the novel that force is Fagin who restores the boy to the company of thieves. Oliver’s laugh sounds “heartily” at the capers of this frolicsome group and at Fagin’s stories of his own career. By his laughter Oliver implicates himself in a world which had been remote and baffling to him, and the narrator observes sententiously but accurately that Fagin was “now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would blacken it, and change its hue forever” (XVIII, 120). In giving Oliver over to Bill Sikes for the Maylie burglary, however, Fagin frustrates his own design. For it is this final exploitation of the boy that leads almost to his death and then to his renewal to a new life in the country environment.

II

Whereas the city in Oliver Twist is always viewed as grimy, lurid, or festering, the country is always fair and blossoming. The Maylies live at Chertsey on the upper Thames, one of those “pleasant little towns” described in Our Mutual Friend where “you may hear the fall of water over the weirs, or even, in still weather, the rustle of the rushes; and from the bridge you may see the young river, dimpled like a young child, playfully gliding away among the trees, unpolluted by the defilements that lie in wait for it on its course, and as yet out of hearing of the deep summons of the sea” (III, viii, 504). During Oliver’s recovery “when the fine warm weather had fairly begun, and every tree and flower was putting forth its young leaves and rich blossoms,” the group move to “a cottage some distance in the country” (XXXII, 209-10). Here the narrator describes the natural scene with Wordsworthian awareness of nature’s power to evoke primal memories. An act of human love, a work of art, a glimpse of nature are related in Dickens’ estimation as they are in Wordsworth’s by their power to link the human imagination with eternal consciousness:

The beauty and harmony of the natural order may touch with life the ennobling dreams of men and influence them to leave off the glum and minor grievances that rust their fretting days:

With Coleridge, however, who emphasized that “in our life alone does Nature live,” Dickens does not posit an intrinsic life in nature nor does he see in it any organic correspondence with the gaiety or pain of individual men:

Indeed, for all its apparently solicitous beauty, nature is fundamentally separate from and indifferent to human affairs. In Nicholas Nickleby, at the death of Lord Frederick Verisopht in the duel with Sir Mulberry Hawk, the minutely particularized and peaceful regularity of nature mocks the shocking discord of the human trespassers as the “clean earth smiling” and the butterfly do man’s reckless enterprise after Stein’s ambush by the rebels in Lord Jim:

Nevertheless, the fresh country surroundings, where, in Hopkins’ words, all is not “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,” foster self-respecting behavior by encouraging in men the most elevated responses to themselves and to others. Even the poor are idealized so that they seem like Arcadian rustics:

Countrymen, though usually not of the lowest class, are celebrated for their health of spirit—but in considerably more candid color tones—in English fiction from Jane Austen’s Robert Martin in Emma through George Eliot’s Caleb Garth in Middlemarch to Forster’s Stephen Wonham in The Longest Journey and Lawrence’s Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow. The language used by Dickens to describe country persons and places in Oliver Twist is often exaggerated—that is, unsatisfactory if close imitation of reality is the standard—but all the scenes of the novel are drawn to accommodate the imaginative bias inherent in a fable. In a novel where no serious attempt at realistic depiction is made and where stylization—and consequently distortion of nature is a prevailing technique, the idealized representation of life in the country, which is consistently carried out, is no more arbitrarily or tendentiously done than the mephitic descriptions of the city which seem to cause little critical complaint on grounds of lack of verisimilitude.

Early in the novel Sowerberry and Oliver approach a slum dwelling where a young woman has recently died:

In the country scene the poor are described as neat and clean; and they are reverently attentive in the church which is fragrant from the air outside and happy with the sound of birds’ song. The entire description is meant to convey an “impression” of a wholesome environment where simple virtue flourishes. But decay, disorder, and viciousness are equally “impressions” of the slums and these qualities are epitomized in the view of the bent humans skulking amid crazy and mouldering buildings. The final sentence of the paragraph is unnecessary for the effect since the rodent-like existence of the people has been sufficiently denoted to establish the analogy without need of excessive specification.

The conclusion from these contrasting descriptions is that evidently only outside the city can men define their own worth and dignity as human persons whereas in the gloom of the tenement world they sink almost inevitably to the most contemptible animal level. When the facts of life are so hard, these facts resist and shatter the values of the spirit from which men customarily take their pride of self-identification and absorb, instead, only the instinctive predatory twitches of the human animal. The mother of the dead woman whose funeral Sowerberry arranges triumphs in her own survival and finds the ironic juxtaposition of young death and old merriment “’as good as a play—as good as a play!’” (V, 32) Since a choice must be made between the two environments, all the “good” figures in the novel are removed from the contaminating influence of the city. Oliver finds his true home in the country remote from London and the vicissitudes of his previous life (for it is another life altogether that he leads at the Maylies and at last under the guardianship of Brownlow). The boy’s dream of happiness—and redemption —is realized at last when the mystery of his birth is explained and he is adopted by Brownlow and taught the ways of filling out his new identity. In the city Oliver had undergone great unhappiness and his potential integrity had been endangered by Fagin. Nevertheless, because of the particularity of his birth as the child of deepest love, he had passed through this experience like a disguised prince amid a host of his enemies or like one of the elect unsinged by the inferno.

Except in the mechanical sense of transit, the rescue of Oliver does not reveal the opening of any moral passage between the reality of the world and the pastoral ideal. The orphan is never essentially touched by the evil around him since even Fagin is cowered by his innocence as a wicked spirit is said to be intimidated by holy water:

Nancy is too implicated emotionally in the wretchedness of her world to be “saved” by Brownlow’s offer of assistance. “Chained” to her old life, she is released from this bondage by her prayer for mercy only at the moment when Sikes’ club descends upon her. One character alone from Fagin’s group is redeemed to a better life, and that is Charley Bates who “appalled by Sikes’s crime, fell into a train of reflection whether an honest life was not, after all, the best” (LIII, 367). Appropriately for the design of the novel he retires to the country where he becomes “the merriest young grazier in all Northamptonshire.”

III

The antagonists in their novel are not Oliver and Fagin, but Brownlow and Fagin. Oliver is the trophy for whose possession they contend. As in the descriptive passages where the city seems the dominant reality, Fagin seems to be more powerful than Brownlow. Certainly his energy is always visible in his physical gestures whether he is sorting through his stolen property or writhing through the tortuous streets of London or frantically working his hands in impatience or covetousness or hate. Brownlow, however, has his forcefulness as well although it is less overtly conveyed; and his character is too strong to be confused with the impulsive boyishness of Losberne or the gentle, almost otiose benevolence of Mrs. Maylie. Losberne’s perpetual youthfulness and his impetuosity, which are like Pickwick’s, have won him “the warmest respect and esteem of all who knew him” (XXXII, 208), but he is not toughly reliable, as Rose Maylie realizes when she chooses to confide Nancy’s story to Brownlow rather than to the Doctor. And the effectiveness of Mrs. Maylie’s kindly nature is circumscribed by a limited imagination and limited energy. The obscurity of Rose’s birth, for example, inspires in Mrs. Maylie reservations, which are prudent but ungenerous, about the propriety of a marriage between her son and the girl.

Brownlow and Fagin are both mature bachelors which is probably a necessary uncircumstanced condition for the role either of savior or destroyer. Losberne is also a bachelor but he is a spasmodic innocent like a hearty child. But Brownlow has suffered disappointment in love, and Fagin whose dislike for women is made clear in his attitude towards Nancy appears to be at least latently homosexual in his relationship with his protégés. As much as disinterestedness is possible in man, Brownlow has such a disinterested attachment for order and virtue while Fagin is equally disinterested in his love of chaos—his physical surroundings are in no way improved nor is he made personally comfortable by his successful “business.” Unlike the Sowerberrys, the Bumbles, or Noah Claypole all of whom are stung by greed and covet status in the morosely selfish way of their society, Fagin is no Conradian “flabby devil” but an ascetic destroyer indifferent to his own aggrandizement and passionately devoted to the extension of evil.

The school of crime over which Fagin presides has a mock Edenic freedom about it—it is the false pastoral environment of the novel—, for his pupils, merry as schoolboys on perpetual holiday, need never turn away from their games and can always be playful in their relationship with each other. As in all the gestures of his life, Fagin is extraordinary in his dealings with his boys, a man of character who can dominate the fancies of the young and win their attachment with his perverse charm. But Fagin’s pupils are also cavorting in a despoiled Eden, and their master is like “some loathesome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved… .” (XIX, 120-21). The gang are always in danger of apprehension, and their argot contains many references to transportation, hanging, and other impending punishments. Moreover, the lack of love and consequently of loyalty in their relationship is shown by their desertion of Oliver after Brownlow’s pocket had been picked. Fagin is a corrupting authority figure who has depraved Nancy and who furiously prods Sikes to murder her. He is worse than his pupils and yet greater than any one around him. Even in his despair in the condemned cell, Fagin, under the eyes of Brownlow, still attempts to persuade Oliver to become one with his evil by having him. Fagin’s last “cry upon cry” marks his terror but not his remorse; it is the clamor of a stricken giant untimely stopped in his vocation to multiply disorder in the world. Brownlow, like God with Job before Satan, brings Oliver before his antagonist to permit Fagin a last trial for the prize which they had both sought. And Fagin’s confinement, it might be noted, gives Brownlow an advantage about equal to that possessed by the Lord with his dimensionless power.

From the time of his appearance in court before the police magistrate, Fang, Brownlow shows that he is not intimidated by brute power—whether it appear in the form of an overbearing minion of society or of a dark Satanic fury. Nor, though a bachelor, is Brownlow an inexperienced man whom life has not touched. An undefinable memory of another’s countenance is strangely signalled by Oliver’s presence and figures from Brownlow’s past are called up:

“Strongly disposed” as he is to trust Oliver, Brownlow, who is cut from a more complicated pattern than the Cheeryble brothers, does not yield to soft and undiscriminating benevolence. Grimwig, that dogged and saturnine sceptic, is like another aspect of Brownlow’s character with which he must contend and whose prerogatives he must acknowledge—the deeply withdrawn self who suspects that life will always disappoint him but who is gratefully surprised when, on rare occasions, it does not. And although in his trial of Oliver urged by Grimwig and in the visit to Fagin’s cell as well as in his attitude towards Nancy, Brownlow, like “the old fantastical Duke of dark corners” in Measure for Measure, may seem to display a remote and ambiguous mode of behavior, his standard of justice is high and consistent and allows the individual freedom to acknowledge or resist it. Grimwig is useful because he can remind his friend that although personal life is short the annals of human corruption are so extensive and varied that no specific instance of betrayal can be considered remarkable. It is hard but reasonable—and indicative also of a larger trust—for Brownlow to submit to Grimwig’s wager and permit Oliver to be tested through the errand to the bookseller. At the same time, even in his disappointment over the boy’s disappearance with the books and the five pound note, Brownlow continues to seek him in order to discover the facts of his case; only when he feels the search is hopeless does he travel abroad to the West Indies.

Throughout the investigation into Oliver’s background, Brownlow is firm and assured and metes out justice with both magnanimity and a clear-eyed apprehension of the possible. Having offered Nancy the hope of asylum from her criminal companions but not necessarily a guarantee of “peace of heart and mind,” Brownlow understands almost at once, as Rose Maylie does not, that Nancy will not accept the offer. In commemoration of his friendship with Monks’ father, Brownlow extends to that corrupt young man at least the freedom to end his life as he chooses. He does not spare the Bumbles for their aimless cruelty and greed: they are removed from their parish posts and are permitted to sink to the position of inmates in the workhouse over which they had formerly presided. Brownlow is not a Nobodaddy in the novel, an ineffectual patriarch exercising bogus influence over those with whom he is involved. Instead he is a man of organized experience who reacts in a vigorous personal manner to any affront to human order he encounters and who brings together into “a little society” those individuals most fit to enjoy a condition as near “to one of perfect happiness as can ever be known in this changing world” (LIII, 365).

The conclusion of Oliver Twist may well be a disappointment to those readers whom experience has led to expect at best a wavering line of demarcation between joy and pain in this life—who indeed suspect, and perhaps rightly, that the upright life not only does not bring success but that it is not even, as Plato would have it, its own reward. It is true that the final chapter looks pretty naive to the sceptical eye when the wicked die of “old disorders” like Monks or “far from home” like the remnants of Fagin’s tribe while the good fish and garden and carpenter, listen to the edifying Sunday sermons of their friend, and meditate with luminous sadness upon the past. But this is the conclusion of a type of romance and everything in the hitherto stylized contrast between the two worlds prepares for the equally stylized close.

IV

In the great world nothing has evidently changed as a result of the elimination of one evil and the departure of some individuals to a life of modified contentment in the country. Dickens had no prophetic message of deliverance as did Blake in Plate 27 of Jerusalem:

The good in Dickens’ novels do not inherit England or the world, for there is little left worthy of inheritance. This denial of customary values and expression of hopelessness before the world as it is—as even its most energetic and potentially most able inhabitants have made it—are basic to Oliver Twist and to the development of Dickens’ treatment of society in his later fiction. As much as Brownlow and his friends do at the conclusion of the novel, Fagin exists outside society and he is no more the author of its corruption than Brownlow is a contributor to its amelioration. In an industrial, financial, and governmental organization so large, complex, and impersonal as the one depicted here and elsewhere in Dickens’ novels, the term social good is without meaning because society is an unprincipled network of mutual hostility, exploitation, and betrayal. That the audience can sympathize with Fagin in his besetment and see him as another victim of society and even that it can feel pain at the death of Sikes slung from the tenement roof in a noose of his own making are not the perverse reactions of readers stupefied by the craft of the artist. For although both these men are murderers of the body and of the spirit, their exercise of this terrible human power has its source in great personal rage and hatred that demand respect from the beholder: not admiration but respect for the evidence of tormented humanity these feelings represent. The Bumbles in their indolent and haphazard cupidity, the London mob in its faceless anger, Henry Maylie’s friends in their anonymous snobbishness are impersonal but corrosive executioners of the human spirit, and their subversion prevails. Fagin can be overcome by Brownlow, but society remains unvanquished; it is enduringly blank and corrupt like the slums it lets moulder around its members. Ironically the only “successful” member of Fagin’s group is Noah Claypole who with the help of his wife becomes an agent of society by turning informer.

The view of the world is more allegorically defined in Oliver Twist with fewer consoling ambiguities than in the other novels by Dickens, but from Pickwick’s retirement to “some quiet pretty neighbourhood in the vicinity of London” (LVII, 796) to the use of the paper mill on the upper Thames operated by the conventionally perfidious—yet here charitable—Jews in Our Mutual Friend, the rejection of the ambitions and standards of contemporary society—its church, its state, and its business—is everywhere apparent in Dickens. The questions and answers of the Stranger in Eliot’s “Choruses from ’The Rock’” are relevant to the depleted world of Oliver Twist:

And in that most Dickensian of Conrad’s fiction, The Secret Agent, Stevie, the retarded boy, the damaged Christ-Apollo figure, sighs for the plight of those around him: “’Bad world for poor people.’” A bad world is depicted there and in Oliver Twist not only for the economically poor but for all men impoverished in their hearts by the false pieties of society. The most explicitly pastoral retreat in the novel is made by Henry Maylie who elects to become a shepherd of country people and announces his decision in the conventionalized language of the enamored swain:

It is only personal evil that can be defeated, this novel announces, and personal love that can triumph. And a life of “mercy to others” in which Brownlow instructs Oliver and of “mutual love” among a few people is not so dispirited an adventure as some critics suppose nor is it defenceless and sentimental reverie as close to the celebration of “the happy summer days” of childhood in Alice in Wonderland as they might imagine.

Source

From ELH 35, no. 3 (1969): 403-421. Copyright © 1968 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.