Oliver in Charlottesville

Oliver Twist was our other road-trip book-on-tape. My mom and I started listening to this somewhere in Virginia, and when we picked my dad up in Charlottesville he started listening to it, too. I was right about it being a crowd-pleaser with a lot of hilarious voices and jokes: we all got really into it and were laughing a lot, and my dad was sad he was going to miss the end, and my mom was sad when she realized I accidentally kept the last CD in my laptop bag (I let her take the CDs back to RI with her, since once I was out of the car I could read the book.) But we were also confused: all the delightful stuff we remembered from the musical (in which I starred as the title character my sophomore year in high school, in the school play) had happened by the time we were about a third of the way through the CDs. "What else could possibly happen before the big climax?" we asked each other as we pulled into a Comfort Inn in Charlottesville (this time on our way home.) We found out that what could possibly happen was a bunch of what I suppose is early-Dickensian filler: after having introduced a variety of delightful characters, and having made us feel very bad for poor little unjustly-persecuted Oliver, and having set up a variety of conflicts (will Oliver escape from the criminals? Will Nancy betray Bill for Oliver's sake? Will Mr Brownlow keep his faith in Oliver's innate goodness even though Mr Grimsby seems to be right that Oliver is untrustworthy?), Dickens just adds a bunch of dumb extra scenes of the Artful Dodger and Master Bates (I snickered at his name through the entire trip, but only because some other kid I went to elementary school with had told me about how someone read her a story with a character named Master Bates in it, could I believe it) playing cards, and Mr Bumble's stupid courting of the stupid workhouse matron (well, they were OK), and then the horrible part where Oliver falls in with the family Bill tries to rob oh my God is that family boring and who cares about the possibly illegitimate niece and her stupid boring romance with a boring guy who shows up like two-thirds of the way through.


I guess this is only Dickens's second novel so I should cut him some slack. But this book was pretty stupid, you guys. Everyone told me I should read The Pickwick Papers instead, but apparently that only has a couple of good parts too. The beginning is delightful, and interesting because it's the part that makes Oliver Twist a social novel--the muckraking is very obvious and very convincing. We were all up in arms about the injustices to Oliver, and we laughed and laughed at all Dickens's funny sarcastic remarks about how unfortunate it was that the guy's horse died just when he had proved a horse could live on one straw a day, and had almost proved it could live on no straws, and how that was related to trying to get the paupers to live on more and more watered-down gruel (and one onion a week), and we felt indignant and proud of ourselves much as we feel when we watch The Daily Show, and probably that's exactly how these newly-created Victorians felt when they read those early installments of Oliver Twist. There was a "waif problem" in London, just as there was, or would be, a "woman problem." And an Irish problem! All those problems. Anyway obviously the workhouse stuff was great, and as was the case in David Copperfield, as well as in Jane Eyre, you're so relieved when anyone is nice to these pathetic little children because you've been so convinced that the world is void of compassion, but you need to believe there can be nice people (and maybe that you could be one of those nice, reasonable people someday). In all those books you're also super relieved when the poor urchin has a big fit and fights back, which Oliver does at the Sowerberrys'; I wonder how much that tendency is a revision of some kind of sentimental reform literature that might be contemporary with these texts? You know, where the kids might be long-suffering saints? Those kids exist in Dickens, right--I guess Dick, Oliver's friend from the parish, is an example.


It was also interesting to note the way in which the bad characters seem aware of the reform movements, and of built-in systems for regulation of public welfare institutions. Mr Bumble, for example, complains to Sowerberry about reformers, and the bad magistrate (Mr. Fang?) is in a bad mood when Oliver's case comes before him because of some muckraking journalist "adverting to some recent decision of his, and commending him, for the three hundred and fiftieth time, to the special and particular notice of the Secretary of State for the Home Department." I don't know why I'm surprised by this; I guess because when Dickens is complaining about Chancery, for example, it seems like it's him (and John Jarndyce) against the world--there isn't much of a sense in Bleak House that people are actively trying to reform Chancery, although there is that reference to people suggesting reform in Parliament and getting shot down with "What would happen to Mr Vholes?" I guess I'm interested in the difference between a text that either is or pretends to be raising awareness of a problem you haven't heard about, and a text that is explicitly engaging in a political debate, or even siding with the established institutions to enforce reform that individual bureaucrats and middle managers or whatever are ignoring. Like maybe Parliament in 1837 agrees with Dickens that orphans shouldn't get fed very thin gruel, but they're letting too many Mr Bumbles get away with it?


Among all Dickens's funny sarcasm is this passage about why we should admire the Dodger & Charlie Bates leaving Oliver in the lurch when he gets accused of pickpocketing: 

and forasmuch as the freedom of the subject and the liberty of the individual are among the first and proudest boasts of a true-hearted Englishman, so, I need hardly beg the reader to observe, that this action should tend to exalt them in the opinion of all public and patriotic men, in almost as great a degree as this strong proof of their anxiety for their own preservation and safety goes to corroborate and confirm the little code of laws which certain profound and sound-judging philosophers have laid down as the main-springs of all Nature's deeds and actions

I think it's interesting for its little jibes at both English patriotism and at pre-Darwinian theories of natural law; it's also interesting as a critique of both nature and culture, especially since I've been reading Hardy lately, an author who seems saddened by both nature and culture (and maybe the conflict between them) but doesn't seem to think there's anything to do about it. Dickens is making fun of the attitude that we can't do anything about it, that we might explain away bad behavior on the grounds of either nature and culture; as a reformer, he seems to imply that we can either go beyond nature and progress as a culture, or that such pat explanations of nature and culture are lazy excuses.

More hilarious sophistry includes this little piece of moral relativism: 

Thus, to do a great right, you may do a little wrong; and you may take any means which the end to be attained, will justify; the amount of the right, or the amount of the wrong, or indeed the distinction between the two, being left entirely to the philosopher concerned, to be settled and determined by his clear, comprehensive, and impartial view of his own particular case.




I'm also interested in Oliver as a kind of proto-David Copperfield, both because it's a novel with a boy's name for the title, which follows the life and (to some extent) development of the title character (I'd have to read Nicholas Nickleby to really figure this out, of course!), and because there are these weird little references to Oliver's developing literacy, and the possibility that he might be a writer one day (mostly just Mr Brownlow being like, "You'd like to write books some day, right?"). The Oliver-as-a-writer amounts to nothing, but it's possible that Dickens stuck it in just in case he did want to make Oliver into a little embryonic novelist; you never know with these crazy serials. Also, the focus on Oliver could have potentially created some of the problems I noticed in David Copperfield, where the field for Dickensian expansiveness and Dickensian/Game of Thrones-style seriality & simultenaiety was limited a little bit by the first-person POV. Because Oliver Twist is in the third person, that doesn't have to happen, but for the first (and best) third of the book the action pretty much follows Oliver along on his adventures; it isn't until we start doing the Mr Bumble sections and then lose track of Oliver for a while after the robbery that we start to follow the simultaneous adventures of a lot of different characters. It really does feel like Dickens is just beginning to feel out this many-wacky-characters technique that seems so effortless in Our Mutual Friend: when he introduces the first Mr Bumble digression, for example, he feels like he has to preface it with this long explanation of why sometimes it's a good idea to interrupt the story with some humor or whatever, while by the end he's just throwing new characters and scenes and situations at you, and suddenly realizing everyone is related and so on, and it's very awkward, and he kind of seems to forget about the Artful Dodger after his big courtroom scene (maybe he was transported? but there are very specific wrap-ups for all these other kind of minor characters), and the revelations are kind of muddy and confusing, while in the later novels I think you're better able to follow along with all the clever twists and turns the narrative takes. The fact that Monks shows up so late in the novel is a real problem, as is the fact that most of the end of the novel is about the stupid family with the stupid romance plot that shows up so late in the novel. Maybe Dickens was like, "Yikes, the only ingenue in this novel is an alcoholic fallen-woman/thief, maybe I'd better put in a young woman who is not destined to be murdered."

And what a murder! My mom listened to it on the CD and called me and was horrified. Bloody hair sizzling in the fire, pretty gross! Also, it's interesting to see how mad Bill is driven by his horrible crime, and how resistant Monks is to killing Oliver because murder will out, and then to read The Woman in White and hear the scary Italian guy being like, "that is all nonsense!" Well, the Italian guy gets punished in Woman in White, but only because he left his secret society.

Finally, Fagin! For some reason I did not expect the anti-semitism to be so palpable. He is so greasy and hateable and also they just call him "The Jew" all the time. Also, his getting caught is kind of an anticlimax (as I think a lot of the major plot points seem to be--why did they need Nancy to come to the bridge if they could just scoop all these people up as easy as pie?) and his death is just kind of weird. Dickens adds in a rabbi, whom Fagin refuses to see, to show that not every Jew is bad--Fagin just happens to be a nasty, evil, cowardly Jew. It's interesting to think about Fagin alongside that kind of mystic, saintly Jewish character in Our Mutual Friend, the one who gets along so well with Jenny Wren, and who gets exploited by that terrible guy who makes use of all those terrible Jewish stereotypes that Dickens uses himself in Oliver Twist.

I feel like I should say something about Nancy and women in this novel, but it's pretty classic saintly girls vs fallen girls, but the fallen girls aren't so bad, but also they can't really be redeemed. Right? I mean I don't think too much is getting subverted in Oliver Twist but who knows. It was pretty fun to listen to in the car.


PS: I'm reminded by the subtitle, A Parish Boy's Progress, to think about how much Oliver Twist has in common with Pilgrim's Progress or Hogarth's Rake's Progress. How much do you think? At the beginning it seems to be very much a progress, through a series of trials and tribulations; then it's like Oliver just sits in Celestial City and waits for God and Jesus to sort things out with various devils and worldly jerks for a super long time, and he's not really part of it anymore. Does that happen in Pilgrim's Progress? Someday I will have to read it.