Lecture Thirty-Two Dickens—Writer with a Mission Scope: The young Charles Dickens exploded onto the literary scene in England under the pen name “Boz.” After the enthusiastic reception of his comic novel The Pickwick Papers, Dickens resolved to use fiction as an instrument for social reform. He believed that novels could shed light on the hardheartedness of the age toward the less fortunate and that they could bring about change. His second novel was Oliver Twist, which took on the 1834 Poor Law Reform Amendment, a cruel piece of legislation that drastically revised the old parish system of social welfare. Dickens chose for his protagonist a child, an innovation in fiction up to that time and a stroke of genius for his attack on the Poor Law. Oliver Twist is melodramatic and sentimental, and its plot goes awry in places; nonetheless, it defined the genre of the novel-with-a-purpose and stands as an outstanding achievement in English literature. Outline I. Literature is a hothouse in which individual genius can come into flower more brilliantly, more fully, and earlier than in almost any other field of human creative activity. A. In the mid-1830s, a young writer exploded on the literary scene in England, writing initially under the pen name “Boz” rather than his real name, Charles Dickens (1812.1870). 1. “Boz” was the infant Charles’s mispronunciation of his family nickname, Moses. 2. Moses, found in the bulrushes, was a motherless child, a situation that Dickens would return to again and again in his fiction. B. Dickens’s own childhood was wretched. His father, John Dickens, was an improvident clerk. The family was constantly on the move, and at age 11, Charles was sent out to work for a few shillings a week in a factory. He recalled his childhood with shame but maintained a lifelong sympathy for abused and suffering children. C. The novel with which Dickens introduced himself to the British public was The Pickwick Papers. Initially, the publishers had conceived the Papers as a series of comic episodes centered on a cartoon. Young Dickens was hired to write the text. 1. Very quickly, Dickens upstaged his collaborator, the artist Robert Seymour, who later committed suicide. 2. Dickens took control of the project and, with another illustrator, Hablot Browne, made the monthly serial a bestseller. 3. The Pickwick Papers remains one of the great comic novels in British literature, but it is, as Dickens himself knew, light and episodic. It has no structure, bouncing from one comic situation to another. II. Having captured his public, Dickens, still under 25 years old, embarked on a mission inspired by the great sage Thomas Carlyle, who saw England as a society fractured by urbanization, the Industrial Revolution, and universal heartlessness. A. Dickens resolved to use the novel as an instrument of political and social reform. Bear in mind that “reform” was a pregnant word in Victorian discourse. It was the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 that extended the franchise in Britain to full democratic proportions (although women would not get the vote until 1917). Reform had transformed England. B. Dickens believed that his personal reforming mission could be accomplished in two ways. 1. First, he needed to cast light on current abuses, hardheartedness, and the epidemic malaise of the time, which Carlyle had diagnosed. Dickens would focus particularly on the hardheartedness that came from above, from the lawmakers in Parliament. 2. Second, Dickens would focus on changing hearts. George Eliot, a novelist whom we’ll meet later, defined the novel as a tool for “extending sympathy.” For Dickens, the novel could make readers aware of the pain and needs of others. 3. In the current literary world, this confidence that the Victorian novelists had in their literary form may seem naive, but such idealism drove Dickens’s fiction to its greatest achievements. He did, in fact, bring about change in his world. 4. The significance of Boz, “the Great Inimitable,” as the Victorians called him, was that he could penetrate the minds of his readers and change them. His readers left his novels different people from who they had been when they entered them. C. Dickens set off on his mission with his second full length novel, Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. Like its predecessor, Oliver Twist was serialized in a monthly magazine, but it was quickly reprinted as a three-volume novel, available in local libraries. D. Unlike The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist has a structure. It has a plot, suspense, and a surprise ending. Dickens was aided in this new sense of structure by collaboration with the greatest illustrator of fiction in the 19th century, George Cruikshank. 1. Cruikshank’s later claim that he was the author of Oliver Twist is preposterous, but it’s true that his collaboration with Dickens was an uneasy alliance of powerful equals. 2. The famous scene in which Oliver asks for more gruel at the workhouse calls to mind Cruikshank’s etching as much as Dickens’s description. III. Like Robinson Crusoe or 1984, Oliver Twist is a novel that most people know, even if they haven’t read it. What is not generally known, however, is the political context in which Dickens was writing. A. A cruel piece of legislation, the 1834 Poor Law Reform Amendment, had come into force a couple of years before the publication of Oliver Twist. It was a drastic revision of the old social welfare system, in which the needy and destitute went “on the parish”; that is, they were supported by the community. B. The parish system presumed a stable local population, but with the Industrial Revolution, the British population lost its roots. In Oliver Twist, the young hero’s restless movement from place to place is symbolic of the migratory shifts of population taking place in England in the first half of the 19th century. London alone doubled in population every 10 years. C. The old welfare system could not work with this mass upheaval and was replaced by the 1834 Amendment Act, which was based on the thinking of Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism. 1. The essence of Benthamism was that human beings organize their lives around the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. 2. It was, his political disciples thought, rational to apply this calculus to the country’s welfare crisis: Make the necessity to live on public charity sufficiently painful, and human beings would choose the less painful option of work and economic independence. 3. Recall the scene in A Christmas Carol in which two gentlemen visit Ebenezer Scrooge in the hopes of getting a charitable donation from him. Scrooge proves himself to be Benthamite to the core. 4. Dickens saw this line of rational social policy for what it was: cruel and heartless, and he would use fiction to oppose it. He would change hard hearts to sympathetic hearts, as Scrooge’s heart is softened in A Christmas Carol by the narratives of the spirits. D. In Oliver Twist, Dickens made his arguments with an innovation that was daring in its time: He made the hero of his novel a child. The Victorians were unaccustomed to fiction that inhabited the child’s universe or showed the world from the child’s perspective. 1. Children figure in Shakespeare, for example, as victims or mischievous imps. There was no major work of fiction, drama, or poetry preceding Dickens that featured the child as a central figure. 2. The one great exception to this rule would be found in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, but that poem wasn’t published until 1851, a decade after Oliver Twist. 3. The credit for constructing a long narrative about a child’s adventures through the prism of a child’s psychology goes to Dickens alone. 4. The fact that Dickens chose an innocent, suffering child as his protagonist for an attack on the iniquities of the 1834 Poor Law Act was a further stroke of genius. IV. The story of Oliver Twist is, in many places, pure melodrama, which was much loved by the Victorians, particularly melodramatic death scenes. A. Oliver Twist opens powerfully. A vagrant woman comes, heavily pregnant, into a small rural town, Mudfog. She gives birth to her child in the workhouse and immediately dies. The nurse is drunk; the surgeon, careless; the world is wholly indifferent to this birth. The mother’s death, described in detail, is moving. With her passing, any prospect of discovering her identity or that of her child is lost. B. The boy is named Oliver Twist and consigned to be brought up in the workhouse, under the discipline of the beadle (parish official), Mr. Bumble, and his ferocious wife. The prospects for advancement in his life are not promising. When he reaches boyhood, Oliver is farmed out as an apprentice to the local undertaker, having narrowly escaped the even less attractive career of chimney sweep. C. Oliver runs away to London, where he meets a street urchin, the Artful Dodger, who introduces him to the thieves’ kitchen run by Fagin, a Jew who receives stolen goods. The depiction of the thieves’ den is vivid, but the anti-Semitism in the description of Fagin is offensive to the modern sensibility. D. As one of Fagin’s gang, Oliver becomes a pickpocket on the London streets. Later, much against his will, he is used by the brutal robber Bill Sykes to assist in a burglary. During the break-in, Oliver is shot and, incredibly, is nursed back to health in the household he and Sykes set out to rob, where he discovers that he is a blood relative. E. We gradually learn that Oliver has been systematically criminalized by a vindictive half-brother, Monks, to keep him out of his inheritance. He’s not a parish boy at all but an heir to a middle-class destiny. F. The plot, from this point, unwinds somewhat ineffectively but with some magnificent set-piece scenes, such as Fagin’s last night in prison before he is to be hanged. Oliver, thoroughly gentrified and rather priggish, visits Fagin and advises the old rogue to pray; Oliver then returns to the comfortable mansion where he now lives. G. Recall that Dickens was still in his mid-20s when he wrote Oliver Twist; his analysis of the British class system would become more subtle as his career advanced. V. Later in life, Dickens became obsessed with giving public readings of his fiction, which earned him vast amounts of money and seemed to have filled a deep psychological need. He almost certainly shortened his life by giving such readings, but he was always excited to share with audiences the scene depicting the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist. A. Nancy is the burglar Bill Sykes’s “fancy woman.” Although a prostitute, she is good at heart and kind to Oliver. Nancy betrays the secrets of Oliver’s birth and makes herself a victim of Sykes, who is furious that she has told Oliver’s family who and where he is. B. In retaliation, Sykes, egged on by Fagin, batters her to death. The scene is the acme of brutality and high melodrama, but it was, for Dickens, probably the most powerful moment in his fiction. 1. As Nancy’s head pours blood, she draws out a white handkerchief given to her by Rose Maylie, a respectable woman to whom Nancy has confided the details of Oliver’s whereabouts. The handkerchief symbolizes Nancy’s own residual goodness. 2. Dickens was angered by the suggestion of Thackeray that London streetwalkers and prostitutes were, in general, a lot less virtuous at heart than Nancy. Dickens, who believed in the intrinsic goodness of humanity, insisted that he had not sentimentalized this woman. C. We can stack up various criticisms of Oliver Twist—it’s sentimental, the plot creaks in places, there’s a persistent surrender to melodrama, Oliver is far too genteel—but nonetheless, it remains one of the outstanding achievements of English literature and the gateway to Dickens’s later immense achievement as the greatest novelist of the 19th century. Suggested Readings: Ackroyd, Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion. Dickens, Oliver Twist. House, The Dickens World. Jordan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Schlicke, ed., The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens. Questions to Consider: 1. What is Dickens angry about in Oliver Twist? 2. Why did Dickens choose a child as his protagonist in this novel?