Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER XXXIX
CHAPTER XL
CHAPTER XLI
CHAPTER XI,II
CHAPTER XLIII
CHAPTER XLIV
CHAPTER XLN
CHAPTER XLVI
CHAPTER XLVII
CHAPTER XLVIII
CHAPTER XLIX
CHAPTER L
CHAPTER LI
CHAPTER LII
CHAPTER LIII
AFTERWORD
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHARLES DICKENS
As a child, Charles Dickens (1812-70) came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A surprise legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success through Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished.
Frederick Busch is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, including Closing Arguments, Girls, and The Mutual Friend, a novel about Charles Dickens. The winner of numerous awards, he is the Edgar W. B. Fairchild Professor Emeritus of Literature at Colgate University.
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First Signet Classics Printing (Busch Introduction), April 2005
Introduction copyright (c) Frederick Busch, 2005
Afterword copyright (c) New American Library a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 1961
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INTRODUCTION:
LEFT HANGING
WHEN CHARLES DICKENS WAS A BOY OF ABOUT TWELVE, HIS PARENTS left him hanging. He dangled between the vulnerabilities of boyhood and the responsibilities of life on his own in a rooming house in rough-and-tumble London. He traveled between his room and the Marshalsea prison, where his father had been locked away for debt and where all the family except Charles--in order that he earn his salary of about six shillings a week--had gone to live with him. Charles walked through teeming London to reach his place of work, Warren's Blacking at 30 Hungerford Stairs. The factory was in an old house beside the Thames, and there he covered with paper the pots of stove blacking on which he then tied labels. A boy named Bob Fagin, also employed there, showed him how to do his work.
It was a "tumbledown old house," he later wrote, "... literally overrun with rats." He recalled them "swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times...." Oliver Twist will be imprisoned by a man named Fagin in a house quite like this one. Dickens never forgot this several months' nightmare and in his maturity he would write: "My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man: and wander desolately back to that time of my life."
So Charles Dickens was suspended by circumstance and sensibility between grown-up realities and a child's fantasies, between security and the fairy-tale fear of abandonment that we find throughout his work and, surely, in Oliver Twist. He wrote about aspects of his life, and the realities conveyed by his fiction were matters to him, and to his readers, of life and death.
When he was in his twenties, Dickens was a reporter covering Parliamentary debates and important elections, but also writing columns about the parish officers called beadles whom he lampooned in his Bumble, and about slum Neighborhoods such as Seven Dials: "streets of dirty, straggling houses, with now and then an unexpected court composed of buildings as ill-proportioned and deformed as the half-naked children that wallow in the kennels"--neighborhoods such as Bill Sikes might have lived in, and such as young Charles Dickens might have walked through, frightened, on his way to work. These sketches were signed by Boz (Dickens' boyhood family nickname), whose imagination was kindled by such grim, sorry scenes, and who used his journalistic experience to make his fiction burn bright.
In 1837, when he was twenty-five, he assumed the editorship of a new monthly magazine called Bentley's Miscellany and his responsibilities included writing sixteen pages for each issue--which became the monthly parts of The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, published under his own name. He undertook this work while writing Sketches by Boz and the ongoing serial novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Containing A Faithful Record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures, and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Membe
rs, Edited by "Boz." He was married to Catherine Hogarth, and they lived with her sister, Mary, at Doughty Street in London--and here, for the moment, we must leave them suspended.
In his preface to the 1841 Third Edition, one of many editions in book form published after the novel's monthly serialization, Dickens says of it: "I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil." He also tells his readers that "I wished to show in little Oliver the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance and triumphing at last...." So we know that Dickens was working with opposing elements--"the vilest evil" as contrasted to "the purest good," "the principle of Good." He moves between these abstractions by juxtaposing Oliver with Bumble, then Oliver with Fagin, then Oliver with Brownlow or Rose, with Nancy or Sikes. He tests the absolute good, the innocent child, but he also tests Nancy and Fagin and Sikes to see what good there is in them. And he writes the "progress," the life's-adventure of a flesh-and-blood child, someone who begins his existence in the first paragraph of the first chapter as an "item of mortality."
The small boy, Dick, whose death Oliver mourns, is one of many dying and dead children whom Dickens employs as a source of purity and a goad to the conscience of his readers. Victimized children, by-products of the Industrial Revolution, also occur with frequency in Dickens' fiction. The protagonist of Little Dorrit, his great novel of 1857, is born in debtors' prison; foreshadowing her, Oliver is born in the prisonlike conditions of the workhouse, not a place of work but a place for the destitute purposely made more harsh than comforting. Regulations were cruel and the food provided was sparse; the paupers seeking shelter were to be made uncomfortable so that they would be discouraged from entering the local parish workhouse and would, instead, seek employment. The assumption was that the poor evaded work, and little distinction was made between paupers who could work (whether they could find employment or not) and those who surely could not (small children, say, or the aged or ill). The sense of accusation in poorhouse regulations was part of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and Oliver Twist is an attack on the mentality that made such a cruel attitude into the law of the land. There is considerable pleasure taken by Dickens, and by the reader, as Bumble the Beadle, that bully, hypocrite, and unmistakable expression of the Poor Law's inhumanity, and his wife, Mrs. Corney, no less shallow or cruel, end up abject in the workhouse. Their erotic relationship begins as a commercial transaction--we watch Bumble paw and appraise her belongings--and it ends in fiscal disaster: they are financially, as well as spiritually, bankrupt. It is worth noting how Dickens plots this pleasure for us: he knows at the start, in chapter XXIII, that the circle of this couple's story will be closed (in chapter LIII) "in that very same workhouse in which they had once lorded it over others." The author needed to know, at least roughly, very early in the serial what elements would need management for the later episodes. The parish boy's "progress" is not merely linear, a straight line of events from his birth as an "item of mortality" to his happy days with Rose Maylie and Mr. Brownlow; there is more design than that to the novel, and we might want to trace it from chapter II.
If you are mortal, or are said to partake of mortality, you are defined as someone who can die. Oliver's birth, then, is an event all-about death: his mother dies as he is born, and he is aimed by his author toward the possibility of early death. Virtually all of the novel is about dying or not dying. Everything else--whether concerning the treatment of the poor, the cruelty of public officers, the public attitude toward poverty, the organization of the underworld, expressions of bigotry--is secondary to the primary concern of the novel: death.
Oliver and the other orphaned paupers in the workhouse are told by a large, nasty boy possessed of "a wild, hungry, eye" that he might well eat the small child sleeping beside him. The boys draw straws to see who must act to forestall this cannibalism. The point for us is that they believe that their lives are this contingent--that someone can decide to feast on them and do so if he will. It is no less perverse an idea than the twisted social Darwinism that enables public officials to permit the weak and helpless to starve because the poor are guilty of being poor. These children believe that they, too, are guilty; they are hounded and harried because they have committed the crime, in society's eyes, of poverty: why, in punishment, should someone not be allowed to feed himself on their sparse flesh? So Oliver asks for more gruel not because he is brave, and not because he feels entitled to it, and not because of appetite. He begs because he must. He has drawn the short straw, and he is required to save one of his mates, and perhaps himself, from being a meal. The response to this reduction of children to food--remember Jonathan Swift's satire, "A Modest Proposal," in which mass starvation in Ireland in 1729 is to be relieved by the cooking and eating of the young--is of course neither mercy nor forbearance. Instead, Oliver is found guilty of wanting more than the Parliamentary act permits him. His destiny is obvious to Mr. Limbkins, who is Bumble's supervisor: " 'That boy will be hung,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. 'I know that boy will be hung.' " The assertion by the poor of their needs is, to such as Limbkins, an assault on the order of this society, a hanging offense. We can read the rest of the novel in terms of that prediction. The book's about the noose around the neck.
Oliver Twist contains elements to be found in most of Dickens' other novels. It concerns an innocent child who is menaced by a cruel world. There is an element of fairy tale--magic changes us, sometimes in terrifying ways--and there is a fairy godmother figure (in this case, Mr. Brownlow, abetted by Mr. Grimwig); lovely motherly women (Rose Maylie, say) of the purest heart will comfort the hero, who is pursued by nightmare forces (Sikes and Fagin); there will be violence, often murder, and Dickens' prose generally becomes incandescent as the social contract is violated. In Oliver Twist, as Dickens examines the principle of goodness, he balances his scrutiny with Nancy, who is good but fallen, and with characters such as Fagin or Bill Sikes, whose absolute evil matches Oliver's and Rose Maylie's absolute good. Another important Dickensian element in the novel is the author's anger: he detested the venality, the blindness, and the viciousness of his great and wealthy nation. His public officials may wear white waistcoats, but they are as covered with pitch as, say, Fagin, whom Dickens renders repulsive.
In preparing Oliver Twist for the Charles Dickens Edition of 1867, Dickens changed most uses of the phrase "the JEW" to "he" or "Fagin." He did so partly in response to a letter from Mrs. Eliza Davis, who, with her husband, had purchased Tavi stock House, Dickens' home in London. Mrs. Davis had written Dickens saying that his depiction of Fagin encouraged "a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew." Dickens had replied that "Fagin in Oliver Twist is a Jew, because it unfortunately was true of the time to which that story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.... I have no feeling towards the Jewish people but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public, or in private...." But of course he did not, and, in writing Fagin, he does not. And because he knew it, one suspects, he made the changes in the edition of 1867; in writing his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1865), he created a Jewish character named Riah, who is possessed of great humanity and kindness, and who is victimized by a Christian moneylender.
But Fagin is not only a Jew seen through the lens of bigotry and stereotype; he is Dickens' way of setting absolute evil against Oliver's absolute good. Oliver first sees Fagin with a fork in his hand before a fire: he is a childish portrait of the Devil, but Oliver sees him only as a kind and helpful man; it is we who see him as satanic. The boy's vision of the world assumes that it is good, in spite of the harm it has done him; ours, as we dwell on the harm, does not. It is important, here, to consider how Dickens manipulates this novel's point of view--the way a character perceives and reports his environment. Because Oliver is a principle of good, and not very much of an interesting person--except in his victimhood, which Dickens takes personally--Dickens does not keep his vision focused on Ol
iver's thoughts and feelings. They are rather basic. In chapter V, when he is dealing with Sowerberry the undertaker, Oliver is told, concerning funerals--remember: this is a book about mortality--that " 'you'll get used to it.... Nothing when you are used to it, my boy.' " Oliver's response is to wonder "Whether it had taken a very long time to get Mr. Sowerberry used to it." This is not a fascinating analysis, and Dickens seems to be merely rounding off the chapter that this colloquoy concludes. But we, through Dickens' imagery, have witnessed the grief of the impoverished husband who could not help to save the woman he loved; we have seen the attendants throw a can of cold water over him after he faints, and we have seen him locked--consider how many doors and gates are locked and broken through in this novel of imprisonment--out of the churchyard. The reader is directed to social callousness, and Oliver, said to be "thinking over all he had seen and heard"--those are the chapter's concluding words--walks away from us with those thoughts.
What interests Dickens more than Oliver's routine thinking is social cruelty, violence, and inner darkness. When they impinge on Oliver's mind, as when he understands Fagin's enterprise with the street urchins, the prose employed by Dickens to describe the boy's mental process becomes very different--as in chapter X: "In an instant the whole mystery of the handkerchiefs, and the watches, and the jewels, and the Jew, rushed upon the boy's mind." The blood so tingles in his veins "that he felt as if he were in a burning fire." And when Oliver is safely out of the way in chapter XIX, recaptured by Fagin, see what Dickens does with mud and mist, with rain that falls "sluggishly," as if it were a thick broth of evil, with everything "cold and clammy to the touch." Fagin walks the streets: "As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal." "The Jew" is the serpent--not only a reptile, but the reptile: Satan himself, evil incarnate. When Dickens later writes Riah, the upstanding Jew of Our Mutual Friend, the prose he uses for describing him is never this dynamic because Riah is mild, not fiendish.