Oliver Twist Essay -- essays research papers

Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, in 1883, to show the reader things as they really are. He felt that the novel should be a message of social reform. One of its purposes was to promote reform of the abuses in workhouses. In no way does Dickens create a dream world. His imagination puts together a bad place during a bad time; an English workhouse just after the Poor Law Act of 1834 (Scott-Kilvert, 48). In the first chapter of Oliver Twist, Dickens moves from comedy to pathos and from pathos to satire. He takes us from the drunken old woman to the dying mother to the hardened doctor. Such rapid switches help in all the later novels to hold together disparate effects, to provide variety and unity, and to give that double opportunity for comedy and pathos that Dickens admired in stage melodrama (Scott-Kilvert, 47). In this first chapter, Dickens also captures life and death in a single sentence, "Let me see the child, and die." (Dickens, 2). This sums up the mother's will to see the newborn baby, and takes a short stride from birth to death. Dickens seems to create his characters to open the reader's eye's to the true characteristics of their nature. One of his subjects are conditioned human nature and the relationship of the individual to his environment (Scott-Kilvert, 47-48). In Oliver Twist, Dickens attempts to free his characters of any influence of their environment. He muddles the message of the novel by making Oliver immune to an environment which is denounced as necessarily corrupting (Price, 86). Dickens created Oliver's character to be virtuous and innocent. He put many stressed tests on him in the course of the book. Dickens comes close to endangering Oliver's idealized virtue, though; in the great temptation scene in Chapter 18 (Scott-Kilvert, 49). This is where the child is being carefully brainwashed, first cunningly cold-shouldered and isolated, then cunningly brought in the deadly warmth of the thieves' family circle (Scott-Kilvert, 49). Oliver was but too glad to make himself useful; too happy to have some faces, however bad, to look upon; too desirous to conciliate those about him when he could honestly do so; to throw any objection in the way of this proposal. So he at once expressed his readiness; and, kneeling on the floor, while Dodger sat upon the table so that he could take his foot in his lap, he applied himself to... ...uous are prosecuted by the rich and corrupt (Gerould, 287). The motive force of melodrama is the villain. The dynamic and sinister figure recognized by the audience as the embodiment of evil (Gerould, 287). The result is usually a happy one for the sympathetic character, resulting in just rewards and punishments and affirming the laws of morality and the benevolent wakings of providence (Gerould, 287). This is so true of the literary work of art of Oliver Twist. Dickens allowed virtue and good prevail over crime and evil. This book was clearly made to show the reality of the world. Dickens does not create a dream world that captures the optimism of readers. He is truly showing things as they really are; how hte world really is. He carefully planned his setting and his description of places so theat he could capture every detail of the hard life. As Martin Price put it in Dickens, "Oliver Twist is not a satisfying novel-it does not liberate us" (Price, 84-385). Dickens' purpose was to spark a sense of rage through peoples hearts towards the English workhouses. He was promoting reform by getting the people "involved" in the melodramatic novel of Oliver Twist.