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.” It was in fact, with a backward glance at Bunyan, subtitled “The Parish Boy’s Progress.” It is a child’s success story, with some of the qualities—and those who know their Grimm know that these include nightmarish qualities—of a fairy tale.The orphan does not fare badly in finding substitute mothers—Mrs.Bedwin, Rose Maylie, even Nancy.Virtually all his anguish comes from the false fathers—Bumble, Fagin (with his habitual irony of “my dear”), Bill Sikes.If Nancy and Sikes had been legally married and Oliver their son.there is not the slightest reason to suppose either parent would have acted differently.It would still have been that archetypal domestic situation which so fascinated Dickens, in which the mother pleads, and pleads in vain, with the brutal or drunken father, who abuses his child as he abuses his dog and sends him out to toil or beg or steal.The boy Dickens, sent to the blacking factory (where one of his fellow workers was named Bob Fagin) to contribute to his parents’ support, never forgot and never forgave this reversal of the proper situation: the result is episode after episode where the all-devouring ne‘er-do-well or criminal father bites the little hand that feeds him.Long before the autobiographical David Copperfield this theme haunts the author, in “The Drunkard’s Death” of the Sketches, in Chapter III of Pickwick—“The Stroller’s Tale.”The emaciation of the “pale thin child” of nine is like that of the younger brother in the fairy tales.(The older brother is meanwhile thriving and scheming.) When Oliver is due to be indentured to the ogrelike Mr.Gamfield, the chimney sweep, he is given by Mr.Bumble “a basin of gruel and the holiday allowance of two ounces and a quarter of bread.At this tremendous sight, Oliver began to cry very piteously, thinking, not unnaturally, that the board must have determined to kill him for some useful purpose, or they never would have begun to fatten him up in that way” (III).This is Hansel without Gre tel.And the change to bliss is just as sharp.“There was dinner prepared, and there were bedrooms ready, and everything was arranged as if by magic” (LI) That last phrase still had force and freshness in Dickens’s day.The human needs are simple—a little coddling and two bowls of a better cereal.But these are what are hard, it seems, for an orphan to get in the England of 1837, and it is in the development of this point that Dickens becomes what will soon be recognized as his usual crusading self.This is low life as it must have been, in its inexhaustible and monotonous squalor, with the creaking rat-infested buildings, the oozing walls and fetid clothes and foul-smelling food.The reader whose ordinary fare is present-day realism must marvel that the author is able to convey’ what he wants to convey without large splatter ings of criminal jargon and lascivious suggestion.A low word here and there puts in an embarrassed appearance—“drab” is the worst, dropped three times, but it need mean no more than slattern.(The repeatedly indecent mode of referring to Charley Bates belongs apparently to the humor of the unconscious.) For the most part Dickens more than gets along without the spice now considered indispensable.Bill Sikes is pure of speech.He curses, but the curses are not spelled out.Nancy is a prostitute, but she is never—with the possible exception just noted—called that in the story.She is called that in the Preface, the place where the author defends himself, “I saw no reason, when I wrote this book, why the very dregs of life, so long as their speech did not offend the ear, should not serve the purpose of a moral”; and again, “I endeavoured, while I painted it in all its fallen and degraded aspects, to banish from the lips of the lowest character I introduced, any expression that could by possibility offend.” He was driven to defend himself, for the Quarterly reviewer and others had found the book immoral.But it is as moral as periphrasis can make it.But need it be a limitation? Is it in Oliver Twist? I think not.We understand Nancy’s status, and that is all that is required.“Do you know who you are, and what you are?” (xvi) It is enough for Sikes to say this to her, and we need not dictate that he substitute one monosyllable for these ten.Or it is enough that Oliver, long before, noticed the “great deal of colour” in her face.It is suggested that certain characters are foul-mouthed: the details can properly be left to the imagination.The data are not given, the words are not there, but we react as if they were.It is a case of successful illusion as distinguished from documentation.Oliver can no more be contaminated by the surrounding filth than the Lady in Comus.If he got even physically smudged, we are not told.His mastery of the Queen’s English extends to the distinction between “should” and “would,” and a difficult sequence of tenses does not trouble him a bit: “I should have been very sorry not to have been at home when you and Mr.Maylie went away, sir,” he tells Mr.Losberne, who responds, “That’s a fine fellow.” (xxxvi).It may be indeed that the remark is too fine, too grammatically correct and too gratuitously polite, in the manner of Little Lord Fauntleroy.But this comes when Oliver is secure and is being treated like a lord.(Also we can catch him, in a moment of stress, using “don‘t” for “doesn’t,” but perhaps he spells it “do‘n’t.” xxxiii).Unlike the Lady in Comus (who does not really need rescuing), Oliver does have, for more than half the story, the pathos of helplessness.Maybe he should have it longer.He conspicuously retires from the narrative while, in the last third, Nancy and Sikes and Fagin carry on alone.First he escaped from them to Mr.Brownlow‘s, then he escaped from them to the Maylies, and after that Dickens gives up trying to involve him.(The last-minute visit to Fagin’s cell is patently artificial.) At the end, when Sikes is being cornered, Charley Bates is put in the place of Oliver Twist.We have a happy ending before the ending, and this looks like a structural oddity.The British film of a decade ago made a logical adjustment when it put Oliver back into Sikes’s vile hands and onto the roof of the last perilous scene.Dickens may have loved Oliver too much to expose him for the third and most horrendous.time.He was unwilling to strain his own heart for the sake of straining his reader’s.The strain was in any case considerable, and was there for the paying public to see in Dickens’s last series of readings, for as Forster reports, “the Sikes and Nancy scenes, everywhere his prominent subject, exacted the most terrible physical exertion from him.” There would be a physician-in the wings to take the author’s puise after each performance and frown at the way it had shot up.Reading these scenes to semi-hysterical audiences (the evening was not a success if no woman screamed or fainted) may literally have killed Dickens; the nervous energy that went into the writing is still coiled in the last chapters for all to sense.The inescapable fact is that murder took for Dickens the place of central excitement that sex takes for others
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