Oliver Twist: Good Vs Bad

Introduction

The eponymous child hero of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist became a crucial cultural icon of Victorian childhood. Indeed, Dickens published the novel serially from 1837 to 1839, coinciding with the commencement of Queen Victoria's long reign in 1837. The novel follows the nine-year-old orphaned child Oliver Twist from the provincial workhouse ORPHANAGE where boys are brutally mistreated to the metropolis of London where (Donovan, pp. 34-42), under the tutelage of the master criminal Fagin, boys like Oliver are initiated into the criminal underworld. In dramatizing the harshness of the work-house the novel contributed to an increasing public awareness and growing outrage at the miserable conditions to which children were sometimes subjected in such institutions.

Discussion

The central dramatic concern of the novel, however, is Oliver's struggle to preserve his spiritual innocence within the criminal context of Fagin's gang. Dickens clearly articulates the Victorian tenet of childhood's innocence, which was synthesized from a variety of earlier ideological strands including Christian theology, the enlightened ideals of JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, and the Romantic intimations of William Wordsworth. Dickens, in Oliver Twist and in his later novels as well, discovered a melodramatic formula for capturing the hearts of the Victorian public by representing a child whose innocence is menaced by an evil world (Donovan, pp. 34-42).

Fagin trains the boys to pick pockets, and Oliver is eventually expected to participate in burglary. Yet he desperately objects to such conduct: "Oh! pray have mercy on me, and do not make me steal. For the love of all the bright Angels that rest in Heaven, have mercy upon me!" (p. 154). Dickens suggests that a child like Oliver dreads compromising his innocence for fear of succumbing to utter corruption. In Fagin's world, children are criminally exploited, perhaps even sexually exploited-though Dickens is not explicit about this-by vicious and unscrupulous adults. Dickens was, however, well aware of the irony that it was legal institutions like the workhouse that by their brutality actually drove children like Oliver Twist into the illegal machinations of exploitative criminals.

Oliver is finally redeemed by his own resistance to evil and ends the novel under the kindly adoptive care of bourgeois patrons, but only after it has been recognized that the boy has successfully preserved his embattled innocence (Kaplan, pp. 78-88). In one scene a respectable doctor and a beneficent young lady observe Oliver asleep and speculate about his possibly criminal history:

"Vice," sighed the surgeon, replacing the curtain, "takes up her abode in many temples; and who can say that a fair outside shall not enshrine her?"

"But at so early an age!" urged Rose.

"My dear young lady," rejoined the surgeon, mournfully shaking his head; "crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered alone. The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims." (p. 197)

In the Victorian ideology of childhood, the child was conceived as naturally innocent but also profoundly susceptible to the forces of moral, criminal, and sexual corruption. Indeed the Victorian cult of the innocence of childhood, in which Dickens ...