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A review by abbydee
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Wow. I’ve been frolicking through life just assuming I had read Oliver Twist at some point, because after A Christmas Carol, this is probably the Dickens work most people are familiar with. Orphan, poverty, please-sir-can-i-have-some-more. I could have told you that before I started. But this is a wayyyyyy different book than I was expecting.
Oliver Twist is incredibly dark. I’ve read a respectable smattering of Dickens–I knew he could do spooky, knew he always brings the melodrama, knew there is an underlying grittiness to his work and that children never have a good time of it. Oliver Twist in popular parlance is shorthand for a defenseless kid being mistreated or neglected, but what happens in the novel is so much more disturbing to me. More than being abused, children are systematically manipulated into organized crime and used as labor for the black market. They are encouraged toward addiction so that they can be more easily controlled. The ringleader (a person frequently called just “the Jew”...still t-minus 100 years for good Jewish characters from English lit, I guess) sends them on jobs and controls them by his knowledge of what they’ve done. This is Dickens’ cartel novel, and I’ll be honest, for all I knew of Dickens, I would not have expected him to be able to pull that off. But he pulls nary a punch in this one: a person is beaten to death on screen, first with a pistol and then with a wooden club, and the aggressor hangs himself from a height of 35 ft in a very explicit scene. Like, I would not let a young person read this book.
I also wasn’t expecting the geographical precision. He describes London’s underbelly with landmarks, as though giving his readers directions to the Three Cripples pub, to the eavesdropping nook under London Bridge, to Jacob’s Island. I love how much pointless care he puts into describing exactly which roads people take to the suburbs and back and where the posh or seedy neighborhoods are. This is your city, he seems to be saying. You know where I’m talking about. This is happening all around you. This book, more than any of his others I’ve read, establishes Dickens as the urban griot of a particular city. It makes me think about the city I live in, its underbelly and its chroniclers. Who is doing this for Tucson? I have a few answers.
Also, I was today years old when I realized the cartoon Oliver and Company named all its characters after ones from this book. I swear I thought it was just a movie about a cat.
Oliver Twist is incredibly dark. I’ve read a respectable smattering of Dickens–I knew he could do spooky, knew he always brings the melodrama, knew there is an underlying grittiness to his work and that children never have a good time of it. Oliver Twist in popular parlance is shorthand for a defenseless kid being mistreated or neglected, but what happens in the novel is so much more disturbing to me. More than being abused, children are systematically manipulated into organized crime and used as labor for the black market. They are encouraged toward addiction so that they can be more easily controlled. The ringleader (a person frequently called just “the Jew”...still t-minus 100 years for good Jewish characters from English lit, I guess) sends them on jobs and controls them by his knowledge of what they’ve done. This is Dickens’ cartel novel, and I’ll be honest, for all I knew of Dickens, I would not have expected him to be able to pull that off. But he pulls nary a punch in this one: a person is beaten to death on screen, first with a pistol and then with a wooden club, and the aggressor hangs himself from a height of 35 ft in a very explicit scene. Like, I would not let a young person read this book.
I also wasn’t expecting the geographical precision. He describes London’s underbelly with landmarks, as though giving his readers directions to the Three Cripples pub, to the eavesdropping nook under London Bridge, to Jacob’s Island. I love how much pointless care he puts into describing exactly which roads people take to the suburbs and back and where the posh or seedy neighborhoods are. This is your city, he seems to be saying. You know where I’m talking about. This is happening all around you. This book, more than any of his others I’ve read, establishes Dickens as the urban griot of a particular city. It makes me think about the city I live in, its underbelly and its chroniclers. Who is doing this for Tucson? I have a few answers.
Also, I was today years old when I realized the cartoon Oliver and Company named all its characters after ones from this book. I swear I thought it was just a movie about a cat.