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A review by jenn756
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
4.0
This is high Victorian melodrama, Dickens shamelessly playing to his audience and throwing everything into the mix. Its different in style to the later novels I thought - shorter paragraphs, a more punchy plotline and the story rattles along at double quick speed. I found myself reading it to see what will happen next, which I don't normally do with Dickens' novels, much as I love them.
The cast of characters are strong too, the strongest of any Dickens novel (except A Christmas Carol) - as immortalized in countless film and TV adaptions. They are nastier than the film adaption, you have the sweet impression of lots of cheerful Cockneys dancing about in the film but Dickens portrays a thoroughly cruel deprived world. His anger is obvious, he's raging, fuming, at the cruelties of the Poor Laws, the treatment of the poor and the callousness of Industrialised England.
By modern standards the good characters are impossibly good and the bad ones impossibly bad. I mean Oliver Twist would have been brutalized by his upbringing and he certainly wouldn't have had that nice accent and manner of speaking, but still, that was what Victorians wanted. The thing I love, love about Dickens is his sense of place - the description of London's back-streets, the hawkers and street-sellers flooding into the city in the early morning, the filth and the crowds. He did that better than any other writer. You have the feeling he hated the depravity of London but immersed himself in it at the same time.
The cast of characters are strong too, the strongest of any Dickens novel (except A Christmas Carol) - as immortalized in countless film and TV adaptions. They are nastier than the film adaption, you have the sweet impression of lots of cheerful Cockneys dancing about in the film but Dickens portrays a thoroughly cruel deprived world. His anger is obvious, he's raging, fuming, at the cruelties of the Poor Laws, the treatment of the poor and the callousness of Industrialised England.
By modern standards the good characters are impossibly good and the bad ones impossibly bad. I mean Oliver Twist would have been brutalized by his upbringing and he certainly wouldn't have had that nice accent and manner of speaking, but still, that was what Victorians wanted. The thing I love, love about Dickens is his sense of place - the description of London's back-streets, the hawkers and street-sellers flooding into the city in the early morning, the filth and the crowds. He did that better than any other writer. You have the feeling he hated the depravity of London but immersed himself in it at the same time.