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A review by mattycakesbooks
Oliver Twist by Gerald Dickens, Charles Dickens, Philip Horne
3.0
Obviously this is a classic and blah blah blah, but a few quick notes as to why it gets three stars instead of 4 or 5:
First off, it was impossible to not notice the anti-Semitism with which Fagin was depicted. He's just SUCH a hardcore stereotype that it was pretty distracting. Which isn't to say he wasn't an effective villain, or that he wasn't even creepier than the psychotic Sikes, it's just to say that the anti-Semitism was excessive and distracting.
The second point is that I have difficulty with any Victorian literature that portrays its characters as totally pure. It seems to be a trend in Vic Lit (which I'm totally taking the credit for coining) to make the heroes pure, and it makes them insanely boring. I could not give two shits about Oliver Twist or Rose, but I wanted to hear more on the Artful Dodger, Sikes, Nancy, Fagin, and Charley Bates. It makes the villains the only people in the story that feel real, and this can be frustrating sometimes, because in Vic Lit, the bores always win.
It's obviously a great piece of social criticism, and I appreciate that, but my final and third thought is this: the "umph" of the brutality of Oliver's upbringing was kind of sucked out by the revelation that he was actually of relatively high birth, and his angelic nature that refused to turn bad SEEMED to support the type of thinking that people of "higher birth" are purer than the low people of the streets, like the criminalized Nancy, Dodger, and Bates. While you've gotta praise Dickens for condemning the conditions in London at the time, these ideas make the book hard to really feel gung-ho about in terms of its politics, unlike, say, Les Miserables.
First off, it was impossible to not notice the anti-Semitism with which Fagin was depicted. He's just SUCH a hardcore stereotype that it was pretty distracting. Which isn't to say he wasn't an effective villain, or that he wasn't even creepier than the psychotic Sikes, it's just to say that the anti-Semitism was excessive and distracting.
The second point is that I have difficulty with any Victorian literature that portrays its characters as totally pure. It seems to be a trend in Vic Lit (which I'm totally taking the credit for coining) to make the heroes pure, and it makes them insanely boring. I could not give two shits about Oliver Twist or Rose, but I wanted to hear more on the Artful Dodger, Sikes, Nancy, Fagin, and Charley Bates. It makes the villains the only people in the story that feel real, and this can be frustrating sometimes, because in Vic Lit, the bores always win.
It's obviously a great piece of social criticism, and I appreciate that, but my final and third thought is this: the "umph" of the brutality of Oliver's upbringing was kind of sucked out by the revelation that he was actually of relatively high birth, and his angelic nature that refused to turn bad SEEMED to support the type of thinking that people of "higher birth" are purer than the low people of the streets, like the criminalized Nancy, Dodger, and Bates. While you've gotta praise Dickens for condemning the conditions in London at the time, these ideas make the book hard to really feel gung-ho about in terms of its politics, unlike, say, Les Miserables.