A review by hadeanstars
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

4.0

If you can manage it, by which I mean pass off the extremism which Mr Dickens foists onto his unsuspecting characters, such that they are either very, very good, or unremittingly bad, then you will love this charming novel. I say charming, but it is not absolutely charming, only occasionally so, but when it is charming, it truly is. This is far from my favourite Dickens' novel (of the five I have so far read), but even his less accomplished works seem a delight. What his characters lack in grey area, they make up in utter blackness, or illumination. I realise (or so it seems to me) that this is a fault of Victorian lit, where the women are impossibly good, (such as Rose herein, or Agnes in David Copperfield, or Mina in Dracula) or dreadfully fallen and unfortunate, like poor Nancy, or Eustacia Vye in Return of the Native, and it seems, after you have read a great deal of it to be formulaic of the workings of the worldviews of upstanding Victorian authors, and that can get you thinking about where the roots of the Patriarchy might be found, but then you are transported in spite of it all, because Mr Dickens' great gift is that he can carry you off, reservations and all into a world so replete with warmth and humanity that how can you do anything but love it?

Perhaps not his best, I don't know, maybe the relative brevity of this 600 pages undermines it a little, but even so, a work to delight in and savour, being as it is, almost as good and deserving as little Oliver's heart.