Essay on the topic: The main characters of the novel “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickenson. Oliver Twist image
The main character of the novel about the adventures of Oliver Twist is a boy whose fate cannot be called easy. Having grown up without parental care, he managed not to harden his soul and not become a notorious villain. Life in an orphanage only strengthened the main character, made him courageous and decisive.
An equally interesting character is Fagin. This is the leader of thieves and swindlers. He is distinguished by treachery, cruelty and greed. Fagin, without a doubt, has a negative influence on children, because learning to steal and cheat has never brought happiness to anyone. This hero did not tolerate disobedience. He simply kicked out the most obstinate students into the street, dooming them to certain death. But in the end, the evil was punished - Fagin was sentenced to death.
The exact opposite image is Mr. Brownlow. This gentleman influenced Oliver in the best way. Without him, the boy's fate would undoubtedly have been much more sad. The generous man adopted Twist and cared for him sincerely. The fact that his house was filled with books speaks in favor of Brownlow. His adoptive father helped Oliver get into reading and enrich his soul with priceless treasures of knowledge.
The following characters also played an important role in Oliver’s fate: Mrs. Maylie and Rose, as well as Nancy (despite her unseemly profession, she knew how to remember decency and sympathy). Each of them loved the boy in her own way and tried to help him in difficult life situations.
Oliver Twist image
The work of Charles Dickens “Oliver Twist” tells about the difficult life of a poor boy. Through this image, the author showed the plight of the English people, who were forced to steal, deceive and even kill in order to survive. The entire society of those times was mired in vile lies.
The description of tramp children is especially painful. These eternally hungry and unloved kids did not live, but only tried to survive. The main character, Oliver, grew up in such an environment. His existence in the workhouse left no hope for improvement in the future. Among the other children, the boy stood out for his obstinacy. For example, once he dared to ask for more porridge, for which he was almost hanged. The naughty boy, in retaliation, was first brutally flogged, and then sent to the formidable chimney sweep, who had more than one ruined child’s soul on his conscience. However, the main character did not break in the face of such difficulties.
One day, Oliver managed to escape from a tyrannical chimney sweep. He found himself in an equally destructive environment of swindlers. Now a buyer of stolen goods, a robber and a woman of easy virtue took up raising the boy. Oliver was incredibly lucky to meet the good old man - Mr. Brownlow. He had a positive influence on the boy and warmed the poor fellow with the warmth of his care.
The character of Oliver Twist embodied Dickens' thoughts about social injustice, cruelty towards children and lawlessness. In this way he sought to improve the morality of his readers.
The main character of the novel is Oliver Twist. He was born in a workhouse. Mom took one look at Oliver and died. As a child, he endures bullying, hunger, and does not know what parental care is. Finding himself as an undertaker's apprentice, Oliver is humiliated and bullied by the orphanage boy Noe Claypole. Twist blows everything away, but beats up a strong opponent after Noe insults his mother. Oliver is punished and runs away from the undertaker.
A boy goes to London after seeing a road sign. He meets a beggar peer - the Artful Dodger. The boy introduced himself as Jack Dawkins. In the city, the Artful Dodger introduces the hero to the leader of swindlers and thieves, Fagin. On his first outing, Oliver sees the Artful Dodger and his friend stealing a handkerchief. He is horrified and runs, but he is caught and accused of theft. The gentleman from whom the handkerchief was stolen abandoned the claim: he takes Oliver to his house. The boy has been sick for many days, he is being treated and taken care of. Brownlow and housekeeper Bedwin notice the resemblance between a boy and a young girl depicted in a portrait hanging in the living room.
But the past does not let Oliver go. Fagin kidnaps a boy and forces him to take part in a house robbery. The hero does not want to participate in the crime and decides to raise the alarm. However, he is immediately wounded in the arm. The “partner,” the beggar boy Sikes from Fagin’s company, throws Oliver into a ditch to escape pursuit. The hero comes to his senses and barely gets to the porch of the house. There Roz and her aunt Mrs. Maylie put the boy to bed and go to the doctor. They are not going to hand him over to the police.
Old Sally died in the workhouse. It was this woman who looked after the hero’s mother, and after her death, she robbed her. Sally tells the warden that she stole a gold item from the hero’s mother, gives the mortgage receipt to Corny and dies.
Nancy finds out that Fagin is making a thief out of the hero on the orders of a stranger. The stranger Monks demands that Fagin find Oliver and bring him to him.
The hero is surrounded by care and gradually recovers. He told his story, but nothing could confirm it. Brownlow left. But the attitude towards Oliver does not change for the worse. Then both women go with him to the village. There he meets a stranger and mistakes him for a madman. Then he sees the same man at the window with Fagin. The household members come running to Oliver's cry, but they cannot find the aliens.
Monks found Corny and bought a tiny wallet from her. It was taken from Oliver's mother's neck. Inside there is a medallion with a wedding ring and curls, on the inside there was an engraving: “Agnes”. Monks threw the wallet into the stream. He then tells Fagin about this. Nancy hears everything and goes to Rose to tell her what is happening. She tells her the story in detail, says that Monks called the hero brother. Nancy then returns to the gang, asking not to give her away. Roz and Oliver find Brownlow and give him everything. Now they need a description of the stranger's appearance. They get it from Nancy. Fagin suspects Nancy and finds out about her affairs. He decides to punish her and tells Sikes that she has made herself a boyfriend. Bill Sikes kills a girl.
Brownlow begins to investigate. Edwin Lyford is the stranger's name. He is Oliver's brother. Their father was friends with Brownlow. He suffered in his marriage, his son was vicious even in his youth. Oliver's father fell in love with Agnes Fleming, but, having gone to Rome on business, fell ill and died. They found an envelope with my father's will. He allocated part of the money to his eldest son and wife, leaving Agnes the rest. The boy will receive an inheritance if he does not tarnish his honor. But the will was burned by Monks' mother. The letter was kept to shame Agnes. Her father died. Agnes's younger sister is Rose, Mrs. Maylie's adopted niece. Monks runs away from home at 18 and commits a lot of crimes. His mother tells him about the history of the family, he sets himself the goal of discrediting his brother. Under pressure from Brownlow, Monks leaves England.
Fagin was arrested and executed, Sykes died. Oliver finds a family, Rose agrees to Harry (her admirer), who became a priest instead of pursuing a career.
Composition
OLIVER TWIST (English Oliver Twist), hero of the novel by Charles Dickens “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” (1837-1839), an orphan boy, illegitimate son of Edward Lyford and Agnes Fleming. O.T. is the hero of a combination of a “novel of education” and a “novel of wanderings.” Typologically, this image is associated with such heroes as, for example, Fielding's Tam Jones or George Sand's Conzuelo, for whom wandering is a form of gaining life experience. In addition, he is also an example of the embodiment of Dickens’ archetype of the “pursued child,” which is stable in his novel world. FROM. - the only Dickensian child hero who remained a child until the end of the novel, and - what is important - alive and prosperous. At the same time, O.T. is a psychologically rather conditional personality. The situation of “upbringing” (being pursued by London scum in the company of a villainous relative) rather allows us to discover who O.T. unlike, say, his peer the Dodger (undoubtedly, according to Dickens, born for his robbery profession) he never becomes: a thief, a liar and a cynic. By his very nature, he is not initially just a sensitive and kind boy, which Dickens often found among the inhabitants of the bottom of London. Despite the fact that O. was born and raised in a workhouse, his speech, behavior and, most importantly, way of thinking are noble and aristocratic. FROM. a born gentleman. The noble nature, even the breed, is not eradicated in him by any “education” and “educators”, among whom is one of Dickens’s most colorful characters - the old Jew Fagin, the sinister Karabas-Bara-bass of the London street children serving in his theater - a school of theft. FROM. experienced many hardships and suffering, but fate was generally favorable to him. Persecution and persecution do not last forever. He turns out to be a rich heir. Due to the family resemblance of O.T. different people who knew his father or mother recognize him; twice during his “wanderings” he finds himself under the protection of good people - both times they are acquaintances or relatives of his parents. As a result, O.T. finds his own aunt and adoptive father, and his adventures end. It is significant that Dickens does not find room in the epilogue traditional for his novels for any specific description of the life of O.T. in new conditions. After all, its brightest, although certainly difficult, period has ended. Like a typical Dickensian child hero (if one manages to survive the dangerous age of childhood), O.T. can easily get lost in a prosperous world, losing any remarkableness.
Lit.: Magsis S. Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey. L, 1965. P. 18-19, 54-91; Chesterton K. Charles Dickens. M., 1982. S. 76-78; Genieva E. The Great Mystery // The Mystery of Charles Dickens. M., 1990. P.15-16.
The novels “Oliver Twist” and “Dombey and Son” were created in different periods of the writer’s work: “Oliver Twist” is one of Dickens’s early social novels, which he completed in March 1839; "Dombey and Son" is the best work of the 40s, revealing a more in-depth approach of the writer to social phenomena and is rightfully considered a "brilliant novel", while in "Oliver Twist" many critics note shortcomings - for example, the process is not convincingly revealed the relationship between man and the environment, the direct influence of surrounding social conditions on the evolution of the characters and the formation of their characters is not shown. However, both of these novels can be combined as works in which children are the positive characters.
Dickens, choosing a child as a positive hero for his works, tried to awaken in his adult readers a bygone childhood, their childish spontaneity of perceptions and assessments. He always argued that in a world where practicality and industrialization reign, it is necessary to develop the imagination in every possible way, encouraging children's imagination. In the writer himself, an active, witty, painfully sensitive to injustice and a writer reacting to it - and a strange and sensitive child with an unusual worldview - coexisted in an amazing way. It is not without reason that the writer's childhood served as the source of many images in his work.
Little Oliver is born, and harsh life with all its mercilessness makes its demands on him: “... he was marked and numbered and at once took his place - a child in the care of the parish, an orphan from a workhouse, a humble, half-starved wretched, doomed to endure jolts, making their way in the world, wretches whom everyone despised and no one pitied. Oliver's childhood passes among unfortunate orphans like him, “burdened neither by excess food nor by excess clothing,” as Warden Bumble and Mrs. The Maine do their best to make the most of the meager supplies of food and clothing provided to the parish orphans. The children here die of hunger and beatings, or turn into pitiful, downtrodden, frightened creatures. But Oliver is touching not because he - a broken victim who does not dare say a word, expects nothing and hopes for nothing. Oliver is touching because he is an optimist. His timid request for an additional portion of porridge: “Be so kind, sir, I want more.” It is regarded as a dangerous rebellion that he dares, knowing that there is untruth, to still believe in the truth. The whole tragedy of this scene is that Oliver expects good and believes in justice; With this childlike faith, Oliver denounces injustice not because it is bad from an economic or social point of view, but simply because it is bad. With the same naive faith in goodness and hope for sympathy, he turns to Mr. Bumble: “Everyone hates me. Oh sir, please don’t be angry with me!” Mr. Bumble is surprised, and it cannot be otherwise - after all, he has long lost that childish spontaneity that we see in Oliver and which Dickens is trying to awaken in his readers.
Oliver remains spontaneous and naive - remains a child! - throughout the entire narrative: becoming an apprentice to an undertaker, finding himself in a gang of thieves, becoming a victim of the villain Sikes and the owner of a den of thieves Fagin, seeing the darkest sides of life, he retains his inherent purity and childish naivety - among a gang of thieves and in the house of a good gentleman Mr. Brownlow, he speaks and behaves with unfailing nobility - his character is formed independently of the influence of surrounding circumstances. This leads some critics to say that this positive image is essentially just empty space. Dickens, in their opinion, introduces the image of Oliver into the novel as a symbol of the human soul under the influence of external forces; The writer needs it in order to awaken in the reader a feeling of compassion (after all, in front of him is a small, lonely, offended child) and hatred of a ruthless system that turns poverty, ignorance and faith in goodness to its own benefit, in order to evoke fear and disgust of the gang thieves, debunk the false halo of romance around the image of the underworld. However, the images of Fagin, Sykes, the Artful Dodger, and Noe Claypole are much more convincing than “a whole army of kind, noble, but colorless and sickly sensitive characters who become the child’s friends and in the end, by some miracle, turn out to be his relatives.”
Rose Maylie and Mr. Brownlow are also positive heroes, but the first is too angelic and impeccable, and the second is too good-natured and well-disposed towards everyone to be lively and convincing, at least somewhat believable. Just like in a fairy tale, these kind and merciful people unexpectedly and accidentally come to the aid of Oliver in all the difficult moments of his life. This is hardly true, but in the preface to Oliver Twist, Dickens emphasizes that one of the purposes of his book is to “show the hard truth.” But we must not forget that Dickens also considers the tasks of the artist from the point of view of moral influence on the reader - and in this case, Dickens the moralist contradicts Dickens the artist. He cares about justice and tries to convince his reader that “without deep love, kindness of heart and gratitude to the one whose law is mercy... without this, happiness is unattainable.” And even though Rose Maylie is just one of his ethereal female images, just an echo of the blow dealt to the author by the death of Mary Hogarth; Even though Mr. Brownlow is just an old, good-natured gentleman, much less bright than the same Noah Claypole, these positive heroes make the reader, like little Oliver Twist, believe childishly in the existence of mercy, kindness and justice towards the oppressed and disadvantaged.
The underworld must be disgusting - Dickens proves this idea through Oliver's rejection of the demands of Fagin's gang; the boy does what he is entrusted with mechanically, calling on God for help, begging him “it’s better to send down death now... to save him from such deeds.” Oliver throws away the book about crimes that Fagin gives him in horror - Dickens recognizes this natural horror of a child in front of the ugly, vile, wretched life of a criminal gang as the only correct attitude. Even though Oliver, according to critics, is a weak-willed hero, a puppet - but this puppet is driven by the best intentions and beliefs of the author. If the happy ending of the novel, Oliver's unexpected acquisition of family and property, and his remaining unchanged moral purity and faith in goodness show us things that are not as they really are, then that is how they simply must be. Dickens may have been sentimental in telling the story of Oliver Twist - but it would be more accurate to say that he was wise, childishly wise: he looks at evil with wonderful surprise, through the eyes of his hero - Oliver Twist, attacking the workhouse with the simplicity of a boy, met a cannibal. Concluding the novel, albeit implausibly, but safely for Oliver and his friends - all his good heroes - Dickens fervently demands truth and justice, just as the boy from the orphanage demanded porridge.
The children of Dickens's early works, including Oliver Twist, are not far removed from their predecessors in the literature of the 18th century - they are extremely ethereal, passive creatures, guided by someone else's will. The image of Paul Dombey, as mentioned above, opens new horizons. The character of Mr. Dombey, around whom all the plot lines of the novel are concentrated, is considered to be Dickens’s great creative success, but the novel is still called “Dombey and Son,” and to tear Paul’s story away from the book as a whole means to scatter the entire novel.
Paul, defending his individuality, gets rid of the negative passive characteristic, which in the old Dickens was a mandatory indicator of childish naivety. Paul Dombey is also naive, but in a different way - such naivety will not do any good: he is quite naively interested in what money is - and suddenly, with childish insight, he debunks the golden idol that his father worships: “If they are good and can do anything, I I don’t understand why they didn’t save my mother... they also can’t make me strong and completely healthy, right, dad?... Not only “dad”, but also the reader understands that this is true; here, through the mouth of Paul, in fact speaks the truth. Paul's conversation with the Pipchin mission is deeply naive and natural: “I don’t think I’ll love you even a little, I want to leave. This is not my home. This is a very nasty house." Little Paul cannot endure the system of education to which his father exposes him; Blimber's school and Mrs. Pipchin's boarding school are destructive for him - the pedantry of adults only emphasizes the fact that Paul is still a child in need of care and affection. He becomes a victim of the economic view of the child - he was supposed to become the heir and successor to the work of his father, who had been increasing the wealth of the company all his life. But for Paul, money is “cruel”, he is a weak and sickly child, and not some fictitious, abstract heir whom he sees the father in him. The child in him is seen only by his sister Florence and, perhaps, by old Glab, who tells him strange stories. Paul seeks solitude, does not participate in games, answering his comrades that he does not need them; his face looks like a “young gnome ", and at night he dreams of strange things. This is no longer Oliver Twist, remaining a child in any circumstances - Paul is depressed and prone to long thoughts, he is “tired, very lonely, he is very sad.” Dickens emphasizes that Paul soon lost the liveliness with which he was distinguished at first, and became “even more old, strange and concentrated.” The only ones who noticed Paul's condition were his sister Florence and Mr. Toots - also positive characters in Dombey and Son, although completely different.
Florence Dombey is essentially a combination of Rose Maylie and Oliver Twist. On the one hand, this is another pale female image of those that Dickens always found particularly unconvincing - a “little mamma”, much more passive by nature than her brother. On the other hand, she, like Oliver Twist, takes on the role of a kind of white canvas, onto which Dickens the artist superimposes the indifference of a cold father, and the ardent affection of Paul, and the reader’s sympathy for a rejected and hated daughter.
Some critics consider Mr. Toots to be the best of the positive images not only in Dombey and Son, but in the entire work of the writer. Toots seems to be telling the reader that being kind and stupid is not bad, but very good, since you are endowed with that impeccable simplicity for which everything is surprising. Toots is a big child, with a pure look of humility he sees the world as it is, embodying a very deep truth: everything external is vain and deceitful, and everything internal is unclear, unconscious, but true. Despite the fog that obscured his thoughts, Paul's small figure was never obscured from Toots, who asked "fifty times a day" how Paul was doing. Toots may forget who is in front of him and whether he has already asked him about his well-being. But he will never forget what the essence of a person is, he will never mistake bad for good. He admires true Christians, confusing their names; by doing everything wrong, he lives right. He honors the Fighting Rooster because he is strong, and Florence because she is good, but he firmly knows what is better, preferring goodness to strength, like a true man. Mr. Toots is one of Dickens's great eccentrics, embodying, oddly enough, the best human qualities.
However, Paul Dombey is also called a “little eccentric” in the novel, and the child thinks a lot about this, not understanding what those around him mean. It is from this moment that Dickens's attentive and detailed penetration into the inner world of a weak, sick child begins, who thinks about his sister, and about the roar of the sea, and about the portrait on the stairs, and about wild birds over the sea, and about clouds - thoughts that are not suitable for heir to a prosperous company. But the good thing about Paul is that he is Paul, just little sweet Paul, and not Dombey, the notorious Son that his father wants him to be. Paul never felt his father's love - rather, he felt that his father needed him; although Dombey’s feeling for his son is great, this is not what a small, weak child needs - it is not for nothing that before his death Paul remembers his mother and his old nurse, and asks his father only “not to grieve for him,” as if understanding that with his death all Dombey’s hopes are the hopes of an ambitious the proud will fail. It is important for Dickens to show Paul not as part of the Dombey and Son firm, crushed by the burden of hopes placed on him that are not destined to come true, but as a simple child who seems eccentric because he is out of place. Mr. Dombey, having trampled on his son's feelings, ruins his own soul; he blindly follows Mrs. Pipchin’s dogma that “young people should not be forced too much, but should resort to affection - there is no need to think about it, they never thought like that in my time.” Dickens paints impressive pictures of the bad upbringing of Miss Pipchin and in the “academy” of Dr. Blimber, and the consequences arising from such upbringing: Paul, who was previously “childish, not averse to playing, and generally not distinguished by gloominess,” turns into a lonely child, surrounded by bizarre images created by his imagination. The image of Paul is more complex, deep and tragic than the image of the same Oliver Twist - in “Dombey and Son” the tragic fate of a child in a bourgeois world where money rules is shown with terrible truth, not smoothed over by happy endings. Dickens makes the reader think deeply about the fate of little Paul, although his story occupies a relatively small place in the novel. So, in the novels Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son, Dickens turns to the child as a positive hero, inviting his readers to find the same childish spontaneity of perception as his heroes. The images of positive heroes become more and more clearly defined from novel to novel, gaining complexity and individuality - if critics have the right to call Oliver Twist an ethereal shadow, then Paul Dombey is an undoubtedly more complex image, shown in the light of the influence of surrounding social and moral conditions on the formation of a child's personality; Dickens refuses excessive straightforwardness in depicting the character of a child, seeking to reveal in his inherent psychological complexity the inner world of little Paul Dombey, whose image morally opposes the gloomy image of his father.
"The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is Dickens's first social novel, in which the contradictions of English reality appeared incomparably clearer than in "The Pickwick Papers." “Hard truth,” Dickens wrote in the preface, “was the object of my book.”
In the preface to the novel Oliver Twist, Dickens declares himself a realist. But he immediately makes the exact opposite statement: “... It is still far from clear to me why the lesson of the purest good cannot be drawn from the most vile evil. I have always considered the contrary to be a firm and unshakable truth... I wanted to demonstrate in little Oliver how the principle of good always triumphs in the end, despite the most unfavorable circumstances and difficult obstacles.” The contradiction that is revealed in this programmatic statement of the young Dickens arises from the contradiction that characterizes the writer's worldview at the early stage of his creative activity.
The writer wants to show reality “as it is,” but at the same time excludes the objective logic of life’s facts and processes and tries to interpret its laws idealistically. A convinced realist, Dickens could not abandon his didactic plans. For him, fighting this or that social evil always meant convincing, that is, educating. The writer considered the correct education of a person to be the best way to establish mutual understanding between people and the humane organization of human society. He sincerely believed that most people are naturally drawn to goodness and a good beginning can easily triumph in their souls.
But it was impossible to prove the idealistic thesis - “good” invariably defeats “evil” - within the framework of a realistic depiction of the complex contradictions of the modern era. To implement the contradictory creative task that the author set for himself, a creative method was required that combined elements of realism and romanticism.
At first, Dickens intended to create a realistic picture of criminal London only, to show the “pathetic reality” of the thieves’ dens of London’s “Eastside” (“Eastern” side), that is, the poorest quarters of the capital. But in the process of work, the original plan expanded significantly. The novel depicts various aspects of modern English life and poses important and pressing problems.
The time when Dickens collected material for his new novel was a period of fierce struggle over the Poor Law, published back in 1834, according to which a network of workhouses was created in the country for the lifelong maintenance of the poor. Drawn into the controversy surrounding the opening of workhouses, Dickens strongly condemned this terrible product of bourgeois rule.
“... These workhouses,” Engels wrote in “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” “or, as the people call them, poor-law-bastilles, are designed in such a way as to frighten away everyone who has even the slightest hope of living without this form of public charity. In order for a person to turn to the poor fund only in the most extreme cases, so that he resorts to it only after exhausting all possibilities of getting by on his own, the workhouse was turned into the most disgusting place of residence that the refined imagination of a Malthusian can come up with.”
The Adventures of Olever Twist is directed against the Poor Law, workhouses and existing political economy concepts that lull public opinion with promises of happiness and prosperity for the majority.
However, it would be a mistake to consider that a novel is only the fulfillment by the writer of his social mission. Along with this, when creating his work, Dickens joins the literary struggle. “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” was also the author’s original response to the dominance of the so-called “Newgate” novel, in which the story of thieves and criminals was told exclusively in melodramatic and romantic tones, and the lawbreakers themselves represented a type of Superman that was very attractive to readers. In fact, in the Newgate novels, criminals acted as Byronic heroes who turned into a criminal environment. Dickens strongly opposed the idealization of crimes and those who commit them.
In the preface to the book, Dickens clearly stated the essence of his plan: “It seemed to me that to portray real members of a criminal gang, to draw them in all their ugliness, with all their vileness, to show their wretched, miserable life, to show them as they really are , - they always sneak, overcome with anxiety, along the dirtiest paths of life, and wherever they look, a black terrible gallows looms before them - it seemed to me that to depict this means to try to do what is necessary and what will serve to society. And I did it to the best of my ability.”
The author shows that evil penetrates into all corners of England; it is most common among those whom society has doomed to poverty, slavery, and suffering. The darkest pages in the novel are those devoted to workhouses.
Workhouses were contrary to the beliefs of Dickens the humanist, and their depiction becomes the writer's response to the controversy surrounding a deeply pressing issue. The excitement that Dickens experienced in studying what he saw as a failed attempt to alleviate the lot of the poor, and the acuteness of his observations, gave the images of the novel great artistic power and persuasiveness. The writer depicts the workhouse based on real facts. It depicts the inhumanity of the Poor Law in action. Although the workhouse order is described in only a few chapters of the novel, the book has firmly established itself as a work that exposes one of the darkest sides of English reality in the 1930s. However, a few episodes, eloquent in their realism, were enough for the novel to firmly establish its reputation as a novel about workhouses.
The main characters of those chapters of the book in which the workhouse is depicted are children born in dark dungeons, their parents dying of hunger and exhaustion, eternally hungry young inmates of workhouses and hypocritical “trustees” of the poor. The author emphasizes that the workhouse, promoted as a “charitable” institution, is a prison that degrades and physically oppresses a person.
Liquid oatmeal three times a day, two onions a week and half a loaf on Sundays - this was the meager ration that supported the pitiful, always hungry workhouse boys, who had been shaking hemp since six o'clock in the morning. When Oliver, driven to despair by hunger, timidly asks the warden for more porridge, the boy is considered a rebel and locked in a cold closet.
Dickens, in the first of his social novels, also depicts the dirt, poverty, crime that reigns in the slums of London, and people who have sunk to the “bottom” of society. The slum dwellers Fagin and Sikes, Dodger and Bates, who represent thieves' London in the novel, in the perception of the young Dickens are an inevitable evil on earth, to which the author contrasts his preaching of good. The realistic depiction of the London bottom and its inhabitants in this novel is often colored with romantic and sometimes melodramatic tones. The pathos of denunciation here is not yet directed against those social conditions that give rise to vice. But whatever the writer’s subjective assessment of the phenomena, the images of the slums and their individual inhabitants (especially Nancy) objectively act as a harsh indictment against the entire social system that generates poverty and crime.
Unlike the previous novel, in this work the narrative is colored with gloomy humor, the narrator seems to have difficulty believing that the events taking place belong to a civilized England that boasts of its democracy and justice. There is a different pace of the story here: short chapters are filled with numerous events that make up the essence of the adventure genre. In the fate of little Oliver, adventures turn out to be misadventures when the ominous figure of Monks, Oliver's brother, appears on the scene, who, in order to obtain an inheritance, tries to destroy the main character by conspiring with Fagin and forcing him to make Oliver a thief. In this novel by Dickens, the features of a detective story are palpable, but the investigation of Twist’s secret is not carried out by professional servants of the law, but by enthusiasts who fell in love with the boys who wanted to restore the good name of his father and return his legally belonging inheritance. The nature of the episodes is also different. Sometimes the novel sounds melodramatic notes. This is especially clearly felt in the scene of the farewell of little Oliver and Dick, the hero’s doomed friend, who dreams of dying quickly in order to get rid of cruel torments - hunger, punishment and overwork.
The writer introduces a significant number of characters into his work and tries to deeply reveal their inner world. Of particular importance in “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” are the social motivations for people’s behavior, which determined certain traits of their characters. True, it should be noted that the characters in the novel are grouped according to a peculiar principle arising from the unique worldview of the young Dickens. Like the romantics, Dickens divides heroes into “positive” and “negative”, the embodiment of goodness and bearers of vices. In this case, the principle underlying this division becomes a moral norm. Therefore, one group (“evil”) includes the son of wealthy parents, Oliver’s half-brother Edward Lyford (Monks), the head of the gang of thieves Fagin and his accomplice Sikes, the beadle Bumble, the workhouse matron Mrs. Corney, who is raising Mrs. Mann’s orphans, and others. It is noteworthy that critical intonations in the work are associated both with the characters called upon to protect order and legality in the state, and with their “antipodes” - criminals. Despite the fact that these characters are at different levels of the social ladder, the author of the novel endows them with similar traits and constantly emphasizes their immorality.
The writer includes Mr. Brownlow, the sister of the main character’s mother Rose Fleming, Harry Maley and his mother, Oliver Twist himself, to another group (“kind”). These characters are drawn in the traditions of educational literature, that is, they emphasize ineradicable natural kindness, decency, and honesty.
The defining principle of the grouping of characters, both in this and in all subsequent novels by Dickens, is not the place that one or another of the characters occupies on the social ladder, but the attitude of each of them to the people around him. Positive characters are all persons who “correctly” understand social relationships and the principles of social morality that are unshakable from his point of view, negative characters are those who proceed from ethical principles that are false for the author. All “kind” people are full of vivacity, energy, and the greatest optimism and draw these positive qualities from their performance of social tasks. Among Dickens's positive characters, some (“the poor”) are distinguished by their humility and... devotion, others (“rich”) - generosity and humanity combined with efficiency and common sense. According to the author, fulfilling social duty is the source of happiness and well-being for everyone.
The negative characters of the novel are carriers of evil, bitter with life, immoral and cynical. Predators by nature, always profiting at the expense of others, they are disgusting, too grotesque and caricatured to be believable, although they do not leave the reader in doubt that they are true. Thus, the head of a gang of thieves, Fagin, loves to enjoy the sight of stolen gold things. He can be cruel and merciless if he is disobeyed or his cause is harmed. The figure of his accomplice Sykes is drawn in more detail than the images of all the other accomplices of Fagin. Dickens combines grotesque, caricature and moralizing humor in his portrait. This is “a strongly built subject, a fellow of about thirty-five, in a black corduroy frock coat, very dirty short dark trousers, lace-up shoes and gray paper stockings that covered thick legs with bulging calves - such legs with such a suit always give the impression of something unfinished if they are not decorated with shackles.” This “cute” character keeps a “dog” named Flashlight to deal with children, and even Fagin himself is not afraid of him.
Among the “people of the bottom” depicted by the author, the most complex is the image of Nancy. Sykes's accomplice and lover is endowed by the writer with some attractive character traits. She even shows tender affection for Oliver, although she later pays cruelly for it.
Ardently fighting selfishness in the name of humanity, Dickens nevertheless put forward considerations of interest and benefit as the main argument: the writer was possessed by the ideas of the philosophy of utilitarianism, widely popular in his time. The concept of “evil” and “good” was based on the idea of bourgeois humanism. To some (representatives of the ruling classes), Dickens recommended humanity and generosity as the basis of “correct” behavior, to others (toilers) - devotion and patience, while emphasizing the social expediency and usefulness of such behavior.
The narrative line of the novel has strong didactic elements, or rather, moral and moralizing ones, which in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club were only inserted episodes. In this Dickens novel they form an integral part of the story, explicit or implied, expressed in a humorous or sad tone.
At the beginning of the work, the author notes that little Oliver, like his peers, who find themselves at the mercy of heartless and morally unscrupulous people, awaits the fate of “a humble and hungry poor man, going through his life’s path under a hail of blows and slaps, despised by everyone and finding no pity anywhere.” . At the same time, depicting the misadventures of Oliver Twist, the author leads the hero to happiness. At the same time, the story of a boy born in a workhouse and immediately left an orphan after birth ends happily, clearly contrary to the truth of life.
The image of Oliver is in many ways reminiscent of the characters in Hoffmann's fairy tales, who unexpectedly find themselves in the thick of the battle between good and evil. The boy grows up, despite the difficult conditions in which the children being raised by Mrs. Mann are placed, experiences a half-starved existence in the workhouse and in the family of the undertaker Sowerberry. The image of Oliver is endowed by Dickens with romantic exclusivity: despite the influence of his environment, the boy strictly strives for good, even when he is not broken by the lectures and beatings of the workhouse trustees, and has not learned obedience in the house of his “educator,” the undertaker, and ends up in Fagin’s gang of thieves. Having gone through the life school of Fagin, who taught him the art of thieves, Oliver remains a virtuous and pure child. He feels unsuited to the craft for which he is an old swindler, but he feels easily and freely in Mr. Brownlow’s cozy bedroom, where he immediately pays attention to the port of a young woman, who later turned out to be his mother. As a moralist and Christian, Dickens does not allow the moral fall of the boy, who is saved by a happy accident - a meeting with Mr. Brownlow, who snatches him from the kingdom of evil and transports him to the circle of honest, respectable and wealthy people. At the end of the work, it turns out that the hero is the illegitimate, but long-awaited son of Edwin Lyford, to whom his father bequeathed a fairly significant inheritance. A boy adopted by Mr. Brownlow finds a new family.
In this case, we can speak not of Dickens’s strict adherence to the logic of the life process, but of the romantic mood of the writer, confident that the purity of Oliver’s soul, his perseverance in the face of life’s difficulties need to be rewarded. Together with him, other positive characters in the novel find prosperity and a calm existence: Mr. Grimwig, Mr. Brownlow, Mrs. Maley. Rose Fleming finds her happiness in marriage with Harry Maley, who, in order to marry his beloved girl of low birth, chose a career as a parish priest.
Thus, a happy ending crowns the development of intrigue, the positive heroes are rewarded by the humanist writer for their virtues with a comfortable and cloudless existence. Equally natural for the author is the idea that evil must be punished. All the villains leave the stage - their machinations have been unraveled, and therefore their role has been played. In the New World, Monks dies in prison, having received part of his father’s inheritance with Oliver’s consent, but still wanting to become a respectable person. Fagin is executed, Claypole, in order to avoid punishment, becomes an informant, Sykes dies, saving him from pursuit. Beadle Bumble and the workhouse matron, Mrs. Corney, who became his wife, lost their positions. Dickens reports with satisfaction that, as a result, they “gradually reached an extremely miserable and wretched state, and finally settled as despicable paupers in the very workhouse where they had once ruled over others.”
Striving for maximum completeness and convincingness of a realistic drawing, the writer uses various artistic means. He describes in detail and carefully the setting in which the action takes place: for the first time he resorts to subtle psychological analysis (the last night of Fagin, sentenced to death, or the murder of Nancy by her lover Sikes).
It is obvious that the initial contradiction of Dickens's worldview appears especially clearly in Oliver Twist, primarily in the unique composition of the novel. Against a realistic background, a moralizing plot deviates from the strict truth is built. We can say that the novel has two parallel narrative lines: the fate of Oliver and his fight against evil, embodied in the figure of Monks, and a picture of reality, striking in its truthfulness, based on a truthful depiction of the dark sides of the writer’s contemporary life. These lines are not always convincingly connected; a realistic depiction of life could not fit within the framework of the given thesis - “good conquers evil.”
However, no matter how important the ideological thesis is for the writer, which he is trying to prove through a moralizing story about the struggle and final triumph of little Oliver, Dickens, as a critical realist, reveals the power of his skill and talent in depicting the broad social background against which the hero’s difficult childhood passes. In other words, Dickens's strength as a realist appears not in the depiction of the main character and his story, but in the depiction of the social background against which the story of the orphan boy unfolds and ends successfully.
The skill of the realist artist appeared where he was not bound by the need to prove the unprovable, where he depicted living people and real circumstances over which, according to the author’s plan, the virtuous hero was supposed to triumph.
The advantages of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist,” according to V.G. Belinsky, lie in “fidelity to reality,” but the disadvantage is in the denouement “in the manner of sensitive novels of the past.”
In “Oliver Twist,” Dickens’s style as a realist artist was finally defined, and the complex complex of his style matured. Dickens's style is built on the interweaving and contradictory interpenetration of humor and didactics, documentary transmission of typical phenomena and elevated moralizing.
Considering this novel as one of the works created at an early stage of the writer’s work, it should be emphasized once again that “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” fully reflects the originality of the early Dickens’ worldview. During this period, he creates works in which positive heroes not only part with evil, but also find allies and patrons. In Dickens's early novels, humor supports positive characters in their struggle with the hardships of life, and it also helps the writer to believe in what is happening, no matter how gloomy the reality may be painted. The writer’s desire to penetrate deeply into the life of his characters, into its dark and light corners, is also obvious. At the same time, inexhaustible optimism and love of life make the works of the early stage of Dickens’s work generally joyful and bright.