The didactic result was an improvised revision lesson by a very disappointed (angry?) teacher. It focused on the main themes in Oliver Twist, the social criticism and the context, some scenes we had seen in our last lesson in the lab ... whatever came to my puzzled (furious?) mind. An improvised lesson which, fortunately, turned into an animated , interesting discussion.
The practical definite result is that my beloved collection of DVDs has lost one item, gone for good.
Oliver Twist deserves to be studied and Roman Polanski's film to be watched till the end, so I'm sure I'll find a solution, though, I'm quite certain, NOT my DVD.
Let's say something about this novel, since we are here ...
The workhouses
Oliver Twist was first published in instalments by Dickens between 1837 and 1838. Oliver is an orphan born in workhouse. This setting allows Dickens to criticise Victorian policy toward the poor (The Poor Laws , 1834) . Oliver Twist was born in a workhouse and his mother died immediately after his birth. He was taken by the attendants who announced his arrival into the workhouse by sticking a badge and a ticket on him.
Indeed much of the first part of the novel criticises the charity organisations run by church and government which stipulated that the poor could only be helped if they moved into workhouses, which were usually awfully severe places: children were separated from their families and put into forced labour, food was rationed, clothing inadequate. Workhouses operated on the principle that poverty was the consiquence of laziness and that the regime of the workhouse would lead the the poor to improve their circumstances. However, as Dickens describes in his novel, the officials who ran the workhouses were themselves often greedy, lazy and arrogant.
Mrs Mann, the lady that ran the branch-workhouse where Oliver Twist was brought up as an orphan, was in Dickens's words:
" ... an elderly female, who received the culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week. ... The elderly female was a woman of wisdom and experience; she knew what was good for children; and she had a very accurate perception of what was good for herself. so she appropriated the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own use, and consigned the rising parochial generation to even a shorter allowance than was originally provided for them." (chapter 2)
As Dickens points out, instead of alleviating the sufferings of the poor, the officials who ran workhouses, abused their rights as individuals and caused them further misery.
London's life vs country idyll
In Dickens's novel all the injustices and violence suffered by the poor occur in the city and seems to be the product of it. Indeed, among the most memorable pages are the descriptions of London and its outskirts, and the cramped, desperately unhealthy living conditions of its inhabitants.
On the other hand, when the Maylies take Oliver to the countryside he discovers a whole "new existence". In Oliver Twist, country scenes have the potential to "purify our thoughts" and cure the vices that develop in the city. In dickens's idealised countryside, the poor are free of the squalor that afflicts their urban counterparts.
This theme is rather Rousseauian and Dickens seem to use Oliver's character to challenge the victorian idea that the poor and criminals are already evil at birth, arguing instead that the real source of vice is a corrupt envinronment.
Nancy , a round character
Nancy’s love for Sikes exemplifies the moral ambiguity of her character. As she herself points out to Rose, devotion to a man can be “a comfort and a pride” under the right circumstances. But for Nancy, such devotion is “a new means of violence and suffering”—indeed, her relationship with Sikes leads her to criminal acts for his sake and eventually to her own demise. The same behavior, in different circumstances, can have very different consequences and moral significance. In much of Oliver Twist, morality and nobility are black-and-white issues, but Nancy’s character suggests that the boundary between virtue and vice is not always clearly drawn.
Fagin and antisemitism
Although Dickens denied that anti-Semitism had influenced his portrait of Fagin, the Jewish thief’s characterization does seem to owe much to ethnic stereotypes. He is ugly, simpering, miserly, and avaricious. Constant references to him as “the Jew” seem to indicate that his negative traits are intimately connected to his ethnic identity. However, Fagin is more than a statement of ethnic prejudice. He is a richly drawn, resonant embodiment of terrifying villainy. At times, he seems like a child’s distorted vision of pure evil. Fagin is described as a “loathsome reptile” and as having “fangs such as should have been a dog’s or rat’s.” Other characters occasionally refer to him as “the old one,” a popular nickname for the devil. Twice, in Chapter 9 and again in Chapter 34, Oliver wakes up to find Fagin nearby. Oliver encounters him in the hazy zone between sleep and waking, at the precise time when dreams and nightmares are born from “the mere silent presence of some external object.” Indeed, Fagin is meant to inspire nightmares in child and adult readers alike. Perhaps most frightening of all, though, is Chapter 52, in which we enter Fagin’s head for his “last night alive.” The gallows, and the fear they inspire in Fagin, are a specter even more horrifying to contemplate than Fagin himself.
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