Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

attacking the Poor Law Amendment Act itself, or the failure of the new commissioners to stamp out abuses that had become entrenched under the old system. The main targets of his satire, Bumble, Mrs. Corney, and Mrs. Mann, are all relics of the old system of poor relief. In Oliver Twist, and throughout his writings, Dickens fails to present cogent arguments for reform at a systemic or institutional level because he harbors a deep mistrust of all systems and institutions. As Steven Marcus points out, Oliver Twist’s “determined, aggressive satire” cannot “in any convincing sense be assigned to partisan allegiance.” Dickens can conceive of reform only on a personal level.
    In the world of Oliver Twist, public officials are at worst negligent and corrupt like Bumble or Mrs. Mann, at best merely inept and comic like the Bow Street Runners Blathers and Duff, who fail to solve the Maylies’ burglary. Oliver’s rescue is accomplished through the compassionate actions of individuals in the private sphere. Dickens nowhere offends his middle-class readership by suggesting that Brownlow, Grimwig, or the Maylies, as members of bourgeois society, can be blamed for condoning or collaborating in institutionalized oppression of the poor. He further assuages bourgeois sensibilities by providing his readers with a middle-class hero in disguise. In reality, Noah Claypole, and even Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger, present far more convincing models of the likely fate of a penniless nineteenth-century orphan.
    Successful or not, social criticism ceases to be Dickens’s chief concern once his orphan hero arrives in London. In his portrayals of the workhouse officials, Dickens gives evil a comic face: Polemic is never far from pantomime. In their marital squabbles, Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney are like Punch and Judy, the sparring couple in a traditional English slapstick puppet show. When Oliver falls among thieves, the characters he encounters are recovered from a much darker and more primitive layer of the author’s imagination. From now on, Dickens can rarely muster enough detachment to write satire. He has entered Oliver’s orphanhood and is once again the abandoned and fearful boy in the blacking factory. As many readers have noticed, the denizens of Dickens’s underworld are curiously sexless: Nancy, the prostitute, is a slatternly Madonna, and there is never a hint of pederasty in Fagin’s relationship with the boys. Rather than, as is commonly supposed, distorting his characters to please a prudish Victorian audience, I believe Dickens created them this way because this was how they presented themselves to him: exaggerated, larger-than-life, erotic but sexless, grotesque, and mysteriously powerful, as grown-ups appear to a child.
    Oliver Twist’s extreme polarities reproduce the moral landscape of childhood. In this respect, the novel resembles a fairy tale. As Bruno Bettelheim observes in The Uses of Enchantment, “The figures in fairy tales are not ambivalent—not good and bad at the same time, as we all are in reality. But since polarization dominates the child’s mind, it also dominates fairy tales” (p. 9). In the world of Oliver Twist, adult characters are either neglectful or corrupting parents, like Bumble, Sikes, or Fagin, or they are wise fathers and nurturing mothers, like Brownlow and Rose Maylie. Only Nancy, the sacrificial penitent, is allowed the least shade of moral ambiguity. Oliver’s good and bad adoptive families each have their own domestic hearth: While Brownlow and the Maylies sip tea from fine china and introduce Oliver to the pleasures of reading, Fagin presides over a den of drinking and gambling. The thieves’ London is a labyrinth of mean and dirty streets, noisy and noisome. Oliver’s refuges are neat and orderly. He picks flowers in the Maylies’ Edenic garden. Yet in Dickens’s novel, as in many a fairy tale, it is the ogre, the bad fairy, the wicked stepmother—that embodiment of