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

London streets, hungry and resentful, after long days in the blacking factory. Fagin and his boys are the criminal outsiders that Dickens narrowly escaped becoming. They are the shadow selves he must reject utterly in order to identify with Oliver and the “principle of Good.”Yet, although Fagin and the murderer Sikes are brought sternly to justice, and indeed their final sufferings are described with ghoulish glee, it is undeniably true that the criminal characters in Oliver Twist receive the author’s most inspired and loving attention.
    The novel is most compelling when Fagin, Sikes, and the Artful Dodger hold court. We turn the pages impatiently when forced to stay too long with Brownlow or the Maylies. Once he has left the workhouse, Oliver becomes a mere pawn in the novel’s larger game, and scarcely a character at all. It is the Artful Dodger, another orphan, though emphatically not a victim or a principle, who bursts out of the novel endowed with all of the author’s industry, vigor, and comic energy. Dickens cannot bring himself to assign the Dodger a bad end. After his dazzling linguistic performance in court, he is shipped off to Australia, protesting to the last, “I shall have something to say elsewhere” (chap. XLIII). Somewhere, outside the margins of Victorian society and free from the constraining polarities of Oliver Twist, Dickens promises him a blank page and a brilliant career. His creator is, we suspect, as Blake said of Milton, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
     
    Jill Muller was born in England and educated at Mercy College and Columbia University. She is currently teaching at Mercy College and Columbia University. She has published articles on James Joyce, John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the medieval women mystics. She is working on a book on the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, to be published by Routledge.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST CHEAP EDITION
    A t page 267 of this present edition of Oliver Twist there is a de scription of “the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordi nary of the many localities that are hidden in London.” And the name of this place is Jacob’s Island.
    Eleven or twelve years have elapsed since the description was first published. I was as well convinced then as I am now, that nothing effectual can be done for the elevation of the poor in England until their dwelling-places are made decent and wholesome. I have always been convinced that this reform must precede all other Social Reforms; that it must prepare the way for Education, even for Religion; and that, without it, those classes of the people which increase the fastest must become so desperate, and be made so miserable, as to bear within themselves the certain seeds of ruin to the whole community.
    The metropolis (of all places under heaven) being excluded from the provisions of the Public Health Act passed last year, a society has been formed called the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, with the view of remedying this grievous mistake. The association held its first public meeting at Freemason’s Hall on Wednesday the sixth of February last, the Bishop of London presiding. It happened that this very place, Jacob’s Island, had lately attracted the attention of the Board of Health, in consequence of its having been ravaged by cholera; and that the Bishop of London had in his hands the result of an inquiry under the Metropolitan Sewers Commission, showing, by way of proof of the cheapness of sanitary improvements, an estimate of the probable cost at which the houses in Jacob’s Island could be rendered fit for human habitation—which cost, as stated, was about a penny three farthings per week per house. The Bishop referred to this paper with the moderation and forbearance which pervaded all his observations, and did me the honour to mention that I had described Jacob’s Island. When I subsequently made a few observations myself, I confessed that soft impeachment.
    Now the