Oliver Twist
By Charles Dickens
Publication Year: 1839
Type: Fiction
Genre: classic
Read on 2018-06-06
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2018 Reading Survey ➞
★★☆☆☆
So the title is very misleading - this book is about everybody BUT Oliver Twist, who exhibits about as much agency and personality as an eraser and is entirely absent from the narrative from pages 298 to 455. (I’m not kidding).
The vast majority of the book is mindnumbingly boring, with characters acting solely in the manner of maximally amped up caricatures (inclusive of the explicitly xenophobic antagonist of Fagin “the Jew”) and featuring unpleasant, unsatisfactory, repetitive plot points that meander with no discernible purpose or momentum (Oliver is abused! Oliver falls in with the wrong crowd! Oliver gets rescued by impossibly and inexplicably nice rich people!). The final act finds neat resolutions to every character and story line but the preceding +300 pages does absolute jack shit to set any of these up.
I can understand that the logic of this world is moralistic rather than realistic, in the way of fables. But if you actually examine the retributive justice served to the Bad characters and conversely the rewards to the Good, it becomes quite apparent that, for Dickens, Good and Bad are not determined by your behavior but rather set in stone by your breeding. Oliver and Rose are good people in spite of their horrible childhoods and good will always fall upon them because they were /born/ good - that is, to good parents, whom neither ever knew past gestation. If it was circumstance that determined their virtue, they would be as wretched as Sikes or Nancy. Even Monks’ evil is justified by his evil mother - and then immediately tempered in his ultimate fate by his kindly father. The moral of this story is therefore not that you should do good rather than bad, but rather that good and bad are conditions you are born into and will not ever be able to change. To a twenty first century atheist-humanist like me this worldview isn’t just depressing - it makes the entire existence of this book totally moot.
Nancy is the only character who is remotely interesting or complexly imagined, and the only one who - apart from maybe Mr. Brownlow who really just becomes a personified deus ex machina - exhibits anything remotely resembling agency. This book would’ve been 10000% improved if everything stayed basically the same but the story followed Nancy’s life rather than Oliver’s.
—- spoilers below —-
But of course, she doesn’t get to enjoy a slap on the wrist by Brownlow like Monks who orchestrated it all or even the incidental (albeit gruesome) death afforded to the murderer’s dog - no, Nancy is brutally brutally brutally murdered because she is a whore.
#JusticeForNancy
