[DICKENS MODELS FOR]

Dickens drew on various literary and dramatic models in his second novel. The Gothic novel may well have contributed 'a certain supernatural element implied in the diabolic character of Fagin, and in the mysterious absence of his footprints after he has peered in upon Oliver in his country retreat, and in the whole phantom character of Monks'. The eighteenth-century picaresque novel may have suggested 'the disputed -inheritance -cum -illegitimate -son plot' (cf. Tom Jones and Humphery Clinker). Popular melodrama of the kind that Dickens enjoyed in the London theaters made its contribution, notably to the stylized and implausible dialogue at certain points. Most obvious of all to Dickens' first readers would have been the influence of the so-called 'Newgate novel', which flourished in the 1830s; to this category belong such once-popular works as Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832), and Harrison Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834). Such novels glamorized the criminal classes (the heroes of the first and third are highwaymen). At the end of the decade Thackeray satirized this school of fiction in his Catherine (serialized in 1839-40), narrated by 'Ikey Solomon, junior' (Ikely Solomon had been the prototype for Fagin); and in Frazer's Magazine (August 1840), describing the crowd at a public execution, he contrasted the real-life Nancys with those depicted in Dickens:

I was curious to look at them, having, in late fashionable novels, read many accounts of such personages. Bah! what figments these novelist tell us! Boz, who knows life well, knows that his Miss Nancy is the most unreal fantastical personage possible; . . . He dare not tell the truth concerning such young ladies.

[OLIVER TWIST AS SOCIAL CRITIQUE]

Most obviously, there is the satire on the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and its effects. Peter Fairclough notes that the opening chapters of the novel appeared when a campaign by The Times attacking the Act was at its height. As Fairclough says,

The chief object of the new Act was to stop the benevolent Allowance System--a development of the granting of wholesale outdoor relief by many humane J.P.'s, whereby labourers' wages were supplemented to subsistence level by contributions to the Poor Rate--by abolishing out-relief to the able-bodied [see Note, Poor Laws]

Oliver is born into the pre-1834 system, and sent to one of the baby farms which were a feature of the early nineteenth-century provision for pauper orphans. But by the time he is nine years old (Ch. 2) the new Act is in effect and his fate is settled by one of the elected Boards of Guardians that had been newly established. Humphry House has commented that Bumble's still being beadle after the introduction of the new Act was perfectly possible: 'all the details did not change at a stroke, and the early reports of the Commissioners are full of complaints of unsuitable officers taken over from the old system'.

Dickens was to continue his attack on the inhumanity of the workhouse system: almost thirty years later, in his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, it is still a target. But it is not the only topical aspect of this early novel; indeed, according to House, 'A novel could hardly have been more topical than Oliver Twist,' Saffron Hill, where much of the action takes place, was notorious in the period as a haunt of thieves, prostitutes and fences, and in making it the base of Fagin's activities 'Dickens was . . . using a contemporary topical allusion with which a great number of his readers would have been quite familiar beforehand' (House). The brief reference to Oliver's narrow escape at being apprenticed to a chimney-sweep alludes to the plight of the climbing boys, another contemporary scandal.

[FAIRYTALE AND FOLKTALE ELEMENTS]

Oliver is a sort of male Cindrella or princess disguised as a goosegirl; and his innate gentility (manifested, for example, in his speech--a product of his birth rather than his environment) is flagrantly non-realistic. Similarly, there is a problem arising from the conflict between the impulse of Dickens's part to satirize with righteous indignation and the impulse to turn anything and everything to comedy. Bumble is not, a priori, a figure of fun but the corrupt representative of an evil system. In the novel, however, he is a comedian, and some of the scenes in which he appears (for example, his courtship of Mrs. Corney) have little or nothing to do with the attack on the poor law. This is an aspect of Dickens' art not confined to this novel (compare, for instance, the treatment of Mrs Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit, where the exposure of her incompetence as a nurse is almost lost sight of in the rich eccentricities of her monologues) . . . .

Evil is rendered with much more conviction than good. Beside Fagin, the benevolent Mr Brownlow is insubstantial; even Nancy, though her activities as prostitute are scarcely touched on (Dickens never uses the word in the novel) and her sexuality is played down, is a human(i) portrait in a way that the virtuous Rose Maylie is not. Between these groups, as Wilson says, move 'the passive figure of Oliver himself and the mechanical figure of his sinister half-brother Monks.'

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