The Adventures of Oliver Twist conclusion. Features of the realistic method in Dickens's early novels (The Adventures of Oliver Twist)
This is the most suitable boy for you.
Need it from time to time
treat with a stick - that'll do
for his benefit. And its content
won't be expensive because
he had not been fed since birth.
C. Dickens. The Adventures of Oliver Twist
Having been published, the works of Charles Dickens immediately fell into the treasury of world literature, since they reflected many acute problems public life XIX century, and especially the plight of common people in England.
Main character novel - a little boy Oliver Twist, whose school of life was hard and cruel from birth. Ironically, Oliver was born in a workhouse. His mother died immediately after giving birth, no one knew his father. Therefore, as soon as he was born, he received the status of a criminal or “violator of the poor law” and was forced to be raised by strangers, or, in other words, “was a victim of a system of treachery and deception.” In infancy, Oliver was placed “on a farm,” where, “without suffering from excess food or clothing,” he received the precious right to suffer and die, since most of the children in this institution died at a very tender age.
There is a bitter irony in the writer’s tone when he tells us about the caring upbringing the poor boy received, who managed to survive on the farm and was, at nine years old, “a pale, stunted child, short in stature and, undoubtedly, skinny.” , that is, quite suitable for hard work.
Denouncing the cruelty of the councilors and public trustees, Dickens portrays them as “very wise, shrewd philosophers” who condescendingly gave the workhouse poor the right to choose: “either to starve slowly in the workhouse, or die quickly outside its walls.” Children who end up here are doomed to be raised by beatings, hunger and, of course, work. Asking for an addition to the pitiful portion of thin porridge that the children received here (enough to slowly starve to death) was equated with a social crime and was severely punished. Where else, if not in the workhouse, did the English poor from childhood learn to lie, offend the weak, steal, and care only about themselves.
From the doors of this humane orphanage, three roads opened before Oliver. One led to apprenticeships with a chimney sweep, where little boys were forced to spend many hours in dirty, smoky chimneys, which many of them could not stand, getting stuck or suffocating in the workplace. Another road, which, by the way, Oliver had to take, led to the “mourners” to the undertaker, where the boy received no less valuable life lessons in the ability to adapt to living conditions than in the workhouse. And finally, the third road is to the underworld, to the streets belonging to representatives of the criminal “bottom”, where Oliver Twist continues to be brought up under sensitive leadership little thieves and the big robber Sikes, as well as the buyer of stolen goods Fagin, who seek to introduce the boy to theft and immorality. Material from the site
However, a realist in describing everyday details, Dickens idealizes his hero, endowing him with innate virtue, which no vices and dirt of the surrounding world can shake. In difficult moments of life, people come to the aid of the lonely, useless Oliver. good people: managed to save living soul in the inhumane conditions of the criminal world, Nancy, Mr. Brownlow, who subsequently adopted Twist, and the kind and merciful Rose Maylie.
With all his heart attached to his little hero, Charles Dickens helps him withstand all the tests. The book ends happily, but over the course of many pages it makes the reader think about those unjust laws that contribute to the achievement of happiness for the chosen few, while the bulk of the people endure humiliation, insults, bullying, and all possible deprivations. And this, of course, is the educational impact of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” on public consciousness.
"The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is Dickens's first social novel, in which the contradictions of English reality appeared incomparably clearer than in "Notes Pickwick Club" “Hard truth,” Dickens wrote in the preface, “was the object of my book.”
In the preface to the novel Oliver Twist, Dickens declares himself a realist. But he immediately makes the exact opposite statement: “... It is still far from clear to me why the lesson of the purest good cannot be drawn from the most vile evil. I have always considered the contrary to be a firm and unshakable truth... I wanted to demonstrate in little Oliver how the principle of good always triumphs in the end, despite the most unfavorable circumstances and difficult obstacles.” The contradiction that is revealed in this programmatic statement of the young Dickens arises from the contradiction that characterizes the writer's worldview at the early stage of his creative activity.
The writer wants to show reality “as it is,” but at the same time excludes objective logic facts of life and processes, tries to interpret its laws idealistically. A convinced realist, Dickens could not abandon his didactic plans. For him, fighting this or that social evil always meant convincing, that is, educating. The writer considered the correct education of a person to be the best way to establish mutual understanding between people and the humane organization of human society. He sincerely believed that most people are naturally drawn to goodness and a good beginning can easily triumph in their souls.
But to prove the idealistic thesis - “good” invariably defeats “evil” - within the framework of a realistic depiction of complex contradictions modern era it was impossible. To implement the controversial creative task that the author set for himself, it was necessary creative method, combining elements of realism and romanticism.
At first, Dickens intended to create a realistic picture of criminal London only, to show the “pathetic reality” of the thieves’ dens of London’s “Eastside” (“Eastern” side), that is, the poorest quarters of the capital. But in the process of work, the original plan expanded significantly. The novel depicts various aspects of modern English life and poses important and pressing problems.
The time when Dickens collected material for his new novel was a period of fierce struggle over the Poor Law, published back in 1834, according to which a network of workhouses was created in the country for the lifelong maintenance of the poor. Drawn into the controversy surrounding the opening of workhouses, Dickens strongly condemned this terrible product of bourgeois rule.
“... These workhouses,” Engels wrote in “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” “or, as the people call them, poor-law-bastilles, are designed in such a way as to frighten away everyone who has even the slightest hope of living without this form of public charity. In order for a person to apply to the cash fund for the poor only in the most extreme cases so that he would resort to it only after exhausting all possibilities of making do on his own, the workhouse was turned into the most disgusting place that the refined imagination of a Malthusian can come up with.”
The Adventures of Olever Twist is directed against the Poor Law, workhouses and existing political economy concepts that lull public opinion with promises of happiness and prosperity for the majority.
However, it would be a mistake to consider that a novel is only the fulfillment by the writer of his social mission. Along with this, when creating his work, Dickens joins the literary struggle. “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” was also the author’s original response to the dominance of the so-called “Newgate” novel, in which the story of thieves and criminals was told exclusively in melodramatic and romantic tones, and the lawbreakers themselves represented a type of Superman that was very attractive to readers. In fact, in the Newgate novels, criminals acted as Byronic heroes who turned into a criminal environment. Dickens strongly opposed the idealization of crimes and those who commit them.
In the preface to the book, Dickens clearly stated the essence of his plan: “It seemed to me that to portray real members of a criminal gang, to draw them in all their ugliness, with all their vileness, to show their wretched, miserable life, to show them as they really are , - they always sneak, overcome with anxiety, along the dirtiest paths of life, and wherever they look, a black terrible gallows looms before them - it seemed to me that to depict this means to try to do what is necessary and what will serve to society. And I did it to the best of my ability.”
The author shows that evil penetrates into all corners of England; it is most common among those whom society has doomed to poverty, slavery, and suffering. The darkest pages in the novel are those devoted to workhouses.
Workhouses were contrary to the beliefs of Dickens the humanist, and their depiction becomes the writer's response to the controversy surrounding a deeply pressing issue. The excitement that Dickens experienced in studying what he saw as a failed attempt to alleviate the lot of the poor, the acuteness of his observations, gave the images of the novel great artistic power and persuasiveness. The writer draws a workhouse based on real facts. It depicts the inhumanity of the Poor Law in action. Although the rules of the workhouse are described in only a few chapters of the novel, the book has firmly established the reputation of a work exposing one of the most dark sides English reality of the 30s. However, a few episodes, eloquent in their realism, were enough for the novel to firmly establish its reputation as a novel about workhouses.
The main characters of those chapters of the book in which the workhouse is depicted are children born in dark dungeons, their parents dying of hunger and exhaustion, eternally hungry young inmates of workhouses and hypocritical “trustees” of the poor. The author emphasizes that the workhouse, promoted as a “charitable” institution, is a prison that degrades and physically oppresses a person.
Liquid oatmeal three times a day, two onions a week and half a loaf on Sundays - this was the meager ration that supported the pitiful, always hungry workhouse boys, who had been shaking hemp since six o'clock in the morning. When Oliver, driven to despair by hunger, timidly asks the warden for more porridge, the boy is considered a rebel and locked in a cold closet.
Dickens, in the first of his social novels, also depicts the dirt, poverty, crime that reigns in the slums of London, and people who have sunk to the “bottom” of society. The slum dwellers Fagin and Sikes, Dodger and Bates, who represent thieves' London in the novel, in the perception of the young Dickens are an inevitable evil on earth, to which the author contrasts his preaching of good. The realistic depiction of the London bottom and its inhabitants in this novel is often colored with romantic and sometimes melodramatic tones. The pathos of denunciation here is not yet directed against those social conditions that give rise to vice. But whatever the writer’s subjective assessment of the phenomena, the images of the slums and their individual inhabitants (especially Nancy) objectively act as a harsh indictment against the entire social system that generates poverty and crime.
Unlike the previous novel, in this work the narrative is colored with gloomy humor, the narrator seems to have difficulty believing that the events taking place belong to a civilized England that boasts of its democracy and justice. There is a different pace of the story here: short chapters are filled with numerous events that make up the essence of the adventure genre. In the fate of little Oliver, adventures turn out to be misadventures when the ominous figure of Monks, Oliver's brother, appears on the scene, who, in order to obtain an inheritance, tries to destroy the main character by conspiring with Fagin and forcing him to make Oliver a thief. In this novel by Dickens, the features of a detective story are palpable, but the investigation of Twist’s secret is not carried out by professional servants of the law, but by enthusiasts who fell in love with the boys who wanted to restore the good name of his father and return his legally belonging inheritance. The nature of the episodes is also different. Sometimes the novel sounds melodramatic notes. This is especially clearly felt in the scene of the farewell of little Oliver and Dick, the hero’s friend doomed to death, who dreams of dying as soon as possible in order to get rid of cruel torments - hunger, punishment and overwork.
The writer introduces a significant number of characters into his work and tries to deeply reveal them inner world. Of particular importance in “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” are the social motivations for people’s behavior, which determined certain traits of their characters. True, it should be noted that the characters in the novel are grouped according to a peculiar principle arising from the unique worldview of the young Dickens. Like the romantics, Dickens divides heroes into “positive” and “negative”, the embodiment of goodness and bearers of vices. In this case, the principle underlying this division becomes a moral norm. Therefore, one group (“evil”) includes the son of wealthy parents, Oliver’s half-brother Edward Lyford (Monks), the head of the gang of thieves Fagin and his accomplice Sikes, the beadle Bumble, the workhouse matron Mrs. Corney, who is raising Mrs. Mann’s orphans, and others. It is noteworthy that critical intonations in the work are associated both with the characters called upon to protect order and legality in the state, and with their “antipodes” - criminals. Despite the fact that these characters are at different levels of the social ladder, the author of the novel endows them with similar traits and constantly emphasizes their immorality.
The writer includes Mr. Brownlow, the sister of the protagonist’s mother Rose Fleming, Harry Maley and his mother, Oliver Twist himself, to another group (“kind”). These characters are drawn in the traditions of educational literature, that is, they emphasize ineradicable natural kindness, decency, and honesty.
The defining principle of the grouping of characters, both in this and in all subsequent novels by Dickens, is not the place that one or another of the characters occupies on the social ladder, but the attitude of each of them to the people around him. Positive characters are all persons who “correctly” understand social relationships and the principles of social morality that are unshakable from his point of view, negative characters are those who proceed from ethical principles that are false for the author. All “kind” people are full of vivacity, energy, and the greatest optimism and draw these positive qualities from their performance of social tasks. Among Dickens's positive characters, some (“the poor”) are distinguished by their humility and... devotion, others (“rich”) - generosity and humanity combined with efficiency and common sense. According to the author, fulfilling social duty is the source of happiness and well-being for everyone.
The negative characters of the novel are carriers of evil, bitter with life, immoral and cynical. Predators by nature, always profiting at the expense of others, they are disgusting, too grotesque and caricatured to be believable, although they do not leave the reader in doubt that they are true. Thus, the head of a gang of thieves, Fagin, loves to enjoy the sight of stolen gold things. He can be cruel and merciless if he is disobeyed or his cause is harmed. The figure of his accomplice Sykes is drawn in more detail than the images of all the other accomplices of Fagin. Dickens combines grotesque, caricature and moralizing humor in his portrait. This is “a strongly built subject, a fellow of about thirty-five, in a black corduroy frock coat, very dirty short dark trousers, lace-up shoes and gray paper stockings that covered thick legs with bulging calves - such legs with such a suit always give the impression of something unfinished if they are not decorated with shackles.” This “cute” character keeps a “dog” named Flashlight to deal with children, and even Fagin himself is not afraid of him.
Among the “people of the bottom” depicted by the author, the most complex is the image of Nancy. Sykes's accomplice and lover is endowed by the writer with some attractive character traits. She even shows tender affection for Oliver, although she later pays cruelly for it.
Ardently fighting selfishness in the name of humanity, Dickens nevertheless put forward considerations of interest and benefit as the main argument: the writer was possessed by the ideas of the philosophy of utilitarianism, widely popular in his time. The concept of “evil” and “good” was based on the idea of bourgeois humanism. To some (representatives of the ruling classes), Dickens recommended humanity and generosity as the basis of “correct” behavior, to others (toilers) - devotion and patience, while emphasizing the social expediency and usefulness of such behavior.
The narrative line of the novel has strong didactic elements, or rather, moral and moralizing ones, which in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club were only inserted episodes. In this Dickens novel they form an integral part of the story, explicit or implied, expressed in a humorous or sad tone.
At the beginning of the work, the author notes that little Oliver, like his peers who find themselves at the mercy of heartless and morally unscrupulous people, awaits the fate of “a humble and hungry poor man going through his life path under a hail of blows and slaps, despised by everyone and not meeting pity anywhere.” At the same time, depicting the misadventures of Oliver Twist, the author leads the hero to happiness. At the same time, the story of a boy born in a workhouse and immediately left an orphan after birth ends happily, clearly contrary to the truth of life.
The image of Oliver is in many ways reminiscent of the characters in Hoffmann's fairy tales, who unexpectedly find themselves in the thick of the battle between good and evil. The boy grows up, despite the difficult conditions in which the children being raised by Mrs. Mann are placed, experiences a half-starved existence in the workhouse and in the family of the undertaker Sowerberry. The image of Oliver is endowed by Dickens with romantic exclusivity: despite the influence of his environment, the boy strictly strives for good, even when he is not broken by the lectures and beatings of the workhouse trustees, and has not learned obedience in the house of his “educator,” the undertaker, and ends up in Fagin’s gang of thieves. Having gone through the life school of Fagin, who taught him the art of thieves, Oliver remains a virtuous and pure child. He feels unsuited to the craft for which he is an old swindler, but he feels easily and freely in Mr. Brownlow’s cozy bedroom, where he immediately pays attention to the port of a young woman, who later turned out to be his mother. As a moralist and Christian, Dickens does not allow the moral fall of the boy, who is saved by a happy accident - a meeting with Mr. Brownlow, who snatches him from the kingdom of evil and transports him to the circle of honest, respectable and wealthy people. At the end of the work, it turns out that the hero is the illegitimate, but long-awaited son of Edwin Lyford, to whom his father bequeathed a fairly significant inheritance. A boy adopted by Mr. Brownlow finds a new family.
In this case, we can talk not about Dickens’s strict adherence to the logic of the life process, but about the romantic mood of the writer, confident that the purity of Oliver’s soul, his resistance to life's difficulties need reward. Together with him, others also find prosperity and a peaceful existence. positive characters novel: Mr. Grimwig, Mr. Brownlow, Mrs. Mailey. Rose Fleming finds her happiness in marriage with Harry Maley, who, in order to marry his beloved girl of low birth, chose a career as a parish priest.
Thus, a happy ending crowns the development of intrigue, the positive heroes are rewarded by the humanist writer for their virtues with a comfortable and cloudless existence. Equally natural for the author is the idea that evil must be punished. All the villains leave the stage - their machinations have been unraveled, and therefore their role has been played. In the New World, Monks dies in prison, having received part of his father’s inheritance with Oliver’s consent, but still wanting to become a respectable person. Fagin is executed, Claypole, in order to avoid punishment, becomes an informant, Sykes dies, saving him from pursuit. Beadle Bumble and the workhouse matron, Mrs. Corney, who became his wife, lost their positions. Dickens reports with satisfaction that, as a result, they “gradually reached an extremely miserable and wretched state, and finally settled as despicable paupers in the very workhouse where they had once ruled over others.”
Striving for maximum completeness and convincingness of a realistic drawing, the writer uses various artistic means. He describes in detail and carefully the setting in which the action takes place: for the first time he resorts to subtle psychological analysis (the last night of Fagin, sentenced to death, or the murder of Nancy by her lover Sikes).
It is obvious that the initial contradiction of Dickens's worldview appears especially clearly in Oliver Twist, primarily in the unique composition of the novel. Against a realistic background, a moralizing plot deviates from the strict truth is built. We can say that the novel has two parallel narrative lines: the fate of Oliver and his fight against evil, embodied in the figure of Monks, and a picture of reality, striking in its truthfulness, based on a truthful depiction of the dark sides of the writer’s contemporary life. These lines are not always convincingly connected; a realistic depiction of life could not fit within the framework of the given thesis - “good conquers evil.”
However, no matter how important the ideological thesis is for the writer, which he is trying to prove through a moralizing story about the struggle and final triumph of little Oliver, Dickens, as a critical realist, reveals the power of his skill and talent in depicting the broad social background against which the hero’s difficult childhood passes. In other words, Dickens's strength as a realist appears not in the depiction of the main character and his story, but in the depiction of the social background against which the story of the orphan boy unfolds and ends successfully.
The skill of the realist artist appeared where he was not bound by the need to prove the unprovable, where he depicted living people and real circumstances over which, according to the author’s plan, the virtuous hero was supposed to triumph.
The advantages of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist,” according to V.G. Belinsky, lie in “fidelity to reality,” but the disadvantage is in the denouement “in the manner of sensitive novels of the past.”
In “Oliver Twist,” Dickens’s style as a realist artist was finally defined, and the complex complex of his style matured. Dickens's style is built on the interweaving and contradictory interpenetration of humor and didactics, documentary transmission of typical phenomena and elevated moralizing.
Considering this novel as one of the works created on early stage the writer’s work, it should be emphasized once again that “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” fully reflects the originality of the early Dickens’ worldview. During this period, he creates works in which positive heroes not only part with evil, but also find allies and patrons. IN early novels Dickens's humor supports positive characters in their struggle with the hardships of life, and it also helps the writer to believe in what is happening, no matter how gloomy the reality may be painted. The writer’s desire to penetrate deeply into the life of his characters, into its dark and light corners, is also obvious. At the same time, inexhaustible optimism and love of life make the works of the early stage of Dickens’s work generally joyful and bright.
History of the creation of the novel: Dickens's novel was first published under the title "Oliver Twist, or the Way of a Parish Boy" in the magazine "Bentley's Mixture" from February 1837 (the writer began working on it in 1836) to March 1839. Even before the publication of this publication was completed (in October 1838), by mutual agreement with the founder of the magazine, Richard Bentley, the writer published the novel as a separate book under everything already famous name"The Adventures of Oliver Twist", which contained illustrations of the famous English artist and publicist George Cruikshank. And in 1841, the third edition of the novel was published with forewords by the author. "The Adventures of Oliver Twist"
Atmosphere shown in the novel: In 1834, the so-called “Poor Law” was adopted in the English Parliament. According to this document, workhouses were opened. Since then, according to Dickens's bitterly ironic remark, "all beggars were given a choice of two options (for, of course, no one wanted to rape anyone!): either slowly starve to death in the workhouse, or die a quick death outside its walls." . In fact, workhouses were miserable shelters, in which a family could be forcibly separated to live in, where there was almost no food, and residents were deprived of basic civil rights and were completely dependent on parish authorities like the beadle Bumble, the hero of the novel The Adventures of Oliver Twist. These terrible conditions were made worse by the fact that apt definition Scientists of that time, the English bourgeoisie perceived the poor, destitute people as bandits, and the workhouses as prisons, and the inmates there as people who were outside the law." Biddle Bumble Living conditions in English workhouses were well known to Dickens, since he worked as a reporter and collected material everywhere: from parliament to a poorhouse or in prison. Let us also remember that the Dickens family lived for some time in a debtor's prison, which was similar to a workhouse. These houses were then popularly called “prisons”, because the rules they were so terrible that the poor were ready for any working conditions, any harshest exploitation by employers, just to avoid ending up there. And since there were millions of poor people in the then Great Britain, the issue of their way of life acquired a national scale. This social evil and portrayed Dickens with all the skill of his writing talent.
Summary novel: Oliver Twist is a boy whose mother died in childbirth in a workhouse. He grows up in an orphanage at a local parish, whose funds are extremely meager. Starving peers force him to ask for more for lunch. For this obstinacy, his superiors sell him to the undertaker's office, where Oliver is bullied by the senior apprentice. In the workhouse. After a fight with the apprentice, Oliver flees to London, where he falls into the gang of a young pickpocket nicknamed the Artful Dodger. The den of criminals is ruled by the cunning and treacherous Jew Fagin (Feigin). The cold-blooded killer and robber Bill Sikes also visits there. His 17-year-old girlfriend Nancy sees a kindred spirit in Oliver and shows him kindness. London The Artful Dodger FaginBill Sykes The criminals plan to train Oliver to be a pickpocket, but after a robbery goes wrong, the boy ends up in the house of a virtuous gentleman, Mr. Brownlow, who over time begins to suspect that Oliver is his friend's son. Sykes and Nancy bring Oliver back into the underworld to take part in a heist. As it turns out, behind Fagin is Monks, Oliver's half-brother, who is trying to deprive him of his inheritance. After another failure of the criminals, Oliver first ends up in the house of Miss Rose Meili, who at the end of the book turns out to be the hero's aunt. Nancy comes to them with the news that Monks and Fagin are not giving up the hope of kidnapping or killing Oliver. And with this news, Rose Meili goes to Mr. Brownlow’s house to resolve this situation with his help. Oliver then returns to Mr. Brownlow. Sikes becomes aware of Nancy's visits to Mr. Brownlow. In a fit of anger, the villain kills the unfortunate girl, but soon dies himself. Monks has to open his dirty secrets, come to terms with the loss of his inheritance and go to America, where he will die in prison. Fagin goes to the gallows. Oliver lives happily in the house of his savior Mr. Brownlow.
Film adaptations and theatrical performances Oliver Twist silent film, 1922 Oliver Twist Oliver Twist classic film adaptation 1948, dir. David Lin. Oliver Twist 1948 David Lean Oliver! musical, 1960 (West End, London), 1962 (Broadway), 1984 (Broadway revival), 1994 (West End revival), 2002 (Australasia Tour), 2003 (Tallinn), 2009 (West End revival) Ende), from December 2011 (UK tour) Oliver!West End LondonBroadway AustralasiaTallinn UK Oliver! film-musical, based on the musical of the same name, 1968 Oliver! Oliver Twist cartoon, 1982 Oliver Twist Oliver Twist television series, 1985. Dir. Gareth Davies (UK) Oliver Twist Oliver Twist film, 1997. Director Tony Bill (USA) Oliver Twist Oliver Twist film, 2005. Directed by Roman Polanski. Oliver Twist Roman Polanski Oliver Twist series, 2007. Directed by Coky Giedroyc. Oliver Twist In Memory of Oliver Twist Documentary, year 2014. Directed by Ronald Uklanism. In memory of Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens(1812-1870) at the age of twenty-five already had in his homeland the fame of “inimitable”, the best of modern novelists. His first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), a brilliant masterpiece of comic prose, made him the favorite writer of the English-speaking world. Second novel "Oliver Twist"(1838) will be the subject of our consideration as example of a Victorian novel.
This is the defiantly improbable story of a pure orphan boy, illegitimate, who miraculously survives in a workhouse, as an apprentice to a ferocious undertaker, in the darkest dens of thieves in London. The angelic Oliver wants to be destroyed by his brother, the secular young man Monks, who does not want to fulfill the will of his late father, who before his death bequeathed half of his fortune to his illegitimate son Oliver. According to the terms of the will, the money will go to Oliver only if, before he comes of age, he does not stray from the straight path and does not tarnish his name. To destroy Oliver, Monks enters into a conspiracy with one of the lords of the London underworld, the Jew Fagin, and Fagin lures Oliver into his gang. But no forces of evil can prevail over good will honest people, who sympathize with Oliver and, despite all the machinations, restore his good name. The novel ends traditionally for English classical literature happy ending, a “happy ending” in which all the scoundrels who sought to corrupt Oliver are punished (the buyer of stolen goods Fagin is hanged; the murderer Sikes dies while escaping from police pursuit and an angry crowd), and Oliver finds his family and friends, regains his name and fortune.
Oliver Twist was originally conceived as a crime novel. IN English literature In those years, the so-called “Newgate” novel, named after the London criminal prison Newgate, was very fashionable. This prison is described in the novel - in it he spends his last days Fagin. The “Newgate” novel necessarily described criminal crimes that tickled the reader’s nerves, and weaved a detective intrigue in which the paths of the lower classes of society, the inhabitants of London’s bottom, and the very top crossed—aristocrats with an impeccable reputation, who in fact turned out to be the masterminds of the most monstrous crimes. The sensational "Newgate" novel obviously owes much to its poetics of deliberate contrasts romantic literature, and thus in early work Dickens reveals the same measure of continuity in relation to romanticism that we noted for " Shagreen leather", an early novel by Balzac. However, at the same time, Dickens opposes the idealization of crime inherent in the "Newgate" novel, against charm Byronic heroes who have infiltrated the criminal world. The author's preface to the novel indicates that the main things for Dickens as a Victorian novelist were the exposure and punishment of vice and the service of public morality:
It seemed to me that to portray real members of a criminal gang, to draw them in all their ugliness, with all their vileness, to show their wretched, miserable life, to show them as they really are - they are always sneaking, overcome with anxiety, along the dirtiest paths life, and wherever they look, a black, terrible gallows looms before them - it seemed to me that to depict this means to try to do what is necessary and what will serve society. And I did it to the best of my ability.
The “Newgate” features in “Oliver Twist” consist in the deliberate thickening of colors in the description of dirty dens and their inhabitants. Hardened criminals and escaped convicts exploit the boys, instilling in them a kind of thieves' pride, from time to time betraying the less capable of their students to the police; They also push girls like Nancy onto the panel, torn by remorse and loyalty to their lovers. By the way, the image of Nancy, a “fallen creature,” is characteristic of many novels of Dickens’s contemporaries, being the embodiment of the feeling of guilt that the prosperous middle class. The most vivid image of the novel is Fagin, the head of a gang of thieves, a “burnt beast,” according to the author; Of his accomplices, the most detailed image of the robber and murderer Bill Sikes is drawn. Those episodes that unfold in the thieves' environment in the slums of the East End are the most vivid and convincing in the novel; the author as an artist here is bold and diverse.
But in the process of work, the concept of the novel was enriched with themes that indicate Dickens’ attention to the urgent needs of the people, which make it possible to predict its further development as a truly national realist writer. Dickens became interested in workhouses, new English institutions created in 1834 under the New Poor Law. Before that, local church authorities and parishes took care of the weak and poor. The Victorians, for all their piety, did not give very generously to the church, and new law ordered to gather all the poor from several parishes in one place, where they had to work as hard as they could, paying for their maintenance. At the same time, families were separated, they were fed so that the inhabitants of the workhouses died of exhaustion, and people preferred to be imprisoned for begging than to go to workhouses. With his novel, Dickens continued the heated public controversy surrounding this newest institution of English democracy and strongly condemned it in the unforgettable first pages of the novel, which describes the birth of Oliver and his childhood in the workhouse.
These first chapters stand apart in the novel: the author writes here not a criminal, but a socially revealing novel. Description of Mrs. Mann's "baby farm" and workhouse practices is shocking modern reader cruelty, but completely reliable - Dickens himself visited such institutions. The artistry of this description is achieved by the contrast of the dark scenes of Oliver's childhood and the humorous tone of the author. Tragic material is shaded light comic style. For example, after Oliver's "crime" of asking for more of his meager porridge in desperation of hunger, he is punished with solitary confinement, which is described as follows:
As for the exercises, the weather was wonderfully cold, and he was allowed to take a bath every morning under the pump, in the presence of Mr. Bumble, who took care that he did not catch cold, and used a cane to create a feeling of warmth throughout his whole body. As for society, every two days he was taken to the hall where the boys dined, and there he was flogged as an example and warning to everyone else.
In the novel, which is diverse in material, the connecting link is the image of Oliver, and in this image the melodramatic nature of the art of early Dickens, the sentimentality so characteristic of Victorian literature as a whole, is most clearly manifested. This is melodrama in in a good way words: the author operates with enlarged situations and universal human feelings, which are perceived very predictably by the reader. Indeed, how can one not feel sympathy for a boy who did not know his parents and was subjected to the most severe trials; how not to be filled with disgust for villains who are indifferent to the suffering of a child or push him onto the path of vice; how not to sympathize with the efforts of the good ladies and gentlemen who snatched Oliver from the hands of the monstrous gang. Predictability in the development of the plot, a given moral lesson, the inevitable victory of good over evil - character traits Victorian novel. In this sad story intertwined social problems with features of a criminal and family novels, and from the novel of education Dickens takes only general direction development of the plot outline, because of all the characters in the novel, Oliver is the least realistic. These are Dickens's first approaches to the study of child psychology, and the image of Oliver is still far from the images of children in Dickens's mature social novels, such as Dombey and Son, " Hard times", "Big hopes". Oliver in the novel is called upon to embody Good. Dickens understands the child as an unspoiled soul, an ideal being, he resists all the ills of society, vice does not stick to this angelic creature. Although Oliver himself does not know about it, he is of noble origin, and Dickens is inclined to explain it innate subtlety of feelings, decency is precisely the nobility of blood, and vice in this novel is still to a greater extent property of the lower classes. However, Oliver would not have been able to escape the pursuit of evil forces alone if the author had not brought to his aid the cloying images of “good gentlemen”: Mr. Brownlow, who turns out to be closest friend Oliver's late father, and his friend Mr. Grimwig. Another defender of Oliver is the “English rose” Rose Maylie. The lovely girl turns out to be his own aunt, and the efforts of all these people, wealthy enough to do good, lead the novel to a happy ending.
There is another aspect of the novel that made it especially popular outside of England. Dickens here for the first time showed his remarkable ability to convey the atmosphere of London, which XIX century was largest city planets. Here he spent his own difficult childhood, he knew all the districts and nooks and crannies of the giant city, and Dickens paints it differently than was customary before him in English literature, without emphasizing its metropolitan façade and signs cultural life, and from the inside out, depicting all the consequences of urbanization. Dickens biographer H. Pearson writes on this occasion: “Dickens was London itself. He merged with the city together, he became a particle of every brick, every drop of mortar. To what other writer does any other city owe so much? This, after him humor, his most valuable and original contribution to literature. He was the greatest poet streets, embankments and squares, but in those days this unique feature of his work escaped the attention of critics."
Perception of Dickens's work beginning of XXI century, naturally, is very different from the perception of his contemporaries: what caused tears of tenderness in the reader victorian era, today seems to us forced, overly sentimental. But Dickens's novels, like all great ones, realistic novels, will always show examples of humanistic values, examples of the fight between Good and Evil, inimitable English humor in creating characters.
In the novel The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Dickens builds a plot centered on a boy's encounter with an ungrateful reality. The main character of the novel is a little boy named Oliver Twist. Having been born in a workhouse, from the first minutes of his life he was left an orphan, and this meant in his situation not only a future full of hardships and deprivations, but also loneliness, defenselessness in the face of the insults and injustice that he would have to endure. The baby was frail, the doctor said that he would not survive.
Dickens, as an educational writer, never reproached his unfortunate characters with either poverty or ignorance, but he reproached a society that refuses help and support to those who were born poor and are therefore doomed from the cradle to deprivation and humiliation. And the conditions for the poor (and especially for the children of the poor) in that world were truly inhuman.
Workhouses, which were supposed to provide ordinary people work, food, shelter, in fact they were similar to prisons: the poor were forcibly imprisoned there, separated from their families, forced to do useless and hard work and practically not fed, doomed to a slow death of starvation. It was not for nothing that the workers themselves called workhouses “bastilles for the poor.”
From the workhouse, Oliver is apprenticed to an undertaker; there he encounters the orphanage boy Noe Claypole, who, being older and stronger, constantly subjects Oliver to humiliation. Oliver soon escapes to London.
Boys and girls who were of no use to anyone, who by chance found themselves on the streets of the city, often became completely lost to society, as they ended up in the criminal world with its cruel laws. They became thieves, beggars, girls began to trade own body, and after that many of them ended their short and unhappy lives in prisons or on the gallows.
This novel is a crime novel. Dickens portrays the society of London criminals simply. This is a legitimate part of the existence of capitals. A boy from the street, nicknamed the Artful Rogue, promises Oliver an overnight stay and protection in London and leads him to a buyer of stolen goods, godfather London thieves and swindlers to the Jew Fagin. They want to put Oliver on a criminal path.
For Dickens, it is important to give the reader the idea that the soul of a child is not inclined to crime. Children are the personification of spiritual purity and unlawful suffering. A considerable part of the novel is devoted to this. Dickens, like many writers of that time, was concerned with the question: what is most important in the formation of a person’s character, his personality - social environment, origin (parents and ancestors) or his inclinations and abilities? What makes a person what he is: decent and noble or vile, dishonest and criminal? And does criminal always mean vile, cruel, soulless? Answering this question, Dickens creates in the novel the image of Nancy - a girl caught in early age into the criminal world, but retaining a kind, sympathetic heart, the ability to sympathize, it’s not in vain that she is trying to protect little Oliver from the vicious path.
Thus we see that social novel Charles Dickens's "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is a lively response to the most pressing and pressing problems of our time. And judging by the popularity and appreciation of readers, this novel can rightfully be considered a folk novel.