Oliver Twist Dickens, London, Realism

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Oliver TwistDickens, London, Realism
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I. Dickens London

• Hippolyte Taine on London
• Nothing here is natural everything is
  transformed, violently changed, from the earth
  and man himself, to the very light and air. But
  the hugeness of this accumulation of man-made
  things takes off the attention from this
  deformity and this artifice in default of a
  wholesome and noble beauty, there is life,
  teeming and grandiose.

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I. Dickens London

• George Gissing on Dickenss London
• London as a place of squalid mystery and
  terror, of the grimly grotesque, of labyrinthine
  obscurity and lurid fascination, is Dickenss
  own he taught people a certain way of regarding
  the huge city, and to this day how common it is
  to see London with Dickenss eyes.

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II. A Novel Medium

• Dickens Preface to OT
• It is useless to discuss whether the conduct
  and character of the girl seems natural or
  unnatural, probable or improbable, right or
  wrong. IT IS TRUE. Every man who has watched
  these melancholy shades of life, must know it to
  be so. From the first introduction of that poor
  wretch, to her laying her blood-stained head upon
  the robbers breast, there is not a word
  exaggerated or over-wrought. It is emphatically
  gods truth, for it is the truth. (Preface xvii)

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II. A Novel Medium

• It is the custom on the stage, in all good
  murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and
  the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as
  the layers of red and white in a side of streaky
  bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed
  down by fetters and misfortunes in the next
  scene, his faithful but unconscious squire
  regales the audience with a comic song. We
  behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the
  grasp of a proud and ruthless baron her virtue
  and her life alike in danger, drawing forth her
  dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the
  other and just as our expectations are wrought
  up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard, and
  we are straightway transported to the great hall
  of the castle where a grey-headed seneschal
  sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of
  vassals, who are free of all sorts of places,
  from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in
  company, carolling perpetually.
• Such changes appear absurd but they are not so
  unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The
  transitions in real life from well-spread boards
  to death-beds, and from mourning-weeds to holiday
  garments, are not a whit less startling only,
  there, we are busy actors, instead of passive
  lookers-on, which makes a vast difference. The
  actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are
  blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses
  of passion or feeling, which, presented before
  the eyes of mere spectators, are at once
  condemned as outrageous and preposterous. (129)

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III. Twists London

• Map of Olivers London

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III. Twists London

• Saffron-Hill, Field Lane, Farringdon (near
  Holborn) A dirtier or more wretched place he
  had never seen. The street was very narrow and
  muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy
  odours. There were a good many small shops but
  the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of
  children, who, even at that time of night, were
  crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming
  from the inside. The sole places that seemed to
  prosper amid the general blight of the place,
  were the public-houses and in-them, the lowest
  orders of Irish were wrangling with might and
  main. Covered ways and yards, which here and
  there diverged from the main street, disclosed
  little knots of houses, where drunken men and
  women were positively wallowing in filth and
  from several of the door-ways, great ill-looking
  fellows were cautiously emerging, bound, to all
  appearance, on no very well-disposed or harmless
  errands. (59-60)

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III. Twists London

• Smithfield, Farringdon
• It was market-morning. The ground was covered,
  nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire a thick
  steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies
  of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which
  seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung
  heavily above.
• . . . Countrymen, butchers, drovers,
  hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of
  every low grade, were mingled together in a mass
  the whistling of drovers, the barking of dogs,
  the bellowing and plunging of oxen, the bleating
  of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the
  cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and
  quarrelling on all sides the ringing of bells
  and roar of voices that issued from every
  public-house the crowding, pushing, driving,
  beating, whooping, and yelling the hideous and
  discordant din that resounded from every corner
  of the market and the unwashed, unshaven,
  squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to
  and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng
  rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene,
  which quite confounded the sense (164).

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IV. Controversies

• Queen Victorias DiariesTold him (Lord
  Melbourne) Mamma admonished me for reading light
  books (Oliver Twist) (44)Lord Melbourne on
  Oliver Twist I dont like those things
  (Workhouses and Pickpockets) I wish to avoid
  them I dont like them in reality, and therefore
  I dont wish them represented.William
  Thackeray on Oliver TwistNovelist William
  Thackeray, a rival of Dickens', asserted that men
  of genius "had no business to make these
  characters interesting or agreeable, to be
  feeding their readers' morbid fancies, or
  indulging their own, with such monstrous food."

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IV. Controversies

• Dickens Letter to a reader about his portrayal
  of Fagin, 1863  
• I must take leave to say, that if there be any
  general feeling on the part of the intelligent
  Jewish people, that I have done them what you
  describe as a great wrong, they are a far less
  sensible, a far less just, and a far less
  good-tempered people than I have always supposed
  them to be. Fagin, in Oliver Twist, is a Jew,
  because it unfortunately was true of the time to
  which that story refers, that that class of
  criminal almost invariably was a Jew.

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IV. Dickenss Realism Remediated
Henry Mayhew, The Jew, 1861.
John Thompson, The Crawlers, 1877.
Gustave Dore, Wentworth Street,Whitechapel, 1872.