The frequent talk during the recent election of food banks, and the number of children living in poverty, must have brought Oliver Twist to many minds.  Thanks partly to countless dramatizations, several films and above all perhaps the musical, Dicken’s novel has become, as Ella Westland says in her introduction to the Wordsworth edition, `legendary in British culture’.   The young orphan, acting as a reluctant and timid representative of his equally hungry companions, and holding out his bowl to ask for more, is now an iconic figure.   But though Oliver gives his name to the novel, he is not its most interesting character.  A triumph of nature over nurture and with an innate gentility which means that he can never willingly succumb to wrong doing he is like Peter Pan in never seeming to grow up.   Yet he is a convenient peg on which Dickens can hang the complicated narrative of what was essentially his first novel.

              It is true that The Pickwick Papers had come before but, as its title suggests, this was less a novel than a series of sketches, most of which displayed Dickens’s astonishing talent for comedy.  By calling the man who plays such a prominent role in his hero’s early tribulations Bumble, it might seem as if he was treading the same path in Oliver Twist yet initially the beadle is very largely a cruel monster and a manifestation of the indignation which had been excited in his creator by discussions surrounding the new Poor Law act of 1834.  It is only later, and particularly after he has married the matron of the workhouse, Mrs. Corney and become head of the workhouse himself, that Bumble begins to live up to his name.  What seems to incense Dickens about the treatment of poor orphans is not so much the harshness of the regulations but the behaviour of those who, dressed in a little brief authority, administer them.  It is Bumble’s self-importance which becomes comically absurd, especially when his opportunities for his exerting it are rendered null by a domineering wife.   A more extreme example of those who abuse their modicum of power is the magistrate who, indifferent to the evidence and full of angry prejudice, is on the point of sending Oliver off to jail for a theft he did not commit.  Appropriately called Fang, he is clearly a result of the time Dickens spent as a journalist reporting on crime in the law courts.  The fierce sarcasm with which he is treated is reminder of the difficulty of knowing when and how far satire should be regarded as comic.  How often are readers of Swift’s Modest Proposal found rolling in the aisles?

              Moving from sketches to novel writing involved Dickens in a steep learning curve, especially as he was writing in instalments.   His heavy reliance on theatrical devices reflect his keen interest in the stage and the fact that, in the early 1830s, he seriously considered becoming an actor.  One of these devices is overhearing and it is striking the efforts he goes to in order to make it realistic.  The spot in The Three Cripples, the pub Fagin and his associates frequent, where you can hear clearly what those in an adjoining booth are saying, is minutely described as is that on the descent from London Bridge where Noah Claypole can overhear what the golden-hearted prostitute Nancy is saying to Mr Brownlow and Rose.  Nancy, it is true, only learns why Monks and Fagin are so concerned about Oliver by listening at the door and Monks himself is a villain straight out of early Victorian melodrama.  One can almost see him twirling the ends of his mustachios as he speaks.

              Dickens’s narrative drive rarely falters but there is a point in the middle of the novel where, to achieve the requisite length, he falls back on having Oliver rescued twice.  On the first occasion, he is saved by Mr Brownlow who is then foolish enough to take a bet with his eccentric friend Grimwig that the boy will safely deliver books and money to the local bookseller when the readers know that Fagin and his gang are out to kidnap him.  Don’t do it, you can hear the audience in the gods shouting.  Back with the thieves, Oliver is then taken on a house-breaking expedition by Bill Sikes because only he is small enough to get through the window Sikes knows how to prise open.  When the house is alerted Oliver is wounded but then nursed lovingly back to health by the Maylie family.  The period he spends with them is the only time in this novel when its interest begins to slacken so that it is a relief to be taken back from highly sentimental middle-class comfort to Fagin’s academy for young pickpockets and the low life of Sikes and Nancy.

              The reason Fagin initially gives for his anxiety to recover Oliver is fear that he might `peach’ (later it will be revealed to have involved his parentage, legacies and the fact that Monks is his half-brother).     Peaching in the sense of to inform against is one of the many terms that Dickens borrows from a thief’s vocabulary that adds local colour to his lively depiction of London’s underworld.   Stealing handkerchiefs (but watches also if you can get them!) must have been the equivalent of today’s shoplifting and just as in our time stolen goods are bought by cut-price stores for resale so Dickens, with his remarkable knowledge of the capital’s more obscure and unsavoury quarters, describes where you can find stolen handkerchiefs on open sale.   Fagin’s pickpockets are a cheerful group, at least if Charlie Bates and the Artful Dodger are anything to go by, but for burglary and muscle he has to rely on Bill Sikes.  The relation of Bill with Nancy is an illustration of the Stockholm syndrome before anyone thought to call it that.  Abused as she is, Nancy cannot see any prospect for herself in desertion and only inadvertently betrays Sikes in her efforts to protect Oliver.   There is an obvious parallel here with Sikes’s dog who, similarly abused, is faithful to the last even if it is his very loyalty which leads Sikes’s pursuers back to him and eventually causes his death.  Early as the novel is, this is one of the great scenes in Dickens and one he returned to often in his public readings.

              The ending of Oliver Twist gives us the first real taste of Dickens’s determination to satisfy his readers’ expectations and tie up all the knots although one could easily quarrel with one of two of his decisions.  Fagin is no less anti-Semitic in conception than Shakespeare’s Shylock but that he should meet a sad end seems appropriate enough even though his dealings with his protegés often appear kindly.  The evil in his nature is made clear when it is revealed that he has the habit of betraying associates to the police when he no longer has any use for them and the way he inaccurately conveys to Sikes what Noah Claypole has told him about Nancy’s meeting with Brownlow and Rose more or less ensures she will be killed.  Noah himself is a peculiarly odious figure from the moment he persecutes Oliver when the two of them are working for the undertaker, to when he reappears in order to function as Fagin’s spy.  Stupid, cowardly and treacherous he gets off lightly in Dickens’s settling of accounts.  Bumble and his wife are dealt with by the assurance they will never work for a parish again and it seems like justice of the poetic variety that they themselves should end up in the same poorhouse whose occupants they had previously ill-used so systematically.  There is redemption for Charlie Bates after he has courageously expressed his horror at Sikes’ murder of Nancy but the Dodger is a notable absentee from these final reckonings.  In his now standard biography of Dickens, Michael Slater calls the Dodger Oliver Twist’s `greatest comic character’ and refers to the `splendidly unrepentant comic-triumphant exit’ he has already made before these reckonings take place.  Readers have therefore to assume that he will be or has already been transported in which case they are likely to conclude that Australia’s gain is England’s loss.

              One of the most cheering aspects of Oliver Twist is how immensely popular it was.  The general public appeared to have immediately recognised that here was a writer who could not only make them laugh but display  extraordinary powers in describing and evoking both the natural world and all the byways of a great city, especially the less frequented ones; that his management of narrative was skilful and that he knew how to exploit to the full various of the dominant literary modes of his day.  What they could not know was how seemingly inexhaustible his creativity would prove and how the prediction of one his critics which Slater quotes, that having risen like a rocket Dickens might well come down like a stick, would prove unfounded.  Even as he was writing the pursuit and death of Sikes, he was also busy with the splendid opening pages of Nicholas Nickleby with their assault on the evils of financial greed.  His public could immediately see he was a great writer but not that he had an imagination which in its richness and staying power would prove positively Shakespearean.