ŷ������

“Midnight had come upon the crowded city. The palace, the night-cellar, the jail, the madhouse: the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face of the corpse the calm sleep of the child: midnight was upon them all.��

Charles Dickens was only 25 when he began what would become Oliver Twist, intended as a serial in Bentley’s Miscellany which he was just beginning to edit, and had his hand in a number of other projects at the same time. So he was young, distracted, over-worked, and inexperienced, and yet still, he pulled this off. Amazing. You watch Dickens turn into a novelist as he wrote this, a journey I found particularly fascinating.

The story is a unique combination of gritty realism, sensational melodrama, and thoughtful social commentary. Oliver is born a parish boy, an orphan raised on a “baby farm�� to go straight to the work house. He’s used and abused by those within the law and outside of it, and Dickens builds an intricate web of story around him, involving all sorts of characters. Thieves and prostitutes and exploiters are the real grist of this story, a world he knew from his own insecure childhood. But he didn’t make them caricatures. Regardless of their acts, they’re rounded and mostly sympathetic. I love this about Dickens.

And his villainous characters are not the real villains here. The real villains are those in power who do not stop to look and see what is happening in the lives of those they control. So he draws the picture to help show us the reality we’re missing. This makes him more than an entertainer, more than a novelist. He’s a humanitarian of the first order and though we still have so far to go, his work has truly made a difference in this world.

I came to this knowing little about the story. I’d never read it, never seen the play or even a film all the way through. So I feel like I got the full effect, and thanks to the Dickensians! group and our slow read, I got it in a similar way to his original readers. I cannot thank Bionic Jean enough for teasing out and generously sharing the massive amount of detail and background to this story, giving it so much depth and making it another very memorable experience.

My admiration for Dickens continues to grow with every book, and I have many more ahead of me, a fact that fills me with delightful anticipation!