Jørgen Riber Christensen
Oliver Twist or, The Parish Boy’s Progress
On the first page of Horace’s Ars Poetica from the first century B.C. he writes about
‘purpureus pannus’ - a purple patch - an impressive passage that can catch the eye, a
passage that stands out from the rest of the poem. Horace’s concept may be adapted a little
to denote a passage that is unforgettable and that takes on the function of an icon of the total
text, or that even takes on an independent existence and that is able to live on its own.
Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ springs to the mind, but also within popular culture we may
encounter purple passages such as ‘Quite frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn!’ from the film
Gone with the Wind or ‘There’s a hundred and six miles to Chicago. We’ve got a full tank of
gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.’ from the cult film
Blues Brothers. Dickens has his purple passage of quite a modest kind in Oliver Twist in
chapter 2 when Oliver speaks his line ‘Please, Sir, I want some more.’ This sentence may
very well be one of the most central in world literature. Everybody knows that Oliver is the boy
who asked for more. Here we see that Oliver Twist has turned into a culture text or a mythotext, i.e., a text that has left the domain of literature and entered the more general realm of
culture-describing and culture-understanding texts, and as such this particular tableau in
Oliver Twist has broken away from the rest of the novel; but this passage is also - not
surprisingly - the key to the whole novel. It may be noted that in the film adaptations of Oliver
Twist this scene is stressed.
Poverty, Oliver and Malthus
The first eleven chapters of Oliver Twist are about poverty, misery and starvation, and life at
the workhouse is an apt symbol of the condition of the poor in Victorian Britain. Dickens, the
social reformer, shows his indignation here. It is perhaps the most valuable of the discourses
in the novel with its pivotal point in the “more-scene.” This strong ideological content of the
novel cannot be read without taking Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and his theory about the
increase of the population as well as The New Poor Law of 1834 into account.
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In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798, rev. ed. 1803) Thomas Malthus
contended that poverty and distress are unavoidable because population increases faster
than the means of subsistence. As check on population growth he accepted only war, famine
and disease, but in the revised edition of 1803 Malthus added ‘moral restraint’ as well. (It may
here be noted that the dreaded and rapid rise of population was due not to an increase in
births, but to a decrease in deaths: Between 1801 and 1831 the inhabitants of England,
Wales and Scotland rose from 11 to 16.5 millions.)
These Malthusian principles were the ideological basis of the New Poor Law of 1834. This
Poor Law had as one of its functions to be a means of demographic regulation. This function
was carried out in various ways. First of all life in the workhouse was to be made less
attractive than employment in field and factory for the workman. So meagre rations and harsh
discipline were to see to it that able-bodied men sought employment. However, the treatment
of old people, children and the invalid was just as bad. Malthus had argued against the old
Poor Law and its provisions: The right of the poor to parish relief tended to promote ‘vice and
misery’ by encouraging population growth. So to prevent the poor from propagating their class
the workhouses were segregated by sex, which meant that families were separated, and
there was a mandate to low diets, so that the poor remained in a semi-starved condition to
prevent them from being ‘overwhelmed’ by their ‘powerful instincts’.
When Oliver asks for more in his confrontation with Bumble, the Beadle, he illustrates the
meeting between the “necessity” of the New Poor Law with its human consequences. Dickens
was careful in his choice of a representative of the poor. Oliver is an innocent boy, an orphan
even. He is not a sexual being. He belongs to the lumpen-proletariat; but later in the novel we
get to know that he has middle-class origins. And yet he is a rebel. When Oliver asks for
more, he asks for a redistribution of the wealth of society. Yet Oliver never voices these
demands explicitly. They are not spoken aloud until much later in the novel in the court scene
where the Artful Dodger with echoes of Sam Weller in the court scene in The Pickwick Papers
demands his rights as an Englishman. The Artful Dodger is transported; but Oliver’s
innocence poses a much wider threat as he is a danger both to bourgeois society in the form
of Mr. Bumble and the Police Magistrate as well as to the lumpen-proletariat in the form of
Fagin.
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Malthus’ ‘powerful instincts’ are a metaphor for sexuality. The sexuality of the proletariat
poses a demographic danger; but what is Oliver, the innocent child in his latency period,
doing in such a context? The Cruikshank illustration of ‘Oliver asking for more’ has been read
in a sexual light (Richard Dellamora, Pure Oliver: or Representation without agency in Schad,
1996). Oliver’s raised spoon has been interpreted as the proletarian reproductive and not
productive phallus that consumes and spends at the same time. Yet Oliver is carefully
positioned and chosen by Dickens so that he immediately negates what he suggests. Oliver is
a child, and as such he is an example of procreation, and not of sexuality. He is not a mature
sexual being. His innocence and purity are also at this point in the novel an ideological
argument against Malthus. He is an orphan asking for more thin gruel. He is not a Chartist,
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not a male proletarian. At this point the plot and the ideology of the novel are in accord, as
Oliver’s purity is a crucial element in the argumentative structure of each.
Oliver’s purity is again the issue in the corresponding illustration, ‘Oliver introduced to the
Respectable Old Gentleman’. The two illustrations anchor one another. They have the same
composition and the same elements. In particular Oliver’s raised walking stick has been seen
as a parallel to the phallic spoon. It may be so, but within the last illustration the walking stick
is an actual parallel line to Fagin’s toasting fork, which is pointing at the broadsheet print on
the wall of a hanging. So the message of the illustration is both a hint of what may happen to
Oliver if he stays with Fagin and a prolepsis of Fagin’s fate. The two illustrations together
show Oliver being threatened by the representatives of the bourgeois state as well as by the
proletariat. Oliver is in an intermediary position in the class structure. He belongs nowhere in
it. He is not just on his way up in the class system. The novel is no easy rags-to-riches story.
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Oliver actually never achieves a bourgeois existence of respectability. There is no translation
of his purity into respectability. The solution to Oliver’s stratificational problems is that he is
adopted by a group of wealthy bachelors; but charity and benevolence on this purely personal
level is more an ideological smoke screen than a remedy against the Malthusian workhouse
system. The novel is not silent about the untenability of its own solution. Oliver is kidnapped
or threatened even in the haven of the bourgeoisie, and the ‘respectability’ of the ‘benevolent’
class is first caricatured by Fagin, when he parades in front of the boys in chapter 9 ‘in
imitation of the manner in which old gentlemen walk about the streets any hour in any day’,
and later by Monks, Oliver’s half-brother whose face is disfigured by a ‘hideous disease’, i.e.,
syphilis.
Respectability, plot and ideology
The plot of Oliver Twist is Gothic in its nature. The main character is a victim threatened by a
mysterious figure, who is eventually disclosed as a near-relative. As in other novels by
Dickens a will plays an important role in the plot. Oliver’s and Monk’s father has stipulated in
his will that if Oliver is not ‘pure’ the whole fortune will belong to Monks, and Monks seeks
through Fagin to pervert Oliver away from his innocence. However, the denouement of the
plot and the disclosure of Oliver’s middle-class origins do not make him respectable. Monk’s
being Oliver’s half-brother and the fact that he is illegitimate taint Oliver as it does he sainted
mother as well as his father. Here ideology and plot are intertwined in a complex way
because we do not just have the superficial success story at the level of the plot of Oliver
moving from the lumpen-proletariat or the poor into the bourgeoisie and Monks moving in the
opposite direction. We also have at the level of ideology that Oliver moves from the lumpenproletariat towards the bourgeoisie but is stopped before he reaches it and has to stay here,
and Monks in the universe of the novel does not really originate in the bourgeoisie - his
connection to Fagin is far too strong - though he ends up in the lumpen-proletariat and dies in
prison abroad. The point is that Oliver ends up in a stasis at the end of the novel between the
lumpen-proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Oliver does not represent a consensus-like mediator
in the class system. He is simply caught tragically between two classes.
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Also, at the plot level the two worlds or classes find it hard to meet. When they are
confronted as the situation when Monks and Fagin look at Oliver through the window of the
Maylies house he is not sure whether it is a dream or not. Oliver's passages from one class to
another are like rebirths from which he always has to recuperate. The unreality of Oliver’s
stays in both classes is stressed by the fact that his identity is at risk and being negated in
both worlds.
To the reader the ideological aspect of Oliver Twist seems to be stronger than its Gothic
plot. What is memorable are the first eleven chapters with its proletarian world and its
atmosphere, whereas the complicated plot with its intricacies of the second half of the book
fades from memory pretty soon. Mr. Bumble and Fagin are far more memorable than Mr.
Brownlow and Mr. Grimwig.
What happened to the Oliver who asked for more?
In the first half of the novel Oliver is described as a miserable and frightened child whose
character is enhanced by the fact that it stands for the oppressed Victorian poor. In the
second part of the book this Oliver has been changed into a wronged young gentleman
seeking to win a place in the bourgeoisie, and this character tends to be less interesting. The
first Oliver disappears as he awakens to his new life in with Mr. Brownlow. However, the
Oliver who asked for more is transformed into Jack Dawkins, or the Artful Dodger as he is
called. The Artful Dodger repeats Oliver’s plea when he at court echoes the spirit of the
People’s Charter of 1838: 'this ain’t the shop for justice’ and ‘where are my priwileges?’. The
Artful Dodger as an ideological representative in the second part of the novel of the first Oliver
does qua his ideological status not fit into the plot. He is removed from it through a sentence
of seven years of transportation. Fagin on the other hand, is not saved from the plot. He is
hanged. Fagin is not ideologically double-coded, and as such the pity which the reader cannot
help from feeling with him in the condemned cell is transformed into not social indignation, but
indignation directed at the system of capital punishment, which Dickens had already
documented the year before he started to write Oliver Twist in ‘A Visit to Newgate’ (1836).
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