B.A .Thesis Chapter 2 Analysis of Oliver Twist
decidedly older in his grown man?s clothes and because he had got about him all the airs and manners of a man” (Dickens, 1992:78).
In due time, Oliver himself begins to get familiar with the dark and dirty surroundings of Fagin?s den and even with all of central London. In all the dreary rooms, there was but one “back-garret window, with rusty bars outside, which had no shutter, and out of which Oliver often gazed with a melancholy face for hours together; but nothing was to be descried from it but a confused and crowded mass of house-tops, blackened chimneys and gable-ends” (Dickens, 1992:96). Here, Oliver develops a physical connection to the den and the surrounding city, as his gaze is fixed on the largely undistinguishable “crowded mass” of the city in the same manner that the “window of his observatory was nailed down” (Dickens, 1992:97). His many gazes out the window serve to connect him to the city, however, his gaze stems from a longing and desire to be someplace other than the den. In this instance, Oliver?s connection with the city is far more distant than the relationships that Fagin and the Dodger share with the city.
Oliver?s vastly different relationship with the city of London allows him to distance himself from the corruption in a manner that other characters cannot achieve. Nothing physically ties any of the characters to a specific place such as London, even if they share a distinctly clear physical relationship with that place. As wrote earlier, Oliver runs into
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B.A .Thesis Chapter 2 Analysis of Oliver Twist
the Dodger outside the city, but his relationship to the city is so embedded in his identity that he takes a part of the city?s vicious forces with him. When Fagin leaves London and his den, he too carries particular signs of those places. The evenning on which Fagin and Monks discover Oliver sleeping in his room, the mere presence of Fagin changes the scene. Still asleep, Oliver senses that “the air became close and confined, and he thought with a glow of terror that he was in the Jew?s house” (Dickens, 1992:110). Fagin?s identity is so closely mingled with his den, which represents the evil center of London, that he cannot rid himself of the connection. In crafting Oliver?s relation to the city, Dickens takes particular care to ensure that it does not damage his identity but instead only touches him on a surface level. Thus not allowing Oliver to blend in with society, unlike the Dodger and Fagin. As a result, this separation from the city?s identity allows Oliver to prosper in the care of the Maylies and Mr. Brownlow.
Dickens? decision to represent Oliver Twist as incorruptible has “exposed both author and character to considerable abuse” (Peters, 1998:55). Exactly why did Dickens pursue such a strategy? I will argue that Dickens represents his hero as morally immune from the effects of his brutal childhood environment because of an acute anxiety about the ability of the bourgeois society to inculcate a moral principle. This anxiety, far from being peculiar to Dickens, is made by the very structure
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B.A .Thesis Chapter 2 Analysis of Oliver Twist
of nineteenth-century England. At the same time, Oliver stands for the goodness and hope of the society
Last, Oliver Twist was the Dickens himself in the novel.
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B.A .Thesis Chapter 3 Analysis of Fagin
Chapter 3 Analysis of Fagin
3.1 Fagin and his Den
In Oliver Twist，London is the home of spectacle, lurid and grotesque. And one of Dickens? narrative purposes is to involve us in the excitements of the discovery of Oliver. It is developed by the sequence that starts with the Artful Dodger discovering the hungry Oliver and ends when the boy is brought to Fagin?s den.
As Fagin glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the ugly old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, born in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal.
Fagin?s den is both a dungeon and a place of refuge. It is absolutely shut off from the outside world, but it is also a parody, at least, of a home, that place where one lives safely. Fagin?s den, says Dickens, is a “snug retreat,” and inside its walls we find a society leagued for common protection against the hostility of the outside world.
Those of us who have but little taste for a romantic praise of criminality will resist the temptation to see Dickens as totally caught up with the world of Fagin and Sikes. Though the accounts we hear of
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B.A .Thesis Chapter 3 Analysis of Fagin
Dickens? public readings from Oliver Twist, in which he portrayed its characters with a terrifying vividness, suggest that part of him must have felt a secret kinship with these outlaws. We are surely persuaded by Dickens to deplore the thieves and murderers, to feel disgust and fright before them. Dickens put these outlaws in the sharpest contrast to the blandness of the “good” characters. Fagin and his gang talk like recognizable human beings. And when the Artful Dodger, in one of Dickens? most brilliant descriptions, is dragged into court, he sounds like a comic echo of Julien Sorel at the end of The Red and the Black. “Gentlemen, I have not the honor to belong to your class,” Julien tells his jurors. “This isn?t the shop for justice,” the Artful Dodger tells his judges.
3.2 Fagin’s Absolute Evil
Fagin is the strongest figure in the book—certainly the most troubling. He is a forceful figure. He barely exists as an individual and barely needs to. We learn nothing about his interior life, we are not invited to see him as “three dimensional”, except, in the last chapter, where he sits in prison waiting to be hanged and suffers that terror of death which finally makes him one of us. Nor is Fagin given the sort of great redeeming speech that Shakespeare gives Shylock. Fagin does cry out before his death, “What right have they to butcher me”, but this has little of the generalizing moral resonance of Shylock?s “Hath not a Jew
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