Cityread Blog

Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy’s Progress: What kind of book does this title encourage us to expect? What kind of hero does it offer?
April 10, 2012

A response from Aoife Mannix to the first of our online book group discussion points.  Please add your own comments here and/or join the discussion on facebook. http://www.facebook.com/cityreadlondon

Check out Aoife’s guest blog post for Foyles here http://www.foyles.co.uk/guest-blog-london-through-the-eyes-of-dickens

I first read Oliver Twist when I was twelve years old.  My mother had taken me to see the musical on Broadway as we lived in New York at the time.  Mainly I remember being devastated by Nancy’s death.  I loved the show so much I thought I’d try the book.  Admittedly it didn’t have the catchy songs and there were quite a lot of big words but it seemed to be about a boy around my age struggling to make sense of a strange adult world.  Despite our very different circumstances, there was a lot I could relate to.

Coming back to it a quarter of a century later, I realise I’d completely forgotten the full title is ‘Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy’s Progress.’  It’s a title that introduces Oliver as a young hero who begins in poverty but manages to advance himself.  It seems to appeal to a certain Victorian Christian ideal of charity and hard work.  The Victorians were rather fond of dividing the poor into those that were deserving of sympathy and those that were lazy and degenerate.  The title sets up a certain expectation of this being a moral tale of the triumph of virtue and innocence over corruption.  Which on one level the novel almost certainly is.

However from the first pages Dickens undermines the moralising tone with his dark sense of humour.  He describes how the newborn Oliver is struggling to draw his first breath in circumstances of shocking neglect.

Now, if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been killed in no time. There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer; and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them. The result was, that, after a few struggles, Oliver breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to advertise to the inmates of the workhouse the fact of a new burden having been imposed upon the parish, by setting up as loud a cry as could reasonably have been expected from a male infant who had not been possessed of that very useful appendage, a voice, for a much longer space of time than three minutes and a quarter.

Dickens doesn’t of course really believe that a baby should be born with nobody paying any attention as to whether he lives or dies.  Yet rather than preaching at his readers about Victorian London’s appalling child mortality rate, he pokes fun at the notion of progress under such inhuman conditions.  It seems to me that from the outset, Dickens is questioning his own title and the Victorian morality behind it.

Comments (1)

  • http://www.camden.gov.uk Felicity Page

    This is a subtle point – I just laughed inwardly when I read this paragraph about Oliver’s birth, thinking that Dickens was being sly and poking fun at muddling adults. He also gives us a hint of Oliver’s character and determination at a very early stage in his life – the very first stage – as a sign that he will be a survivor, not like many poor children in Dickens’ novels who die at an early age, overswhelmed by their unfortunate circumstances and the indifference of the adults around them. The mid- wife is not misty eyed at the miracle of life as one might expect, but by over indulgance of beer – and she is a key to his identity, as we later discover, so a very important character in his life.

A Week in December
By Sebastian Faulks

London, the week before Christmas 2007. Over seven wintry days, we follow the lives of seven characters across the city, from a hedge fund manager to a Tube train driver. Above the complex patterns of modern urban life, the writing on the wall appears in letters ten feet high, but the characters refuse to see it . As the gripping climax looms, they are forced, one by one, to awake from their blinkered present to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit.

About Aoife Mannix
Aoife Mannix was born in Sweden of Irish parents. She grew up in Dublin, Ottawa and New York before moving to London. Her first novel Heritage of Secrets was published in 2008. She is the author of four collections of poetry; The Trick of Foreign Words (2002), The Elephant in the Corner (2005), Growing Up An Alien (2007) and Turn The Clocks Upside Down (2008). She regularly features on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live. She has been writer in residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Poetry School, Spread the Word, All Change and Apples & Snakes. She has performed throughout the UK including at Latitude, the Big Chill, and Ledbury Poetry Festival. She has toured internationally with the British Council to China, Latvia, Nigeria, Turkey, Taiwan, Thailand, India, Norway and Austria. To find out more, please visit her website www.aoifemannix.com

About Sarah Parker
Dr Sarah Parker is an early career academic specialising in nineteenth and twentieth century literature. She is running this year’s Cityread Online Book Group.


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