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                                              Oliver Twist
In his preface to Oliver Twist, Dickens emphatically expressed resentment at the practice in popular literature of depicting rogues, like Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera, as dashing figures, leading lively and colorful lives. He considers such misrepresentations as a potentially harmful influence on impressionable minds. Dickens firmly maintains that the nature and behavior of his seemingly extreme characters reflect truth without distortion, however implausible they may seem.
Dickens is frequently charged with offering a view of the world that exaggerates reality. A novelist, however, communicates his interpretation of life through the medium of fiction. His accomplishment grows out of a blend of experience and imagination. In judging the writer’s success, we have to grant his purposes and goal. Dickens was fascinated by extreme behavior and attitudes. He had a peculiar talent for exaggeration. For him, real life was the springboard for fancy. Thus the world of story he created is a mirror in which the truths of the real world are reflected.

Oliver Twist is a good illustration of Dickens’s belief that the novel should do more than merely entertain. It should, he believed, be directed toward social reform. This does not mean Dickens was a propagandist who held forth idealistic goals as cures for the ills of the world. Although he bitterly attacks the defects of existing institutions—government, the law, education, penal systems—and mercilessly exposes the injustice and wretchedness inflicted by them, he does not suggest the overthrow of the established order. Nor will you find any easy answers or pat solutions.

Dickens’s attitudes and themes reflect a general approval of the English state and society. He could not have had such enormous popularity if he had not in a large measure voiced sentiments and values that motivated the readers of his times. Dickens looked upon almost all institutions with suspicion, including religious movements. In Hard Times, trade unionism is shown to be loaded with the potential for mischief, in the manner of all oppressive forces when those in power fall prey to corruption and abuse. Dickens had little confidence in systems as agencies of good but placed his faith in people.

To bring about improvements, he depended upon the release of the goodness that he felt to be inherent in all human nature. Dickens kept a strong belief that people, if they were not stifled, would behave with fairness. As a result, he firmly hated all individuals, institutions, and systems that he regarded as standing in the way of natural human goodness. He does not believe this endowment of human goodness is indestructible. In Oliver Twist, he acknowledges that the trait of goodness in humanity can be irretrievably lost if it is subjected to ungoverned corrupting influences.

For this reason, Dickens lays great stress on environment in the development of character and regulation of conduct. Although he had little faith in the operation of politics, he rested his hopes for progress on education. But schooling must be well conceived and administered. In many of his books, Dickens demonstrates with the full strength of his satiric lash how education, in the hands of the wrong authority figures, can become as bad if not worse than ignorance. It is noteworthy that whenever Oliver Twist’s fortunes begin to rise, his benefactors immediately take an interest in his education.

By: Charles Dickens

Edited by: Ahmad Shaaban