Skip to main content

Oliver Twist: Charles Dickens


 About Author:

                 Charles Dickens was the well-loved and prolific British author of numerous works that are now considered classics.British novelist Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England. Over the course of his writing career, he wrote the beloved classic novels Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. On June 9, 1870, Dickens died of a stroke in Kent, England, leaving his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished.



Theme of the novel:
1)The Failure of Charity
2)Purity in a Corrupt City
3) The Countryside Idealized
  About Novel:


                      Oliver Twist is born in a workhouse in 1830s England. His mother, whose name no one knows, is found on the street and dies just after Oliver’s birth. Oliver spends the first nine years of his life in a badly run home for young orphans and then is transferred to a workhouse for adults. After the other boys bully Oliver into asking for more gruel at the end of a meal, Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle, offers five pounds to anyone who will take the boy away from the workhouse. Oliver narrowly escapes being apprenticed to a brutish chimney sweep and is eventually apprenticed to a local undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry. When the undertaker’s other apprentice, Noah Claypole, makes disparaging comments about Oliver’s mother, Oliver attacks him and incurs the Sowerberrys’ wrath. Desperate, Oliver runs away at dawn and travels toward London.

                 Outside London, Oliver, starved and exhausted, meets Jack Dawkins, a boy his own age. Jack offers him shelter in the London house of his benefactor, Fagin. It turns out that Fagin is a career criminal who trains orphan boys to pick pockets for him. After a few days of training, Oliver is sent on a pickpocketing mission with two other boys. When he sees them swipe a handkerchief from an elderly gentleman, Oliver is horrified and runs off. He is caught but narrowly escapes being convicted of the theft. Mr. Brownlow, the man whose handkerchief was stolen, takes the feverish Oliver to his home and nurses him back to health. Mr. Brownlow is struck by Oliver’s resemblance to a portrait of a young woman that hangs in his house. Oliver thrives in Mr. Brownlow’s home, but two young adults in Fagin’s gang, Bill Sikes and his lover Nancy, capture Oliver and return him to Fagin.
            Fagin sends Oliver to assist Sikes in a burglary. Oliver is shot by a servant of the house and, after Sikes escapes, is taken in by the women who live there, Mrs. Maylie and her beautiful adopted niece Rose. They grow fond of Oliver, and he spends an idyllic summer with them in the countryside. But Fagin and a mysterious man named Monks are set on recapturing Oliver. Meanwhile, it is revealed that Oliver’s mother left behind a gold locket when she died. Monks obtains and destroys that locket. When the Maylies come to London, Nancy meets secretly with Rose and informs her of Fagin’s designs, but a member of Fagin’s gang overhears the conversation. When word of Nancy’s disclosure reaches Sikes, he brutally murders Nancy and flees London. Pursued by his guilty conscience and an angry mob, he inadvertently hangs himself while trying to escape.
               Mr. Brownlow, with whom the Maylies have reunited Oliver, confronts Monks and wrings the truth about Oliver’s parentage from him. It is revealed that Monks is Oliver’s half brother. Their father, Mr. Leeford, was unhappily married to a wealthy woman and had an affair with Oliver’s mother, Agnes Fleming. Monks has been pursuing Oliver all along in the hopes of ensuring that his half-brother is deprived of his share of the family inheritance. Mr. Brownlow forces Monks to sign over Oliver’s share to Oliver. Moreover, it is discovered that Rose is Agnes’s younger sister, hence Oliver’s aunt. Fagin is hung for his crimes. Finally, Mr. Brownlow adopts Oliver, and they and the Maylies retire to a blissful existence in the countryside.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poem: Were I To Choose by Gabriel Okara

Were I to Choose   “When Adam broke the stone             and red streams reged down to           gather in the womb,           an angel calmed the storm”, “And I, the breath mewed             in Cain, unbliniking gaze                 at the world without                              from the brink of an age”.             Gabriel is immersed in folk tradition and ballad influences of tradition and culture are found in his poem. His poems are regional as well as universal. His poems are sometimes lyrical and full of music.                     The poem ‘Were I to choose’ is reminiscent of yeast poem called “Adam’s Curse.” The poet has tried to compare Adam’s toiling in the soil with the Negros working in the soil. They broke the stone themselves which was their very foundation. The red streams are symbolized for the multilingual diversity that reaches the womb Africa.           Cain in this poem metaphorically represents the next generation. ‘I’ in Ok
Post a Comment
Read more

Poem: "Daddy" by sylvia plath

  Poem: Daddy You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew.
Post a Comment
Read more

Poem: The Mystic Drum by Gabriel Okara

The Mystic Drum:                     The Mystic Drum is Okara’s love lyric. The Mystic Drum evinces a tripartite ritual pattern of imitation from innocence through intimacy to experience. By comparison to the way of zone as manifested in the experience of Zen master, Chin Yuan Wei-Asian this pattern resolves itself into an emotional and epistemic logical journey from conventional knowledge through more intimate knowledge to learn of experience empowers the lover to understand that beneath the surface attractiveness of what we know very well may lie an abyss of the unknown and unknowable belching darkness.                   But experience teaches us at this stage of substantial knowledge not to expose ourselves to the dangers of being beholden to this unknown and unknowable reality by keeping our passions under strict control including the prudent decision to ‘pack’ the ‘Mystic Drum’ of our innocence and evanescence making sure that it does not ‘beat so lo
Post a Comment
Read more