Oliver Twist 343seek refuge from starvation and physical abuse by
escaping into an underworld of crime and violence.
Oliver’s flight from the horrors of the workhouse
and the corruption of Fagin’s gang, and his eventual
ascension to his rightful social role and inheritance
is presented as an uplifting story of reclamation and
progress. However, even as Dickens underscores
the exceptional nature of Oliver’s happy fate, he
emphasizes to his middle-class audience the neces-
sity of saving the vast majority of orphans who, like
Nancy, the Artful Dodger or Bill Sykes, must resort
to a criminal life in order to survive.
In the first section of the novel, which describes
the wretched world of the workhouse, Dickens
focuses on Oliver’s physical endurance of the insti-
tution’s brutalities. The boy’s passage from infancy
to childhood is portrayed as a miracle of withstand-
ing the harsh ministrations of adult caretakers. The
author attacks the hypocrisy of British society’s
institutionalized charity through his ironic descrip-
tion of the workhouse and its officials, who, instead
of providing succor to the poor, impose on them a
vicious test of survival of the fittest. Oliver’s reac-
tions to deprivation and abuse, such as his request
for more food on behalf of the orphans and his
confrontation of those who insult his parentage,
reveal an inner core of moral courage that help him
escape an existence that drives others to despair
and death. Dickens does emphasize that aspects of
Oliver’s inherited gentility, manifested in his attrac-
tive appearance and gentle manners, help to save
him since others take pity upon him. Nonetheless,
it is the boy’s resolve to defy his oppressors and
seek another life that demonstrates he is not ground
down by the economic philosophers who have engi-
neered the workhouse system as a means of subdu-
ing the pauper class.
It is in the novel’s portrayal of London’s under-
world that the theme of survival is most thoroughly
explored. Oliver encounters young characters who
represent alternative corrupted childhoods that may
also entrap the young hero’s body and soul. The
Artful Dodger, who exploits the boy’s trust and
entices him into Fagin’s gang, has himself survived
the dangers of London’s street life by assuming the
airs, appearance, and craftiness of an adult criminal.
Dodger thus foregoes the innocence of childhood
and also the possibility of spiritual growth and moral
development. Nancy, another gang member, has
survived poverty and abuse as a child by succumb-
ing to adult corruptors who train her in theft and
prostitution. She therefore seems to be irrevocably
entrapped within their criminal caste. However,
she is inspired by Oliver’s innocent vulnerability
and goodness to eventually challenge the processes
of corruption driven by evildoers like Fagin and
Monks, Oliver’s half brother, who seek to obliter-
ate the child’s true identity and steal his right-
ful inheritance. Nancy foregoes her own physical
survival when she decides to save the orphan after
discovering that he is being forced to assist in the
gang’s house robberies. When she reveals to Oliver’s
benefactors that Fagin and Monks intend to make
the boy a criminal, her betrayal of the gang’s plans
becomes a death sentence, but by sacrificing her life
to rescue Oliver from corruption, she ensures her
spiritual salvation. Nonetheless, the fact that Nancy
is not allowed to survive, despite her noble deed,
lends force to Dickens’s message to his audience that
women like her and victimized youths like those of
Fagin’s gangs must be saved from a criminal culture
spawned by social forces based on irresponsible and
vicious materialism.
Ultimately, Dickens presents Oliver’s story not
only as an adventure of survival but also as a journey
of progress that leads the boy to the reclamation
of his true heritage and takes the form of genteel
class identity and material inheritance. Thus, Oliver
Twist is not merely a narrative of human endurance
whereby the author uses the figure of the pauper
orphan as a touchstone for society’s lack of char-
ity and neglect for its weakest members. The novel
offers hope that the power of innocence and purity,
as embodied in the child hero, can survive intact
and may even act as an agent of resistance against
the morally bankrupt forces that threaten to erode
Victorian society.
Diana ChlebekWOrk in Oliver Twist
By focusing on the lives of the working poor in Oli-
ver Twist, Charles Dickens grapples with a theme
that represents the introduction of a controversial
contemporary issue into Victorian fiction. Through