Cheap Oliver Twist (Book) (Charles Dickens) Price

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Customer Reviews of Oliver Twist

Thieves, Murderers and all of their Ilk
This book surprised me, not by the quality of its writing, which one can expect from Charles Dickens, but by the violent, lusty primal quality of the story. This is no dry musty tome, but a vital novel that arouses both passion and intellect. A literal page turner, I found myself having more than one sleepless night when I just couldn't put it down.

Inside are some of the major characters in the realm of fiction; Fagin and his gang of child thieves, including the Artful Dodger. Nancy, the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold. Master Charles Bates (was this a pun even then?) Bad Bill Sikes, who shows the darker edge to all of this dangerous fun, and the innocent, pure Oliver Twist, who is the very definition of nature over nurture.

A great book, and one that I am glad to have finally read.

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A Page-Turner
A novel of this size can be daunting for the reader. "If I start this book, I'm going to have to spend the next month finishing it". That's what I thought anyway. But in Oliver Twist I sailed through the pages. It's rare that a classic, and I have read many of them, becomes a page-turner but this one did. Maybe I was lucky in not having seen the film versions prior to the reading of the book because I desperately wanted to find out what happened to Oliver and the multitude of other brilliantly written characters who inhabit the pages of Dickens' classic.

The plot is simple. A boy escapes his orphan home to live in London with a group of thieves and pickpockets. He's saved from this depraved life by a kindly, lonely old gentleman. But the villains, Bill Sykes and especially Fagin, fear that the boy may rat them out and so they kidnap him back. Can Oliver make it back to the life he deserves?

Oliver's story is not a very originally one, but it is enlivened by some of the greatest characters I've ever seen written. My personal favourites and there are many, are Noah Claypole who becomes a principle player and a very funny one at that, near the book's conclusion; and Mr. Brownlow, who's catchphrase "I'll eat my own head" had me bursting into laughter.

The book is diminished by its excessive sentimentality at the conclusion. Its female characters, apart from the courageous Nancy, are written in a golden light so as to become fantasies rather than the gloriously dirty reality of their male counterparts. A sub-plot between Mary and her boyfriend is ridiculously excessive.

Against these weaknesses, the book is a triumph of character. Often memorably played on screen, the two villains have become more famous than the title character, who is slightly simpering. Fagin is deliciously smarmy and Sykes is evil incarnate. They get their comuppance in justifiably brutal fashion. Dickens like most of us was a sucker for a happy ending.

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POOR LITTLE TWIST
Right off the bat, I've never been a fan of Dickens. To me, there's always been something mercenary about his writing due to the fact that his novels were written to be serialized in magazines of his time. From one week to the next, he was just winging it, creating it as he went. While his improvisation is impressive, it lended itself to bloatedness and inefficency. I've read or tried to read about 5 of his works and never liked the writing. Despite that, I've tried to keep a positive outlook about the guy. I mean, with his status in the Western canon, maybe I just wasn't getting it. Thankfully, I really enjoyed Oliver Twist. Finally, a book of his that I liked.

Oliver Twist is an orphan whose father is unknown and whose mother died during childbirth. Consequently he is raised in the equivalent of the 19th century English welfare system. His raising by the state is despicable. The powers that be in the government of that time, much like our government, had to deal with the problem of indigents taking advantage of the welfare system. They made the homeless shelters and lunchlines so atrocious that the down-on-their luck would HAVE to look elsewhere for help. They went on the assumption that all the displaced were bums just looking for handouts. So the honest and dishonest were treated the same way.

Oliver Twist is a victim of this in that the daily meals he is served in the workhouse as a child are not enough to sustain a human being. Foolishly or bravely, one day he stands up and states the famous line, "Please sir, I want some more." In return for this he is bundled off to be an apprentice undertaker. After some trouble with another boy in the house, he runs away, in the process meeting The Artful Dodger, who indoctrinates him into a gang of pickpockets and thieves led by the Jew Fagin. The question is whether or not a boy who is basically good can escape from such an evil life, or whether he will fall victim to it.

This was a great book. The characters were great and the novel has a dark undertone that I wouldn't expect from Dickens. Unlike David Copperfield, this work does not exhaust itself through its very length. The ending tended to be a little too talky and clean.