As the BBC launches a new competition to find Nancy and Oliver for Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage show, now is a great time to revisit Charles Dickens' classic novel.
There can be few people who have never heard of Oliver Twist. There have been countless retellings of Dickens’ story on stage and on both the big screen and the small, helping Oliver, Fagin, Nancy and Sykes to become some of the best known literary characters the UK has ever produced.
Publication of Oliver Twist
The novel itself was first published in serial form in Bentley’s Miscellany, beginning in February 1837 and concluding in April 1839, a publication process common to many of Dickens’ works and a clear indication why his novels tend to make such watchable TV serialisations. At this early period of his writing career, Dickens was actually working as the editor of this particular magazine, a post he held from 1836 to 1839.
The Adventures of Oliver Twist, as the serialisation was known, is widely credited as the first book in the English language to focus throughout on a child protagonist; the novel was even subtitled The Parish Boy’s Progress to ensure the reader was in no doubt over the book’s main concern: to show a young boy’s encounter with poverty and the criminal underworld.
A Life of Crime
Oliver is in an unfortunate position from birth: he is born in a workhouse to a mother who dies during childbirth, and has no knowledge of whom his father might be. He is provided for under the terms of the Poor Law, but this is done begrudgingly, and he and the other children at the workhouse are underfed, overworked, and denied any kind of love or comfort. Lack of food, of course, leads to perhaps the most famous line in the novel, as Oliver loses a bet with the other boys and has to request another helping of gruel: “Please Sir, I want some more” (chapter 2).
This episode leads to Oliver being marked out as a troublemaker, and he is advertised as being for sale. Thus Oliver embarks upon a series of adventures, working first at an undertaker’s, and then fleeing to London where a chance encounter with a young pickpocket called The Artful Dodger leads him to work for Fagin, an “old shrivelled Jew” who attempts to indoctrinate Oliver into the criminal world (chapter 8). Here he also meets the sympathetic Nancy and her violent lover Bill Sikes.
Poverty in Oliver Twist
Many readers will be familiar with how the story then unfolds: ultimately Oliver’s true parentage is revealed and a happy ending is reached, but not before a shockingly violent event has occurred. Dickens was at pains in this novel not to glamorise or sentimentalise the criminal underworld, and describes London slums so unfit for human habitation that it seems scarcely surprising that so many of the inhabitants themselves lack human qualities. Many seem born to a life of crime, but Oliver is different – he is appalled by the cruelty he sees and proves himself the gentleman that he of course turns out to be.
Continuing Popularity of Oliver Twist
There have been countless adaptations of this famous story: Dickens himself liked to perform a dramatic version of the story of Sikes and Nancy, and unauthorised stage versions of the novel took place throughout England during Dickens’ lifetime. A number of film versions have appeared, although the 1948 feature directed by David Lean and starring Alec Guinness as Fagin is still widely regarded as the definitive adaptation. Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! first played in 1960, and continues to be popular to this day: the fact that a BBC primetime show is now looking to cast a new Nancy and Oliver proves that Dickens’ influence is set to be felt for some considerable time to come.
