The most difficult thing in writing a book, as in any other business, is to competently continue and finish what you started. Having caught inspiration, you run into a blank wall of despair. In a poem, you cannot express yourself beyond the fourth line, realizing the whole stupidity of the situation. A beautiful beginning is ruined by an attempt to create a continuation adequate to the initial impulses. Things are not going on - there is a process - the author tries to dodge - fills with volume - goes aside - develops other lines - desperately looking for a means to fill in the gaps. The first two books of Dickens are written in this way. I don’t know how Dickens got on with things, but “ Posthumous notes The Pickwick Club and The Adventures of Oliver Twist have all the features of a blissful exciting beginning and absolute emptiness in the middle of the story. Patience is running out, it is useless to appeal to the conscience of the author. Don't forget that Dickens wrote books like periodicals. His works are periodical newspapers. If you want to live and eat well, earn money. It is not possible to think through to the end - write as it turns out. Such an approach to literature is offended. Perhaps everything will be better with Dickens - after all, “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” is only his second book.

Like I said, the beginning is excellent. Dickens himself says that he is disgusted with the ennoblement of criminals. He does not develop the theme with examples, but we know perfectly well how under the pen of writers the most terrific villains became noble. Dickens decides to change the situation by showing the life of the bottom of society from the true side. He is quite good at it. Only too Dickens persists, describing the bottom, lowering the bottom below the bottom. He is too categorical, twists in many moments. Where he has good - very good, there is evil - very evil. Time after time you are amazed at the unfortunate lot of Oliver Twist. Life constantly brings the poor boy to his knees before insoluble dilemmas, depriving the guy of hope for a brighter future.

In the dirt, Dickens finds an uncut diamond. This gem could not break the circumstances - he blinked his eyes and wished for a different outcome. It is known that the environment affects the person most in a strong way. But Oliver is above this - nobility and understanding of the wrong order of the world plays in his blood. He will not steal, he will not kill, he will hardly beg for alms, but he will greedily eat rotten meat and fawn under a kind, gentle hand. There is something of a rogue in him, only Dickens idealizes the boy too much, drawing him better fate. Although, if you started talking about the punks, then take him to the crooked road leading to the square of the city executioner. Instead, we have Mowgli of the urban jungle and a future version of the noble Tarzan with exorbitant ambitions, but Dickens will not tell the reader about this. And good! To continue reading the adventures of Oliver Twist would be simply unbearable.

You must believe in a successful outcome until the very end, perhaps someone also writes about your life.

Additional Tags: Dickens Adventures of Oliver Twist criticism, Dickens Adventures of Oliver Twist analysis, Dickens Adventures of Oliver Twist reviews, Dickens Adventures of Oliver Twist review, Dickens Adventures of Oliver Twist book, Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist or The Parish Boy’s Progress

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In the novel The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Dickens builds a plot in the center of which is the collision of a boy with an ungrateful reality. Main character novel - a little boy named Oliver Twist. Born in a workhouse, from the first minutes of his life he remained an orphan, and this meant in his position not only a future full of hardships and hardships, but also loneliness, defenselessness against the insults and injustice that he would have to endure. The baby was frail, the doctor said that he would not survive. Dickens, as an enlightening writer, never reproached his unfortunate characters with either poverty or ignorance, but he reproached a society that refuses to help and support those who were born poor and therefore doomed to deprivation and humiliation from the cradle. And the conditions for the poor (and especially for the children of the poor) in that world were truly inhuman. Workhouses that were supposed to provide ordinary people work, food, shelter, in fact, were like prisons: the poor were imprisoned there by force, separated from their families, forced to do useless and hard work and practically not fed, dooming them to a slow death of starvation. Not for nothing, after all, the workers themselves called the workhouses "bastille for the poor." From the workhouse, Oliver is apprenticed to an undertaker; there he runs into Noah's orphanage boy Claypole, who, being older and stronger, constantly humiliates Oliver. Soon Oliver escapes to London. Boys and girls who were not needed by anyone, by chance finding themselves on the streets of the city, often became completely lost to society, as they fell into the criminal world with its cruel laws. They became thieves, beggars, the girls began to sell their own bodies, and after that many of them ended their short and unhappy lives in prisons or on the gallows. This novel is criminal. Society of London criminals Dickens portrays simply. This is a legitimate part of the existence of capitals. A boy from the street, known as the Sly Trickster, promises Oliver lodging and patronage in London, and takes him to a buyer of stolen goods, godfather London thieves and swindlers to the Jew Fagin. They want to put Oliver on a criminal path. It is important for Dickens to give the reader the idea that the soul of a child is not prone to crime. Children are the personification of spiritual purity and unlawful suffering. A large part of the novel is devoted to this. Dickens, like many writers of that time, was concerned about the question: what is the main thing in shaping the character of a person, his personality - the social environment, origin (parents and ancestors) or his inclinations and abilities? What makes a person what he is: decent and noble, or vile, dishonorable and criminal? And does criminal always mean vile, cruel, soulless? Answering this question, Dickens creates in the novel the image of Nancy - a girl who has fallen into early age into the criminal world, but retaining a kind, sympathetic heart, the ability to sympathize, because it is not in vain that she is trying to protect little Oliver from a vicious path. Thus, we see that social romance Ch. Dickens "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is a lively response to the most topical and burning problems of our time. And in terms of popularity and appreciation of readers, this novel can rightfully be considered a folk novel.

The plot of the novel "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is built in such a way that the reader is in the center of attention of a boy who is faced with an ungrateful reality. He is an orphan from the first minutes of his life. Oliver was not only deprived of all the benefits of a normal existence, but also grew up very lonely, defenseless against an unfair fate.

Since Dickens belongs to the writers of the Enlightenment, he never focused on the inhuman conditions in which the poor lived at that time. The writer believed that poverty itself was not so terrible as the indifferent attitude of other people to such a category of people. It was because of this misperception by society that the poor suffered, as they were doomed to eternal humiliation, deprivation and wandering. After all, workhouses, the creation of which was conceived to provide ordinary people with shelter, food, work, rather resembled prisons. The poor were separated from their families and imprisoned there by force, fed very poorly, forced to do backbreaking and useless work. As a result, they just slowly starved to death.

After the workhouse, Oliver becomes an undertaker's apprentice and victim of orphanage boy Noah Claypole's bullying. The latter, using his advantage in age and strength, constantly humiliates the protagonist. Oliver flees and ends up in London. As you know, such children of the street, whose fate did not bother anyone, for the most part became the dregs of society - vagabonds and criminals. They were forced to engage in crime in order to somehow live. And there reigned cruel laws. Boys turned into beggars and thieves, and girls earned a living with their bodies. Most often, they did not die a natural death, but ended their lives on the gallows. At best, they were incarcerated.

They even want to involve Oliver in the underworld. Ordinary boy from the street, whom everyone calls the Artful rogue, promising the protagonist protection and lodging for the night in London, takes him to a buyer of stolen goods. This is the godfather of local swindlers and thieves Fagin.

In this crime novel, Charles Dickens portrayed the London criminal society in a simple way. He considered it an integral part of the then metropolitan life. But the writer tried to convey to the reader main idea that the soul of a child is initially not prone to crime. After all, the child in his mind personifies illegal suffering and spiritual purity. He's just a victim of that time. It is this idea that the main part of the novel "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is devoted to.

But at the same time, the writer was concerned about the question: what influences the formation of a person’s character, the formation of his personality? Natural inclinations and abilities, origin (ancestors, parents) or is it the social environment? Why does someone become noble and decent, and someone vile and dishonorable criminal? Can he not be soulless, cruel and vile? In order to answer this question for himself, Dickens introduces storyline novel image of Nancy. This is a girl who got into the criminal world at an early age. But this did not prevent her from remaining kind and sympathetic, able to show sympathy. It is she who is trying to prevent Oliver from taking the wrong path.

The social novel by Charles Dickens "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is a true reflection of the most topical and burning problems of our time. That's why this work very popular among readers and since its publication has managed to become popular.

Features of the realistic method in early novels Dickens ("The Adventures of Oliver Twist")

Social Philosophy of Dickens and the Formation of the Realist Method

The social philosophy of Dickens in the form in which it has come down to us in most of his works takes shape in the first period of his work (1837-1839). Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and the somewhat later Martin Chasseluit, which in their external structure are a kind of Fielding's Tom Jones, turned out to be the first novels by Dickens to give some more or less coherent realistic picture. new capitalist society. It is on these works, therefore, that it is easiest to trace the process of the formation of Dickensian realism, as it, in its essential features, developed in this era. In the future, however, there is a deepening, expansion, refinement of the already achieved method, but the direction in which one can go artistic development, is given in these first social novels. We can see how in these books Dickens becomes the writer of his own time, the creator of the English social novel of a wide range. Tugusheva M.P. Charles Dickens: Essay on Life and Works. M., 1983

The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837-1839), begun simultaneously with The Pickwick Club, being Dickens' first realistic novel, thus creating a transition to a new period of his work. Here the deeply critical attitude of Dickens to bourgeois reality has already fully affected. Along with the traditional plot scheme of the adventure novel-biography, which was followed not only by writers of the 18th century like Fielding, but also by such immediate predecessors and contemporaries of Dickens as Bulwer-Lytton, there is a clear shift towards socio-political modernity. Oliver Twist was written under the influence of the famous Poor Law of 1834, which doomed the unemployed and homeless poor to complete savagery and extinction in the so-called workhouses. Dickens artistically embodies his indignation at this law and the position created for the people in the story of a boy born in a charity house. Silman T.I. Dickens: an essay on creativity. L., 1970

Dickens's novel began to appear in those days (since February 1837) when the struggle against the law, expressed in popular petitions and reflected in parliamentary debates, had not yet ended. Particularly strong indignation, both in the revolutionary Chartist camp and among bourgeois radicals and conservatives, was caused by those Malthusian-colored clauses of the law, according to which husbands in workhouses were separated from wives, and children from parents. It is this side of the attack on the law that found the most vivid reflection in the Dickensian novel. Nersesova T.I. The work of Charles Dickens. M., 1967

In The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Dickens shows the hunger and horrendous bullying that children endure in a community care home. The figures of the parish beadle, Mr. Bumble, and other bosses of the workhouse open a gallery of satirical grotesque images created by Dickens.

Oliver's life path is a series of terrible pictures of hunger, want and beatings. Depicting the ordeals that fall on young hero novel, Dickens unfolds the big picture English life of his time.

First, life in the workhouse, then in the "teaching" of the undertaker, and finally, the flight to London, where Oliver falls into a den of thieves. Here - new gallery types: the demonic owner of the thieves' den Fagin, the robber Sykes, a tragic figure in his own way, the prostitute Nancy, in which good start argues with evil all the time and finally wins.

Thanks to their revealing power, all these episodes obscure the traditional plot scheme of the modern novel, according to which the protagonist must certainly extricate himself from a difficult situation and win a place for himself in the bourgeois world (where he, in fact, comes from). For the sake of this scheme, Oliver Twist also finds his benefactor, and at the end of the novel becomes a rich heir. But this path of the hero to well-being, quite traditional for the literature of that time, in this case is less important than the individual stages of this path, in which the revealing pathos of Dickensian creativity is concentrated.

If we consider the work of Dickens as a consistent development towards realism, then "Oliver Twist" will be one of milestones this development.

In the preface to the third edition of the novel, Dickens wrote that the purpose of his book was “one harsh and naked truth,” which forced him to abandon all the romantic embellishments that were usually full of works dedicated to the life of the scum of society.

“I read hundreds of stories about thieves - charming little ones, for the most part amiable, impeccably dressed, with a tightly stuffed pocket, connoisseurs of horses, bold in handling, happy with women, heroes behind a song, a bottle, cards or bones and worthy comrades, the bravest, but I have not met anywhere, for the inclusion of Hogarth, the true cruel reality. It occurred to me that I could describe a handful of such comrades-in-crime as really exist, describe them in all their ugliness and misery, in the miserable poverty of their lives, show them as they actually wander or creep anxiously through the most dirty paths of life, seeing before them, wherever they went, a huge black, terrible ghost of the gallows - what to do this meant trying to help society in what it badly needed, which could bring him a certain benefit ". Dickens C. Collected works in 2 volumes. M.: " Fiction", 1978.

Among the works sinning with such a romantic embellishment of the life of the scum of society, Dickens ranks the famous "Beggars' Opera" by Gay and Bulwer-Lytton's novel "Paul Clifford" (1830), the plot of which, especially in the first part, anticipated in many details plot of Oliver Twist. But, arguing with this kind of "salon" image dark sides life, which was characteristic of writers like Bulwer, Dickens still does not deny his connection with literary tradition of the past. He names as his predecessors whole line writers XVIII century. “Fielding, Defoe, Goldsmith, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie - all of them, and especially the first two, brought the scum and scum of the country onto the stage for the most good purposes. Hogarth is the moralist and censor of his time, whose great works will forever reflect both the age in which he lived and the human nature of all times - Hogarth did the same, without stopping at anything, did with force and depth of thought, which were the lot of very few before him ... "Ibid.

Pointing to his closeness to Fielding and Defoe, Dickens thereby emphasized the realistic aspirations of his work. The point here, of course, is not in the closeness of the theme of Mole Flanders and Oliver Twist, but in the general realistic orientation, which forces authors and artists to depict the subject without softening or embellishing anything. Some of the descriptions in Oliver Twist could well serve as an explanatory text for Hogarth's paintings, especially those where the author, deviating from the direct following of the plot, stops at individual pictures of horror and suffering.

Such is the scene that little Oliver finds in the poor man's house, crying for dead wife(Chapter V). In describing the room, the furnishings, all the members of the family, Hogarth's method is felt - each object tells, each movement narrates, and the picture as a whole is not just an image, but a coherent narrative seen through the eyes of a moral historian.

Simultaneously with this decisive step towards a realistic depiction of life, we can observe in Oliver Twist the evolution of Dickensian humanism, which is losing its abstract dogmatic and utopian character and is also approaching reality. Silman T.I. Dickens: an essay on creativity. L., 1970

The good beginning in Oliver Twist parted with the fun and happiness of the Pickwick Club and settled in other areas of life. Already in recent chapters The "Pickwick Club" idyll had to face the gloomy sides of reality (Mr Pickwick in Fleet Prison). In "Oliver Twist", on fundamentally new grounds, there is a separation of humanism from the idyll, and the good beginning in human society is increasingly combined with the world of real everyday disasters.

Dickens seems to be groping for new ways for his humanism. He had already broken away from the blissful utopia of his first novel. Good no longer means happy for him, but rather the opposite: in this unjust world, drawn by the writer, good is doomed to suffering, which does not always find its reward (the death of little Dick, the death of Oliver Twist's mother, and in the following novels the death of Smike, little Nellie, Paul Dombey, who are all victims of cruel and unjust reality). This is how Mrs. Maley reasons in that woeful hour when her beloved Rose is threatened with death from deadly disease: "I know that death does not always spare those who are young and kind and on whom the affection of others rests."

But where, then, is the source of goodness in human society? In a certain social class? No, Dickens cannot say that. He resolves this issue as a follower of Rousseau and the Romantics. He finds the child, the uncorrupted soul, the ideal being who emerges pure and undefiled from all trials and who resists the plagues of society, which in this book are still largely the property of the lower classes. Subsequently, Dickens will stop blaming criminals for their crimes, and will blame the ruling classes for all existing evil. Now the ends have not yet been made, everything is in its infancy, the author has not yet drawn social conclusions from the new arrangement of moral forces in his novel. He does not yet say what he will say later - that goodness not only coexists with suffering, but that it mainly resides in the world of the destitute, unfortunate, oppressed, in a word, among the poor classes of society. In "Oliver Twist" there is still a fictitious, as it were, supra-social group of "good gentlemen" who, in their ideological function, are closely connected with reasonable and virtuous gentlemen. XVIII century, but, unlike Mr. Pickwick, they are well-to-do enough to do good deeds (a special power is “good money”). These are Oliver's patrons and saviors - Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Grimwig and others, without whom he would not have escaped the persecution of evil forces.

But even within the group of villains, a close-knit mass of opposing philanthropic gentlemen and beautiful-hearted young men and women, the author looks for such characters that seem to him capable of moral rebirth. Such is, first of all, the figure of Nancy, a fallen being, in whom, nevertheless, love and self-sacrifice prevail and even overcome the fear of death.

In the preface to Oliver Twist cited above, Dickens wrote the following: “It seemed very rude and indecent that many of the persons acting in these pages were taken from the most criminal and low strata of the London population, that Cyke is a thief, Fagin - - a hoarder of stolen goods, that the boys are street thieves, and the young girl is a prostitute. But, I confess, I cannot understand why it is not possible to learn the lesson of the purest good from the most vile evil ... I saw no reason when I wrote this book why the very dregs of society, if their language does not offend their ears, cannot serve moral goals at least as much as its top” Dickens C. Collected Works in 2 volumes. M .: "Fiction", 1978.

Good and evil in this novel by Dickens have not only their "representatives", but also their "theorists". Indicative in this regard are the conversations that Fagin and his student have with Oliver: both of them preach the morality of shameless selfishness, according to which every person - “ best friend to himself" (Chapter XLIII). At the same time Oliver and little Dick are prominent representatives morality of philanthropy (cf. chapters XII and XVII).

Thus, the alignment of the forces of "good" and "evil" in "Oliver Twist" is still quite archaic. It is based on the idea of ​​a society that has not yet been divided into warring classes (a different idea appears in literature XIX century later). Society is viewed here as a kind of more or less whole organism, which is threatened by various kinds of "ulcers" that can corrode it either "from above" (soulless and cruel aristocrats) or "from below" - depravity, begging, crime of the poor. classes, or from the side of the official state apparatus - the court, police officials, city and parish authorities, etc.

Artistic features of the novel

Oliver Twist, as well as novels such as Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839) and Martin Chasseluit (1843-/1844), were the best proof of how outdated the plot scheme, which Dickens still continued to adhere to. This plot scheme, however, allowed a description of real life, however real life existed in it only as a significant background (cf. “ pickwick club”), and Dickens in his realistic novels had already outgrown such a conception of reality.

For Dickens, real life was no longer a "background". It gradually became the main content of his works. Therefore, it had to come into inevitable collision with the plot scheme of the traditional bourgeois novel-biography.

In the realistic social novels of Dickens of the first period, despite their broad content, there is one protagonist in the center. Usually these novels are called by the name of their protagonist: "Oliver Twist", "Nicholas Nickleby", "Martin Chasseluit". Adventures, "adventures" (adventures) of the hero, on the model of the novels of the 18th century (meaning biographical novels like "Tom Jones"), create the necessary prerequisite for depicting the world around us in that variety and at the same time in that random motley those in which modern reality appeared to the writers of this relatively early period in the development of realism. These novels plotly follow the experience of an individual and, as it were, reproduce the randomness and natural limitations of this experience. Hence the inevitable incompleteness of such an image Mikhalskaya I.P. Charles Dickens: Essay on Life and Works. M., 1989

And indeed, not only in the novels of the 18th century, but also in the early novels of Dickens of the late 1930s and early 1940s, we observe the promotion of one or another episode in the hero’s biography, which can simultaneously serve as material and means for depicting some or a typical phenomenon of social life. So in "Oliver Twist" a little boy finds himself in a den of thieves - and before us is the life of scum, outcasts and fallen ones ("Oliver Twist").

Whatever the author depicts, no matter what unexpected and remote corner of reality he throws his hero, he always uses these excursions into one or another area of ​​​​life to draw a wide social picture, which was absent from the writers of the XVIII century. This is the main feature of early Dickensian realism - the use of any seemingly random episode in the hero's biography to create a realistic picture of society.

But at the same time, the question arises: how comprehensive is the picture that the writer unfolds before us in this way? To what extent all these separate phenomena, so important in themselves - since it is they who often determine the color, character and main content of this or that Dickens novel - are equivalent from a social point of view, are they equally characteristic, whether they are shown organic connection with each other in a capitalist society? This question must be answered in the negative. Of course, all these phenomena are unequal.

The early works of Dickens, his realistic novels, thus, give us an extremely rich, lively, diverse picture of reality, but they paint this reality not as a single whole, governed by uniform laws (it is precisely this understanding of modernity that Dickens will later have), but empirically. , as the sum individual examples. During this period, Dickens interprets contemporary capitalist reality not as a single evil, but as a sum of various evils, which should be fought alone. This is what he does in his novels. He stabs and nods his hero, in the course of his personal biography, with one of these primary evils and all possible means of cruel satire and withering humor, takes up arms against this evil. Now the barbaric methods of raising children, now the hypocrisy and vulgarity of the middle philistine classes of English society, now the venality of parliamentary figures - all this in turn causes an angry protest or ridicule of the writer.

As a result of summing up these various aspects, do we get any general impression regarding the nature of the reality depicted by the author? Undoubtedly, it is created. We understand that this is a world of venality, corruption, and crafty calculation. But does the author set a conscious goal to show the internal functional connection of all these phenomena? So far, this is not the case, and it is precisely here that the difference between the two periods of Dickens' realistic work lies: while in the first period, which has just been discussed, Dickens is still largely an empiricist in this respect, "in In his further artistic development, he will more and more subordinate his work to the search for generalizations, drawing closer in this respect to Balzac ”Katarsky I.M. Dickens / critical and bibliographic essay. M., 1980

In the novel The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Dickens builds a plot in the center of which is the collision of a boy with an ungrateful reality. The protagonist of the novel is a little boy named Oliver Twist. Born in a workhouse, from the first minutes of his life he remained an orphan, and this meant in his position not only a future full of hardships and hardships, but also loneliness, defenselessness against the insults and injustice that he would have to endure. The baby was frail, the doctor said that he would not survive.

Dickens, as an enlightening writer, never reproached his unfortunate characters with either poverty or ignorance, but he reproached a society that refuses to help and support those who were born poor and therefore doomed to deprivation and humiliation from the cradle. And the conditions for the poor (and especially for the children of the poor) in that world were truly inhuman.

Workhouses, which were supposed to provide ordinary people with work, food, shelter, actually looked like prisons: the poor were imprisoned there by force, separated from their families, forced to do useless and hard work and practically not fed, dooming them to slow starvation. Not for nothing, after all, the workers themselves called the workhouses "bastille for the poor."

From the workhouse, Oliver is apprenticed to an undertaker; there he runs into Noah's orphanage boy Claypole, who, being older and stronger, constantly humiliates Oliver. Soon Oliver escapes to London.

Boys and girls who were not needed by anyone, by chance finding themselves on the streets of the city, often became completely lost to society, as they fell into the criminal world with its cruel laws. They became thieves, beggars, the girls began to sell their own bodies, and after that many of them ended their short and unhappy lives in prisons or on the gallows.

This novel is criminal. Society of London criminals Dickens portrays simply. This is a legitimate part of the existence of capitals. A boy from the street, nicknamed the Artful Rogue, promises Oliver lodging and patronage in London and leads him to a buyer of stolen goods, the godfather of London thieves and swindlers, the Jew Fagin. They want to put Oliver on a criminal path.

It is important for Dickens to give the reader the idea that the soul of a child is not prone to crime. Children are the personification of spiritual purity and unlawful suffering. A large part of the novel is devoted to this. Dickens, like many writers of that time, was concerned about the question: what is the main thing in shaping the character of a person, his personality - the social environment, origin (parents and ancestors) or his inclinations and abilities? What makes a person what he is: decent and noble, or vile, dishonorable and criminal? And does criminal always mean vile, cruel, soulless? Answering this question, Dickens creates in the novel the image of Nancy - a girl who fell into the criminal world at an early age, but retained a kind, sympathetic heart, the ability to sympathize, because it is not in vain that she is trying to protect little Oliver from a vicious path.

Thus, we see that the social novel by Charles Dickens "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is a lively response to the most topical and burning problems of our time. And in terms of popularity and appreciation of readers, this novel can rightfully be considered a folk novel.