Vintage Tales discussion

Hey all! Oliver Twist is the Winner of our March group read so be sure to discuss the book here. Thanks! :)

yeaaah 2 birds 1 stone for me then lol

Have fun reading it Tracey! :)

Too long for a reread. But great book!

That's great! I'm so glad this won and am enjoying it again already, as are several other readers :)

If there's anyone who is a bit fazed by its length, there are lots of really good dramatisations around if you don't know the story. You miss Dickens' wit and great writing of course, but it's a lot better than nothing and the plot is fantastic :)

I've seen oliver the musical which is a good version of the story. Saw a community theater version of it a few years ago.

That's the sort of thing I meant Amber :) Not all of us may have time to read it at the moment, but the story is worth a look even if we're busy with something else.

Shall I post a little about the workhouse? Right at the beginning Oliver is born there, so it won't "spoil" anyone's reading :)

You may notice how scathing Dickens's tone is. This novel was written in 1837. It helps to know that there was a new version of the"Poor Law" just 3 years earlier in 1834, and this is what Dickens is reacting to.

Previously it had been the duty of the parishes to care for the poor. But the only help available to poor people from 1834 was to become inmates in the workhouse.

As Dickens tells us with bitter sarcasm in chapter 2, the workhouse was little more than a prison for the poor. Civil liberties were denied, families were separated, and human dignity was destroyed. The inadequate diet instituted in the workhouse prompted his ironic comment that,

"all poor people should have the alternative... of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it."

It doesn't look as if anyone is reading this after all, except Tracey and me. Unless they're reading it later in the month...

I enjoyed it, but don't think it's one of his best. Here's my detailed review if anyone would like to know what I think :)

I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts, Noam :)

Though I'm not actually re-reading this right now, I read it as a child and liked it; and I still remember a great deal of it. (The edition I read, I think, was the second one, since I recall that in his preface, Dickens took issue with some of the previous critical responses to the book; and I don't recall as much stress on Fagin's Jewish ethnicity as some readers note in the first edition.) Of course, I understand some aspects of it better now than I did then!

Dickens' social consciousness, and his strong sympathy with the poor and downtrodden, is a major theme in this novel. But one of its most positive features is that it doesn't reduce the poor to passive victims of society, and doesn't deny them the dignity of moral choice and responsibility. Bill Sykes and Fagin aren't what they are because "society made them do it;" the poor can make choices about how they treat other people --exemplified by Nancy, who made quite an impression on me even as a kid.

Werner - Yes, Dickens took out a lot of references to "the Jew" in the second "Charles Dickens Edition". He had expressed surprise, when the Jewish community complained about the stereotypical depiction of Fagin at the time Oliver Twist was written (1837). Dickens had befriended James Davis, a Jewish man, and when he eventually came to sell his London residence, he sold the lease of Tavistock House to the Davis family, as an attempt to make restitution. "Letters of Charles Dickens 1833-1870" include this sentence in the narrative to 1860.

"This winter was the last spent at Tavistock House...He made arrangements for the sale of Tavistock House to Mr Davis, a Jewish gentleman, and he gave up possession of it in September."

There is other additional evidence of a rethink, and we have to remember that Dickens was a very young man - still only 25 - when he wrote "Oliver Twist". In his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend , (1864) Dickens created Riah, a positive Jewish character.

The character of Fagin was modelled on an actual person, a notorious Jewish fence by the name of Ikey Solomon. Dickens also sited him in a real location. Several of the characters were based on real people, not just "types".

"Mr Fang" the magistrate was based on Allan Stewart Laing, who served as a police magistrate from 1820-1838, before being dismissed by the Home Secretary for what sounds like abuse of his power. Dickens even went so far as to ask his friend, an influential police reporter, to smuggle him into the Hatton Garden office so he could get an accurate physical description of him!

I too am interested in how people respond to their environment, in Dickens's novels, Werner, and the influence of this is one of Dickens's constant themes. Victorian society placed a lot of value and emphasis on industry, capitalism and individualism. And who embodies this most successfully? Fagin - who operates in the illicit businesses of theft and prostitution! His "philosphy" is that the group’s interests are best maintained if every individual looks out for himself, saying,

"a regard for number one holds us all together, and must do so, unless we would all go to pieces in company."

Sometimes Dickens says that a good person will behave nobly and decently in whatever situation and circumstances. There are countless examples of "the noble poor". The troubled and(view spoiler)[ultimately doomed (hide spoiler)] Nancy, however, seems to indicate Dickens making a case for the opposite idea, that good people can be warped by bad experiences and fall into vice.

This is good psychology. It would be so easy for an author to take a stereotypical view of children having early influences which then inform their later behaviour and ethics to such a ridiculous extent that they all behave the same way. Dickens can be guilty of "persuasive literary techniques" yes; he likes to tell us what to think. But he is too great an author to put his characters into straitjackets for this purpose. Diversity of characterisation is one of his great strengths.

Sorry I am not reading this book. I tried to read Murder at the vicarage last month but had to take it back to the library but will get it at the ebooks library and will read it this year. I want to read Frankenstein this year too.

It's always a problem to get to read all the books we want, Amber, but I'll push a lot of things aside for a reread of my favourite author :)

You read a lot of new authors too, Amber, which is admirable. Do you know if Holly joined in with this one?

Thanks Jean and not really sure. LOL. I still need to read Northanger abbey too as I still haven't read that either but am starting Little Men tonight as a readalong/buddy read at the aab book club with Leslie.

Oh yes, I spotted that :)

Yep. ^_^ Hope you guys enjoyed oliver twist this month though. It's almost the end of the month again, should we start nominations for next month's group read?

Jean, thanks for that comment; lots of good information there! The introduction to the edition of Our Mutual Friend that I read (also as a kid, albeit an older one --I liked that book, too!) stated that Dickens consciously created the character of Mr. Riah in response to criticism, by a Jewish lady who was a friend of his, of the portrayal of Fagin; it was a deliberate way of showing that he didn't think all Jews were Fagin-like.

Back in the 60s, when black characters were first beginning to be seriously depicted on American TV, the earliest ones were uniformly quite saintly, with no visible faults. I remember that back then, a particularly astute pundit, writing I think in TV Guide, made the statement that TV would never be really integrated until writers could feel comfortable depicting a black villain. (That finally happened a few years later.) His point was that people are individuals, and that all races and ethnic groups embody the full range of human possibilities; realistic literary and dramatic art reflect that truth. Dickens' portrayal of Fagin, I think, is best viewed in that light, especially since, as you pointed out, it was based on an actual person who happened to be Jewish. (Deliberately altering his ethnicity in the novel would have been, IMO, artistically dishonest.) Sykes, of course, is as obviously Anglo-Saxon as they come; but nobody sees his portrayal as a claim that ALL Anglo-Saxons are bestial thugs.

Fagin's philosophy (as exemplified in the line you quoted, Jean) is exactly the Utilitarian capitalist philosophy of thinkers like Hume, Bentham, Adam Smith and his predecessors Barbon and Mandeville, with their glorification of selfishness and self-interest as the "invisible hand" that magically makes society work for the optimum social benefit. The rising Victorian industrial/commercial plutocracy set these men up as gurus of absolute truth; realistically putting their ideas into the mouth of someone like Fagin is a very effective way of stripping off the benevolent mask to expose the naked criminality underneath.

It's heavily ironic, isn't it? Here's a bit about Utilitarianism from my review:

"Dickens himself in these chapters constantly makes negative remarks about "philosophers" in this context. It is possible he was thinking about the principles of Utilitarianism; a fashionable philosophy of the time, responsible for such things as the high positioning of windows in many Victorian buildings, placed so that children and workers would not be distracted by looking out of them. According to Jeremy Bentham, man's actions were governed by the will to avoid pain and strive for pleasure, so the government's task was to increase the benefits of society by punishing and rewarding people according to their actions...

The workhouse functions here as a sign of the moral hypocrisy of the working class. The authorities in charge of the workhouse joke among themselves about feeding minute portions so that the inmates would stay small and thin, thereby needing smaller coffins. They complain about having to pay for burials, again hoping for smaller corpses to bury. Dickens writes a passionate diatribe against both the social conditions and the institutions. His humour is there, but it is a very black biting humour."

I agree about the early portrayals of ethnic minorities on TV and in films Werner! That happened in the UK too.

Thanks for the reference to the introduction to Our Mutual Friend, which I don't think I have in my version. The prefaces to Dickens's novels are highly entertaining in their own right, I think. I've just been reading one to Nicholas Nickleby" in which Dickens goes into great and gory detail about what he will do to "pirates" who try to imitate his work!

As a boy Dickens had lived within a mile of the "Cleveland Street Workhouse", which was very nearly demolished last year!

You might be interested in this link which is to pictures of both the Cleveland Street workhouse, Dickens's childhood home, and some interesting articles (including a feature about a Dickens enthusiast from Toronto stepping in to finance a blue plaque for the house)

Although it may have provided the idea, the Cleveland Street Workhouse was not the only model for the one in "Oliver Twist" though. Apparently he also based it on the Kettering Workhouse, in Northamptonshire, which he said had been his inspiration. The Kettering Workhouse's bad reputation for ill-treatment was apparently widely known.

Thanks for that link, Jean (I just visited the site.) Some fascinating content there!

Yes, I wish I'd known about the plaque ceremony at the time. It's only a tube ride away from me :)

Thanks Noam :) You have made some pretty good observations yourself.

Rose Maylie is very much an idealised version of Dickens's sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, with whom he was in love. She was 17, (like Rose) and had tragically died in his arms a few months earlier. I don't think it is known what Mary died of in real life - it was very sudden. So maybe Dickens was emulating that too in his novel.

Usually though I think they died of tuberculosis, or pneumonia, or if it was after giving birth it was usually septicaemia.